With the new Khans cards how you guys think this deck can do?
I´ve put together the Bant variation of this deck and after Khans was reliased i was pondering if the deck would be worth playing after Treasure Cruise was a thing. Or even if we could play it.
I didn't test much, and still have to get my hands in more copies of Treasure Cruise as i only have 1, but my plan is to change the 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor for the second and third Treasure Cruise main, and play 10 fetchs instead of 8 that i´m playing at the moment.
What you guys think?
I've never played the Shardless Agent list, but I am curious how Treasure Cruise has been working out for you. I run a much more counter-heavy build with 2 Counterspell and 2 Spell Pierce in place of some of your other removal and was debating replacing some of it with TC. Has it been consistently drawing into enough gas to replace the loss of removal and alt wincons? Or otherwise cutting some time off the clock on the games where we stall out and go long?
Oh, and you can probably cut one of the three Thopter Foundry. It's an easy pitch to Force when you have that many, but I've found three to be more than I want to see. With all the Brainstorming, fetching with top, and Enlightened Tutor backup you can simply do with one less. So you might try dropping that in place of Jace or those additional Cruises to keep another wincon around.
I somehow missed the library/graveyard restriction on Grafdiggers. Still, it's not as effective as Rest in Peace simply because it doesn't prevent them from setting up. Dredge usually runs a combination of Ancient Grudge/Nature's Claim in the sideboard simply for those two cards. You might try a Pithing Needle or Phyrexian Revoker in place of the second Crucible. They're just utility cards, but Pithing can slow down a variety of decks, including turning off Wirewood Symbiote in Elves and fetches in most other decks. Since they also hit Stoneforge and any SwordsOf, etc, it's almost never a dead card.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what else you could do. I feel like the consistent counterbalance + spell backup is one of the better reasons to play ThopterBalance in the first place so I'm not exactly sure how well your deck plays.
Grafdigger's Cage is fine, but Rest in Peace is generally better. They both more-or-less do the same thing, but Rest in Peace nukes the graveyard while Dredge just kinda looks at you and then continues to dredge anyway to murder you with Ichorids and Narcomebas if you only use Grafdigger's. Our deck can be really slow so we can't afford to leave those fast decks with a viable clock. I've never had any real trouble with Elves because a resolved counterbalance will end the game and Pathing/Terminus + Force and Daze backup will get you to the 'balance.
I also made some very minor tweaks to my own list recently. As much as I love tutoring in response, I've been wanting another Spell Pierce for a while now so I dropped one of my Enlightened Tutors. It seems to be working out a bit better giving me another early-game counter and another card to pitch to Force when in need. I've also moved to a meta where Affinity is clearly not a thing, but is at least 50% Delver variants. So I've dropped Energy Flux and added in Circle of Protection: Blue in the board to deal with all the True-Name Nemesis I've been seeeing.
Yeah, you definitely only need one Sword of the Meek. It hardly even slows you down if your lone copy gets countered/destroyed in response. I'd also recommend running either Humility or Moat in the mainboard, but not both. Which is kinda your choice. Humility is better vs Sneak & Show or Delver Variants, but Moat is probably better against everything else. I'd also say that, with the counterbalance build (and especially all of the Moxen), Trinisphere is probably just slowing you down, but I don't know how the Tezzeret package interacts. You might also consider dropping one of the Crucibles too. The tutor/tezzeret package makes a singleton pretty easy to find and that will free up room for more 'balances.
Either way, I'd at least recommend -1 Trinisphere, -1 Moat/Humility (siding the other), and -1 Crucible of Worlds for +2 Sensei's Diving Top and +1 Counterbalance. You really, really want to be able to hit the counterbalance/top lock consistently if you're going to be running it. That other Counterbalance in the board should likely be mainboarded as well, but I don't see much else that's redundant.
Also a big Toshi fan here and this thread only helped make mine better: I'll have to post my list when I get home. I built it before I ever saw your thread as more of a combo build, but did end up modifying it to fit the reanimator theme in.
The one thing I wanted to say is that, while I agree with you on the non-black clause for removal, Snuff Out is the one major exception to that. Since Toshi doesn't give flashback, but merely says that you can cast target spell, Snuff Out can chain off itself for free. 8 life isn't too steep with all of the lifegain in Toshi and it's been a game-changer to simply take 8 and take out two important creatures.
So I finally got to play this again in a tournament setting and not just play testing. Well, a few times in between actually. Unfortunately, my results haven't been that great. I've had a few impressive feats like taking Golbins to time, though. I seem to go to turns almost every time I play this deck and it's starting to get a little frustrating. I've had several games that I've lost or drawn simply because I keep running out of time.
First round was up against a weird UR Delver deck running Delvers, TNN, Snapcaster, and Goblin Guide. Along with a lot of burn. I simply got burned out game 1, with 4 Lightning Bolts and 2 Chain Lightning, plus Goblin Guide, thrown my way. I sided in CoP:Red and Terminus to get better control of the creature game and the burn. I Detention Sphere'd a pair of Delvers, dropped CoP:Red and stalled them out until I assembled the Thopter Combo and took it from there. Game three I Force'd one Delver, but never saw Enlightened Tutor, CoP:Red. I stalled out the board for a while with counterspells, but was burnt out by repeated Bolts and snapcasters.
0-1 (1-2)
Round two was a bye... I wasn't actually very happy with this because I wanted to play rather than take the free win.
1-1 (1-2)
Round three was against american delver and went a little bit better than the first. Game one I had to deal with Batterskull, but some well timed Det. Spheres and Pithing Needle and Batterskull of my own kept things manageable until I landed Ensnaring Bridge. Didn't see any counter backup, but eventually landed thopter combo and won. Game two I was just overrun by Delvers and Meddling Mages and Wastelands wrecking my mana base. Still managed to drop Ensnaring Bridge to stall things out, but a sided Wear//Tear eventually broke me. Game three would've been great except that we only had about 5 minutes left in the round. I landed Thoptercombo by turn 4, but it was also turn 3 of turns and I just didn't have enough time.
1-1-1 (2-3)
Round 4 I was paired against Lands. This was less fun than I had hoped. I managed to on-and-off shut down the various engines, but never had an answer to Academy Ruins. I sat under counterbalance for easily 20-30 turns and stopped them from doing almost anything, but they wastelanded my Mishra's Factories and Engineering Explosives on Jace to keep me from doing anything either. I Path of Exiled and otherwise shut down the Marit Lage token five times, but the sixth one got me in turn 4 of turns. I don't know if I should have just conceded this one early on or not so that I could sideboard, but if I'd ever seen a Pithing Needle or Enlightened Tutor to shut down Academy Ruins I would've had this one.
1-2-1 (2-4)
So that's been my most recent experience with this deck. I still love it more than anything, but its really slow and I always feel like I'm lacking some vital piece. Somehow, I'd like to find room for another Spell Pierce (without dropping any other counters) in the main board, but everything seems to do a good job pulling its weight. I also feel like some Preordains or Ponders would help smooth things out but can't see anything to take out.
Not to be rude, but budget still does not justify some of your card choices.
Do you realize that you have Counterbalance and Counterspell, which are UU? Your list has NO fetchland AND you run 4 factories, how consistent are you in getting UU early for your CB/Counterspell? 4 Fetches min. at the least, and Legacy the format in general uses Fetchlands, hence that should be your priority.
Have you seen any deck lists on any tournament results page that runs 2 brainstorm like yours, not 4?
I am not even sure why Factories are there to begin with. How many people on this thread run that? do you run it just because you own them or because it's good for the meta by de-stabilizing your manabase or some other weird reasons?
I'm well aware that fetches would improve how well my deck plays and they're certainly on the list, but it took a considerable amount of my resources to get my hands on the Tundras which wiped out most of the value out of my trade binder. I don't currently have a source of income and have to rely on earning store credit to build back up and Flooded Strands are not cheap.
I believe I explained the lack of Brainstorms in an earlier post. I do not have the fetches to improve the deck. As such, when I see multiple Brainstorms I'm often left with a dead card in hand, particularly since I'm just going to Top every turn anyway. When I can get my hands on some fetches, I'll find room for more. But to answer your question, no, I haven't seen any running just two; four is the norm.
That does bring up the issue of what I should eventually cut for additional Brainstorms. From what I understand, Batterskull, 2 Stoneforges, and Maze of Ith take up the slots that would usually go towards Brainstorms, the fourth Force, and Engineered Explosives, but I've found all four of them to be very useful.
As for the factories, I do have to mull to six more often than I'd like to to make sure I have my colors right early, but they provide a valuable blocker early game and are the biggest thing on the board post-Humility. The biggest issues with the Factories that I've come across is that they leave me more open to Wasteland and Rishidan Port. To be clear, when I say "valuable early blocker" I'm referring to ways to not take 20 to face from Etched Champions that sneak through countermagic or Vialed in Goblin Piledrivers. Often, I really do need to see two or so Factories to not get raced to death; especially in the games where I don't see an early Tutor into Bridge for whatever reason.
With an aggro heavy meta, have you thought about Ensnaring Bridge + Moat? I'm assuming Moat is budget reasons, but Bridge is amazing, probably one of my favorite cards in the deck. I'm guessing the lack of brainstorm is also because of your lack of fetchlands, however, they still work great with counterbalance on the field.
I do run Bridge... and it is just as amazing as you say it is. And yeah, I've been slowly cutting back the Brainstorms because they were too often dead in my hand without the fetches. Still good, but I hate seeing more than one in a game because it's generally a few turns before the second one shows me new cards.
How's spell snare for you? I replaced mine with counterspell when Omni-Tell became prevalent, and snare stopped hitting a lot of things I wanted in other decks. Counterspell turns into spellsnare with counterbalance too.
I like splitting Spell Snare and Counterspell down the middle. Snare still hits most of the field since the aggro-heavy meta keeps costs down. I basically hope that I hit the Snares early and the Counterspells mid-late game. It doesn't always work out that way, but I get plenty of mileage out of them both.
It's really nice to see that this deck is still alive. It's easily my second favorite deck of all time and I've been running one version or another of it since Thopter-Sword combo first appeared. My area is, unfortunately, very light on Legacy and there aren't many tournaments to test in, but this deck still stops a lot of my metagame in their tracks. This is my current list:
I'm aware that I use a few odd choices in my build which are due to a combination of budget and my local metagame. I'm still running Batterskull/Stoneforge because my area is fairly aggro heavy with Burn, Goblins, Fish, Maverick, and Affinity leaving me with a lot of games where I simply need some way to stabilize and swing life back around faster than Foundry can get me there And quite frankly, it works really well as another win-con. For the same reasons I'm also running the four Mishra's Factory.
Budget reasons restrict my landbase a bit and are why I'm running Ratchet Bombs instead of Engineered Explosives and no Moat. And I'm playing Path to Exile of Sword to Plowshares because almost no body plays more than 1 basic land outside of Burn.
The rest of my sideboard isn't too strange, I think. The Conversion is more of a filler card, but works great with CoP:Red to stop Burn and Goblins. Energy Flux and Stony Silence makes Affinity and MUD scoop on the spot, Rest in Peace and Relic help out with the occasional Dredge and Rule of Law hoses the few Storm decks that are played. I haven't gotten a chance to try it out yet, but I think a Spellskite or two in the board should be a good answer to Abrupt Decay ruining my board locks.
This is one of the most awesome things I have seen. Particularly because I've been wanting to make a WoT themed deck for EDH for some time now.
May I recommend Time of Need? I can't think of any better fit for a taveren, or ancient hero spun out by the pattern, coincidentally showing up than that card. Plus, it would allow you to tutor for so many of your creatures and help smooth things out.
Is it just me, or does Togepi refuse to be bred? Sounds funny, but I did get a male and female Togepi from the GTS, and put them in the daycare. However, the man said they wouldn't breed ("they would rather play with other pokemon than each other"). So then I tried each one with one of my many Dittos, and I STILL got the same message and wouldn't breed.
Finally I tried breeding Togepi with Plusle/Minuin and also Pikachu (who are in the same egg group as Togepi). Guess what? They STILL couldn't breed!
Can somebody explain this? Because I also had this problem when I try to breed my Gallade and Medicham together (who are both in the same egg group).
That's because Togepi is classified as a baby pokemon and, therefore, doesn't breed. Try evolving the parents first. No clue why your Gallade and Medicham won't.
Due to terrible timing for vacation, I'm having difficulty coming up with a prerelease, but right now the best option for me is Hartford, CT. I mainly need to know if they flight all day or decide to stop at three flights like they do in AR.
I've never played the Shardless Agent list, but I am curious how Treasure Cruise has been working out for you. I run a much more counter-heavy build with 2 Counterspell and 2 Spell Pierce in place of some of your other removal and was debating replacing some of it with TC. Has it been consistently drawing into enough gas to replace the loss of removal and alt wincons? Or otherwise cutting some time off the clock on the games where we stall out and go long?
Oh, and you can probably cut one of the three Thopter Foundry. It's an easy pitch to Force when you have that many, but I've found three to be more than I want to see. With all the Brainstorming, fetching with top, and Enlightened Tutor backup you can simply do with one less. So you might try dropping that in place of Jace or those additional Cruises to keep another wincon around.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what else you could do. I feel like the consistent counterbalance + spell backup is one of the better reasons to play ThopterBalance in the first place so I'm not exactly sure how well your deck plays.
I also made some very minor tweaks to my own list recently. As much as I love tutoring in response, I've been wanting another Spell Pierce for a while now so I dropped one of my Enlightened Tutors. It seems to be working out a bit better giving me another early-game counter and another card to pitch to Force when in need. I've also moved to a meta where Affinity is clearly not a thing, but is at least 50% Delver variants. So I've dropped Energy Flux and added in Circle of Protection: Blue in the board to deal with all the True-Name Nemesis I've been seeeing.
Either way, I'd at least recommend -1 Trinisphere, -1 Moat/Humility (siding the other), and -1 Crucible of Worlds for +2 Sensei's Diving Top and +1 Counterbalance. You really, really want to be able to hit the counterbalance/top lock consistently if you're going to be running it. That other Counterbalance in the board should likely be mainboarded as well, but I don't see much else that's redundant.
The one thing I wanted to say is that, while I agree with you on the non-black clause for removal, Snuff Out is the one major exception to that. Since Toshi doesn't give flashback, but merely says that you can cast target spell, Snuff Out can chain off itself for free. 8 life isn't too steep with all of the lifegain in Toshi and it's been a game-changer to simply take 8 and take out two important creatures.
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Tundra
1 Steam Vents
1 Breeding Pool
1 Academy Ruins
2 Mishra's Factory
5 Island
2 Plains
1 Maze of Ith
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
2 Counterspell
1 Spell Pierce
3 Path to Exile
3 Enlightened Tutor
2 Detention Sphere
3 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Humility
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Pithing Needle
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Thopter Foundry
1 Sword of the Meek
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Batterskull
3 Terminus
1 Entreat the Angels
3 Meddling Mage
2 Daze
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Rest in Peace
1 Pithing Needle
1 Blood Moon
1 Energy Flux
1 Arcane Laboratory
Today's results-- 1-2-1
First round was up against a weird UR Delver deck running Delvers, TNN, Snapcaster, and Goblin Guide. Along with a lot of burn. I simply got burned out game 1, with 4 Lightning Bolts and 2 Chain Lightning, plus Goblin Guide, thrown my way. I sided in CoP:Red and Terminus to get better control of the creature game and the burn. I Detention Sphere'd a pair of Delvers, dropped CoP:Red and stalled them out until I assembled the Thopter Combo and took it from there. Game three I Force'd one Delver, but never saw Enlightened Tutor, CoP:Red. I stalled out the board for a while with counterspells, but was burnt out by repeated Bolts and snapcasters.
0-1 (1-2)
Round two was a bye... I wasn't actually very happy with this because I wanted to play rather than take the free win.
1-1 (1-2)
Round three was against american delver and went a little bit better than the first. Game one I had to deal with Batterskull, but some well timed Det. Spheres and Pithing Needle and Batterskull of my own kept things manageable until I landed Ensnaring Bridge. Didn't see any counter backup, but eventually landed thopter combo and won. Game two I was just overrun by Delvers and Meddling Mages and Wastelands wrecking my mana base. Still managed to drop Ensnaring Bridge to stall things out, but a sided Wear//Tear eventually broke me. Game three would've been great except that we only had about 5 minutes left in the round. I landed Thoptercombo by turn 4, but it was also turn 3 of turns and I just didn't have enough time.
1-1-1 (2-3)
Round 4 I was paired against Lands. This was less fun than I had hoped. I managed to on-and-off shut down the various engines, but never had an answer to Academy Ruins. I sat under counterbalance for easily 20-30 turns and stopped them from doing almost anything, but they wastelanded my Mishra's Factories and Engineering Explosives on Jace to keep me from doing anything either. I Path of Exiled and otherwise shut down the Marit Lage token five times, but the sixth one got me in turn 4 of turns. I don't know if I should have just conceded this one early on or not so that I could sideboard, but if I'd ever seen a Pithing Needle or Enlightened Tutor to shut down Academy Ruins I would've had this one.
1-2-1 (2-4)
So that's been my most recent experience with this deck. I still love it more than anything, but its really slow and I always feel like I'm lacking some vital piece. Somehow, I'd like to find room for another Spell Pierce (without dropping any other counters) in the main board, but everything seems to do a good job pulling its weight. I also feel like some Preordains or Ponders would help smooth things out but can't see anything to take out.
I'm well aware that fetches would improve how well my deck plays and they're certainly on the list, but it took a considerable amount of my resources to get my hands on the Tundras which wiped out most of the value out of my trade binder. I don't currently have a source of income and have to rely on earning store credit to build back up and Flooded Strands are not cheap.
I believe I explained the lack of Brainstorms in an earlier post. I do not have the fetches to improve the deck. As such, when I see multiple Brainstorms I'm often left with a dead card in hand, particularly since I'm just going to Top every turn anyway. When I can get my hands on some fetches, I'll find room for more. But to answer your question, no, I haven't seen any running just two; four is the norm.
That does bring up the issue of what I should eventually cut for additional Brainstorms. From what I understand, Batterskull, 2 Stoneforges, and Maze of Ith take up the slots that would usually go towards Brainstorms, the fourth Force, and Engineered Explosives, but I've found all four of them to be very useful.
As for the factories, I do have to mull to six more often than I'd like to to make sure I have my colors right early, but they provide a valuable blocker early game and are the biggest thing on the board post-Humility. The biggest issues with the Factories that I've come across is that they leave me more open to Wasteland and Rishidan Port. To be clear, when I say "valuable early blocker" I'm referring to ways to not take 20 to face from Etched Champions that sneak through countermagic or Vialed in Goblin Piledrivers. Often, I really do need to see two or so Factories to not get raced to death; especially in the games where I don't see an early Tutor into Bridge for whatever reason.
I do run Bridge... and it is just as amazing as you say it is. And yeah, I've been slowly cutting back the Brainstorms because they were too often dead in my hand without the fetches. Still good, but I hate seeing more than one in a game because it's generally a few turns before the second one shows me new cards.
I like splitting Spell Snare and Counterspell down the middle. Snare still hits most of the field since the aggro-heavy meta keeps costs down. I basically hope that I hit the Snares early and the Counterspells mid-late game. It doesn't always work out that way, but I get plenty of mileage out of them both.
1 Academy Ruins
1 Ancient Den
2 Hallowed Fountain
5 Island
1 Maze of Ith
4 Mishra's Factory
3 Plains
1 Seat of the Synod
1 Tolaria West
3 Tundra
1 Wasteland
Creatures- 2
2 Stoneforge Mystic
Artifacts- 11
1 Batterskull
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Expedition Map
1 Pithing Needle
3 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Sword of the Meek
2 Thopter Foundry
3 Counterbalance
1 Humility
1 Oblivion Ring
Planeswalkers- 2
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Spells-18
2 Brainstorm
2 Counterspell
4 Enlightened Tutor
3 Force of Will
3 Path to Exile
2 Spell Pierce
2 Spell Snare
1 Conversion
1 Rule of Law
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Rest in Peace
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Stony Silence
1 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Energy Flux
2 Ratchet Bomb
1 Spellskite
1 Pithing Needle
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Spell Pierce
1 Path to Exile
I'm aware that I use a few odd choices in my build which are due to a combination of budget and my local metagame. I'm still running Batterskull/Stoneforge because my area is fairly aggro heavy with Burn, Goblins, Fish, Maverick, and Affinity leaving me with a lot of games where I simply need some way to stabilize and swing life back around faster than Foundry can get me there And quite frankly, it works really well as another win-con. For the same reasons I'm also running the four Mishra's Factory.
Budget reasons restrict my landbase a bit and are why I'm running Ratchet Bombs instead of Engineered Explosives and no Moat. And I'm playing Path to Exile of Sword to Plowshares because almost no body plays more than 1 basic land outside of Burn.
The rest of my sideboard isn't too strange, I think. The Conversion is more of a filler card, but works great with CoP:Red to stop Burn and Goblins. Energy Flux and Stony Silence makes Affinity and MUD scoop on the spot, Rest in Peace and Relic help out with the occasional Dredge and Rule of Law hoses the few Storm decks that are played. I haven't gotten a chance to try it out yet, but I think a Spellskite or two in the board should be a good answer to Abrupt Decay ruining my board locks.
May I recommend Time of Need? I can't think of any better fit for a taveren, or ancient hero spun out by the pattern, coincidentally showing up than that card. Plus, it would allow you to tutor for so many of your creatures and help smooth things out.
That's because Togepi is classified as a baby pokemon and, therefore, doesn't breed. Try evolving the parents first. No clue why your Gallade and Medicham won't.
Do events that I participated in before signing up for player rewards count towards getting rewards?
I got the Rav spoiler. Directly on my computer where the text would be shows up as blocks.