Razor Hippogriff is kind of meh because if you only run one copy you usually don't draw it when you need it. And if you can Pod it, you usually don't need it over an Acidic Slime since your Pod is clearly still alive.
I dunno, he just seems weak. I'm not sure how to quantify it. Maybe I can throw a Suture Priest and Leonin Relic Warder in there?
I usually feel like the only creatures I want sticking around are 1-drop mana sources and Titans or Elesh. I want to sac my 2-drops for bigger stuff while deriving card advantage in the process. Suture Priest and Leonin Relic-Warder are both terrible for that because they only produce value when they stay on the board, which means you have to cast more creatures to sac with Pod. This slows you down.
Say you have a nice curve with turn 1 BOP, turn 2 Emissary, turn 3 Pod + activate. The Warder is useless in this scenario unless you are just playing it as a vanilla creature in which case less card advantage is generated than Emissary.
On the other hand, say it's later in the game and you need to remove a pesky artifact/enchantment. Why get the Warder when you can probably chain into Acidic Slime or hardcast it by now?
The only different use for Warder I see is to use it as a pseudo Glimmerpoint Stag bounce for your Phyrexian Metamorph to copy some creature with ETB effect a second time.
Same with Suture Priest. You can't sac it profitably so it either slows you down or you sac it anyway and didn't get the land you could've gotten with Emissary.
Plus, people don't like to use removals on Emissary, so usually he survives to get Podded.
Before milling, the cards in your opponent's library are random, so choosing to mill is indeed a gamble that may end up bringing your opponent closer to his win card.
However, once the cards have been milled into the graveyard, they are no longer random cards. Some cards are worth more than others in your opponent's deck and if those cards ended up in the graveyard you have now gained something.
The more cards you mill in one go, the higher the chance you have of milling the vital cards.
Let's say the opponent is playing a Splinter Twin deck and he needs to draw one of the 2 Twins left in his remaining library of 20. If you mill him for 10, you have a higher than 50% chance of getting at least one of them. The order of the cards doesn't matter to you as long as the Twin is one of the 10 cards milled.
On the other hand, the order of his remaining 10 cards is very important to him because he needs to draw the single remaining Twin. Assuming he has no card-drawing abilities, he has only a 10% chance of drawing it the next turn. And then you mill him again for 5, which may bring him closer to drawing a Twin, but again the odds are better for you (more than 50%) that you will hit the last Twin.
That is to say, because you are usually milling multiple cards at a time while your opponent draws one card at a time, you have a better chance of milling his key cards than he has of drawing them. It is still a gamble but I won't say that you don't stand to gain anything just because the cards are random.
Of course I don't think that milling is a viable strategy in most situations. But I just think that the cost-benefit analysis of milling is much more complex than "you are milling 10 random cards so it makes no difference".
Attackers can be declared to attack them, but spells and abilities that say "target player" CANNOT target them.
Instead, you target the controlling player. When the spell resolves, you have the option to redirect any damage dealt (but not life loss) to any planeswalker controlled by the targeted player.
New player asks for constructive criticisms and of course the first thing people do is to tell him to netdeck without explaining why. I find this very amusing.
I am more familiar with monoblack so I will just comment on that one.
Firstly, I think the Bloodwitch will either be overkill or useless by the time it comes out. If you have multiple Vampires out and they are alive, you should having a pretty decent board position with all your removals. So the Bloodwitch's ETB ability is probably overkill. On the other hand, if the enemy cleared the board of creatures and you topdeck Bloodwitch, then it's effectively a 4/4 flyer for 5 mana, which is not really a game-changer.
Secondly, I think you have some sub-optimal removal spells. Disfigure is fun for one mana, but it's more of a sideboard card against decks with small creatures such as Tempered Steel. It's a completely dead card against control decks, unlike Doom Blade and GFFT which at least work against Titans. Feast of Blood sounds good in a vampire deck, but it's a sorcery, which severely limits its usefulness, and your opponent can also target your vampires with removals to fizzle the spell by making the condition invalid. Personally I would just run more Doom Blades instead.
The main problem with monoblack is that you have practically no solutions against decks that rely on artifacts and enchantments, particularly when artifacts are quite important in the SOM block. You can consider playing some hand disruption like Duress or Inquisition of Kozilek to deal with this, or play black-red vampire for red's burn and artifact destruction.
How do you guys get the colours to be so even and flat? No matter what I do they always come out in splotches. Do you thin the paint with a special thinner? I tried water and it didn't help.
I run a pretty standard UW build and I don't see how Valakut is a strong matchup. Sure we are fast, but Valakut is just way faster. Plus there's no way to protect your creatures against the massive colourless land damage that comes immediately after they get their Titan into play unless you are so lucky to get two Tempered Steel or Steel Overseer out really early.
I find Hero of Bladehold to be not that great in this deck. I almost never drop her on the fourth turn because I need to be spending mana on casting or using equipment.
She's great when you have Puresteel Paladin out because her soldiers can act as ammunition for your Mortarpod, but if you have Paladin out and he's not dead, usually Hero is just overkill.
I find that most of the time I am winning games just with a few creatures and equipments and Puresteel Paladin (or even without him). I run one Hero and one Sun Titan mostly to recover from board wipes.
She's also great against non-control combo decks as they take time to set up and she puts pressure of them until you get your Puresteel running, so I have an extra copy in the sideboard.
But really, 1 or 2 copies is enough and I think Etched Champion and Mirran Crusader have better synergy with the main source of power in this deck, which is the equipment. We need creatures that can stay alive long enough for us to equip them and Hero is just too vulnerable to removals unless you already have an active Paladin.
So it seems that everybody is playing origin spellbomb, on paper it just seems really bad, yet it's seeing play, what are everybodys opinions?
I find it quite useful.
Your tiny 1/1 creatures are not going to win the match until either Tempered Steel or Steel Overseer comes into play unless your opponent has a very bad draw. So you are not losing out that much having one less 1/1 on the field and just letting Origin Spellbomb sit there.
On the other hand, once Tempered Steel and Steel Overseer come out, your hand is pretty much getting empty, but now you need to get out more creatures. This is when you have the extra mana to use Spellbomb, instantly giving you a (hopefully) 3/3 Myr and letting you draw a card.
Plus, it serves as a cheap way to activate Glint Hawk Idol either for the final attack or during your opponent's turn to block their flyers.
And of course it also helps to recover from board wipes.
Metamorph is excellent tech against monoblack. I've never had a problem with the match-up, you clone an obliterator, which can't be targeted by any of their removal.
Dismember still kills it. And all monoblack decks run dismember at least in the sideboard now.
I usually feel like the only creatures I want sticking around are 1-drop mana sources and Titans or Elesh. I want to sac my 2-drops for bigger stuff while deriving card advantage in the process. Suture Priest and Leonin Relic-Warder are both terrible for that because they only produce value when they stay on the board, which means you have to cast more creatures to sac with Pod. This slows you down.
Say you have a nice curve with turn 1 BOP, turn 2 Emissary, turn 3 Pod + activate. The Warder is useless in this scenario unless you are just playing it as a vanilla creature in which case less card advantage is generated than Emissary.
On the other hand, say it's later in the game and you need to remove a pesky artifact/enchantment. Why get the Warder when you can probably chain into Acidic Slime or hardcast it by now?
The only different use for Warder I see is to use it as a pseudo Glimmerpoint Stag bounce for your Phyrexian Metamorph to copy some creature with ETB effect a second time.
Same with Suture Priest. You can't sac it profitably so it either slows you down or you sac it anyway and didn't get the land you could've gotten with Emissary.
Plus, people don't like to use removals on Emissary, so usually he survives to get Podded.
Before milling, the cards in your opponent's library are random, so choosing to mill is indeed a gamble that may end up bringing your opponent closer to his win card.
However, once the cards have been milled into the graveyard, they are no longer random cards. Some cards are worth more than others in your opponent's deck and if those cards ended up in the graveyard you have now gained something.
The more cards you mill in one go, the higher the chance you have of milling the vital cards.
Let's say the opponent is playing a Splinter Twin deck and he needs to draw one of the 2 Twins left in his remaining library of 20. If you mill him for 10, you have a higher than 50% chance of getting at least one of them. The order of the cards doesn't matter to you as long as the Twin is one of the 10 cards milled.
On the other hand, the order of his remaining 10 cards is very important to him because he needs to draw the single remaining Twin. Assuming he has no card-drawing abilities, he has only a 10% chance of drawing it the next turn. And then you mill him again for 5, which may bring him closer to drawing a Twin, but again the odds are better for you (more than 50%) that you will hit the last Twin.
That is to say, because you are usually milling multiple cards at a time while your opponent draws one card at a time, you have a better chance of milling his key cards than he has of drawing them. It is still a gamble but I won't say that you don't stand to gain anything just because the cards are random.
Of course I don't think that milling is a viable strategy in most situations. But I just think that the cost-benefit analysis of milling is much more complex than "you are milling 10 random cards so it makes no difference".
Attackers can be declared to attack them, but spells and abilities that say "target player" CANNOT target them.
Instead, you target the controlling player. When the spell resolves, you have the option to redirect any damage dealt (but not life loss) to any planeswalker controlled by the targeted player.
I am more familiar with monoblack so I will just comment on that one.
Firstly, I think the Bloodwitch will either be overkill or useless by the time it comes out. If you have multiple Vampires out and they are alive, you should having a pretty decent board position with all your removals. So the Bloodwitch's ETB ability is probably overkill. On the other hand, if the enemy cleared the board of creatures and you topdeck Bloodwitch, then it's effectively a 4/4 flyer for 5 mana, which is not really a game-changer.
Secondly, I think you have some sub-optimal removal spells. Disfigure is fun for one mana, but it's more of a sideboard card against decks with small creatures such as Tempered Steel. It's a completely dead card against control decks, unlike Doom Blade and GFFT which at least work against Titans. Feast of Blood sounds good in a vampire deck, but it's a sorcery, which severely limits its usefulness, and your opponent can also target your vampires with removals to fizzle the spell by making the condition invalid. Personally I would just run more Doom Blades instead.
The main problem with monoblack is that you have practically no solutions against decks that rely on artifacts and enchantments, particularly when artifacts are quite important in the SOM block. You can consider playing some hand disruption like Duress or Inquisition of Kozilek to deal with this, or play black-red vampire for red's burn and artifact destruction.
You cannot pay the kicker if you are not casting it.
She's great when you have Puresteel Paladin out because her soldiers can act as ammunition for your Mortarpod, but if you have Paladin out and he's not dead, usually Hero is just overkill.
I find that most of the time I am winning games just with a few creatures and equipments and Puresteel Paladin (or even without him). I run one Hero and one Sun Titan mostly to recover from board wipes.
She's also great against non-control combo decks as they take time to set up and she puts pressure of them until you get your Puresteel running, so I have an extra copy in the sideboard.
But really, 1 or 2 copies is enough and I think Etched Champion and Mirran Crusader have better synergy with the main source of power in this deck, which is the equipment. We need creatures that can stay alive long enough for us to equip them and Hero is just too vulnerable to removals unless you already have an active Paladin.
I find it quite useful.
Your tiny 1/1 creatures are not going to win the match until either Tempered Steel or Steel Overseer comes into play unless your opponent has a very bad draw. So you are not losing out that much having one less 1/1 on the field and just letting Origin Spellbomb sit there.
On the other hand, once Tempered Steel and Steel Overseer come out, your hand is pretty much getting empty, but now you need to get out more creatures. This is when you have the extra mana to use Spellbomb, instantly giving you a (hopefully) 3/3 Myr and letting you draw a card.
Plus, it serves as a cheap way to activate Glint Hawk Idol either for the final attack or during your opponent's turn to block their flyers.
And of course it also helps to recover from board wipes.
I find it more useful than a Thopter.
Dismember still kills it. And all monoblack decks run dismember at least in the sideboard now.
Ops. Thought it had protection from colours.