I had the same problem with band auras. there aren't too many solutions I can think of that solve this and I think its just one of these match ups we really aren't favoured to win. I tried with 2 glaring spotlight in my sideboard, and when I drew it on the first few turns or in starting hand I never lost. the problem is if you draw it late it's often too late by then and the chances of getting it early aren't all that great. It also means I feel like.I need to be playing unsummon or cr as what good is the 8/8 invisible stalked not having hexproof when searing spear does 3 damage!. honestly maybe better off with fog or even naturlize as last options. if bant auras continues to gain popularity, it maybe time for rug flash to hit the showers....
anyone agree or disagree?
Yeah. I completely agree. That matchup is a nightmare. The good thing is that it shouldn't gain popularity at the larger events simply due to it's chancy nature and the aggro-infested meta.
I've always hated the idea that 'control' decks these days are hard to play. You're not playing tempo or permission control where countering the wrong spell can mean the end of you; you just azorius charm into supreme verdict into sphinxs into answers.
This is coming from someone who has played that type of shell. Aristocrats is the hardest for sure. I don't mind your list at all besides the control thing.
Also, a bit more on topic, I have always played midranged GWx type decks, and this past few months I've been piloting a RG aggro deck on MTGO just because it was cheap. I kept selling cards down online (terrible idea btw) until I only had enough to buy RG aggro. Anyways, the deck has a lot more decisions than most people think. Sure, there are games that just go land creature land 4 creatures land boar land hellrider howhaveinotwonyet....but there are the games where my bad decision will cost me the game.
On top of that, it's a lot like cheesing in starcraft. You can master it and do it perfectly but a big thing you're testing is your opponent's play. Sure, some might not like that but the deck basically says "Okay, I'm playing at neutral skill level, if you play well, you'll win, if you mess up, you'll lose."
Yeah I'm not too impressed with this. It's not that he didn't impress me by getting 2nd--that's cool and all--it's that he didn't do anything overly unique.
First of all, like the guy said above me, Hinterland Harbor and Breeding Pool are rares worth a total of about $60. Those are probably the most important rares he could possibly have, especially in an aggro/tempo deck. Replacing them with basic lands would probably be better than guildgates because the tempo dictates that he has a play every turn, and the fact that he has both of his colors open without missing a drop is crucial.
Second of all, he's just playing solid tempo cards in those colors. Most tempo cards aren't rare, because most tempo cards have no overly unique effect; they normally just have a good mana:p/t ratio.
Lastly, like someone said above me, it's not as if he's playing subpar cards to make a point (as far as I know), he's just playing the cards he feels fit together the best. This is evidenced by the 4 rares in his sideboard (Mayor and Revenge of the Hunted), so essentially I don't understand what the big deal is.
I wouldn't even bat an eye at this deck if you hadn't made this thread, other than maybe at the fact that he got 2nd with a UG aggro deck when the meta is primarily RG.
I was expecting a red deck, but I guess all the playable drops in red are rare nowadays.
While you're mostly right about this, as I mentioned above this is because all the Red cards in these past blocks have had unique effects, probably to keep up with the strength of midrange decks and thragtusk. All of the cards like Hellrider, Ash Zealot, Stromkirk Noble, etc. would be absolutely insane in limited so they have to be at least rare.
I agree completely. At low mana costs it's great, not because it's bad for 7 mana (killing resto angels is cool), but because at low mana costs it doesn't kill our own stuff!
Let's compare mana costs.
Since 3 mana is lowest you can cast either disregarding miracle (will discuss miracle in a sec), we'll start there.
3 mana:
gaze of granite: kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
4 mana:
gaze of granite: now it kills mana dorks, experiment ones, champion of the parishes, stromkirk nobles, rakdos cacklers plus it kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
5 mana:
gaze of granite: hits all the important RG aggro creatures (boar, BTE, ash zealot), hits stuff like our own ground seals, and some enchantments like intangible virtue plus it kills mana dorks, experiment ones, champion of the parishes, stromkirk nobles, rakdos cacklers plus it kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/2s. not too many of these in the format. BTEs, ash zealots, but it does do 2 damage to planeswalkers (important for previously -1'd lilianas or garruk or what have you) and kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
I'm gonna stop there. Looking back on what I just wrote and at what is killed with each for X mana, some may or may not have decided one or the other is better.
Now, include miracle. Bonfire suddenly kills everything under 6 power (not a lot is above 6 power) for 7 mana, and kills all X/3s for 4 mana. Sure, it's not going to be topdecked every game, and it sucks having it in your opening hand, but we already knew that.
Jund is a topdeck deck (lol). The deck is designed to have 1 to 1 answers to their threats. Then, when they're out of threats and you're out of answers (aka no cards in either hand), you draw threats that demand immediate answers (kessig allows this) and sometimes demand more than one (thrag, garruk or huntmaster). A topdecked bonfire just puts the game out of reach. When the deck is designed to answer everything using all of the cards in hand (murder this, tragic slip that, liliana sac last creature), a single card killing literally everything they have is often too much for the opponent.
On top of miracle, the fact that it kills our own stuff is too much. We don't want to kill our own tokens or flipped huntmasters (of which we have plenty) or our own mana-fixing arbor elves or own ground seals or our own olivias, huntmasters, etc.
So, my final verdict FWIW is that while bonfire isn't the perfect card (there is a reason only 2 are being maindecked nowadays and the price is no longer $30), it's farrrrr better than gaze of granite. I don't even think gaze of granite will see play in standard unless token decks have a rise in popularity, which I think is entirely possible, but in this meta, gaze of granite is almost strictly worse to have in your deck.
Playing against what? with what list? What were your expectations of his performance and what happened in your tests?
Mileage varies in context for any card, just saying "he sucks" is of no use to anyone.
He has negative card advantage. The odds of discarding your bomb after drawing it are actually higher than drawing a bomb in the first place. Even if you have 7 cards in your hand already, you still have a 12.5% chance of discarding the card you draw, ignoring the fact you might discard a beneficial card already in your hand. He doesn't draw for you, he replaces a random card in your hand for a random card in your deck. He also has the added drawback that you might discard the random card from your deck.
What exactly is his benefit? What does he do? His -4 is alright but it happens 3 turns later and its freaking -4...
You're the one posting in the established forum for decks with established tournament results. I simply messed around with him for fun and confirmed the fact that he's as bad as I thought he was.
Mizzium is vastly inferior against aggro compared to burning oil & searing spear. You need the instant speed removal to combat the haste creatures that are so prevalent in the format and the recursion of burning oil keeps it relevant in the mid-range matches where it can take out both halves of a Thragtusk or even double shot an Angel of Serenity.
A 6 mana sweeper is too slow to be of use against aggro so what are you sweeping exactly? By the time i hit 6 mana the rest of my deck does far more work than Mizzium would.
Tibalt is in there for extra looting and I've never been disappointed with him throughout months of testing. His abilities and the damage he soaks are just a bonus.
Lingering Souls consistently dissapoints me as an unsupported 4 of. Too many times i draw 2-3 copies and have to rely on them as my defense and find they simply aren't powerful or fast enough or worse, they just get swept away by D-sphere, Sever, Electrickery etc etc.
Lots of copies is powerful against control for sure, hence 2 more in the side but the full 4 main has never performed well for me.
I just playtested with Tibalt. He has to be one of the worst cards I've ever played with. He's a $1.50 planeswalker for a reason--he sucks.
What do you mean slow? Sure, it's sorcery speed but instead you're running a conditional searing spear with flashback? Dreadbore is superior as 2 mana kill spell, but doesn't allow for clearing the board late game, and sever is used for a different purpose altogether. Mizzium is seriously one of the best removal spells right now.
As for the lingering souls, I don't know how that clogs the deck? You run spells like faithless looting that enable you to put lingering souls in your graveyard so that it will literally never clog your deck...
Well thats easy: If your meta is aggro, run more sweepers - I run 7 mb. Deck seems too slow? Play with more dudes and turn them sideways.
What are you trying to get out of this conversation? Whats the point of weighing in here? If you don't like a deck then don't play it.
We have subforums because we enjoy brewing and innovating on deck archetypes. Not all archetypes can be Tier 1. Are you going to post the same type of comments in the MBC or Bant Wolf Run or any of the other dozens of threads?
In the meantime decks like Dega, MBC, and Mono-Green continue to perform well (note: not the best) and continue to be enjoyed by lots of capable players.
...And now I'm a bit sad that this silliness has pushed my decklist back, but I had to weigh in
This is the competitive forum. Not the I enjoy brewing decks forum. The reason that guy is posting is because he played the deck because he liked it/thought it might be good, realized that it has huge problems, and is now reporting what he thinks. This forum is for making good decks that win tournaments, not just throwing together good cards into a deck.
Obviously this deck has had some success, which is good, but I don't like the idea that people can't post negative things about a deck, and that we should only post in our own deck's thread about how awesome our own deck is and how much we love to play our own deck.
Also, MBC and mono green are not competitive. At all.
Basically what the proponents for Ghost Quarter are saying is "I understand I have to hurt my own mana base significantly, but what about these random situations where they might hurt my opponent's mana base enough to where it's as bad as my own subpar mana base.
You're taking a colored land out of your deck in order to potentially take one or hopefully two colors out of their current lands, which may or may not even end up hurting them? Think about that for a second.
Or ghost quartering your own land to fetch an appropriate basic? You've got to be joking...Yeah let's hurt our mana base for a card that can sometimes be used to fix our colors instead of running the needed colors over that card...
I think there's room for idea's. Every new top 8 deck is one no one's thought of. I think when GateCrash started you'd get a laugh by suggesting Ghor-clan rampager. Someone was goofing around and came up with the Stoneblade combo or Elves.
I'm not trying to be rude, but this is exactly what people are talking about. I'm not saying you're a bad player (this isn't a statement about skill or anything like that), but people didn't 'goof' around and come up with these things. Rarely is there a card or deck suggestion from some random person that ends up being a top 8 deck. Most popular decks come from pros or groups of pros, not hastily thrown together messes of decks.
Also rarely is there a deck that top 8's that's just a brand-new archetype that no one has thought of. Junk rites had been thought of before it started dominating; people just made tweaks to a known idea. A deck that fits your description would be prime speaker bant, which came out of nowhere to have 3 almost identical decklists in the same top 16. This type of deck is not what anyone's talking about in this thread. If they posted it here before they top 16'd, people would have a (mostly) reasonable discussion about it.
I understand your overall sentiment, but I just think you're giving the 'bad' players more credit than they're due. No one is complaining about players saying 'Well, here's Junk rites, a top performing deck, what do you think about putting Elderscale Wurm in the main as a 1-of?' People are complaining about players saying 'Here's a winning deck list with XYZ colors, here's my version where I run cards that are widely thought to be unplayable'. Like you said, people can run cards previously thought to be unplayable and come up with a new interaction and find a home for the card, but then these players defend it by saying 'I'VE WON FNM AND TESTED A LOT ON MTGWORKSTATION', which is the crux of the problem.
We've been putting in the testing, it's rough going to be playing red based aggro right now. Coin toss matchups against the "best" deck in the format make it shaky.
I would say that I agree to an extent. You're acting like red decks haven't always been 'coin-flippy', but in this meta it seems that there's not that guaranteed game 1 win followed by two more coin-flip type games of which you only need to win one.
Despite this, Rx sligh decks will always been in the top 8/16 of any big tourney just due to the amount of people who play them because they're fast, cheap, and fun.
Synergy is 'the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.'
I think the whole point everyone is trying to make is that while Resto Angel and Thragtusk do have a certain synergy, the deck itself is not synergistic. For example, old school jund with Bloodbraid elves, bit blasts, and all those good cards was synergistic. It worked together as a whole. Ally decks are synergistic. Human decks are synergistic.
Think of it this way: In a small company, pairs of employees can work insanely well together (synergy), but hate or at least dislike everyone else. However, due to all the employees in that company being really smart, hard-working, etc. the company profits tremendously, beating the competition, even the companies who have a friendly, caring, synergistic workplace, but are less intelligent, or work less, or what have you. There is even a possibility of too much synergy, where they interact together so well that it causes them to ignore the fact that they are slacking off because of this (think ridiculous combo/interaction decks).
I completely agree with the notion of the OP. I think every deck is a goodstuff deck, and there is a lack of symmetry between cards. That being said, junk rites has a very nice amount of symmetry and look how there is literally no counter to it. No one is quite sure how to stop it, and the main ideas for beating it are things like bant hexproof which is, in fact, a more synergistic deck. The problem then cycles to the fact that bant hexproof ends up losing to the goodstuff decks because it doesnt have enough good cards on their own.
I recently got back into Magic this January after a break since around Scars. The last deck I played was a U/W blink deck with Venser, Geist, Blade Slicer, Geist-Honored Monk, and other ETB creatures. I only played it once because it was a quick deck I made after being out for 4-5 months, and it dominated FNM (not that that's saying too much, but it was beating the U/W delver/stoneforge mystic decks everyone was playing). The point is that there was synergy, and now I feel like every deck I make from scratch ends up looking almost to the card like Naya midrange/Jund Midrange/Junk Midrange/Dega Midrange/UWR midrange/esper control, which are basically the top decks, because they're not hard to make; no one had to discover them or their interactions. Thragtusk and Restoration Angel have synergy, yes, but no one had to figure that one out; both of them would have been played without the other, and they both are if the deck is not running white or green, respectively.
TL;DR All the top decks are what would result if you explained magic to an intelligent person and gave him all the cards to build with, and that's my problem with everything.
Also, there's no sideboard...o.O new meta! nosideboard.dec, just make the maindeck that good hahaha.
If you go here: http://mtgpulse.com/event/12737#178421 and click the pdf file in the options it will load the decklist that was submitted and there's no sideboard on it.
My biggest problem is when people post in a competitive thread archetype such as Jund and just post absolute crap. For example, we all know Jund has pretty much been the powerhouse for the past few years in several formats, but the purpose of the thread is to adjust it, which is great. Someone saying 'I don't know guys, I've been cutting Thundermaw Hellkite because the format wants us to be faster' is great discussion. It makes you think about the deck and how it interacts with the meta.
However, in every thread there's some guy going 'Here is my jund list: I run Liliana of the Dark realms and random awful cards that would never see the light of a top 8', which is actually not even the problem. The problem exists when everyone goes 'holy crap that decklist is freaking terrible, can you explain it' and the person responds with something that shows he has no knowledge of how to build a deck, followed by accusing people of being afraid to try cards that aren't known. I honestly think these people should simply be banned from the competitive forum. Sure, it's not inclusive, but when they make it known that they're not competitive, I don't think they are the sort of people we want in this forum.
A lot of people also post decklists that I'm convinced are thinly veiled budget decks, because no way would people run some of these cards unless they were on a budget. Think something along the lines of 'I dont know if I like Jace, the Mind Sculptor that much, I think I'm just gonna play Jace Beleren because he fits better'. Yeah...bet so kid.
Yeah. I completely agree. That matchup is a nightmare. The good thing is that it shouldn't gain popularity at the larger events simply due to it's chancy nature and the aggro-infested meta.
I've always hated the idea that 'control' decks these days are hard to play. You're not playing tempo or permission control where countering the wrong spell can mean the end of you; you just azorius charm into supreme verdict into sphinxs into answers.
This is coming from someone who has played that type of shell. Aristocrats is the hardest for sure. I don't mind your list at all besides the control thing.
Also, a bit more on topic, I have always played midranged GWx type decks, and this past few months I've been piloting a RG aggro deck on MTGO just because it was cheap. I kept selling cards down online (terrible idea btw) until I only had enough to buy RG aggro. Anyways, the deck has a lot more decisions than most people think. Sure, there are games that just go land creature land 4 creatures land boar land hellrider howhaveinotwonyet....but there are the games where my bad decision will cost me the game.
On top of that, it's a lot like cheesing in starcraft. You can master it and do it perfectly but a big thing you're testing is your opponent's play. Sure, some might not like that but the deck basically says "Okay, I'm playing at neutral skill level, if you play well, you'll win, if you mess up, you'll lose."
First of all, like the guy said above me, Hinterland Harbor and Breeding Pool are rares worth a total of about $60. Those are probably the most important rares he could possibly have, especially in an aggro/tempo deck. Replacing them with basic lands would probably be better than guildgates because the tempo dictates that he has a play every turn, and the fact that he has both of his colors open without missing a drop is crucial.
Second of all, he's just playing solid tempo cards in those colors. Most tempo cards aren't rare, because most tempo cards have no overly unique effect; they normally just have a good mana:p/t ratio.
Lastly, like someone said above me, it's not as if he's playing subpar cards to make a point (as far as I know), he's just playing the cards he feels fit together the best. This is evidenced by the 4 rares in his sideboard (Mayor and Revenge of the Hunted), so essentially I don't understand what the big deal is.
I wouldn't even bat an eye at this deck if you hadn't made this thread, other than maybe at the fact that he got 2nd with a UG aggro deck when the meta is primarily RG.
Edit:
While you're mostly right about this, as I mentioned above this is because all the Red cards in these past blocks have had unique effects, probably to keep up with the strength of midrange decks and thragtusk. All of the cards like Hellrider, Ash Zealot, Stromkirk Noble, etc. would be absolutely insane in limited so they have to be at least rare.
I agree completely. At low mana costs it's great, not because it's bad for 7 mana (killing resto angels is cool), but because at low mana costs it doesn't kill our own stuff!
Let's compare mana costs.
Since 3 mana is lowest you can cast either disregarding miracle (will discuss miracle in a sec), we'll start there.
3 mana:
gaze of granite: kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
4 mana:
gaze of granite: now it kills mana dorks, experiment ones, champion of the parishes, stromkirk nobles, rakdos cacklers plus it kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
5 mana:
gaze of granite: hits all the important RG aggro creatures (boar, BTE, ash zealot), hits stuff like our own ground seals, and some enchantments like intangible virtue plus it kills mana dorks, experiment ones, champion of the parishes, stromkirk nobles, rakdos cacklers plus it kills all tokens, regardless of toughness, so thragtusk tokens (including our own), token decks with intangible virtues (junk tokens) that I feel will be very strong soon, tormod's crypt?, our own garruk tokens (and theirs obviously), and flipped cards such as delver or, more importantly, ravager.
bonfire: kills all X/2s. not too many of these in the format. BTEs, ash zealots, but it does do 2 damage to planeswalkers (important for previously -1'd lilianas or garruk or what have you) and kills all X/1s. Aka mana dorks that they overextended on. Also lightning maulers, and unboosted champion of the parishes (why aren't they boosted on t3, I'm not sure)
I'm gonna stop there. Looking back on what I just wrote and at what is killed with each for X mana, some may or may not have decided one or the other is better.
Now, include miracle. Bonfire suddenly kills everything under 6 power (not a lot is above 6 power) for 7 mana, and kills all X/3s for 4 mana. Sure, it's not going to be topdecked every game, and it sucks having it in your opening hand, but we already knew that.
Jund is a topdeck deck (lol). The deck is designed to have 1 to 1 answers to their threats. Then, when they're out of threats and you're out of answers (aka no cards in either hand), you draw threats that demand immediate answers (kessig allows this) and sometimes demand more than one (thrag, garruk or huntmaster). A topdecked bonfire just puts the game out of reach. When the deck is designed to answer everything using all of the cards in hand (murder this, tragic slip that, liliana sac last creature), a single card killing literally everything they have is often too much for the opponent.
On top of miracle, the fact that it kills our own stuff is too much. We don't want to kill our own tokens or flipped huntmasters (of which we have plenty) or our own mana-fixing arbor elves or own ground seals or our own olivias, huntmasters, etc.
So, my final verdict FWIW is that while bonfire isn't the perfect card (there is a reason only 2 are being maindecked nowadays and the price is no longer $30), it's farrrrr better than gaze of granite. I don't even think gaze of granite will see play in standard unless token decks have a rise in popularity, which I think is entirely possible, but in this meta, gaze of granite is almost strictly worse to have in your deck.
He has negative card advantage. The odds of discarding your bomb after drawing it are actually higher than drawing a bomb in the first place. Even if you have 7 cards in your hand already, you still have a 12.5% chance of discarding the card you draw, ignoring the fact you might discard a beneficial card already in your hand. He doesn't draw for you, he replaces a random card in your hand for a random card in your deck. He also has the added drawback that you might discard the random card from your deck.
What exactly is his benefit? What does he do? His -4 is alright but it happens 3 turns later and its freaking -4...
You're the one posting in the established forum for decks with established tournament results. I simply messed around with him for fun and confirmed the fact that he's as bad as I thought he was.
I just playtested with Tibalt. He has to be one of the worst cards I've ever played with. He's a $1.50 planeswalker for a reason--he sucks.
As for the lingering souls, I don't know how that clogs the deck? You run spells like faithless looting that enable you to put lingering souls in your graveyard so that it will literally never clog your deck...
This is the competitive forum. Not the I enjoy brewing decks forum. The reason that guy is posting is because he played the deck because he liked it/thought it might be good, realized that it has huge problems, and is now reporting what he thinks. This forum is for making good decks that win tournaments, not just throwing together good cards into a deck.
Obviously this deck has had some success, which is good, but I don't like the idea that people can't post negative things about a deck, and that we should only post in our own deck's thread about how awesome our own deck is and how much we love to play our own deck.
Also, MBC and mono green are not competitive. At all.
You're taking a colored land out of your deck in order to potentially take one or hopefully two colors out of their current lands, which may or may not even end up hurting them? Think about that for a second.
Or ghost quartering your own land to fetch an appropriate basic? You've got to be joking...Yeah let's hurt our mana base for a card that can sometimes be used to fix our colors instead of running the needed colors over that card...
I'm not trying to be rude, but this is exactly what people are talking about. I'm not saying you're a bad player (this isn't a statement about skill or anything like that), but people didn't 'goof' around and come up with these things. Rarely is there a card or deck suggestion from some random person that ends up being a top 8 deck. Most popular decks come from pros or groups of pros, not hastily thrown together messes of decks.
Also rarely is there a deck that top 8's that's just a brand-new archetype that no one has thought of. Junk rites had been thought of before it started dominating; people just made tweaks to a known idea. A deck that fits your description would be prime speaker bant, which came out of nowhere to have 3 almost identical decklists in the same top 16. This type of deck is not what anyone's talking about in this thread. If they posted it here before they top 16'd, people would have a (mostly) reasonable discussion about it.
I understand your overall sentiment, but I just think you're giving the 'bad' players more credit than they're due. No one is complaining about players saying 'Well, here's Junk rites, a top performing deck, what do you think about putting Elderscale Wurm in the main as a 1-of?' People are complaining about players saying 'Here's a winning deck list with XYZ colors, here's my version where I run cards that are widely thought to be unplayable'. Like you said, people can run cards previously thought to be unplayable and come up with a new interaction and find a home for the card, but then these players defend it by saying 'I'VE WON FNM AND TESTED A LOT ON MTGWORKSTATION', which is the crux of the problem.
I would say that I agree to an extent. You're acting like red decks haven't always been 'coin-flippy', but in this meta it seems that there's not that guaranteed game 1 win followed by two more coin-flip type games of which you only need to win one.
Despite this, Rx sligh decks will always been in the top 8/16 of any big tourney just due to the amount of people who play them because they're fast, cheap, and fun.
Synergy is 'the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.'
I think the whole point everyone is trying to make is that while Resto Angel and Thragtusk do have a certain synergy, the deck itself is not synergistic. For example, old school jund with Bloodbraid elves, bit blasts, and all those good cards was synergistic. It worked together as a whole. Ally decks are synergistic. Human decks are synergistic.
Think of it this way: In a small company, pairs of employees can work insanely well together (synergy), but hate or at least dislike everyone else. However, due to all the employees in that company being really smart, hard-working, etc. the company profits tremendously, beating the competition, even the companies who have a friendly, caring, synergistic workplace, but are less intelligent, or work less, or what have you. There is even a possibility of too much synergy, where they interact together so well that it causes them to ignore the fact that they are slacking off because of this (think ridiculous combo/interaction decks).
I completely agree with the notion of the OP. I think every deck is a goodstuff deck, and there is a lack of symmetry between cards. That being said, junk rites has a very nice amount of symmetry and look how there is literally no counter to it. No one is quite sure how to stop it, and the main ideas for beating it are things like bant hexproof which is, in fact, a more synergistic deck. The problem then cycles to the fact that bant hexproof ends up losing to the goodstuff decks because it doesnt have enough good cards on their own.
I recently got back into Magic this January after a break since around Scars. The last deck I played was a U/W blink deck with Venser, Geist, Blade Slicer, Geist-Honored Monk, and other ETB creatures. I only played it once because it was a quick deck I made after being out for 4-5 months, and it dominated FNM (not that that's saying too much, but it was beating the U/W delver/stoneforge mystic decks everyone was playing). The point is that there was synergy, and now I feel like every deck I make from scratch ends up looking almost to the card like Naya midrange/Jund Midrange/Junk Midrange/Dega Midrange/UWR midrange/esper control, which are basically the top decks, because they're not hard to make; no one had to discover them or their interactions. Thragtusk and Restoration Angel have synergy, yes, but no one had to figure that one out; both of them would have been played without the other, and they both are if the deck is not running white or green, respectively.
TL;DR All the top decks are what would result if you explained magic to an intelligent person and gave him all the cards to build with, and that's my problem with everything.
It's G/W blink and for the most part exactly the decks being discussed here.
2 Angel of Serenity
4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
2 Borderland Ranger
3 Centaur Healer
2 Fiend Hunter
1 Rhox Faithmender
4 Thragtusk
4 Cloudshift
4 Farseek
1 Conjurer's Closet
7 Forest
6 Plains
2 Gavony Township
4 Sunpetal Grove
4 Temple Garden
1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
Also, there's no sideboard...o.O new meta! nosideboard.dec, just make the maindeck that good hahaha.
If you go here: http://mtgpulse.com/event/12737#178421 and click the pdf file in the options it will load the decklist that was submitted and there's no sideboard on it.
However, in every thread there's some guy going 'Here is my jund list: I run Liliana of the Dark realms and random awful cards that would never see the light of a top 8', which is actually not even the problem. The problem exists when everyone goes 'holy crap that decklist is freaking terrible, can you explain it' and the person responds with something that shows he has no knowledge of how to build a deck, followed by accusing people of being afraid to try cards that aren't known. I honestly think these people should simply be banned from the competitive forum. Sure, it's not inclusive, but when they make it known that they're not competitive, I don't think they are the sort of people we want in this forum.
A lot of people also post decklists that I'm convinced are thinly veiled budget decks, because no way would people run some of these cards unless they were on a budget. Think something along the lines of 'I dont know if I like Jace, the Mind Sculptor that much, I think I'm just gonna play Jace Beleren because he fits better'. Yeah...bet so kid.