Playing 4 fatties is basically saying your gameplan revolves around always drawing at least 1. I'd either trim down to 2 or 3 and play a (fragile) draw-go plan or trade Secure for Vendilion Cliques and play a slower version of Esper Death's Shadow. 4 creatures and 4 planeswalkers (or creatures resistant to removal) works well for a midrange-style defensive deck like UW Control, but if everything you have gets hit by Path then you probably want to go up to 12 maindeck. These could also be Lingering Souls or even Bitterblossom. That's the slippery slop of adding more than a copy or two of a card like Tasigur to your deck; once he's in there other interactive spells become more beneficial as additional threats, as they choke out your opponent's removal.
On the other hand, running just 2 copies of something like Tasigur makes for an unreliable win condition. Even when I ran Gideon of the Trials in the place of White Sun's Zenith it became apparent to me in matchups where he could be killed that decking was a possibility. It almost happened against UW Eldrazi once, though I lost that game to a 16-mana Ballista. 5-mana Gideon or Elspeth are good finishers on account of getting around most removal. Gideon doesn't have to activate till you can Esper Charm or counter removal.
That's the slippery slop of adding more than a copy or two of a card like Tasigur to your deck; once he's in there other interactive spells become more beneficial as additional threats, as they choke out your opponent's removal.
I agree with this generally but I don't think it's necessarily true specifically for Tasigur because it is essentially 1 mana a lot of the time. Other threats usually require you to tap low enough that you can't interact with their removal, and that isn't the case here. Non-White decks don't even really have a good way to interact with Tasigur either (is there anything other than terminate?). So sure, it's a bit of a liability against white decks, but I wouldn't say it's a bad card there either. Its not like they will always have the path, or you won't have a counter, or you can't activate Tasigur in response to get up on the exchange. You could also wait until you've charmed them before revealing the Tasigur, they will likely Discard their paths. It also makes sideboarding difficult for the opponent - do they cut path? It's so bad against everything else and maybe you sided out Tasigur.
That said I do think 2-3 is better simply because you don't want them to clog your hands when you don't have enough to delve, or don't have the countermagic backup, or need to position a mindrot or two first.
There is murderous cut, dismember, roast, vapor snag, etc, beyond discard/counterspells that work vs tasigur.
Again, wasting a bunch of counterspells on removal isn't ideal. If you have a bunch of diverse threats, its a lot harder for them to removal all of them to the point that you don't actually have to spend counters on every kill spell they have.
My point again comes up: if you're trying to land an early threat and defend it, you're now playing a different deck. Scapeshift is still going to try winning T4-5. Storm is still going to try winning T3-5. Dredge is still going to put more dudes on the board than you. Affinity is flying over Tas
If you want to play Tas, idk why you don't just play Esper Deaths Shadow. It's not a terrible deck and it does the things you want to be doing - large threats for cheap mana with minimal disruption.
I'm not saying don't play unless it is the core. I'm saying that it will have more successful matchups than the decks that can't decide what they're doing.
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Yeah its hard to fully invalidate opponents removal, but when your only targets are snap, colonnade, and tokens its pretty easy to keep it stranded in their hands and not lose much if/when they get around to using it. Adding any other threat to the deck means it probably eats a removal spell a lot of the time - or you end up having to fight over something that you otherwise wouldn't have. I never counter their push on my snapcaster, I might be stuck negating a path on a tasigur only to regret it when they resolve something tough afterwards.
I played a few hands with 2x opt and 1x search for ancatenza, inital impression was that you absolutely do not want or need to cast search early. I dropped it turn 4 once and flipped it and it was like "so what" I had so many spells still in hand that using my land to try and pull ahead was not even a consideration. It is a late game move so don't sweat tapping low for it early. Just let it rot in your hand until you have a window to cast it and flip it. Nothing much to say about opt yet - it did what I thought it would, made me fetch an island turn 1 then take more damage over next 2 turns to get lands online. I cast both in a game where I was digging for removal and still came up empty handed on turn 5. I have a feeling the ability to "dig" is going to be less exciting than I first thought. When I really need a verdict it will often make no difference whether I am casting opt or some other cantrip because the card has to be at such a precise position in the library for going 1 more card deep to matter. I guess it will be nice when we can hop over removal in matches with no targets, or over counterspells in matchups with caverns/vials, but it'll always be tough to measure that impact.
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Modern
* Esper Draw-Go
* Tezzeret Whir
* Blue Tron
There is murderous cut, dismember, roast, vapor snag, etc, beyond discard/counterspells that work vs tasigur.
Again, wasting a bunch of counterspells on removal isn't ideal. If you have a bunch of diverse threats, its a lot harder for them to removal all of them to the point that you don't actually have to spend counters on every kill spell they have.
Counters/Discard hit anything, not just creatures and Roast and Snag are not real cards. Dismember definitely is though.
So white decks hit it, and ETron hits it. If we look at that objectively, in Tier 1 we have UW control that it's bad against, which I think is a decent matchup for us regardless. Then we have 2 copies in Etron and 2 Copies in Abzan. That's really not a lot of hate for the card. I guess actually Liliana of the Veil hits it too, but I think we are getting wrecked by the card if it resolves anyways right?
And then it's gonna be great against burn, storm and shift. Feels like the upside is a little higher than the downside to me, but not by a ton. And again, other than UW, it shouldn't be hard to find a position to make use of the card against the other 2 decks mentioned. If you board them out after they've seen them, they probably then have 2 dead cards in their deck.
My point again comes up: if you're trying to land an early threat and defend it, you're now playing a different deck. Scapeshift is still going to try winning T4-5. Storm is still going to try winning T3-5. Dredge is still going to put more dudes on the board than you. Affinity is flying over Tas
If you want to play Tas, idk why you don't just play Esper Deaths Shadow. It's not a terrible deck and it does the things you want to be doing - large threats for cheap mana with minimal disruption.
I'm not saying don't play unless it is the core. I'm saying that it will have more successful matchups than the decks that can't decide what they're doing.
I don't think adding a pair of 1 mana threats makes the deck less successful compared to decks that "know what they're doing', mostly because when you say they are successful, I don't know what you're talking about because this deck hasn't had any objective success, which is the whole point in suggesting change, but also because it isn't a fundamental shift in philosophy, unlike the strawman that you and others keep lifting where you're insinuating that changing 2 cards completely (adding creatures) and moving around some effects for others that are similar (say Glimmer over Think Twice) is equivalent to changing ~50% of the cards in the deck to non-comparable cards (moving from the stock list to Esper Shadow).
There's also maelstrom pulse, liliana edict as you mentioned, karn, skred, fiend hunter, smallpox, beast within, hour of devastation, dusk//dawn, other wraths, echoing truth, lightning axe, go for the throat, victim of night, and other cards all hit tasigur too.
Not sure why roast and vapor snag aren't real cards in your book.
Merfolk is an actual deck, and I've seen roast all over the place, from storm, to valakut, to blue moon or ponza, and other places. Its not the most popular card, sure, but its definitely real.
Anyhow, nonwhite decks definitely have tools to answer tasigur. Sure, fatal push, lightning bolt and abrupt decay miss him, which is great, but thats not all of the removal in the format.
The major thing though, is that UW control, for example is a good matchup for builds of this deck that don't run tasigur. Does tasigur singlehandedly ruin the matchup? No, but a deck playing tasigur does so because it wants different matchup percentages against different decks. And its gonna get them eveywhere. By how much will vary, but decks that are good for a stock list aren't always going to be good for different versions.
How great it will actually be against those decks is also somewhat up for debate. Valakut, for example is simply not a matchup that I want to be on a "play an early 4/5 and go to town" plan. I feel that "play a lockpiece and counter whatever else matters" is simply better.
CodyX - I agree completely with the second half of your post. In fact it's my whole premise; we won't know how much those percentages change without testing. The first half of the post I think is valid, but less relevant. Most of those cards are niche and aren't going to matter the majority of the time.
I get that I'm basically just coming up with a list just to prove you wrong, but the point is basically that just because tasigur is "big" doesn't really make him all that unkillable, and that can be a problem. Obviously, no threat is perfect if have a huge list of criteria for an ideal finisher (instant speed, gains life/prevents damage to us, provides CA, hard to kill, hard to block, possible to play early while still being a late game threat, inevitable, etc, etc). Obviously some cards like geist, batterskull, 3mana gideon, or secure/wsz fill a lot more of these than others (Grave titan, tasigur, baneslayer angel, vendilion clique) and thats not to say that either grouping is bad (baneslayer in particular can do a ton of work in certain matchups) but there is a reason some of these cards are more popular than others (or some are mostly sideboard-only).
Tasigur and the other Death's shadow creatures do dodge a lot of removal spells, that's a good point.
The other half of the problem with running a small number of vulnerable creatures is that they do nothing in spell-based matchups until your opponent's life total is zero. This is why actual blue creatures tend to have ETB triggers like Spell Queller. If you cast Tasigur on turn 3 against those decks, you have to attack 5 times (4 if Colonnade swings for lethal, which means the card "does something" around turn 8. Every spell-based deck in Modern will have dumped it's hand by then, and Tasigur is a mulligan from the perspective of actually being able to control your opponent. This is assuming of course that they don't twiddle their fingers while you activate him each turn. Of course, Tasigur's draw ability is pretty terrible and you're better off drawing a card by just about any means if possible.
It's probably best to consider what the card replaces. In the previously posted list it took the place of Sphinx's Revelation, along with some other spells. Revelation is terrible against most all spell-based decks, so you get an improvement from swapping those first 2 copies, but that's rough business when your finisher against the creature-based majority of Modern decks is 2 copies of Tasigur. There are no decks in Modern left that are weak to Tasigur, correct me if I'm wrong. Even Death's shadow only has 3 creatures that don't just attack through it (guess who?!?). The rest of these decks would steamroll you in a game where your payoff was a Tasigur:
Eldrazi (everything is just bigger)
GR Valakut (dies to a fetchland)
Affinity (can block exactly Memnite)
UW Control (pretty obvious)
Junk (close, but Path, Liliana, Lingering Souls, Siege Rhino, Tarmogoyf, etc.)
Collected Company (you're just dead on account of no Verdict...)
...so you basically have a worse deck unless you commit more. It seems so evident that it's hard to believe you've really played a list with a pile of these Delve threats and done well, so you can understand people's skepticism.
When I first entered modern, I played Esper delver. Played a couple MB swords of X/Y also. Loved the deck because I could play control OR I could play tempo. Even won a legacy tournament with it once, beating high tide, BUG Delver, UW CounterTop and Belcher (didn't even have FoW to sub in).
I don't continue to play the deck because our format doesn't really support a format of creatures that don't just end the game in 3 turns when backed up by disruption. We don't play 5+ discard spells to keep the opponent from going off.
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Cipher - "The other half of the problem with running a small number of vulnerable creatures is that they do nothing in spell-based matchups until your opponent's life total is zero. This is why actual blue creatures tend to have ETB triggers like Spell Queller. If you cast Tasigur on turn 3 against those decks, you have to attack 5 times (4 if Colonnade swings for lethal, which means the card "does something" around turn 8. Every spell-based deck in Modern will have dumped it's hand by then, and Tasigur is a mulligan from the perspective of actually being able to control your opponent. This is assuming of course that they don't twiddle their fingers while you activate him each turn. Of course, Tasigur's draw ability is pretty terrible and you're better off drawing a card by just about any means if possible."
This is not a fair assessment - There are so few decks that deal less than 5 damage to themselves, and if you can manage even one or two chipshots with Snapcaster it's more like a 3-4 turn clock. Putting pressure on the opponent is "doing something" regardless of whether or not the source of pressure has an ETB effect - Pressure will force your opponent to play a reactive game when they might have wanted to play a proactive game, in either case it will cause them to change up their game plan a little. And finally, in what world is Tasigur's draw ability worse than drawing a card by any other means possible? Its a guaranteed non-land card! That's better than generic "draw a card" by a lot.
Cody X - "Obviously, no threat is perfect if you have a huge list of criteria for an ideal finisher (instant speed, gains life/prevents damage , provides CA, hard to kill, hard to block, possible to play early while still being a late game threat, inevitable, etc, etc)".
The most important aspects of your ideal finisher sound like they could be describing Search for Azcanta ;). Have you gotten a chance to play it yet? I only have Esper in paper, so I can't speak specifically for this deck, but I do have UW online and I do understand that just because it's good there doesn't mean it would be good here, but I have to say, I have been very impressed with it all day except once against burn.
While search may be an ideal threat, its not an ideal finisher, since it doesn't finish people.
Also, the "most important aspects" is highly subjective (ie, I think instant speed, hard to kill, and inevitable are the 3 most important things, followed by gaining life, card advantage, and difficult to kill, with being an early play the least important).
I've been able to play a little bit with it, but mostly not in esper.
It definitely finishes people! Not in the sense that it is the card the deals the final point of damage, but winning off of it is inevitable if it goes unchecked. Sort of like Sphinx's Rev is as a finisher, sorry *was* as a finisher! I don't think I'll ever sleeve that card up again lol - You know I'm just yanking your chain lol
I agree about it being subjective, in a sense. I also favor instant speed win conditions, I'm sure the vast majority who follow this thread would agree with that. I do think that search is only 2cmc mitigates the fact that it can only be played at sorcery speed though. I can't wait to get my physical copies so I can play some Esper with it - Proxy against the same deck over and over isn't telling me much about it.
By finishes people, I do indeed means deals the last points of damage.
The point being, that you need to either play something to prevent you from milling out or something else to kill them with.
IE: as far as deck construction goes, its card advantage, not wincon.
Winning off of it is only inevitable if you're playing a wsz already.
Unfortunately, despite me having already opened approx a box of ixalan from having attended 2 prereleases, I've still not opened one, or seen one opened yet. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on real copies soon.
hey guys, some info you may find usefull
Wafo Tapa told me he is playing 4 opt now. he was already playing anticipate instead of serum visions
With Opt, Fatal Push, Path, and cheap counters from the SB, I feel like any list not playing 4 Snaps is wrong, but generalizations tend to bite people in the ass. More often than not though, 4 Snaps will be the way to go.
This is not a fair assessment - There are so few decks that deal less than 5 damage to themselves, and if you can manage even one or two chipshots with Snapcaster it's more like a 3-4 turn clock. Putting pressure on the opponent is "doing something" regardless of whether or not the source of pressure has an ETB effect - Pressure will force your opponent to play a reactive game when they might have wanted to play a proactive game, in either case it will cause them to change up their game plan a little.
My point was that a 3-4 turn clock dropped on turn 3 gives you a turn 6-7 kill. A combo deck that can't go off by then (through disruption, even) must have drawn terribly. You basically have to stop your opponent with [i]other[i] draws and then instead of locking them out by drawing more disruption than they can draw answers (with Revelation), you're expecting to kill your opponent before they can draw into their combo again.
The fact that you automatically pointed to damage from Snapcaster helping shorten the clock should be evidence in support of what we're all saying about "being a bad midrange list". Every successful tempo/midrange deck is running between 12-15 creatures/planeswalkers for a reason. If you're going to go below that number you gotta only play ETB value creatures like Snapcaster/Vendilion Clique.
And finally, in what world is Tasigur's draw ability worse than drawing a card by any other means possible? Its a guaranteed non-land card! That's better than generic "draw a card" by a lot.
Tasigur costs 4 mana to activate, which puts it in Azure Mage territory. His card draw is of the Browbeat style, similar to Steam Augury. You jsut give your opponent a card that can't interact, another copy of Tasigur, or a cantrip. Free is always good, but if you've got a Think Twice or Esper Charm in hand you're probably better off casting those.
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UWR Control
BR Hollow One
On the other hand, running just 2 copies of something like Tasigur makes for an unreliable win condition. Even when I ran Gideon of the Trials in the place of White Sun's Zenith it became apparent to me in matchups where he could be killed that decking was a possibility. It almost happened against UW Eldrazi once, though I lost that game to a 16-mana Ballista. 5-mana Gideon or Elspeth are good finishers on account of getting around most removal. Gideon doesn't have to activate till you can Esper Charm or counter removal.
I agree with this generally but I don't think it's necessarily true specifically for Tasigur because it is essentially 1 mana a lot of the time. Other threats usually require you to tap low enough that you can't interact with their removal, and that isn't the case here. Non-White decks don't even really have a good way to interact with Tasigur either (is there anything other than terminate?). So sure, it's a bit of a liability against white decks, but I wouldn't say it's a bad card there either. Its not like they will always have the path, or you won't have a counter, or you can't activate Tasigur in response to get up on the exchange. You could also wait until you've charmed them before revealing the Tasigur, they will likely Discard their paths. It also makes sideboarding difficult for the opponent - do they cut path? It's so bad against everything else and maybe you sided out Tasigur.
That said I do think 2-3 is better simply because you don't want them to clog your hands when you don't have enough to delve, or don't have the countermagic backup, or need to position a mindrot or two first.
Again, wasting a bunch of counterspells on removal isn't ideal. If you have a bunch of diverse threats, its a lot harder for them to removal all of them to the point that you don't actually have to spend counters on every kill spell they have.
If you want to play Tas, idk why you don't just play Esper Deaths Shadow. It's not a terrible deck and it does the things you want to be doing - large threats for cheap mana with minimal disruption.
I'm not saying don't play unless it is the core. I'm saying that it will have more successful matchups than the decks that can't decide what they're doing.
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I played a few hands with 2x opt and 1x search for ancatenza, inital impression was that you absolutely do not want or need to cast search early. I dropped it turn 4 once and flipped it and it was like "so what" I had so many spells still in hand that using my land to try and pull ahead was not even a consideration. It is a late game move so don't sweat tapping low for it early. Just let it rot in your hand until you have a window to cast it and flip it. Nothing much to say about opt yet - it did what I thought it would, made me fetch an island turn 1 then take more damage over next 2 turns to get lands online. I cast both in a game where I was digging for removal and still came up empty handed on turn 5. I have a feeling the ability to "dig" is going to be less exciting than I first thought. When I really need a verdict it will often make no difference whether I am casting opt or some other cantrip because the card has to be at such a precise position in the library for going 1 more card deep to matter. I guess it will be nice when we can hop over removal in matches with no targets, or over counterspells in matchups with caverns/vials, but it'll always be tough to measure that impact.
* Esper Draw-Go
* Tezzeret Whir
* Blue Tron
Counters/Discard hit anything, not just creatures and Roast and Snag are not real cards. Dismember definitely is though.
So white decks hit it, and ETron hits it. If we look at that objectively, in Tier 1 we have UW control that it's bad against, which I think is a decent matchup for us regardless. Then we have 2 copies in Etron and 2 Copies in Abzan. That's really not a lot of hate for the card. I guess actually Liliana of the Veil hits it too, but I think we are getting wrecked by the card if it resolves anyways right?
And then it's gonna be great against burn, storm and shift. Feels like the upside is a little higher than the downside to me, but not by a ton. And again, other than UW, it shouldn't be hard to find a position to make use of the card against the other 2 decks mentioned. If you board them out after they've seen them, they probably then have 2 dead cards in their deck.
I don't think adding a pair of 1 mana threats makes the deck less successful compared to decks that "know what they're doing', mostly because when you say they are successful, I don't know what you're talking about because this deck hasn't had any objective success, which is the whole point in suggesting change, but also because it isn't a fundamental shift in philosophy, unlike the strawman that you and others keep lifting where you're insinuating that changing 2 cards completely (adding creatures) and moving around some effects for others that are similar (say Glimmer over Think Twice) is equivalent to changing ~50% of the cards in the deck to non-comparable cards (moving from the stock list to Esper Shadow).
Not sure why roast and vapor snag aren't real cards in your book.
Merfolk is an actual deck, and I've seen roast all over the place, from storm, to valakut, to blue moon or ponza, and other places. Its not the most popular card, sure, but its definitely real.
Anyhow, nonwhite decks definitely have tools to answer tasigur. Sure, fatal push, lightning bolt and abrupt decay miss him, which is great, but thats not all of the removal in the format.
The major thing though, is that UW control, for example is a good matchup for builds of this deck that don't run tasigur. Does tasigur singlehandedly ruin the matchup? No, but a deck playing tasigur does so because it wants different matchup percentages against different decks. And its gonna get them eveywhere. By how much will vary, but decks that are good for a stock list aren't always going to be good for different versions.
How great it will actually be against those decks is also somewhat up for debate. Valakut, for example is simply not a matchup that I want to be on a "play an early 4/5 and go to town" plan. I feel that "play a lockpiece and counter whatever else matters" is simply better.
The other half of the problem with running a small number of vulnerable creatures is that they do nothing in spell-based matchups until your opponent's life total is zero. This is why actual blue creatures tend to have ETB triggers like Spell Queller. If you cast Tasigur on turn 3 against those decks, you have to attack 5 times (4 if Colonnade swings for lethal, which means the card "does something" around turn 8. Every spell-based deck in Modern will have dumped it's hand by then, and Tasigur is a mulligan from the perspective of actually being able to control your opponent. This is assuming of course that they don't twiddle their fingers while you activate him each turn. Of course, Tasigur's draw ability is pretty terrible and you're better off drawing a card by just about any means if possible.
It's probably best to consider what the card replaces. In the previously posted list it took the place of Sphinx's Revelation, along with some other spells. Revelation is terrible against most all spell-based decks, so you get an improvement from swapping those first 2 copies, but that's rough business when your finisher against the creature-based majority of Modern decks is 2 copies of Tasigur. There are no decks in Modern left that are weak to Tasigur, correct me if I'm wrong. Even Death's shadow only has 3 creatures that don't just attack through it (guess who?!?). The rest of these decks would steamroll you in a game where your payoff was a Tasigur:
Eldrazi (everything is just bigger)
GR Valakut (dies to a fetchland)
Affinity (can block exactly Memnite)
UW Control (pretty obvious)
Junk (close, but Path, Liliana, Lingering Souls, Siege Rhino, Tarmogoyf, etc.)
Collected Company (you're just dead on account of no Verdict...)
...so you basically have a worse deck unless you commit more. It seems so evident that it's hard to believe you've really played a list with a pile of these Delve threats and done well, so you can understand people's skepticism.
I don't continue to play the deck because our format doesn't really support a format of creatures that don't just end the game in 3 turns when backed up by disruption. We don't play 5+ discard spells to keep the opponent from going off.
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This is not a fair assessment - There are so few decks that deal less than 5 damage to themselves, and if you can manage even one or two chipshots with Snapcaster it's more like a 3-4 turn clock. Putting pressure on the opponent is "doing something" regardless of whether or not the source of pressure has an ETB effect - Pressure will force your opponent to play a reactive game when they might have wanted to play a proactive game, in either case it will cause them to change up their game plan a little. And finally, in what world is Tasigur's draw ability worse than drawing a card by any other means possible? Its a guaranteed non-land card! That's better than generic "draw a card" by a lot.
The most important aspects of your ideal finisher sound like they could be describing Search for Azcanta ;). Have you gotten a chance to play it yet? I only have Esper in paper, so I can't speak specifically for this deck, but I do have UW online and I do understand that just because it's good there doesn't mean it would be good here, but I have to say, I have been very impressed with it all day except once against burn.
Also, the "most important aspects" is highly subjective (ie, I think instant speed, hard to kill, and inevitable are the 3 most important things, followed by gaining life, card advantage, and difficult to kill, with being an early play the least important).
I've been able to play a little bit with it, but mostly not in esper.
I agree about it being subjective, in a sense. I also favor instant speed win conditions, I'm sure the vast majority who follow this thread would agree with that. I do think that search is only 2cmc mitigates the fact that it can only be played at sorcery speed though. I can't wait to get my physical copies so I can play some Esper with it - Proxy against the same deck over and over isn't telling me much about it.
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The point being, that you need to either play something to prevent you from milling out or something else to kill them with.
IE: as far as deck construction goes, its card advantage, not wincon.
Winning off of it is only inevitable if you're playing a wsz already.
Unfortunately, despite me having already opened approx a box of ixalan from having attended 2 prereleases, I've still not opened one, or seen one opened yet. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on real copies soon.
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With Opt, Fatal Push, Path, and cheap counters from the SB, I feel like any list not playing 4 Snaps is wrong, but generalizations tend to bite people in the ass. More often than not though, 4 Snaps will be the way to go.
The fact that you automatically pointed to damage from Snapcaster helping shorten the clock should be evidence in support of what we're all saying about "being a bad midrange list". Every successful tempo/midrange deck is running between 12-15 creatures/planeswalkers for a reason. If you're going to go below that number you gotta only play ETB value creatures like Snapcaster/Vendilion Clique.
Tasigur costs 4 mana to activate, which puts it in Azure Mage territory. His card draw is of the Browbeat style, similar to Steam Augury. You jsut give your opponent a card that can't interact, another copy of Tasigur, or a cantrip. Free is always good, but if you've got a Think Twice or Esper Charm in hand you're probably better off casting those.