I get the feeling that a lot of people are evaluating cantrips in the "turn 2, Paladin in play, tapped out, I must combo off now" scenario. Yes, in that case you would rather have Noxious Revival, Repeal, or even another equipment over a cantrip.
The problem is that it's a worse idea to combo off on turn 2 than you might think. Let's forget about cantrips or Noxious Revivals for a moment here. If you try to combo off on turn 2, you're extremely tight on mana. You need to draw Mox Opal before the first Retract, or you fizzle. If you fizzle without drawing Retract, then any second Paladin that you drew is useless since you already blew all your equipments on the first. On the other hand, if you combo off on turn 3 instead, you have 3-4 more mana to spend (3 from lands, 1 from Paradise Mantle) - mana that can be spent on extra Paladins, for example, and we all know how hard it is to lose with 2 Paladins. You don't need to draw into Mox Opal before Retract, you have lands for the first one or two Retract casts. You don't have to draw into 2 Moxes to cast Grapeshot, again because you have lands. You can dig 2-3 cards deep for Retract with cantrips.
Once you accept that the average combo turn is not one with 0 mana untapped but 4, you'll appreciate cantrips more. Cantrips are good at any time - during turn 1 (in fact they're the best thing you could play on turn 1), and during the combo turn. Noxious Revival and Repeal are good when you've already gotten rolling, but cantrips are what will get you rolling in the first place. They let you play low land counts in the deck and keep 1-land or 0-Paladin hands and get away with it.
There another mindset which I'd like to dispel, and that's the "mulligans will save me, I just need to mulligan down to Paladin" mindset. In reality things are never that simple, because you have a fizzle rate, and your opponent can kill your Paladin and force you to look for another one, which you now can't do because your hand is two equipments after a mull to 4. Cantrips solve this by saving you from mulligans in the first place.
While slower, more stable lists are certainly good in ways that the basic all-in list is not, as a general rule this is entirely incorrect.
Cheeri0s goes off as early as possible. Every time. The weapon it uses is speed, and by thinking this way about all Cheeri0s decks instead of just the slower ones, you give up that weapon and gain .
1) You do not need to draw Opal before Retract. You can draw them in either order. I don't know where this statement came from or if you didn't phrase what you were thinking correctly, but as written it's literally just incorrect.
2) Yes going off on turn 2 leaves you right on mana. This is an element of how the combo functions. If you feel unsafe doing this, or feel like this is not right, you haven't played enough Cheeri0s. Yes, you will fizzle more on Turn 2 than turn 3 or 4. Guess what, regular storm will fizzle less if they wait until turn 8.
2a) A very, VERY important concept to understand: FIZZLING ON TURN 2 IS OK. If they have removal, they will still have it if you wait until turn 3. If you fizzle, you go into turn 3 having drawn X cards and landed a Paladin already, instead of just hold everything and drawing nothing. If your deck has a certain sequence of cards that causes a fizzle, that sequence will be the same on turn 2 and 3, and trying to go off Turn 2 allows you to maximize each turn. Fizzling into nothing but lands is highly unlikely, meaning you probably fizzle into Paladins, Noxious Revivals, or something else useful for your turn 3 attempt. If you have experience with the deck you will know that drawing a Paladin and then starting to brick means that you should hold one equipment. If the fizzle is obvious early enough, you should be able go stop with 2 equipment in hand. If you don't do this regularly, you need to practice turn 2 combos over and over until you start to see it.
3) You MUST mulligan to Paladin (to 4-5). If you don't think so, you don't understand what the deck is doing. Cantrips do NOT make this unnecessary; they give a slight cushion for when you've mulliganed to 4 or 5 and still haven't found Paladin, but have these cards that you might have instead to help. The reason this mindset is crucial is that the deck does not function without the engine, and every other piece is easier, and better, to wait on. Getting hit with removal after mulling hard will happen, that doesn't mean you shouldn't mulligan.
It is not a bad idea to combo off on Turn 2. The construction of this deck is to function on 0 or 1 mana while turning free cantrips into the 2 cards needed to go effectively infinite. Waiting offers stability and consistently, and is sometimes mecessary, but is not strictly optimal and most of the time is suboptimal. I say this having played some version of the deck in literally every format for years, having won events, and having played across from every form of hate imaginable and found clever solutions to most of them using only the basic core cards. I know what these cards do together and how to best use them, and it is almost always by going off as soon as possible.
@smash1010 why are we trying to play the long game when most decks can kill us turn 3/4 with most control decks by that point just going to lock us out with counters. I can understand if this were sidebaord but as the main win con in the deck i think its too slow and not good enough vs control and aggro.
Also we may have a problem with sram. Its a requirement that we draw a card when we cast an equipment or artifact so we will mill ourselves if we try play too much and keep retracting too much.
This isn't actually an issue. It only becomes a problem when you have two or more guys out, and your deck has fewer cards than lethal storm*number of guys, at which point you use Noxious Revivals to cycle Opals to make enough mana to use both Grapeahots.
Play legacy cheeri0s for a while, where you will cast multiple glimpses in a majority of games, and you become very very good at draw math.
I don't recommend Probe at all, but I also don't recommend cantrips for all lists. They aren't wrong or bad, but they aren't strictly better. I don't want to get into the Spoils/Plunge debate again, especially since they aren't needed any more, but decks not running cantrips definitely aren't suboptimal because of that.
I'm not sure why the downward trend continued after we tested down to 22, but I say very, very confidently that 18 is the absolute minimum, and that only for slower lists. 20-23 is optimal for normal lists, 24 or 25 for very streamlined lists, and 26 is the upper bound (and I can't think of a list that actually would be good with that many). This deck is about chaining equipments until you find Retract or a second Paladin, and having too few equipments makes that very unlikely. 16 is not going to be smooth on turn 2, ever, and it probably won't be very consistent on turn 3 unless you manage to open with Retract or a second Paladin.
I would actually see dropping Muddled altogether in an extremely aggressive, streamlined list; Datka is still for it but I'm not sure it's worth the dead draws now that there are 8 natural Paladins. At least not in every playstyle.
I would still not play cantrips, and never play any Cheeri0s deck without the full playset of Noxious.
And comparing decks across formats is fine when we're looking at very fundamental elements of an archetype. We aren't comparing Oath's plan to ours, or the meta that Oath has to contend with to Burn and BG/x; we're comparing basic functionality. It has an engine, cards devoted to making that engine run, cards that the engine turns into wins, and it has elements that flow seamlessly into the engine to perform important side jobs. Almost every combo deck ever does. Noxious Revival does many, many things, and it does them while playing straight into our engine (manipulating the topdeck in a combo that uses draw power as fuel). 1 Noxious will not reliably be an anti-Bolt when you need it. 1-ofs and 2-ofs in this style of deck mean "I need this, but not until after I've drawn my deck". I need Noxious almost all the time.
Good combo decks don't need too much protection/utility
I'm going to disagree with this ktkenshinx (also hey! Long time no see). Good combo decks have utility built into them without disrupting the engine, otherwise every combo deck would be glass cannon. Things like Noxious revival, which cost minimal resources (one card, 2 life, 4 deck slots) but offer multiple uses, and flow well with the engine (which Noxious does magnificently) are very important. In Legacy Cheeri0s, things like Summoner's Pact, Noxious, and Ingot Chewer fill this role. In Vintage Oath, Swan Song, Beast Within, and niche things like Memory's Journey. In Elves, the choices of specific elves are based on utility. Combos can stand as "good" on their own, but a full combo deck has to have something built into it that covers a lot of bases or offers seamless protection.
4 Noxious Revival is a must in any version of this deck that aims to push the combo hard. Removal is just too painful and the card has way too many niche uses to pass up.
Painlands are not a problem, only Burn is a serious consideration for hoarding life totals, and they're already a bad matchup due to having so many Bolts with our Paladin's name written on them. Even using painlands exclusively would only top out at maybe ~5 or 6 damage in a long game. Every cheeri0s deck in every format should have a very Black conception of life totals.
20-23 0-drops is about the perfect zone. Depends on what you want to do and what your support cards are (such as Mentor wanting maybe 22 for more explosive turns), but 16 is far too few and 18 is optimal for versions aiming at Turn 3. Legacy Cheeri0s traditionally runs 26-28, but the balance has to be slightly different because it goes off Turn 1 instead of Turn 2 and essentially can't use lands.
Cavern of Souls is a must-use in combo centric lists. It does not at all interfere with Retract, Noxious Revival should virtually always be cast for 2 life, and it can cast Grapeshot, Transmute Muddle, and pay for a non-zero Repeal. Beating turn 2 and 3 counterspells is way too important to ignore. I have never, ever run this deck without 4 Caverns.
To expand on that a little bit, here's why it doesn't interfere with casting anything:
Either you go off Turn 2, in which case you used both your lands for Paladin or Sram already, and NO land in your deck would be useful for casting things, or you went off Turn 3, meaning you got to choose which 2 of your 3 lands you used to cast Paladin/Sram, and which one is open for Retract. If you chose to leave Cavern open...well stop that. Maybe you'd holding 3 Caverns or you go off on 2 lands turn 3 and draw Cavern. These won't come up often, but in each case chances are you're better off holding the Cavern (in the first case) or that you would've bricked on any land (in the second case). Only very rarely will you draw Cavern, Retract, and no other mana source or way to continue.
2 Plains is generally a judgment call, but when pushing as hard as possible for turn 2 wins, it's too many. It essentially only serves as a basic for when you get Path'd, so that your opponent isn't just using the single best removal spell in the game.
When the deck was young, it was able to reach about a 50% turn 2 goldfish. Having 8 Paladins raises that to (at a rough estimate before doing lots of crazy math) about 80%. That's based on a 92% of seeing a Paladin or Sram within a mulligan to 6, and the increased odds of opening with 2 mana sources+engine because you need fewer mulligans and thus start with more cards.
Also, having 8 guys means that you should NOT mulligan to 4, and should mulligan to 5 less aggressively; the increase for an 8-of on the mull to 5 (92% to 96%) is not large enough to be worth it in most cases.
For people who aren't entirely sure if Sram is as hyped as we're making it: he's not broken on his own, at least not any more than Paladin (who I would consider pretty broken already). What's broken is having 8 of this effect available. The reason it's broken is that it just cold skyrockets the odds of having a Turn 2 combo. When you off turn 2, you rarely cast a second Paladin anyway, usually you can only spare the single mana for Retract. So Legendary isn't important for the turn 2 combo, which as I said is now much more likely.
AND it gives very solid resiliency against removal, our biggest weakness.
Essentially I you go back to the original thread, you'll see pages and pages of debate about Spoils, Plunge, Vedalkan Archmage, Riddlesmith....having a second Paladin obsoletes all of that. Paladin is a powerful, fast engine with a weakness to removal, but the raw speed of having 8 is insane.
Well guys, I had left Sally for a lot of personal reasons and I'm not back for good; but given the news today I had to come by for you.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing so many people having fun with this, and taking it in a thousand unique directions.
Sram really takes this deck to a whole different level as nothing else could. 8 Paladins, without having to commit Spoilcide or double your killturn with Muddle, is amazing.
I've been out of the game for a while, so I don't know what Modern looks like and I'm hazy on new cards from the past two or three sets. But I know that, even still staring down removal, this deck is so much more explosive and consistent now that the meta is going to have to double down to prepare for it.
Pretty sure Mentors go to the board; they're still great but the combo requires a delicate balance and Mentor+Sram is too heavy on engines.
Idr his screen name here, but Datka and I agree that we still want Muddles. As slow emergency Paladins they're ok, but doubling as anti-removal is golden. And in a pinch, go get your Grapeshot!
No idea how many cards that is, I'm in a rush and out of practice counting decklists. But its a rough draft of where I'm going: still streamlined and focused on the turn 2 kill.
Thanks for keeping this alive guys, and don't stop smiling.
Edit oh hey not sure how I forgot about Mana Confluence. Derp.
Acolyte seems really, really bad for needing a second Ally.
Serum Powder is something that I've never felt super strongly about either way. It makes the deck noticeably faster, and speed is clearly the biggest weapon a deck has when it reliably wins Turn 2 but dies to everything. But it's also a dead draw, and the consistency bonus comes at the cost of difficult (and sometimes unpredictable) mulligan decisions and the chance to lose important pieces. Looking at that Top 4 list, though, I think it has strong potential for creating the fastest variant. We have a very solid parallel to Vintage Dredge in that we need exactly one card, and want to open with it as often as possible. We can probably use Serum Powder in the same manner.
Why would Elemental Resonance be different? It'll work the same way it did before. If you use it on a spell that costs 2GW, it'll add 2 colorless, 1 green, and 1 white. CCGW now.
It would be different because, as it's worded now, your example would NOT add 2 colorless. 2GW does not cost 2 colorless, it costs 2 generic. We now have a colorless mana symbol,and it's nowhere in that mana cost, so it can't be added. So the question becomes, does WotC want to allow us to add generic mana to our mana pool (currently a meaningless concept, generic mana only refers to costs), or will they issue errata to make the card function more cleanly with the new distinction between generic and colorless.
The only cards that will receive any errata are cards that add colorless mana to your mana pool. It is not a functional change, these cards will continue to function exactly like they have up until now, the only difference is how it is written on the card.
And possibly Elemental Resonance depending on how they feel about adding generic mana to your mana pool.
No problem, I've been thinking more and more intricately about it the longer I've played the deck.
Land Grant as a mana source is very dangerous; unlike lands or ESG, it is counterable, and your opponent gets to see your hand before deciding whether to counter it. It also has a serious double-edged sword over the other mana sources because it thins your deck when drawn early, but drawing multiples or lands means that extra Land Grants are dead. Extras of other mana sources are still useful.
Land Grant is very useful when you are running Skyshroud Cutter and 4 Summoner's Pact, because it gives you better odds of having a land so that you can play Cutter for free. Without Land Grants, you only have 2-3 cards in your deck that make him playable. I still don't run more than 3, but when I run Cutter as part of my Pact package, I like to have at least a couple Land Grants to make him easier to play so that HE isn't a brick.
While slower, more stable lists are certainly good in ways that the basic all-in list is not, as a general rule this is entirely incorrect.
Cheeri0s goes off as early as possible. Every time. The weapon it uses is speed, and by thinking this way about all Cheeri0s decks instead of just the slower ones, you give up that weapon and gain .
1) You do not need to draw Opal before Retract. You can draw them in either order. I don't know where this statement came from or if you didn't phrase what you were thinking correctly, but as written it's literally just incorrect.
2) Yes going off on turn 2 leaves you right on mana. This is an element of how the combo functions. If you feel unsafe doing this, or feel like this is not right, you haven't played enough Cheeri0s. Yes, you will fizzle more on Turn 2 than turn 3 or 4. Guess what, regular storm will fizzle less if they wait until turn 8.
2a) A very, VERY important concept to understand: FIZZLING ON TURN 2 IS OK. If they have removal, they will still have it if you wait until turn 3. If you fizzle, you go into turn 3 having drawn X cards and landed a Paladin already, instead of just hold everything and drawing nothing. If your deck has a certain sequence of cards that causes a fizzle, that sequence will be the same on turn 2 and 3, and trying to go off Turn 2 allows you to maximize each turn. Fizzling into nothing but lands is highly unlikely, meaning you probably fizzle into Paladins, Noxious Revivals, or something else useful for your turn 3 attempt. If you have experience with the deck you will know that drawing a Paladin and then starting to brick means that you should hold one equipment. If the fizzle is obvious early enough, you should be able go stop with 2 equipment in hand. If you don't do this regularly, you need to practice turn 2 combos over and over until you start to see it.
3) You MUST mulligan to Paladin (to 4-5). If you don't think so, you don't understand what the deck is doing. Cantrips do NOT make this unnecessary; they give a slight cushion for when you've mulliganed to 4 or 5 and still haven't found Paladin, but have these cards that you might have instead to help. The reason this mindset is crucial is that the deck does not function without the engine, and every other piece is easier, and better, to wait on. Getting hit with removal after mulling hard will happen, that doesn't mean you shouldn't mulligan.
It is not a bad idea to combo off on Turn 2. The construction of this deck is to function on 0 or 1 mana while turning free cantrips into the 2 cards needed to go effectively infinite. Waiting offers stability and consistently, and is sometimes mecessary, but is not strictly optimal and most of the time is suboptimal. I say this having played some version of the deck in literally every format for years, having won events, and having played across from every form of hate imaginable and found clever solutions to most of them using only the basic core cards. I know what these cards do together and how to best use them, and it is almost always by going off as soon as possible.
This isn't actually an issue. It only becomes a problem when you have two or more guys out, and your deck has fewer cards than lethal storm*number of guys, at which point you use Noxious Revivals to cycle Opals to make enough mana to use both Grapeahots.
Play legacy cheeri0s for a while, where you will cast multiple glimpses in a majority of games, and you become very very good at draw math.
I would still not play cantrips, and never play any Cheeri0s deck without the full playset of Noxious.
And comparing decks across formats is fine when we're looking at very fundamental elements of an archetype. We aren't comparing Oath's plan to ours, or the meta that Oath has to contend with to Burn and BG/x; we're comparing basic functionality. It has an engine, cards devoted to making that engine run, cards that the engine turns into wins, and it has elements that flow seamlessly into the engine to perform important side jobs. Almost every combo deck ever does. Noxious Revival does many, many things, and it does them while playing straight into our engine (manipulating the topdeck in a combo that uses draw power as fuel). 1 Noxious will not reliably be an anti-Bolt when you need it. 1-ofs and 2-ofs in this style of deck mean "I need this, but not until after I've drawn my deck". I need Noxious almost all the time.
I'm going to disagree with this ktkenshinx (also hey! Long time no see). Good combo decks have utility built into them without disrupting the engine, otherwise every combo deck would be glass cannon. Things like Noxious revival, which cost minimal resources (one card, 2 life, 4 deck slots) but offer multiple uses, and flow well with the engine (which Noxious does magnificently) are very important. In Legacy Cheeri0s, things like Summoner's Pact, Noxious, and Ingot Chewer fill this role. In Vintage Oath, Swan Song, Beast Within, and niche things like Memory's Journey. In Elves, the choices of specific elves are based on utility. Combos can stand as "good" on their own, but a full combo deck has to have something built into it that covers a lot of bases or offers seamless protection.
Painlands are not a problem, only Burn is a serious consideration for hoarding life totals, and they're already a bad matchup due to having so many Bolts with our Paladin's name written on them. Even using painlands exclusively would only top out at maybe ~5 or 6 damage in a long game. Every cheeri0s deck in every format should have a very Black conception of life totals.
20-23 0-drops is about the perfect zone. Depends on what you want to do and what your support cards are (such as Mentor wanting maybe 22 for more explosive turns), but 16 is far too few and 18 is optimal for versions aiming at Turn 3. Legacy Cheeri0s traditionally runs 26-28, but the balance has to be slightly different because it goes off Turn 1 instead of Turn 2 and essentially can't use lands.
Cavern of Souls is a must-use in combo centric lists. It does not at all interfere with Retract, Noxious Revival should virtually always be cast for 2 life, and it can cast Grapeshot, Transmute Muddle, and pay for a non-zero Repeal. Beating turn 2 and 3 counterspells is way too important to ignore. I have never, ever run this deck without 4 Caverns.
To expand on that a little bit, here's why it doesn't interfere with casting anything:
Either you go off Turn 2, in which case you used both your lands for Paladin or Sram already, and NO land in your deck would be useful for casting things, or you went off Turn 3, meaning you got to choose which 2 of your 3 lands you used to cast Paladin/Sram, and which one is open for Retract. If you chose to leave Cavern open...well stop that. Maybe you'd holding 3 Caverns or you go off on 2 lands turn 3 and draw Cavern. These won't come up often, but in each case chances are you're better off holding the Cavern (in the first case) or that you would've bricked on any land (in the second case). Only very rarely will you draw Cavern, Retract, and no other mana source or way to continue.
2 Plains is generally a judgment call, but when pushing as hard as possible for turn 2 wins, it's too many. It essentially only serves as a basic for when you get Path'd, so that your opponent isn't just using the single best removal spell in the game.
When the deck was young, it was able to reach about a 50% turn 2 goldfish. Having 8 Paladins raises that to (at a rough estimate before doing lots of crazy math) about 80%. That's based on a 92% of seeing a Paladin or Sram within a mulligan to 6, and the increased odds of opening with 2 mana sources+engine because you need fewer mulligans and thus start with more cards.
Also, having 8 guys means that you should NOT mulligan to 4, and should mulligan to 5 less aggressively; the increase for an 8-of on the mull to 5 (92% to 96%) is not large enough to be worth it in most cases.
4 Sram, Senior Edificer
4 Muddle the Mixture OR 4 Repeal
4 Retract
4 Noxious Revival
2 Grapeshot
4 Kite Shield
4 Cathar's Shield
4 Paradise Mantle
4 Spidersilk Net
1 Sigil of Distinction
4 Cavern of Souls
4 Mana Confluence
4 City of Brass
1 Plains
AND it gives very solid resiliency against removal, our biggest weakness.
Essentially I you go back to the original thread, you'll see pages and pages of debate about Spoils, Plunge, Vedalkan Archmage, Riddlesmith....having a second Paladin obsoletes all of that. Paladin is a powerful, fast engine with a weakness to removal, but the raw speed of having 8 is insane.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing so many people having fun with this, and taking it in a thousand unique directions.
Sram really takes this deck to a whole different level as nothing else could. 8 Paladins, without having to commit Spoilcide or double your killturn with Muddle, is amazing.
I've been out of the game for a while, so I don't know what Modern looks like and I'm hazy on new cards from the past two or three sets. But I know that, even still staring down removal, this deck is so much more explosive and consistent now that the meta is going to have to double down to prepare for it.
Pretty sure Mentors go to the board; they're still great but the combo requires a delicate balance and Mentor+Sram is too heavy on engines.
Idr his screen name here, but Datka and I agree that we still want Muddles. As slow emergency Paladins they're ok, but doubling as anti-removal is golden. And in a pinch, go get your Grapeshot!
Something like this probably:
4 Sram
4 Muddle the Mixture
4 Mox Opal
4 Retract
2 Grapeshot
4 Accorder's Shield
4 Bone Saw
4 Spidersilk Net
4 Kite Shield
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
2 Glimmervoid
2 Plains
No idea how many cards that is, I'm in a rush and out of practice counting decklists. But its a rough draft of where I'm going: still streamlined and focused on the turn 2 kill.
Thanks for keeping this alive guys, and don't stop smiling.
Edit oh hey not sure how I forgot about Mana Confluence. Derp.
Serum Powder is something that I've never felt super strongly about either way. It makes the deck noticeably faster, and speed is clearly the biggest weapon a deck has when it reliably wins Turn 2 but dies to everything. But it's also a dead draw, and the consistency bonus comes at the cost of difficult (and sometimes unpredictable) mulligan decisions and the chance to lose important pieces. Looking at that Top 4 list, though, I think it has strong potential for creating the fastest variant. We have a very solid parallel to Vintage Dredge in that we need exactly one card, and want to open with it as often as possible. We can probably use Serum Powder in the same manner.
It would be different because, as it's worded now, your example would NOT add 2 colorless. 2GW does not cost 2 colorless, it costs 2 generic. We now have a colorless mana symbol,and it's nowhere in that mana cost, so it can't be added. So the question becomes, does WotC want to allow us to add generic mana to our mana pool (currently a meaningless concept, generic mana only refers to costs), or will they issue errata to make the card function more cleanly with the new distinction between generic and colorless.
And possibly Elemental Resonance depending on how they feel about adding generic mana to your mana pool.
Land Grant as a mana source is very dangerous; unlike lands or ESG, it is counterable, and your opponent gets to see your hand before deciding whether to counter it. It also has a serious double-edged sword over the other mana sources because it thins your deck when drawn early, but drawing multiples or lands means that extra Land Grants are dead. Extras of other mana sources are still useful.
Land Grant is very useful when you are running Skyshroud Cutter and 4 Summoner's Pact, because it gives you better odds of having a land so that you can play Cutter for free. Without Land Grants, you only have 2-3 cards in your deck that make him playable. I still don't run more than 3, but when I run Cutter as part of my Pact package, I like to have at least a couple Land Grants to make him easier to play so that HE isn't a brick.