Have you guys had the privilege of playing against Bant decks with Time Raveler yet? I guess it hasn't been very popular because I only ran into today for the first time since WAR.
Anyways, without access to instant speed CoCo or Queller, they just can't do anything. It's hilarious actually, I had a guy draw 9 cards off tireless tracker and it never even felt close.
Curious though about not recalling the milling; I can't ever remember a time when UW wasn't running at least 4 Path and 4 colorless lands that destroyed other lands. Before that colorless land was Field of Ruin, UW usually consisted of 4x spreading seas as well. My recollection of the era of Gideon of the Trials being introduced was that the only metric that mattered in paper was library count and online the important metrics were library count and clock.
I think the tradeoff bearscape is referring to is the distinctly low count of basic lands in your list, not so much the 5th+ colorless land - many lists are running upwards of 9 basics and as low as 1 fetchable dual. The benefit of that is minimal damage from lands, minimal ETB tapped lands, minimal damage vs land hate cards like Blood Moon, Big Thalia, Arbiter, fulminator and importantly gives you the edge in Field of Ruin mirrors. I would dare to say that the reason why most people believe UW is as successful as it is is due in large part to it having an excellent manabase. Some pro players have gone as far as saying that stock modern UW has the best mana base of any constructed deck ever.
Yes, 2 Veto might a bit much but I just can't justify the second knot. So many decks are running maindeck nihil spellbomb or relic. I don't think the 2nd veto can be too much of a mistake, so I'll leave it for the the time being.
As far as Dovin/Gideon I think you might be over estimating Gideon in the mirror. You mentioned that you are just returning to UW and as such you may be remembering a time when game 1 of the mirror was almost entirely dependant on decking and Gideon was a huge asset. This isn't the case anymore. With the printing of Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and the unbanning of Jace the games just never come down to decking and a Gideon emblem is going to be virtually worthless.
I also don't think the finite nature of Dovin's -1 is going to be very relevant. We run so much removal and are so good going into the late game that we really only need to buy a little tempo with our turn 3 plays in order to make them justified. As I said, I think Dovin provides more tempo due to the tax effect. However, I think Teferi, Time Raveler is superior to both for the simple reason that it draws a card while providing that 1 turn of tempo that is much needed. Once we get to turn 5, 6, 7 I think it matters little which of 3 walkers we having going against everything other than control mirrors (and maybe Tron). In which case Raveler takes the lead by a large margin.
I think Dovin, Hand of Control might just be a better a Gideon of the Trials; The -1 is basically equivalent to the +1 on Trials even so far as them both being on 4 loyalty the turn you use it first, arguably the most important time since you will have more mana to work with on follow up turns. Imo, their main purpose is to buy a few turns until you can stabilize, and I would argue that Dovin is even better in that main function since the tax will also be buying you a little tempo some amount of the time. The main difference between them is that Dovin can't close out games or pressure planeswalkers. However I would argue that the static ability on Dovin outweighs this since UW doesn't really need to close out games, it just needs to not lose. The inability to pressure planeswalkers of Dovin is his greatest downside over Gideon, notably vs the different flavors of liliana decks (though there aren't many of them at the moment). Vs Jace decks the combination of opposing path to exiles and large number of instants/sorceries make an argument for Dovin being superior since he doesn't die to path and taxes said spells. In either case, I don't think Dovin nor Gideon are strong enough right now since the matchup where they are the strongest against (Shadow) is already a matchup we are heavily favored in.
Here's my current list after testing many of the new cards:
I've really been enjoying the 26th land (Blast Zone) and zero Opt/Serum. The biggest downside of that plan is that you can't really go heavy on snapcaster because drawing more than 1 of them in the first 10 cards is awful too often.
The cards I don't like in the list are the 2cmc counterspells and Azcanta. Veto is narrow, logic knot is often dead early, leak is often dead late and Azcanta is a bit slow for the meta. Unfortunately without those cards we would just be really low on two drops and countermagic, so there aren't a lot of better options. I think you could play an Ancestral Vision over the Search and it would have much the same effect for less mana investment.
2 Surgicals main seems a bit steep, but I expect to face a lot of Dredge/Pheonix/Tron and not a lot of burn, so I think I'll find utility for them in most matches.
Depose is my pet card, not really a meta call. It finds a use against every deck, it's never amazing and it's never bad it's just always fine.
The 5th fetch is there to facilitate an additional dual source and the 3rd hallowed fountain is to give more non-basic targets for fetchlands so we don't get too far behind on the path/field wars in mirror matches
If you're interested in a 2 for 1 instant speed tutor, Gifts ungiven is a consideration similar to ignite the beacon. You may not get the exact 2 walkers you want but the flexibility to tutor reactive cards would likely make up for that.
I've been trying to make the value-gifts package work ever since humans came on the scene when we started mixing up our Wrath effects but unfortunately it was just never good enough. The addition of the new planeswalkers may make it worth revisiting though since one the issues I had with it was using it to find a suitable pile of proactive cards; best usually being some mix of Jace, teferi, Azcanta, snap and/or cryptic.
At least we can agree on one thing, Karsten is a saint for the game of magic lol
I think you are misunderstanding me somewhere because by saying "for every hand you can come up with that needs a cantrip over a colorless land I can give you a hand where the reverse is true" it implies I value those cantrips when it's exactly the opposite; I think there are far more hands that want the colorless source over the cantrip, and I don't think it's close. It's especially not close if you change out veto/knot for cards like negate. It's actually my entire argument.
You are also grossly underestimating how often keeping a hand based on your second land being either a colorless source or a cantrip matters. So much so that it makes me think you're either being dishonest or you're new to UW; you can't afford to spend your first few turns digging for lands and there are many keepable hands with a dual-source and a colorless-source where there are nearly zero keepable hands with only 1 land. This possibility is not reflected properly by your billions and billions statement; we're talking nearly 12% of the time you're going to see that 1/60 card difference by your second turn (when you could reasonably expect to cast a veto/knot) and about 7% of the time that colorless/cantrip is going to be accompanied by no other lands in the opener. Those are not numbers that should be ignored.
That being said, I think that Veto might be enough stronger than negate that this risk may be worthwhile.
Unless the blue marble does something other than be a blue marble, like say draw a card or scry, or that not all the blue marbles are the same and exist outside of a hypergeometric vacuum.
If you read back a little further you'll see that I suggested that in order to play a 26 land version I would cut all Serum/Opt in favor of Heiroglyphs. Losing out on the scry absolutely does hinder your ability to cast colored spells.
You're also not considering how many hands with a fetch (or any dual) plus a colourless land are keepable, of which there are many. Every time you add a colorless source, those combinations go up. So while adding a single colorless source in place of a spell doesn't change the odds in a hypergeometric vacuum, the game of magic isn't played in such a vacuum.
As long as you still run 14 white sources, running 26 lands with 6 colorless sources does not make Dovin's Veto any harder to cast than if you had 25 lands with 5 colorless sources
This math only accounts for paying a specific Mana cost on a specific turn;it doesn't account for wanting to play multiple spells in a turn cycle. Whenever you open on 2x colorless lands and a veto/absorb/logic knot you're going to have a hard time casting on curve or trying to double-spell.
You also didn't account for celestial colonnade and glacial fortress; those numbers assume X untapped sources, which is not the case in a 4x colonnade deck - most lists run around 7-9 untapped white sources, not 14.
How good to do we think Blast Zone is in UW Control?
Conceptually it seemed good and in practice it's been even better. I played a few matches with 26 land, 4 Field 2 blast zone and it performs pretty well. Mind you I stay away from cards like absorb and I might be more inclined to lean towards negate over veto running 6 colorless sources.
I will be testing it out some more, but I'm having fun running the Teferi Pool version currently. Fun is about all though, I'm not winning very much with it.
Yes, so it's a 1 sided hard lock. It's pretty interesting to me. I read the guys tournament report and he doesn't seem all to familiar with the deck, and some of his card choices for a combo-control deck seem subpar. Given those two things, I would say that with some tuning and more experience the deck could be a real contender. My only caveat would be that a lot of his success might have also been to his fortunate pairings and the fact that his opponents likely didn't know what was going on. Not sure if a better build and more experience can overcome those two other aspects, but I intend to give it a try.
I would look to cut the non 3cmc walkers and the absorbs for remands and look to include opt over Serum; the ability to opt in response to your opponent trying to get the best card out of the pool is invaluable. This will allow you to play knowledge pool earlier. It could also be the case that you want to cut cards like detention sphere so that slamming a pool on 6 is less likely to lead to a blow out in desperate times if you flip your own sphere to it. Hero of Dominaria is similar.
How come you don't need to bounce pool? If you play a spell with the pool on the table it will exile the spell you're playing and trigger the second ability. If you want to resolve another spell you can't have the pool on the table.
Every spell that gets exiled by pool goes into the pool. So let's say you have a Jace in hand you want to cast - you cast it, have it get exiled and replace it with something else from the pool. Then you cast any other card from hand, have pool exile it and replace it with the Jace that was just exiled.
Opponent can cast during mainphase with empty stack only, pool will trigger and then they will be unable to cast the card from pool. They can't cast anything from hand, no instants, no sorceries, no nothing. They could cast cards from other zones though because pool doesn't trigger from other zones, but there aren't really a whole lot of cards in modern breing cast from other zones. We will still be able to cast any time we would normally be able to then trigger pool and cast something off pool.
You don't need to bounce pool, which makes the combo more robust than people seem to imagine; if you can resolve pool it's unlikely your opponent will be able to kill you the following turn since their ability to play cards in the correct order will be significantly hindered. You can then freely cast your teferi the following turn granted you have at least 1 other spell to cast and the Mana to cast both teferi and the spell.
So there was an interesting UW combo-control list that popped up during the SCG modern event this weekend that took 9th place. It looks a lot like typical UW control except it replaced all the cryptics and most of the jace's and snaps with Teferi, Time Raveler and Knowledge Pool.
I don't think it does anything against shadow; all of their cantrips are instant speed.
Pheonix has a lot of sorcery speed cantrips though, so yea, if you can stick it there it seems fine. However, sticking a 3 Mana planeswalker with 3 loyalty against a fast lightning bolt deck with hasty 3 power creatures seems ambitious.
In the mirror, it's basically a pithing needle for Jace that can draw a card or two, which is fine, but not sure it's worthy of a sideboard slot. If UW players were on more copies of Serum Visions she might be a bit more effective but as it stands she seems like a narrow sideboard card to me.
I don't think Narset is very good for us. Honestly, I'm more interested in Dovin, Hand of Control than Narset. To me, it seems like a better Gideon of the Trials when played on curve; Gideon is the more powerful topdeck and acts as a finisher, but UW doesn't care too much about finishers. Dovin buys a bit more tempo than Gideon does, and good tempo plays are something that UW control is want for. Hard to say Dovin is better than Gids overall, but they are very obviously comparable.
where are you getting your spoilers?
Anyways, without access to instant speed CoCo or Queller, they just can't do anything. It's hilarious actually, I had a guy draw 9 cards off tireless tracker and it never even felt close.
Curious though about not recalling the milling; I can't ever remember a time when UW wasn't running at least 4 Path and 4 colorless lands that destroyed other lands. Before that colorless land was Field of Ruin, UW usually consisted of 4x spreading seas as well. My recollection of the era of Gideon of the Trials being introduced was that the only metric that mattered in paper was library count and online the important metrics were library count and clock.
I think the tradeoff bearscape is referring to is the distinctly low count of basic lands in your list, not so much the 5th+ colorless land - many lists are running upwards of 9 basics and as low as 1 fetchable dual. The benefit of that is minimal damage from lands, minimal ETB tapped lands, minimal damage vs land hate cards like Blood Moon, Big Thalia, Arbiter, fulminator and importantly gives you the edge in Field of Ruin mirrors. I would dare to say that the reason why most people believe UW is as successful as it is is due in large part to it having an excellent manabase. Some pro players have gone as far as saying that stock modern UW has the best mana base of any constructed deck ever.
As far as Dovin/Gideon I think you might be over estimating Gideon in the mirror. You mentioned that you are just returning to UW and as such you may be remembering a time when game 1 of the mirror was almost entirely dependant on decking and Gideon was a huge asset. This isn't the case anymore. With the printing of Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and the unbanning of Jace the games just never come down to decking and a Gideon emblem is going to be virtually worthless.
I also don't think the finite nature of Dovin's -1 is going to be very relevant. We run so much removal and are so good going into the late game that we really only need to buy a little tempo with our turn 3 plays in order to make them justified. As I said, I think Dovin provides more tempo due to the tax effect. However, I think Teferi, Time Raveler is superior to both for the simple reason that it draws a card while providing that 1 turn of tempo that is much needed. Once we get to turn 5, 6, 7 I think it matters little which of 3 walkers we having going against everything other than control mirrors (and maybe Tron). In which case Raveler takes the lead by a large margin.
Here's my current list after testing many of the new cards:
1 Search For Azcanta
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
3 Jace, the mind sculptor
2 teferi, hero of dominaria
Creatures (4)
2 Snapcaster Mage
2 Vendilion Clique
Removal (9)
4 path to exile
1 Condemn
1 detention sphere
2 Supreme Verdict
1 Wrath of God
CounterMagic (7)
1 Mana Leak
1 Logic Knot
2 Dovin's Veto
3 cryptic command
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Depose // Deploy
Lands (26)
4 Flooded Strand
1 Scalding Tarn
4 Celestial Colonnade
3 Hallowed Fountain
1 Glacial Fortress
5 Island
2 Plains
4 Field of Ruin
2 Blast Zone
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Oust
1 Celestial Purge
1 Stony Silence
1 Ceremonious Rejection
1 Spell Snare
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
1 Narset, Parter of Veils
1 Timely Reinforcements
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Settle the Wreckage
1 Dovin's Veto
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Nimble Obstructionist
1 Dispel
I've really been enjoying the 26th land (Blast Zone) and zero Opt/Serum. The biggest downside of that plan is that you can't really go heavy on snapcaster because drawing more than 1 of them in the first 10 cards is awful too often.
The cards I don't like in the list are the 2cmc counterspells and Azcanta. Veto is narrow, logic knot is often dead early, leak is often dead late and Azcanta is a bit slow for the meta. Unfortunately without those cards we would just be really low on two drops and countermagic, so there aren't a lot of better options. I think you could play an Ancestral Vision over the Search and it would have much the same effect for less mana investment.
2 Surgicals main seems a bit steep, but I expect to face a lot of Dredge/Pheonix/Tron and not a lot of burn, so I think I'll find utility for them in most matches.
Depose is my pet card, not really a meta call. It finds a use against every deck, it's never amazing and it's never bad it's just always fine.
The 5th fetch is there to facilitate an additional dual source and the 3rd hallowed fountain is to give more non-basic targets for fetchlands so we don't get too far behind on the path/field wars in mirror matches
I've been trying to make the value-gifts package work ever since humans came on the scene when we started mixing up our Wrath effects but unfortunately it was just never good enough. The addition of the new planeswalkers may make it worth revisiting though since one the issues I had with it was using it to find a suitable pile of proactive cards; best usually being some mix of Jace, teferi, Azcanta, snap and/or cryptic.
I think you are misunderstanding me somewhere because by saying "for every hand you can come up with that needs a cantrip over a colorless land I can give you a hand where the reverse is true" it implies I value those cantrips when it's exactly the opposite; I think there are far more hands that want the colorless source over the cantrip, and I don't think it's close. It's especially not close if you change out veto/knot for cards like negate. It's actually my entire argument.
You are also grossly underestimating how often keeping a hand based on your second land being either a colorless source or a cantrip matters. So much so that it makes me think you're either being dishonest or you're new to UW; you can't afford to spend your first few turns digging for lands and there are many keepable hands with a dual-source and a colorless-source where there are nearly zero keepable hands with only 1 land. This possibility is not reflected properly by your billions and billions statement; we're talking nearly 12% of the time you're going to see that 1/60 card difference by your second turn (when you could reasonably expect to cast a veto/knot) and about 7% of the time that colorless/cantrip is going to be accompanied by no other lands in the opener. Those are not numbers that should be ignored.
That being said, I think that Veto might be enough stronger than negate that this risk may be worthwhile.
If you read back a little further you'll see that I suggested that in order to play a 26 land version I would cut all Serum/Opt in favor of Heiroglyphs. Losing out on the scry absolutely does hinder your ability to cast colored spells.
You're also not considering how many hands with a fetch (or any dual) plus a colourless land are keepable, of which there are many. Every time you add a colorless source, those combinations go up. So while adding a single colorless source in place of a spell doesn't change the odds in a hypergeometric vacuum, the game of magic isn't played in such a vacuum.
This math only accounts for paying a specific Mana cost on a specific turn;it doesn't account for wanting to play multiple spells in a turn cycle. Whenever you open on 2x colorless lands and a veto/absorb/logic knot you're going to have a hard time casting on curve or trying to double-spell.
You also didn't account for celestial colonnade and glacial fortress; those numbers assume X untapped sources, which is not the case in a 4x colonnade deck - most lists run around 7-9 untapped white sources, not 14.
Conceptually it seemed good and in practice it's been even better. I played a few matches with 26 land, 4 Field 2 blast zone and it performs pretty well. Mind you I stay away from cards like absorb and I might be more inclined to lean towards negate over veto running 6 colorless sources.
I will be testing it out some more, but I'm having fun running the Teferi Pool version currently. Fun is about all though, I'm not winning very much with it.
I would look to cut the non 3cmc walkers and the absorbs for remands and look to include opt over Serum; the ability to opt in response to your opponent trying to get the best card out of the pool is invaluable. This will allow you to play knowledge pool earlier. It could also be the case that you want to cut cards like detention sphere so that slamming a pool on 6 is less likely to lead to a blow out in desperate times if you flip your own sphere to it. Hero of Dominaria is similar.
Every spell that gets exiled by pool goes into the pool. So let's say you have a Jace in hand you want to cast - you cast it, have it get exiled and replace it with something else from the pool. Then you cast any other card from hand, have pool exile it and replace it with the Jace that was just exiled.
You don't need to bounce pool, which makes the combo more robust than people seem to imagine; if you can resolve pool it's unlikely your opponent will be able to kill you the following turn since their ability to play cards in the correct order will be significantly hindered. You can then freely cast your teferi the following turn granted you have at least 1 other spell to cast and the Mana to cast both teferi and the spell.
Here's a link: http://www.starcitygames.com/decks/129118
What do you guys think?
Pheonix has a lot of sorcery speed cantrips though, so yea, if you can stick it there it seems fine. However, sticking a 3 Mana planeswalker with 3 loyalty against a fast lightning bolt deck with hasty 3 power creatures seems ambitious.
In the mirror, it's basically a pithing needle for Jace that can draw a card or two, which is fine, but not sure it's worthy of a sideboard slot. If UW players were on more copies of Serum Visions she might be a bit more effective but as it stands she seems like a narrow sideboard card to me.
I don't think Narset is very good for us. Honestly, I'm more interested in Dovin, Hand of Control than Narset. To me, it seems like a better Gideon of the Trials when played on curve; Gideon is the more powerful topdeck and acts as a finisher, but UW doesn't care too much about finishers. Dovin buys a bit more tempo than Gideon does, and good tempo plays are something that UW control is want for. Hard to say Dovin is better than Gids overall, but they are very obviously comparable.