I just really don't believe that GDS is better than 5c. I think it is just a matter of GDS has way more eyes on it so it creates a self-perpetuating cycle of more people playing it. I've seen a couple people advocating for new versions of Grixis Shadow (Lingering Souls in the side, playing Mishra's Bauble in the main) and I think overall the deck is actually a slightly worse version of our deck. GDS has just been more popular for a quite a while now, and people fricken love playing Snapcaster Mage (I can't blame them), so we don't get many converts.
What's the reason to play Jund Death Shadow over Grixis Death Shadow? Although I like the power level of the individual cards, I feel that Grixis has more staying power.
DSJ has a better game 1 against an open field and has more explosive, consistent early game than the other Shadow/GBx decks.
The conventional wisdom is that each deck is stronger in particular metagames. Traverse Shadow is stronger when you need to clock your opponents quickly, while Grixis Shadow is better when you want to fight on a grindier axis due to Snapcaster Mage and better card selection. I still think this is mistaken. It's true in a sense because no one builds their Traverse Shadow lists to be that grindy, but that's because it's a poor choice in the metagame. Your win percentage is higher if you play TBR and try to get them dead. But Traverse Shadow can be pretty grindy without changing the fundamental nature of the deck. Just MD Lingering Souls. Then you'll be the Abzan to Grixis's Jund (if you catch my drift). Take a look at this sketch of a list:
Yes, this is just Abzan Shadow. Hardly anyone is playing it, and for good reason. Going faster is just better. Not being able to grind as well isn't a fundamental characteristic of Traverse lists. It's a characteristic of the way we choose to build those lists right now, because trying to grind harder is not a winning strategy. Even Grixis lists are contorting themselves to be more like Traverse lists - cutting Tasigurs for Anglers and even MDing Temur Battle Rage is becoming a fairly common strategy. See Dylan Donnegan's SCG Columbus T8 list for example.
There is at least one caveat to this: looking at the range of possibilities for both Grixis and Traverse, I do think Grixis can be build to be grindier. Snapcaster Mage + K Command + card selection + Lingering Souls splash will grind harder than basically anything we can do with Traverse. (Again, we see SB Souls + Godless Shrine in Donnegan's list, accomplishing some of this). But once you want to grind that hard, I think you're making a deck selection mistake. If you're that worried about beating Jeskai or re-trumping midrange mirrors, it's probably better to go over the top of them all with Valakut or Tron.
I think there's an argument you can make for Grixis that I don't ever see people making: it's not that Grixis grinds harder than Traverse - Traverse can grind that hard if it wants to, like I said. But Grixis can grind a little bit harder than Traverse while being able to play a similar strength tempo/aggressive game. I.e. it can bring a unique combination of elements to the table that Traverse Shadow cannot. I definitely don't think this is universally true - at the most aggressive end of the spectrum, Grixis will never be able to compete with Traverse just by its very nature. But given a Grixis list like Donnegan's, and a Traverse list built to have a similarly strong aggressive/tempo game, it's possible that Grixis will be a little bit better at grinding through the midrange and control matchups. Or put another way, a similarly grindy Traverse list would be a little bit worse at the aggressive/tempo game - perhaps because it would have to give up TBR.
I'm not sure about the answer to this question either way - whether the current crop of Grixis lists hit combination of grindiness and aggressiveness that just isn't achievable by Traverse lists. But I think it's a better way to think about the question. The recent innovations in Grixis lists have me trying them again. I'm holding off doing much heavy lifting though since I'm not Q'ed for the PT, and I don't have any major events coming up. But once we see the PT results I probably won't be able to help myself.
I think that Grixis is able to more consistently get over it's clunkier draws than we are because of it's cantrips, and that slight bump in consistency is something that people enjoy more than the explosive nature of 5c. I also agree with Spooly that it's largely a meta game call, and I think that the decks are much closer in power level than meta representation suggests.
I spent a little time this week testing a sort of hybrid between the two, based on an article I saw on Reddit, because I really liked the direction that the main deck was headed in:
I've really liked the addition of Opt. It's made hitting delirium in linear matchups much easier, and in general I've found it to be more consistently reliable than Traverse. I started with a 2/2 split of Snapcaster and Traverse, and it's possible that this is correct, but at this point I've just been tweaking numbers a bunch to see how different things feel. I think that Traverse is better in linear matchups and Snapcaster is better in grindy ones, and I've been playing against a lot of grindy decks lately. I started out with the Liliana's in the main deck but recently decided to try moving them to the sideboard in favor of a leaner main deck configuration. I'd considered trying out a Tasigur in Hazoret's slot, but wanted to see how much of a strain on the deck that was, first. I also want to find room for a second K-Command somewhere (it's possible it should be Hazoret's slot), but the sideboard is still very much a work in progress because I've been focusing more on the main deck. The Flooded Strands are a budget replacement for Misty Rainforest, and it's possible that I should be cutting a shock and going up to the full 12 fetchlands.
So far, I've liked the feel of the main deck more than normal 5c Shadow. I'd recently picked up Grixis Shadow online and started playing it for the first time, and I kept finding myself in places where Tasigur/Angler were just a little too lacking in raw power. They're also terrible against Remand, which seems to be seeing more play in the last 2 months than at any other point since Twin was banned. My goal has been to try to find a shell that gets to maintain as many of the strengths of Grixis as possible (obviously conceding the consistency of the manabase), while also incorporating the strongest parts of Jund Death's Shadow (Tarmogoyf and Traverse). The obvious missing card is Lingering Souls, and as I settle more on the main deck I plan to try sideboard configurations with and without the white splash. My hope is that the addition of Snapcaster Mage (which is absurd with Traverse the Ulvenwald) can help overpower the raw card advantage that Lingering Souls provides and allow me to play only 4 colors.
@Spooly- Your last paragraph I think just reiterates my point. It seems silly that the recent Grixis innovations have basically been 'lets make Grixis function more like 5c Shadow'. Why not just play 5c Shadow?
Thanks for all your replies. I agree with what many of you said, that Grixis DS can grind better. Playing Jund/5c DS against Grixis DS feels bad since most of their removal are live against us while our pushes and decays can't hit their delve creatures. But I do like the power level of the individual cards, which feels similar to GBx.
@Spooly- Your last paragraph I think just reiterates my point. It seems silly that the recent Grixis innovations have basically been 'lets make Grixis function more like 5c Shadow'. Why not just play 5c Shadow?
I think the answer to that question has to be that Grixis can hit a combination of attributes that 5c can't hit. I'm not sure if it can, but it seems like a reasonable possibility. The card selection will help it do that, at the cost of cutting off the most aggressive end of the spectrum.
Went 2-0-1 last night which was very low, probably due to school starting back up. Overall it was strong unless I drew the wrong half. The guy I drew with was on GDS and we played it for fun, got slaughtered. No answers to a angler except for dismember which I never saw, and never got delirium up for traverse (never saw a bauble all night). Hopefully Friday will lead to a bigger turnout for some better testing.
Thats the problem with delirium. Depending against which deck you are up against you can miss on types in the graveyard more likely or not. For example against any creature based decks (like Humans, Affinity, CoCo) you can miss on Creature as your type, since they all don't run much removal and or only Path.
Against any control deck you can miss on instant, since you will likely not cast your removal spells to kill a creature.
The only 2 types which are consistant and probably not depending on the matchup are Land and Sorcery. Additionally, there are some draws that help with Creature and Artifact (Street Wraith and Bauble) but they aren't guaranteed.
Sometimes you get your Street Wraith and Bauble and you have delirium, but sometimes you have Street Wraith but no Bauble and playing against Control and therefore miss on Instant, sometimes you have Bauble but not Street Wraith and are up against low removal decks and missing on Creature and so on.
And besides all this, I did not consider sideboarding yet. By changing any significant types of cards into another, it could also heavily affect your ability to get delirium. A simple example would be matchups where you want to trim on discard. That way you will less likely have a Sorcery in your graveyard.
The thing is, delirium is kinda swingy sometimes. You can get nut draws and kill every opponent so fast and effectively that nothing would be able to stop you. And other times you don't draw into creatures and don't have delirium to find creatures.
When playing this deck, one must be aware of that. If thats not your playstyle and prefer more consistancy, then other decks are probably better to play.
3-1 at 24-man FNM, beat GW, Coco, Abzan (!!!) and lost to nut draws from Revolt Zoo, felt helpless.
Really uninterested in Staticaster and Ranger lately - LTLH has been pulling her weight more in grindy matchups. What are you guys running as far as unconventional sideboard tech goes?
3-1 at 24-man FNM, beat GW, Coco, Abzan (!!!) and lost to nut draws from Revolt Zoo, felt helpless.
Really uninterested in Staticaster and Ranger lately - LTLH has been pulling her weight more in grindy matchups. What are you guys running as far as unconventional sideboard tech goes?
I've been off staticaster - my position is that if you have Lingering Souls in your 75, it's not needed, and the only major place you'd really miss it is as a traverse target for Storm. I'd prefer Ranger to be Hazoret, but I also want to be able to keep Stubs in vs. control decks, so it's a pickle. Having access to a different non-red Traversable haymaker would be nice. Tireless Tracker is an idea I haven't tried because I didn't think we'd trigger it enough. But maybe it's worth a shot. Thrun also has some upside, but you're basically never traversing for and casting him in the same turn.
Unfortunately, this deck isn't good for my local meta then. There's at least 3-4 Jeskai/UW decks usually in a pool of 8-10 people. It feels rough to have to dodge those.
Tracker seems awfully mana-intensive for a deck like ours, no?
Yeah, it has a lot of problems, which is why I hadn't tried it (edited my original post because I somehow didn't put "haven't" in there...), but at this point if you're looking for alternatives to Ranger you're probably going to be trying things that don't look like they should work. Or Hazoret.
So, what's everyone playing nowadays? We still on 5 color, or taking Reid's advice and going back to 4? I've been on a Jund + white list with 2 Grim Flayers and really enjoying it, I've been trying to find more creative ways to fuel delirium to see if I can make Whispers of Emrakul work, but delirium is pretty fickle.
I play all 5 colors, the white package in the board, splashing blue for Denial and red for TBR. I didn't like Terminate in the 5c-Version, therefore I replaced it with Dismember.
Reid's list looks good, but I think the upside of Denial is just too big not to play it.
Whispers is definitely interesting, my problem with the card is that it makes your nut draws even better, but is very weak in a suboptimal hand.
So, what's everyone playing nowadays? We still on 5 color, or taking Reid's advice and going back to 4? I've been on a Jund + white list with 2 Grim Flayers and really enjoying it, I've been trying to find more creative ways to fuel delirium to see if I can make Whispers of Emrakul work, but delirium is pretty fickle.
At some point I'll finish my article, which both agrees with Reid and pushes back a bit, but this is my default list:
Roughly, I think Reid is right that we should be 4 colors, but the decklist in this post is also 4 colors. It just choose which 4 colors to be post-board, at the cost of putting a land in your SB. (There's more nuance than that, but I'm working on it).
Also, I spent a lot of time trying to make Whispers work. You need to reliably cast it by turn 3 for it to be good. To do that, start here:
At one point I built a worse version of Grixis Shadow that reliably turned Whispers on using this framework. I doubt you could reliably turn it on without Scour or something similar though. Maybe Faithless Looting. Or maybe the ticket is Sultai instead of Grixis since Whispers + delve creatures is a nombo, but Whispers + Tarmogoyf works fine. I'm not optimistic though. The payoff didn't seem worth it.
I started looking into Whispers because I was working on a BUG Shadow list splashing red for TBR and K-Command (I posted the first rough list a couple pages ago) that was a bit better at getting delirium. I didn't go all the way to Thought Scour because I found that all I really needed was more instants that weren't removal, so I was playing Opt. I could see Scour being the better choice if you're really trying to land a turn 2 Whispers, though. The mana base felt really shaky, much moreso than the normal 5c version, because you're equally dependent on blue and green and that makes 1 hand lands very difficult to navigate. Maybe a delirium-focused, true BUG version is the way to build that color combination? I think it's as hard to leave TBR behind as it is Stubborn Denial, though. :/
Another reason I got onto Whispers was some discussion on the Jund boards about Todd Stevens not liking Liliana of the Veil against true control decks because they'll often have more cards in hand than we will after she's played and activated, which I think is even more true for this deck than traditional Jund. With that in mind, I was looking for something that could attack an opponent's hand, ideally snipe multiple cards, and not affect my own resources.
Stubborn Denial has been a very hard card to give up, and I've also really been missing Disdainful Stroke. I'm looking to play in the Modern Classic at the SCG event in King of Prussia at the end of the month and am finding it impossible to settle on a list.
3-1 at 24-man FNM, beat GW, Coco, Abzan (!!!) and lost to nut draws from Revolt Zoo, felt helpless.
Really uninterested in Staticaster and Ranger lately - LTLH has been pulling her weight more in grindy matchups. What are you guys running as far as unconventional sideboard tech goes?
I've been off staticaster - my position is that if you have Lingering Souls in your 75, it's not needed, and the only major place you'd really miss it is as a traverse target for Storm. I'd prefer Ranger to be Hazoret, but I also want to be able to keep Stubs in vs. control decks, so it's a pickle. Having access to a different non-red Traversable haymaker would be nice. Tireless Tracker is an idea I haven't tried because I didn't think we'd trigger it enough. But maybe it's worth a shot. Thrun also has some upside, but you're basically never traversing for and casting him in the same turn.
how about young pyro/mentor as standalone threats? as in the list below, for example for a 5c shell (although not having souls feels wrong)
The conventional wisdom is that each deck is stronger in particular metagames. Traverse Shadow is stronger when you need to clock your opponents quickly, while Grixis Shadow is better when you want to fight on a grindier axis due to Snapcaster Mage and better card selection. I still think this is mistaken. It's true in a sense because no one builds their Traverse Shadow lists to be that grindy, but that's because it's a poor choice in the metagame. Your win percentage is higher if you play TBR and try to get them dead. But Traverse Shadow can be pretty grindy without changing the fundamental nature of the deck. Just MD Lingering Souls. Then you'll be the Abzan to Grixis's Jund (if you catch my drift). Take a look at this sketch of a list:
18 land
12 Bauble/Wraith/Traverse
8 Shadow/Goyf
2 LotV
3 Souls
2 Decay
3 Push
2 Dismember
Yes, this is just Abzan Shadow. Hardly anyone is playing it, and for good reason. Going faster is just better. Not being able to grind as well isn't a fundamental characteristic of Traverse lists. It's a characteristic of the way we choose to build those lists right now, because trying to grind harder is not a winning strategy. Even Grixis lists are contorting themselves to be more like Traverse lists - cutting Tasigurs for Anglers and even MDing Temur Battle Rage is becoming a fairly common strategy. See Dylan Donnegan's SCG Columbus T8 list for example.
There is at least one caveat to this: looking at the range of possibilities for both Grixis and Traverse, I do think Grixis can be build to be grindier. Snapcaster Mage + K Command + card selection + Lingering Souls splash will grind harder than basically anything we can do with Traverse. (Again, we see SB Souls + Godless Shrine in Donnegan's list, accomplishing some of this). But once you want to grind that hard, I think you're making a deck selection mistake. If you're that worried about beating Jeskai or re-trumping midrange mirrors, it's probably better to go over the top of them all with Valakut or Tron.
I think there's an argument you can make for Grixis that I don't ever see people making: it's not that Grixis grinds harder than Traverse - Traverse can grind that hard if it wants to, like I said. But Grixis can grind a little bit harder than Traverse while being able to play a similar strength tempo/aggressive game. I.e. it can bring a unique combination of elements to the table that Traverse Shadow cannot. I definitely don't think this is universally true - at the most aggressive end of the spectrum, Grixis will never be able to compete with Traverse just by its very nature. But given a Grixis list like Donnegan's, and a Traverse list built to have a similarly strong aggressive/tempo game, it's possible that Grixis will be a little bit better at grinding through the midrange and control matchups. Or put another way, a similarly grindy Traverse list would be a little bit worse at the aggressive/tempo game - perhaps because it would have to give up TBR.
I'm not sure about the answer to this question either way - whether the current crop of Grixis lists hit combination of grindiness and aggressiveness that just isn't achievable by Traverse lists. But I think it's a better way to think about the question. The recent innovations in Grixis lists have me trying them again. I'm holding off doing much heavy lifting though since I'm not Q'ed for the PT, and I don't have any major events coming up. But once we see the PT results I probably won't be able to help myself.
I spent a little time this week testing a sort of hybrid between the two, based on an article I saw on Reddit, because I really liked the direction that the main deck was headed in:
4 Death's Shadow
3 Snapcaster Mage
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Street Wraith
Spells (23)
4 Fatal Push
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
4 Opt
3 Stubborn Denial
4 Thoughtseize
1 Traverse the Ulvenwald
1 Abrupt Decay
2 Temur Battle Rage
1 Dismember
1 Kolaghan's Command
4 Mishra's Bauble
Lands (18)
1 Blood Crypt
1 Breeding Pool
3 Flooded Strand
1 Island
1 Overgrown Tomb
4 Polluted Delta
1 Steam Vents
1 Swamp
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Watery Grave
2 Ceremonious Rejection
1 Stubborn Denial
2 Ancient Grudge
2 Collective Brutality
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Pyroclasm
1 Izzet Staticaster
1 Kozilek's Return
2 Liliana of the Veil
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
1 Hazoret the Fervent
I've really liked the addition of Opt. It's made hitting delirium in linear matchups much easier, and in general I've found it to be more consistently reliable than Traverse. I started with a 2/2 split of Snapcaster and Traverse, and it's possible that this is correct, but at this point I've just been tweaking numbers a bunch to see how different things feel. I think that Traverse is better in linear matchups and Snapcaster is better in grindy ones, and I've been playing against a lot of grindy decks lately. I started out with the Liliana's in the main deck but recently decided to try moving them to the sideboard in favor of a leaner main deck configuration. I'd considered trying out a Tasigur in Hazoret's slot, but wanted to see how much of a strain on the deck that was, first. I also want to find room for a second K-Command somewhere (it's possible it should be Hazoret's slot), but the sideboard is still very much a work in progress because I've been focusing more on the main deck. The Flooded Strands are a budget replacement for Misty Rainforest, and it's possible that I should be cutting a shock and going up to the full 12 fetchlands.
So far, I've liked the feel of the main deck more than normal 5c Shadow. I'd recently picked up Grixis Shadow online and started playing it for the first time, and I kept finding myself in places where Tasigur/Angler were just a little too lacking in raw power. They're also terrible against Remand, which seems to be seeing more play in the last 2 months than at any other point since Twin was banned. My goal has been to try to find a shell that gets to maintain as many of the strengths of Grixis as possible (obviously conceding the consistency of the manabase), while also incorporating the strongest parts of Jund Death's Shadow (Tarmogoyf and Traverse). The obvious missing card is Lingering Souls, and as I settle more on the main deck I plan to try sideboard configurations with and without the white splash. My hope is that the addition of Snapcaster Mage (which is absurd with Traverse the Ulvenwald) can help overpower the raw card advantage that Lingering Souls provides and allow me to play only 4 colors.
I think the answer to that question has to be that Grixis can hit a combination of attributes that 5c can't hit. I'm not sure if it can, but it seems like a reasonable possibility. The card selection will help it do that, at the cost of cutting off the most aggressive end of the spectrum.
Against any control deck you can miss on instant, since you will likely not cast your removal spells to kill a creature.
The only 2 types which are consistant and probably not depending on the matchup are Land and Sorcery. Additionally, there are some draws that help with Creature and Artifact (Street Wraith and Bauble) but they aren't guaranteed.
Sometimes you get your Street Wraith and Bauble and you have delirium, but sometimes you have Street Wraith but no Bauble and playing against Control and therefore miss on Instant, sometimes you have Bauble but not Street Wraith and are up against low removal decks and missing on Creature and so on.
And besides all this, I did not consider sideboarding yet. By changing any significant types of cards into another, it could also heavily affect your ability to get delirium. A simple example would be matchups where you want to trim on discard. That way you will less likely have a Sorcery in your graveyard.
The thing is, delirium is kinda swingy sometimes. You can get nut draws and kill every opponent so fast and effectively that nothing would be able to stop you. And other times you don't draw into creatures and don't have delirium to find creatures.
When playing this deck, one must be aware of that. If thats not your playstyle and prefer more consistancy, then other decks are probably better to play.
Really uninterested in Staticaster and Ranger lately - LTLH has been pulling her weight more in grindy matchups. What are you guys running as far as unconventional sideboard tech goes?
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
I've been off staticaster - my position is that if you have Lingering Souls in your 75, it's not needed, and the only major place you'd really miss it is as a traverse target for Storm. I'd prefer Ranger to be Hazoret, but I also want to be able to keep Stubs in vs. control decks, so it's a pickle. Having access to a different non-red Traversable haymaker would be nice. Tireless Tracker is an idea I haven't tried because I didn't think we'd trigger it enough. But maybe it's worth a shot. Thrun also has some upside, but you're basically never traversing for and casting him in the same turn.
Abzan Traverse / Traverse Shadow / UR Kiki
Thanks.
Yeah, it has a lot of problems, which is why I hadn't tried it (edited my original post because I somehow didn't put "haven't" in there...), but at this point if you're looking for alternatives to Ranger you're probably going to be trying things that don't look like they should work. Or Hazoret.
Reid's list looks good, but I think the upside of Denial is just too big not to play it.
Whispers is definitely interesting, my problem with the card is that it makes your nut draws even better, but is very weak in a suboptimal hand.
At some point I'll finish my article, which both agrees with Reid and pushes back a bit, but this is my default list:
4 Polluted Delta
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Blood Crypt
1 Watery Grave
1 Breeding Pool
1 Swamp
4 Mishra's Bauble
4 Street Wraith
4 Traverse the Ulvenwald
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Grim Flayer
4 Thoughtseize
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
2 Stubborn Denial
2 Temur Battle Rage
3 Fatal Push
2 Dismember
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Liliana of the Veil
1 Stubborn Denial
2 Disdainful Stroke
2 Collective Brutality
2 Radiant Flames
2 Ancient Grudge
3 Lingering Souls
1 Ranger of Eos
1 Godless Shrine
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
Roughly, I think Reid is right that we should be 4 colors, but the decklist in this post is also 4 colors. It just choose which 4 colors to be post-board, at the cost of putting a land in your SB. (There's more nuance than that, but I'm working on it).
Also, I spent a lot of time trying to make Whispers work. You need to reliably cast it by turn 3 for it to be good. To do that, start here:
4 Street Wraith
4 Thought Scour
1 Tarfire
4 Thoughtseize / IoK
At one point I built a worse version of Grixis Shadow that reliably turned Whispers on using this framework. I doubt you could reliably turn it on without Scour or something similar though. Maybe Faithless Looting. Or maybe the ticket is Sultai instead of Grixis since Whispers + delve creatures is a nombo, but Whispers + Tarmogoyf works fine. I'm not optimistic though. The payoff didn't seem worth it.
Another reason I got onto Whispers was some discussion on the Jund boards about Todd Stevens not liking Liliana of the Veil against true control decks because they'll often have more cards in hand than we will after she's played and activated, which I think is even more true for this deck than traditional Jund. With that in mind, I was looking for something that could attack an opponent's hand, ideally snipe multiple cards, and not affect my own resources.
Stubborn Denial has been a very hard card to give up, and I've also really been missing Disdainful Stroke. I'm looking to play in the Modern Classic at the SCG event in King of Prussia at the end of the month and am finding it impossible to settle on a list.
how about young pyro/mentor as standalone threats? as in the list below, for example for a 5c shell (although not having souls feels wrong)
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/896517#online