Have you considered an open relationship with your wife, I have heard this is wonderful for communication, and if it doesn't solve your problems at least it could make her happy ;).
I hear that surgical still matters, it's definitely a different hoser and just does some stuff for the deck that leyline flat out can't like information and shuffling and blanking. But I still think leyline of the void is the best answer to GDS. It cripples most of the things that makes that a problem matchup for us while being immune to most of their answers. Going like 3/3 or more on both leylines in the sideboard would probably swing the matchup into reasonable percentages, but it's a hell of a lot of sideboard space to devote to essentially one deck .
What does everyone think about playing leyline of the void in place of surgical extraction to deal with the death's shadow meta? It keeps them fair and turns off snappy, and they basically have no way to deal with it just like sanctity. Playing multiples of both also just about guarantees that you can mulligan into one or the other, either of which gives you a fighting chance. Also causes splash damage to vines, living end etc. Losing the information is unfortunate, but I think the tradeoff might be worth it?
Noxious revival is the real deal, especially if you selfmill hard, highly recommended. I would actually suggest replacing crucible with it md, its more flexible, won't clutter your hand and can fill in for it when you really need it, I've never really found the GQ lock to add much to the deck outside of a couple matchups (Tron variants and valakut), more of a sideboard consideration imo.
If you want redundant lantern effects though, Mishra's Bauble is the way to go, it does way more for you.
The point I'm making is that if you find combo killing the board as soon as possible as your route to fun, who am I to say no. But don't be surprised when you aren't asked to play again.
This is about the most passive aggressive buttflustered way I could imagine to tell someone you don't like how they have fun.
Combo only really feels oppressive when the majority of the table is running it imo. When you have 50-75% of players in the game running a win con that ends the game on the spot is it really surprising that that's what wins the game most of the time? It's hard to be playing a 'fair' deck in that environment because you most likely have to fight through 80-120 life while thwarting two or three players' win conditions simultaneously, while they have essentially no pressure to do the same, except to interact lightly with each others' setup.
When you instead have a diverse selection of strategies at the table, as long as the players piloting them are skillful and making good calls on threat assessment, this becomes greatly alleviated. Instead of you struggling against three players to do the impossible and outrace all of them, it's them struggling to keep up with three players' threats while fighting through all of their answers to get their 'unfair' win. Just pack interaction for the things that give you trouble, let people play what they want and ask them to change up their decks regularly so you get some variety at the table. Everything sorts itself out pretty quickly.
Against Jund I usually just let bobs stick. They usually don't have an overabundance of answers to us even postboard and more often than not we can just filter them into cards that will end up killing them.
I've always found myself dropping brutalities against Death's Shadow almost immediately. I tried going up to 4 for a while in the post board to hit counters and surprise drain them to death, but I realized pretty quickly it's actually just bad against the deck. Disfigure is practically irrelevant, the duress mode will sometimes be able to hit stubborn denial, but if they have one and you duress they're likely to just counter it anyway, and the drain 2 mode is often useless or actively counter-productive. The only relevant thing it does is take cards out of your hand to turn on bridge which is rarely an issue when they're dropping 4-5+ power threats for 1 mana.
My current post board plan is leylines, maelstrom pulse, and a pair of reckonings dropping needles, surgicals and brutalities. The extra decay is sometimes good, but I can't really settle on whether or not it's worth it over the baubles and other non-essentials I could actually drop for it. Sometimes it will buy me enough time by nailing a lonely shadow and other times it will be dead in hand.
I'd encourage anyone who's actively testing the matchup to experiment with Noxious Revival and Bontu's Last Reckoning, they've given me some good plays against gross boards and hands full of discard and counters. Never really disappointed with either in the matchup.
Death's shadow is one of the things that makes me want to try BLastRs. At the end of the day, DS decks are still trying to play 'fair' magic and just beat you down with creatures, so it folds to a bridge if you can get it to stick. Once you put XDS in a position where it has no means of attacking you the game is trivial. Of course, with an 8 of discard spell for bridge and multiple counterspells that makes things difficult. But XDS is a deck where BLastR can functionally be another copy of bridge once you hit a mill rock and lantern, they have no gameplan if you can keep them off creatures, of which they run relatively few. Even if they have stubborn denial for it, that's one more card that they'll have to counter which can help you stick the bridge that matters. Noxious revival is also huge in that matchup as it provides counterplay to thoughtseizes.
I think a lot of the trouble lantern has with the deck is that the creatures it does have dodge most of your removal. Sure Decay can hit the shadows, but there are bound to be more shadows than decays and we have nothing for angler or tasigur, which will clock you too fast while you're struggling to hit a bridge. BLastR helps shore up that weakness by giving you both removal for the things you can't normally hit and acting like extra bridges in the matchup. Maelstrom pulse is also looking like a card I want to sideboard now for that reason, it can two for one the shadows, which can be big, or it can handle a tasigur or an angler, which is something we don't normally have removal for. Once I get a couple, I'm going to try -2 Brutality +2 BLastR maindeck, and I've already squeezed the pulse into my sideboard.
What do we think about Bontu's Last Reckoning? I feel like it has potential. It can turn around a losing clock and we almost don't care about the drawback, plus it can pretend to be a bridge against fair decks by wiping them and allowing you to just keep them off creatures for the rest of the game. I might be a little overhyped on it because my local meta has a lot of death's shadow, delver and other stuff that can get blown out by it, but I think it's worth experimenting with at least now that there's a wrath that fits our curve.
For the Ascendancy matchup, I've found that Surgicals are great. They normally don't run a whole lot of threats, and using a Surgical on Ascendancy is also good.
Yeah, I figured out how to board for it by game 3 I think, surgicals are definitely an asset there. They can whiff on the actual answer cards because there are so few, but at least they can take away some of the blind draw or burn cards if there's nothing else. Ascendancy is also a pretty crushing loss like you said and you can board into more decay to make it happen.
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but has anyone seen the example Lantern list currently up on MTGGoldfish?
It came 2nd place at an SCG Modern IQ in Edmonton on April 2 (apparently there aren't any other successful decklist results for Goldfish to go off of) and some of the card choices are well...interesting.
All those one-ofs; and TKS, whaaaaaaat? Thoughtseize certainly seems like a better maindeck option. Even if he was worried about recursion for the discards he could just be running more extraction. Faithless looting is interesting territory though. It digs you without increasing your bridge count and you can cast it out of the bin, I don't know that it's any better than what we've settled on, but it's different. Between that and baubles and stirrings his bridge hits have to be pretty consistent at least.
Can you take a look at my current list and suggest what changes I should make to accomodate this? I'd like to try at least one Revival in the main.
I've always found maindeck crucible to be a weak choice, unless you have an insane tron representation in your meta it's probably sideboardable. The reason being that GQ lock doesn't really jive that well with the usual lantern game plan if your opponent has more than 1 or 2 basics, and even then it's slow and probably won't happen until the game is yours anyway. At least that's been my experience with it, I've seen it maindecked by my fellow local lanterners for the fair every turn move, but I don't think it's quite worth the include given how often it comes up dead.
The only other things that I would consider flexible are spellbomb and maybe one of the needles, but I can see where those could both be valid includes depending on what your meta does look like. My maindeck is almost identical to yours, I just run -1 needle, -1 spellbomb, -1 crucible, -1 tutor, +1 inquisition, +1 bauble, +2 revival and split my gold lands to 2/2 spire and void.
FNM Rep
I took 4th of 23 going 4-1 this weekend, revival has continued to be a house. I played against some interesting decks that I hadn't seen yet, which is always engaging.
Round 1: BW Shadow (2-1)
Good black and/or white cards dot deck, featured a lot of pain spells (TS, Anguished Unmaking, Sign in Blood, Caves, etc.) to support Death's Shadow and otherwise just played goodstuff like lili, bob, souls and path. Lost game 1 to a wad of combat damage slipping through before I could find a bridge. Game 2 he kept a great hand with 2 Oblivion Rings 2 Unmakings and some discard, but his only white came from a marsh flats fetch. I got lucky and shuffled him into a marsh flats on top, milled it and extracted to keep him off white the rest of the game. Shredder and revival managed to get me decays for 2 lilis before needle came down on her. Game 3 he mulliganed aggressively for stony silence or answers and I stripped his hand clean and set up shop before his dudes could get there. Sign in blood could have won him the game a couple times but I had to let him take one blind card both times anyway because I was on one rock, so I let that happen to encourage death by bob. Which is a thing that we can make happen fairly regularly against decks that jam confidants for value.
Round 2: Bant Eldrazi (2-1)
Game 1 went easy, he was spinning his wheels for a while just swinging in with hierarch and I landed bridge early enough to take my time. Game two he landed an explosives on 3 and took my bridge to reality smash me to death. Game three I got needle on EE early, he misplayed displacer forgetting to blink Seers to make me draw harder and I locked it up with the second needle and pyxis on the worldbreaker to seal the deal.
Round 3: RW Prison (1-2)
Game 1 was a gimme, he kept a bad five and I drew an early lock to contend with no real threats. Games 2 and 3 I just got destroyed by turn 2 chalice/silence. I keep losing to this deck because silence and chalice always seem to sequence perfectly against me and at just the right time. I've changed up my mana and built my sideboard to tech against it but it just never seems to do quite enough when I have to fight through 3-4 cards in the first 5 or so turns which totally hose me. In game 2 revival got me a second decay to take down silence and in game 3 the basic forest I added did become relevant when I could have drawn a quiet disrepair or abrupt decay to get out from under his other stuff, but it never happened. I'm really stuck on this matchup, I keep getting paired against the guy every week and I usually win-lose-lose without much of a contest in the post-board games. Is there any saucy tech I'm missing for it? I could have a fourth needle in my 75, but I already have 6 answers for chalice after board and I don't know how much harder I can afford to dedicate to boarding against that one deck before it becomes problematic. Maybe wear/tear? I'm getting desperate here.
Round 4: Jeskai Ascendancy (2-1)
So this deck was actually a nightmare, I've never played against it before and I'm not really even sure how I managed to win. Game 1 he thought scoured me into a bridge which came back off of ready ruins and I landed it just in time. He had zero removal cards for it maindeck and drew through the entire deck trying to burn me out, but I managed to mill him off a bolt at the right time and brutality stabilized me at 5. Game 2 he wear/teared my first bridge and I did find a second one but unfortunately I didn't end up with the mana to cast it because fatestitcher kept me tapped down. I did catch him off guard by revivaling him for a time walk though. Game 3 was tense, but I stuck two bridges and exiled one of his wear tears which left him with no outs. He also boarded out burn cards game 3 but kept mentors in which seemed like a mistake to me. What was so scary about the deck is the fact that it has an 8of for spells that let it draw a mystery card. Thought Scour and Sleight of Hand can both draw one card blind through mill effects, and there's so much fast card selection in the deck that it's very easy for them to sandbag answers or just draw into the right cards randomly. Not to mention the number of free loots it gets off of ascendancy weakening the lock in the first place and that it can swing in under bridge sometimes with armies of 1/1s that get big. It would have been a lot worse for me but he had very few answers to my lock pieces and lots of ways to dig for them. I'm not sure if that's just how ascendancy is, simply due to the crazy number of cantrips it wants to run, but it's frightening to think about trying to control 6-8 draws a turn, some of which could be totally blind.
Round 5: BG Delirium (2-1)
Basically redless jund with pox, ghast and LftL working in tandem with tec edge effects and mages to make life hard for me, not sure if this is an established modern deck somewhere but I've never seen it played before. We traded discard spells and my removal kept me safe in game 1 long enough to land bridge. Game 2 he blew out all my lands early on, but I had an explosive start and landed lantern/rock/mopal before it happened. Unfortunately I didn't quite get the mana to play my bridge in time and I got beat down by goyfs and ghasts. Game 3 I had to fight hard to protect my bridges, one got removed and I lost my academy ruins to a fulminator mage, but I had the mana up and topped the final bridge in response. After that I just let his pair of bobs dome him for lethal with useless cards.
I don't think it's really sideboard material to be honest. The way I see it, lantern wants to aggressively self-mill barring some particular situations and matchups, which makes Noxious Revival a powerful consistency tool taking the place of ruins 3-4 and adding some flexibility into the slot. The fact that it makes a great answer to thoughtseize or removal is just an incidental benefit. Time walking with it is also hugely relevant against burn, tron, maybe grixis, anything that has an abundance of runners. I could see it going out when these aren't huge concerns and you really need some extra sideboard tech that you're willing to sacrifice a little consistency for, but I can't think of any matchups where it shines so much that you want to board into more revival. It's just an all around good card for our deck.
If you want redundant lantern effects though, Mishra's Bauble is the way to go, it does way more for you.
This is about the most passive aggressive buttflustered way I could imagine to tell someone you don't like how they have fun.
Combo only really feels oppressive when the majority of the table is running it imo. When you have 50-75% of players in the game running a win con that ends the game on the spot is it really surprising that that's what wins the game most of the time? It's hard to be playing a 'fair' deck in that environment because you most likely have to fight through 80-120 life while thwarting two or three players' win conditions simultaneously, while they have essentially no pressure to do the same, except to interact lightly with each others' setup.
When you instead have a diverse selection of strategies at the table, as long as the players piloting them are skillful and making good calls on threat assessment, this becomes greatly alleviated. Instead of you struggling against three players to do the impossible and outrace all of them, it's them struggling to keep up with three players' threats while fighting through all of their answers to get their 'unfair' win. Just pack interaction for the things that give you trouble, let people play what they want and ask them to change up their decks regularly so you get some variety at the table. Everything sorts itself out pretty quickly.
My current post board plan is leylines, maelstrom pulse, and a pair of reckonings dropping needles, surgicals and brutalities. The extra decay is sometimes good, but I can't really settle on whether or not it's worth it over the baubles and other non-essentials I could actually drop for it. Sometimes it will buy me enough time by nailing a lonely shadow and other times it will be dead in hand.
I'd encourage anyone who's actively testing the matchup to experiment with Noxious Revival and Bontu's Last Reckoning, they've given me some good plays against gross boards and hands full of discard and counters. Never really disappointed with either in the matchup.
I think a lot of the trouble lantern has with the deck is that the creatures it does have dodge most of your removal. Sure Decay can hit the shadows, but there are bound to be more shadows than decays and we have nothing for angler or tasigur, which will clock you too fast while you're struggling to hit a bridge. BLastR helps shore up that weakness by giving you both removal for the things you can't normally hit and acting like extra bridges in the matchup. Maelstrom pulse is also looking like a card I want to sideboard now for that reason, it can two for one the shadows, which can be big, or it can handle a tasigur or an angler, which is something we don't normally have removal for. Once I get a couple, I'm going to try -2 Brutality +2 BLastR maindeck, and I've already squeezed the pulse into my sideboard.
Yeah, I figured out how to board for it by game 3 I think, surgicals are definitely an asset there. They can whiff on the actual answer cards because there are so few, but at least they can take away some of the blind draw or burn cards if there's nothing else. Ascendancy is also a pretty crushing loss like you said and you can board into more decay to make it happen.
All those one-ofs; and TKS, whaaaaaaat? Thoughtseize certainly seems like a better maindeck option. Even if he was worried about recursion for the discards he could just be running more extraction. Faithless looting is interesting territory though. It digs you without increasing your bridge count and you can cast it out of the bin, I don't know that it's any better than what we've settled on, but it's different. Between that and baubles and stirrings his bridge hits have to be pretty consistent at least.
I've always found maindeck crucible to be a weak choice, unless you have an insane tron representation in your meta it's probably sideboardable. The reason being that GQ lock doesn't really jive that well with the usual lantern game plan if your opponent has more than 1 or 2 basics, and even then it's slow and probably won't happen until the game is yours anyway. At least that's been my experience with it, I've seen it maindecked by my fellow local lanterners for the fair every turn move, but I don't think it's quite worth the include given how often it comes up dead.
The only other things that I would consider flexible are spellbomb and maybe one of the needles, but I can see where those could both be valid includes depending on what your meta does look like. My maindeck is almost identical to yours, I just run -1 needle, -1 spellbomb, -1 crucible, -1 tutor, +1 inquisition, +1 bauble, +2 revival and split my gold lands to 2/2 spire and void.
Round 1: BW Shadow (2-1)
Good black and/or white cards dot deck, featured a lot of pain spells (TS, Anguished Unmaking, Sign in Blood, Caves, etc.) to support Death's Shadow and otherwise just played goodstuff like lili, bob, souls and path. Lost game 1 to a wad of combat damage slipping through before I could find a bridge. Game 2 he kept a great hand with 2 Oblivion Rings 2 Unmakings and some discard, but his only white came from a marsh flats fetch. I got lucky and shuffled him into a marsh flats on top, milled it and extracted to keep him off white the rest of the game. Shredder and revival managed to get me decays for 2 lilis before needle came down on her. Game 3 he mulliganed aggressively for stony silence or answers and I stripped his hand clean and set up shop before his dudes could get there. Sign in blood could have won him the game a couple times but I had to let him take one blind card both times anyway because I was on one rock, so I let that happen to encourage death by bob. Which is a thing that we can make happen fairly regularly against decks that jam confidants for value.
Round 2: Bant Eldrazi (2-1)
Game 1 went easy, he was spinning his wheels for a while just swinging in with hierarch and I landed bridge early enough to take my time. Game two he landed an explosives on 3 and took my bridge to reality smash me to death. Game three I got needle on EE early, he misplayed displacer forgetting to blink Seers to make me draw harder and I locked it up with the second needle and pyxis on the worldbreaker to seal the deal.
Round 3: RW Prison (1-2)
Game 1 was a gimme, he kept a bad five and I drew an early lock to contend with no real threats. Games 2 and 3 I just got destroyed by turn 2 chalice/silence. I keep losing to this deck because silence and chalice always seem to sequence perfectly against me and at just the right time. I've changed up my mana and built my sideboard to tech against it but it just never seems to do quite enough when I have to fight through 3-4 cards in the first 5 or so turns which totally hose me. In game 2 revival got me a second decay to take down silence and in game 3 the basic forest I added did become relevant when I could have drawn a quiet disrepair or abrupt decay to get out from under his other stuff, but it never happened. I'm really stuck on this matchup, I keep getting paired against the guy every week and I usually win-lose-lose without much of a contest in the post-board games. Is there any saucy tech I'm missing for it? I could have a fourth needle in my 75, but I already have 6 answers for chalice after board and I don't know how much harder I can afford to dedicate to boarding against that one deck before it becomes problematic. Maybe wear/tear? I'm getting desperate here.
Round 4: Jeskai Ascendancy (2-1)
So this deck was actually a nightmare, I've never played against it before and I'm not really even sure how I managed to win. Game 1 he thought scoured me into a bridge which came back off of ready ruins and I landed it just in time. He had zero removal cards for it maindeck and drew through the entire deck trying to burn me out, but I managed to mill him off a bolt at the right time and brutality stabilized me at 5. Game 2 he wear/teared my first bridge and I did find a second one but unfortunately I didn't end up with the mana to cast it because fatestitcher kept me tapped down. I did catch him off guard by revivaling him for a time walk though. Game 3 was tense, but I stuck two bridges and exiled one of his wear tears which left him with no outs. He also boarded out burn cards game 3 but kept mentors in which seemed like a mistake to me. What was so scary about the deck is the fact that it has an 8of for spells that let it draw a mystery card. Thought Scour and Sleight of Hand can both draw one card blind through mill effects, and there's so much fast card selection in the deck that it's very easy for them to sandbag answers or just draw into the right cards randomly. Not to mention the number of free loots it gets off of ascendancy weakening the lock in the first place and that it can swing in under bridge sometimes with armies of 1/1s that get big. It would have been a lot worse for me but he had very few answers to my lock pieces and lots of ways to dig for them. I'm not sure if that's just how ascendancy is, simply due to the crazy number of cantrips it wants to run, but it's frightening to think about trying to control 6-8 draws a turn, some of which could be totally blind.
Round 5: BG Delirium (2-1)
Basically redless jund with pox, ghast and LftL working in tandem with tec edge effects and mages to make life hard for me, not sure if this is an established modern deck somewhere but I've never seen it played before. We traded discard spells and my removal kept me safe in game 1 long enough to land bridge. Game 2 he blew out all my lands early on, but I had an explosive start and landed lantern/rock/mopal before it happened. Unfortunately I didn't quite get the mana to play my bridge in time and I got beat down by goyfs and ghasts. Game 3 I had to fight hard to protect my bridges, one got removed and I lost my academy ruins to a fulminator mage, but I had the mana up and topped the final bridge in response. After that I just let his pair of bobs dome him for lethal with useless cards.