Not so sure about mainboard batterskulls. I was on the verge of throwing together cruel control for a better combo matchup (slaughter games, quicker clock) over esper before the bans, and dig through time into a pair of batterskulls seemed reasonable for a win con package mainboard. Now without the ability to reliably hit them, I'm not sure a miser's batterskull is worthwhile over more consistent disruption or a faster clock. You can't have everything, and I feel like cruel control is conceding the burn pre-board games to have a much better g2/g3 against scapeshift among other things, as versus esper which has a reasonable burn matchup but has a hard time with some combo decks that cruel control can shred.
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ult jace, get a cruel ultimatum + whatever your best card is. Seems reasonable.
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it's not. Away is cmc 3, geth's verdict is 2. That's a big difference when you need the edict early to beat boggles.
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cruel control has kinda been synonymous with grixis control for a long time now. Although, I guess that could be a distinction to question.
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I know electrolyze is a sweet card, but given that I predict the metagame to skew heavily towards BGx, I don't see it as being as strong of a player in Grixis and UWR as it was when delver was the deck to slaughter, and pod a close 2nd with all the mana dorks ever.
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The very clear goal being to hit every conceivable land drop to keep things flowing smoothly, with as much cheap interaction via the cantrips and removal as is reasonably possible, and enough burn that the dead terminates don't cause me to lose to spell-based combo. I like spell snare a lot in what I believe will be the emerging metagame, although I feel like cruel control would be really poorly positioned against liliana, everything else seems fairly reasonable to deal with--Spell snare, unconditional goyf removal, shadow of doubt for fetchland harassment and cantripping, keranos as a value permanent to ensure you can trade with their late game topdecks, etc. The first cruel ultimatum stabilizes, the second one ends the game, the third one actually kills them if it lasts that long.
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I still don't like the river of tears as much--it seems far better in straight UB like faeries, where you're on a tempo gameplan. If you're not playing enough discard spells to always go t1 discard, I think an additional drowned catacombs is better than a river of tears. Looking at your sideboard, counterflux seems rather important for matchups against opposing control decks and combo decks--ratchet bomb is for a different class of matchups entirely, and I feel like it slots in better over something like rakdos charm, anger of the gods, or spellskite. That being said, I don't know what your proposed mainboard is with the listed mana base, so it could be you're already heavily prepared mainboard for combo matchups and don't need the additional help from the sideboard, but I generally feel like access to a counterflux if your mana can support it is really helpful.
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it depends. If they're playing Blue Moon, you might be really, REALLY glad of the ability to operate with all of your spells under a blood moon, because the game will go long. OTOH, you won't likely ever see all of them in most games, but the other thing to consider is that under blood moon, you realistically won't ever cast cryptic command, but you can cast dismember, bolt, terminate, snapcaster, etc, and therefore you want 2 swamps and an island if you know you're gonna have to deal with blood moon, so having three swamps and two islands doesn't seem unreasonable. You shouldn't ever have to worry about red mana. If it's delver, yeah, if you don't have immediate interaction or a batterskull, you're likely not gonna have very long to live.
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no--rather, I mean that 6 basics is far more than enough for grixis or UWR. Esper plays a longer game and should have access to them, but Grixis only needs 1 of each, 2 islands being better for supporting a dig through time under blood moon. Basic mountain really is optional. 2 islands 3 swamps is probably better than 2-2-1, simply because it enables cruel ultimatum under blood moon.
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I have played both esper and Grixis and there is no way you could argue for esper being slower than grixis...I love casting cruel ultimatum but it is nowhere near the speed elspeth+ gideon can give you...or lingering souls beatdown after a Supreme verdict is even a potentially faster clock than we usually get with these lists.
I said esper control not esper midrange. try a singleton white sun's zenith, a pair of snapcaster mages, and colonnades +1 tarpit as your only win cons. It's slower than grixis. I've taken eleven turns to kill a storm opponent that put themselves to 1 life with a pithing needle on colonnade.
I think I like the approach, previously mentioned above, of looking at other similar proven manabases that work. Unfortunately we don't have a vast pool of tournament results in the grixis control variety to look at, this is why I tend to check out the UWR control manabases in modern that have historically put up results, and work from their manabases. these lists might help you out in terms of manabases, List 1 List 2
youll notice both of these lists have very similar manabases and make good use of the checklands(shahar's list runs 3, mclaren's list runs 2 presumably because it runs 4 tec edges while the other runs only 3), from my own experience with these lands I can definitely see why. These checklands many times can come very close to being dual lands (that can't be fetched) This helps save a ton of life since you avoid having to shock to hold up mana leak on turn 2, along with many other things, with so many fetchlands in the deck being able to play them untapped is pretty easy.
Also worth noting is that they both only run 2 islands, and 1 of each other basic. I get why you would want to run 3 islands (for cryptic under a blood moon i would assume) but I've heard of players like lsv simply siding out cryptic commands vs. blood moon decks and it doesn't seem like too crazy of a strategy to me since its only 3 cards in the deck, I mean cryptic is a crazy good card don't get me wrong but I think its not an unreasonable strategy that he uses, also it seems unlikely youre going to fetch all your basics before a blood moon hit, thats gotta be pretty rare. Also if you would want to build a manabase with choke in mind, you may already consider less islands and more lands that tap for blue without the island land type on them.
and finally of course you might notice that they both have 7 fetches and 5 shocks (4 blue/x shocks, and 1 nonblue/nonblue shock, presumably because triple blue for cryptic is a concern). (for your purposes i'd say that 7 fetches wouldn't leave u with dead fetches too often, and so i don't think it would be too big of a concern for you).
Of course there are variables that might make you want to change a few of the numbers of types of lands etc, but if you're still figuring out your manabase, i'd say thats at least a good place to start since its been fairly consistent in putting up significant results. Also for anyone else out there trying to figure out their manabases.
I don't ever recommend three islands as part of the fetch package for grixis--Esper plays a long enough game that against blood moon decks, it's reasonable to sometimes have to deal with it two or even three times in a game, so the ability to long-term fetch out six basics against a UR opponent that sideboarded into heavy control components and blood moon is relevant. For grixis or UWR, I see 4 basics as plenty, and 3 being doable.
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EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
I've made several posts across different threads over time about fetchland to mana producing land ratios. One way to look at it is start with a manabase that "works" and is known to be "optimal" through rigorous playtesting.
Let's look at the stock RUG delver mana base from legacy: 3 Volcanic Islands, 3 Tropical Islands, 4 Wastelands, 8 fetchlands. This 18 land build needs to effectively support 2 lands in play, zero double-casting cost spells, and only wants to draw the third land if it's a wasteland. if you back out the cantrips from the deck, using the +2 cantrips, -1 land rule of thumb, you get that those mana requirements are supported in a 22 land build. This is in line with what you'd expect, for example, from a white weenie deck in most standard formats. The ratio of fetches to fetchable lands? 4:3.
Look at a miracles mana base--this is more like cruel control, in that it's a control deck that wants to hit at least four land drops consecutively, intends to play a long game, and needs to have enough actual mana sources (not just fetches) to cast its spells. Let's look at Philip Schonegger's list, pretty much THE stock miracles list at this point: 4 island, 2 plains, 3 tundra, 3 volc, 9 fetches. Deck runs 4 ponder, 4 brainstorm, so again with our cantrip adjustment it goes up to 25 lands, with a 3-2 ratio of fetches to fetchable lands.
So, somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 times the fetches as your fetchable lands seems to be our range for legacy. Taking that further, we need to consider that legacy benefits much more from the shuffle effects than modern does, so they err on the side of more fetch lands. Let's look at a stock jund mana base:
8 fetches 8 fetchable lands. To confirm my assumption, i'll look at a maverick list. One placed top 64 at the open: 7 fetches, 7 fetchables.
What I take away from these numbers is that, outside of decks that generate card quality by abusing the shuffles from fetchlands, approximately a 1 to 1 ratio of fetchlands to fetchable lands is what I see in legacy. These weren't cherry picked examples either, I looked at a bunch of other lists real quick on TC decks and a couple other places and saw time and again that non-blue decks were usually equal or off by 1 in the fetches to fetchables, while blue decks had a ratio between 1.2 and 1.5, with the most fetch-heavy deck being miracles and the delver decks being closest to the ground.
Given that modern games often are far grindier than legacy matchups, and that mana requirements are more stringent (even combo decks need 2-3 lands in play to go off), it seems plausible that mana bases should err further on the side of fewer potential dead fetchland draws. I know from my testing with esper that 6 fetches and 11 fetchable lands (10 and 9 targets each for strand and delta) still leaves me often in the position late game of having fetches in my deck or hand but with no actual targets to find--in a deck with better closing potential like grixis, you probably won't have that problem running a few more fetches as your games end sooner.
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EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
A typical esper mana base looks something like: 4-5 manlands, 6-8 fetches, 4-6 shocklands, 4-7 basics, 4-7 utility lands. Your utility lands are going to include tectonic edge, filter lands, ghost quarters, academy ruins, etc. Reflecting pool I would generally count in the manland category as it's a colored source that is dependent on other lands for value. In general, 20-21 blue sources, 12-13 red sources and 14-15 black sources should meet your mana requirements, so if you can do that in 25 lands, you can run a 26th as academy ruins. probably doing so would require a bit more pain, with the full 8 fetches and 5-6 shocklands, but it should also help fuel dig to find your engineered explosives to make use of the ruins.
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I think if you consider remand as a "permission" spell, you're looking at it the wrong way. In the esper thread, we mostly view it as a cantrip, alongside shadow of doubt, squelch, and serum visions. It provides some sort of potential incremental value while digging you deeper into your land drops.
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I can't for the life of me understand the number of mana leaks I see you guys having in your lists--Forget Jace, AOT, which I personally feel is bad and haven't seen it be strong enough in testing esper to change my mind on that, and forget the awkwardness of sideboarded shadow of doubts and mainboard singleton thoughtseize, why in tarnation are you guys still playing mana leak? Logic Knot is strictly better in Esper, and Cruel Control has just as if not more stringent mana requirements, which means your mana bases should support it even better, in addition to a plethora of cheap removal, discard, and bolts. I don't understand why y'all are still playing mana leak, the card falls off really, REALLY hard in the late game, and your game plan is to resolve a 7 mana spell for crying out loud, you are a CONTROL DECK. /rant
On a secondary note, how has liliana held up for you? It's not really an option at all in Esper because the esper engine is based on traditional control in a card-drawing-engine similar to old school whispers of the muse blue decks and can't afford to be discarding to plus liliana, but I feel like it's probably a super good card in the meta against most decks that don't play delver.
Tertiary question: Have any of you played/tested/considered think twice as a source of raw card advantage/velocity? It feels like most of your deck plays at instant speed and could therefore benefit from it, but I haven't tried to sit down and seriously build a cruel control list since well before khans was spoiled.
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@amalek0 Why is it that all your post are always negative thoughts and they almost never bring anything to the table but complains. Is like if you put cards in the worst case escenario they always be bad. Like all the examples you put for Jace AoT to be bad, Jace 2.0 (best walker ever) would also be bad so no point in arguing.
We should look for which escenarios cards are good in and what the meta looks like, right now Jace is really good in the meta what accept it or not that is another thing. The point of arguing cards is to see what they can bring since it seems everyone are specialist in seen the bad sides of cards, i mean i remember when Jace 2.0 was out and tons of people where arguing he wasn't good enough until chapin came up with a deck and everyone was like WoW!
I tend to comment very negatively because the majority of the things I see to comment on are obvious weaknesses. For example, I'm never going to look at a decklist with a reasonably solid mana base and comment on the mana base, unless it's requested, because I assume it's been tested somewhat and it appears to satisfy the mana requirements. I've played control for a long time in every format, and In particular I've played a ton of esper and UW control in modern over the last year. I know from experience and trying to test tons of different cards that in the modern format, turn three is the critical turn, and therefore anything that can't come down on turn three or sooner HAS to have game-ending implications against the majority of decks. Cryptic command is an example of this--the worst mode it has is a timewalk that also draws a card (tap/draw against a fair deck). Verdict and BSZ in my list for esper are the only expensive spells that don't interact favorably with EVERY deck in game one, and I can point to games in testing where drawing those cards has lost me game 1's I would pretty much have otherwise locked up. Over a long tournament, you WILL lose games to having too many dead draws against decks.
With respect to Jace 2.0, IDK what you mean about naysayers, I made enough $$ that I paid for my first semester of college on JTMS's, on a Highschool student's budget at the time. I'm almost done making my way through college on the back of buying and selling magic cards, mostly standard specs. WRT to Jace 2.0 being bad in all the listed situations, he most certainly is not. Firstly, bear in mind that JTMS in modern would enable miracle-esque decks, so he most certainly enables setting up temporal mastery, entreat the angels, or terminus based stabilization, and against a stable board he wins the game in a more commanding fashion than just about any other 4-drop in the game can, not only winning but constraining opposing draw steps to neutralize their ability to even find an answer to him. You can't fairly compare JTMS to Jace AOT in any of these situations to begin with because the metagame positioning of JTMS based control versus what we currently have in modern is so radically different that entirely different ways of building for a given metagame become reasonable. Another way to look at it is that Jace AOT is competing with cryptic command, damnation, and snapcaster mage (as an effective 3/4 drop), whereas JTMS is competing with cruel ultimatum. You can't compare what is primarily a brutally powerful win con and secondarily a utility permanent that enables grindy advantages with a utility planeswalker that primarily generates slow value and only secondarily serves as a win con in games that you already have under strict control.
Taking a lot of advise from amalek0, I revamped the list, changing my low-cost creatures to Artist and Gatekeeper who, though they die to bolt, still put in work regardless with the creature sac and effective extort. I also changed the mana curve so everything produces black now to support the Obliteraters. I put in damnation as my sweeper instead of one of the damage sweepers because they don't work with Obliterater and most people in my friend group/local hangout spot like to run midrange with a good bit of creatures with > 3 toughness. I like Chandra so she's still in for now. Lillie is an easy choice. Not sure about Blightning yet so I'd like input on that.
Please let me know if there are still glaring holes, I'm pretty new to competitive MTG so I appreciate the input.
Your new mana base is much, much more solid than previously, although I REALLY don't like the city of brass--make it a mana confluence and play an urborg if you must, but have some way to make it produce mana without damaging you in the process. It's do-able easily and it's a small change that can prevent otherwise silly losses. I still don't like four obliterators, when they aren't even your curve topper, as too many of those/grave titans can clog up your opening hands unnecessarily. I think you want to look at getting Dig through Time over treasure cruise, since the mana cost isn't much different to this deck, and you have a variety of 2/3 of's that you want to be able to find more consistently. Consistency is the key to control decks.
I do like gatekeeper of malakir--I've played around with him in esper testing, he definitely can be value-added against fair decks. I don't like blood artist, as it feels too low-impact to be worth its slot. Compare it to child of night--as a 2/1 lifelink for the same mana cost, it's more likely to trade favorably or race something. On its own for example, it can race a creeping tar pit or a delver, for example. Damnations are good, but depending on your meta you may want to consider some number of additional pyroclasms and/or Anger of the Gods between your main deck and sideboard, as two wraths likely isn't enough against UR delver, and pyroclasm, volcanic fallout, and anger of the gods are all budget friendly and provide their own pro's and con's against faster agro decks.
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Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
1 Lavaclaw Reaches
3 Polluted Delta
3 Scalding Tarn
2 Island
2 Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
2 Steam Vents
2 Watery Grave
1 Blood Crypt
1 Sunken Ruins
1 Cascade Bluffs
1 Drowned Catacomb
1 Sulfur Falls
4 Lightning bolt
4 Terminate
3 Anger of the Gods
Permission:
2 Logic Knot
3 Cryptic Command
2 Counterflux
4 Spell Snare
Cantrips:
2 Shadow of Doubt
2 Remand
1 Vendilion Clique
4 Snapcaster Mage
1 Keranos, God of Storms
2 Cruel Ultimatum
The very clear goal being to hit every conceivable land drop to keep things flowing smoothly, with as much cheap interaction via the cantrips and removal as is reasonably possible, and enough burn that the dead terminates don't cause me to lose to spell-based combo. I like spell snare a lot in what I believe will be the emerging metagame, although I feel like cruel control would be really poorly positioned against liliana, everything else seems fairly reasonable to deal with--Spell snare, unconditional goyf removal, shadow of doubt for fetchland harassment and cantripping, keranos as a value permanent to ensure you can trade with their late game topdecks, etc. The first cruel ultimatum stabilizes, the second one ends the game, the third one actually kills them if it lasts that long.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
I said esper control not esper midrange. try a singleton white sun's zenith, a pair of snapcaster mages, and colonnades +1 tarpit as your only win cons. It's slower than grixis. I've taken eleven turns to kill a storm opponent that put themselves to 1 life with a pithing needle on colonnade.
I don't ever recommend three islands as part of the fetch package for grixis--Esper plays a long enough game that against blood moon decks, it's reasonable to sometimes have to deal with it two or even three times in a game, so the ability to long-term fetch out six basics against a UR opponent that sideboarded into heavy control components and blood moon is relevant. For grixis or UWR, I see 4 basics as plenty, and 3 being doable.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Let's look at the stock RUG delver mana base from legacy: 3 Volcanic Islands, 3 Tropical Islands, 4 Wastelands, 8 fetchlands. This 18 land build needs to effectively support 2 lands in play, zero double-casting cost spells, and only wants to draw the third land if it's a wasteland. if you back out the cantrips from the deck, using the +2 cantrips, -1 land rule of thumb, you get that those mana requirements are supported in a 22 land build. This is in line with what you'd expect, for example, from a white weenie deck in most standard formats. The ratio of fetches to fetchable lands? 4:3.
Look at a miracles mana base--this is more like cruel control, in that it's a control deck that wants to hit at least four land drops consecutively, intends to play a long game, and needs to have enough actual mana sources (not just fetches) to cast its spells. Let's look at Philip Schonegger's list, pretty much THE stock miracles list at this point: 4 island, 2 plains, 3 tundra, 3 volc, 9 fetches. Deck runs 4 ponder, 4 brainstorm, so again with our cantrip adjustment it goes up to 25 lands, with a 3-2 ratio of fetches to fetchable lands.
So, somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 times the fetches as your fetchable lands seems to be our range for legacy. Taking that further, we need to consider that legacy benefits much more from the shuffle effects than modern does, so they err on the side of more fetch lands. Let's look at a stock jund mana base:
8 fetches 8 fetchable lands. To confirm my assumption, i'll look at a maverick list. One placed top 64 at the open: 7 fetches, 7 fetchables.
What I take away from these numbers is that, outside of decks that generate card quality by abusing the shuffles from fetchlands, approximately a 1 to 1 ratio of fetchlands to fetchable lands is what I see in legacy. These weren't cherry picked examples either, I looked at a bunch of other lists real quick on TC decks and a couple other places and saw time and again that non-blue decks were usually equal or off by 1 in the fetches to fetchables, while blue decks had a ratio between 1.2 and 1.5, with the most fetch-heavy deck being miracles and the delver decks being closest to the ground.
Given that modern games often are far grindier than legacy matchups, and that mana requirements are more stringent (even combo decks need 2-3 lands in play to go off), it seems plausible that mana bases should err further on the side of fewer potential dead fetchland draws. I know from my testing with esper that 6 fetches and 11 fetchable lands (10 and 9 targets each for strand and delta) still leaves me often in the position late game of having fetches in my deck or hand but with no actual targets to find--in a deck with better closing potential like grixis, you probably won't have that problem running a few more fetches as your games end sooner.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
On a secondary note, how has liliana held up for you? It's not really an option at all in Esper because the esper engine is based on traditional control in a card-drawing-engine similar to old school whispers of the muse blue decks and can't afford to be discarding to plus liliana, but I feel like it's probably a super good card in the meta against most decks that don't play delver.
Tertiary question: Have any of you played/tested/considered think twice as a source of raw card advantage/velocity? It feels like most of your deck plays at instant speed and could therefore benefit from it, but I haven't tried to sit down and seriously build a cruel control list since well before khans was spoiled.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
I tend to comment very negatively because the majority of the things I see to comment on are obvious weaknesses. For example, I'm never going to look at a decklist with a reasonably solid mana base and comment on the mana base, unless it's requested, because I assume it's been tested somewhat and it appears to satisfy the mana requirements. I've played control for a long time in every format, and In particular I've played a ton of esper and UW control in modern over the last year. I know from experience and trying to test tons of different cards that in the modern format, turn three is the critical turn, and therefore anything that can't come down on turn three or sooner HAS to have game-ending implications against the majority of decks. Cryptic command is an example of this--the worst mode it has is a timewalk that also draws a card (tap/draw against a fair deck). Verdict and BSZ in my list for esper are the only expensive spells that don't interact favorably with EVERY deck in game one, and I can point to games in testing where drawing those cards has lost me game 1's I would pretty much have otherwise locked up. Over a long tournament, you WILL lose games to having too many dead draws against decks.
With respect to Jace 2.0, IDK what you mean about naysayers, I made enough $$ that I paid for my first semester of college on JTMS's, on a Highschool student's budget at the time. I'm almost done making my way through college on the back of buying and selling magic cards, mostly standard specs. WRT to Jace 2.0 being bad in all the listed situations, he most certainly is not. Firstly, bear in mind that JTMS in modern would enable miracle-esque decks, so he most certainly enables setting up temporal mastery, entreat the angels, or terminus based stabilization, and against a stable board he wins the game in a more commanding fashion than just about any other 4-drop in the game can, not only winning but constraining opposing draw steps to neutralize their ability to even find an answer to him. You can't fairly compare JTMS to Jace AOT in any of these situations to begin with because the metagame positioning of JTMS based control versus what we currently have in modern is so radically different that entirely different ways of building for a given metagame become reasonable. Another way to look at it is that Jace AOT is competing with cryptic command, damnation, and snapcaster mage (as an effective 3/4 drop), whereas JTMS is competing with cruel ultimatum. You can't compare what is primarily a brutally powerful win con and secondarily a utility permanent that enables grindy advantages with a utility planeswalker that primarily generates slow value and only secondarily serves as a win con in games that you already have under strict control.
Your new mana base is much, much more solid than previously, although I REALLY don't like the city of brass--make it a mana confluence and play an urborg if you must, but have some way to make it produce mana without damaging you in the process. It's do-able easily and it's a small change that can prevent otherwise silly losses. I still don't like four obliterators, when they aren't even your curve topper, as too many of those/grave titans can clog up your opening hands unnecessarily. I think you want to look at getting Dig through Time over treasure cruise, since the mana cost isn't much different to this deck, and you have a variety of 2/3 of's that you want to be able to find more consistently. Consistency is the key to control decks.
I do like gatekeeper of malakir--I've played around with him in esper testing, he definitely can be value-added against fair decks. I don't like blood artist, as it feels too low-impact to be worth its slot. Compare it to child of night--as a 2/1 lifelink for the same mana cost, it's more likely to trade favorably or race something. On its own for example, it can race a creeping tar pit or a delver, for example. Damnations are good, but depending on your meta you may want to consider some number of additional pyroclasms and/or Anger of the Gods between your main deck and sideboard, as two wraths likely isn't enough against UR delver, and pyroclasm, volcanic fallout, and anger of the gods are all budget friendly and provide their own pro's and con's against faster agro decks.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm