On Bedlam Reveler, I stopped playing it because there weren't enough fair decks that it was good against. I don't like it against Shadow decks. When UW started to pick up, Spreading Seas and GQ/Tec Edge were a problem for supporting RR while trying to play around our own Blood Moons.
I like Reveler against classic Midrange decks like Mardu and GBx, but I don't know if there are enough fair decks like that to make it worth the slot again. If Jeskai is really about as popular as MTGGoldfish says (~7%), I could see putting a Reveler back in. Jeskai doesn't run much graveyard hate against us anyways.
Shadow matchup felt mostly fine. i haven't played against jund shadow yet but i am 2-0 vs grixis shadow. I suspect jund shadow is tougher
I find the Shadow matchup is pretty even. Sometimes they have a bunch of discard and can stall long enough to land giant threats, sometimes they have a bunch of Shadows and answer our threats just in time, but sometimes we just kill them. I imagine it is even better when you run three Vapor Snag (love it against them, assuming we have a board).
Jund Shadow is so much harder to beat. They just play really hard to the board, and clock without mercy. They also play more Lilis since they don't care about their hand. I haven't played against the version splashing Blue, so I'm not sure how much them having Denial affects the matchup. It does make me want to play the deck though!
It is a Standard deck. It plays "grow" style creatures which get bigger while you play Magic. Counters, cantrips, burn, and such to back it up. Looks like a Tempo deck. I have no idea if it is any good because I also don't follow Standard.
Matt-watsonman, are you asking if this would work in Standard? Because we have no idea, and besides being a similar archetype, it is unrelated.
If you are asking if this kind of deck works in Modern, that is very related. It sort of does. This thread is dedicated to working on a very similar deck, and it can perform. You need to make a lot of good decisions though, so it is very punishing, especially at first.
Edit: Changed how I typed your username because the forum detected the second t and wat as a bad word and bleeped it. I didn't know it had censoring. That's neat.
My first thought was the diversified Mana Leak slot. They have 1 Leak, 1 Remand, and 1 Deprive, which is quite interesting. I imagine they wanted to minimize the negative impact of having too many Leaks late-game, too many Remands against 1-mana spells, or too many Deprives when light on U sources.
I actually like the list a lot. It goes hard on Tempo with 3 bounce spells and great Shoals. 18 1-CMC pitches, and 9 2-CMC pitches, while running 3 Baubles. I will probably steal a bunch of ideas from this to work on my Chart list, which I think is pretty exchangeable with Curiosity, offering a similar effect with a higher floor but lower ceiling.
If anything looks somewhat odd, I'd say the sideboard looks a little out there. Hazoret is something I considered when I mentioned Keranos, but I don't like how cleanly Path answers it. The board has a lot of one-offs that don't see a lot of play these days, but then again, the deck doesn't see a lot of play. I think all of the choices make sense, as they can easily be sorted into land hate, resilient threats, recursion, artifact/enchantment hate, sweepers, and graveyard hate. That all makes sense.
I actually like this list quite a bit. I think it might look weird to us at first glance, especially because we are used to running specific stuff, but I think it all makes sense, and it looks good.
Edit: I was comparing my Chart list to the list that top 16'ed. They have 61 cards, unless my math is off. Notable, but I'm not sure it's really relevant.
I blanked on playing Needle immediately to go to one. That might be better. Stopping Elspeth as soon as possible seems promising. It leaves you dead to the anthem you died to, but it doesn't take much to die to those. I'm not sure what line I'd take.
I don't know how okay it is to discuss Counter Cat stuff here, but the plays in that situation translate almost perfectly to RUG, so I doubt there is actually anything wrong with looking at the lines we can take.
You don't have enough life to survive an attack from the opponent. Elspeth can make any of those creatures unlockable and lethal, so they all have to go. That means we are going to fire off the Pyroclasm. Otherwise we die. First though, we are attacking the Elspeth with Huntmaster and the Wolf. They will die to Pyroclasm, so the attack is free. I don't like attacking with Mandrills because they might see the Pyroclasm coming, and decide to trade some tokens for it. A sweeper is our only real out, so they don't have much reason not to take out Mandrills. I want it to survive because it is our only clock, and our only way to take out that Elspeth after.
Pyroclasm will take out whatever tokens don't block, and Cult Leader will die to state-based actions.
On the opponent's turn, they probably make a token to present lethal again. Play Needle naming Elspeth, and go at the opponent's life total. Hold onto the EE in case they make more tokens. You may need to use the EE early to kill the leftover token because it wins the game if left unchecked for a few turns. You can't afford to hold Mandrills back to block because we need to clock them as fast as possible. We don't want them to draw many cards.
That requires the Spell Pierce to protect our threat, them to draw kind of terribly, and us to draw some good stuff (I'm assuming they will hit at least a couple of threats/pieces of removal in five to six turns). I find it extremely unlikely that we win, but it is possible, and I think that line gives us the best chance to win.
Regarding Alchemist, thinking of it as a worst-case-scenario removal magnet won't do you any favors because the card costs 2CMC and dies to all the 1CMC removal spells. Cards must trade with answers at parity to be considered for that role, i.e. Monastery Swiftspear. Otherwise you're just opening yourself up to free tempo losses.
Ob, if you want the reach Alchemist gives you (it sounds like you really like the card), run it. To the point of removal magnets, I think Ashton is right that you are going to want the Push magnet to cost one mana. I actually think that Narnam Renegade is a better option than Swiftspear. Swiftspear looks small here, and deathtouch is both very useful and a magnet for removal. If you are looking to be really aggressive and change up the deck accordingly, Swiftspear might work for you.
The strength of bauble is that grows your goyf for free helping meanwhile at flipping delver, giving us some informations (not much, but more than nothing), and growing the yard speeding up mandrills. So in a game can result in more than a few damage by itself. That said I can see adding a few burn spells (I'd add Incinerate if you play at least 2 Tarfires).
About Take into custody. I thought about it too. It's actually an interesting card but I always felt it weaker than other card. So I'm interested in your test. I'd like to hear about your considerations.
Thermo-Alchemist doesn't flip delver. I'd rather play Savage Knucleblade in its slot but that's my playstyle. Again I'd like to hear the results of your test in any case.
By the way I'm going to test in the 2nd Knucks slot a Tireless tracker. Don't know if it belongs to our deck, but I'm going to discover it.
Keep us posted on how Tracker performs. It could be very good, but I haven't tried it because I fear we don't have enough lands to make it really work.
I think your list is really interesting because it looks a lot how I imagine my Chart and Shoal deck will look. However, you are still running Traverse. My opinion is more lenient than Ashton's (I think you can play Bauble and Shoal if you don't go straight to playsets), but I don't think you can support Bauble, Shoal, and Traverse. You only have 14 one mana Blue cards to pitch to Shoal. That is really low. You have 9 two mana spells, which is great, but I think you need more one CMC ones. There just isn't room for Bauble and Traverse in a deck looking to support Shoal. Not unless you start cutting Burn, lands, or threats, and I don't think we can afford much of that.
Are you saying you don't like the delayed draw from Bauble? The fact that we don't get to see the card right away does slow us down somewhat, in comparison to a card like Probe.
If that is your main problem, I think cutting Bauble is defensible. I think its benefits outweigh that aspect, but the logic makes sense. I'm working on a more Tempo-focused Shoal build myself that I will hopefully test out soon. Going up on Shoal makes Bauble a lot worse, so I'm going to start by trimming one. I think cutting Bauble is even more defensible when you are actively trying to support Shoal more.
If you aren't aiming at maximizing Shoal's potential, I think that Bauble is something that you want. It can slow us down a bit, but it can also speed us up. The main draw then is the fact that we have a ~56 card deck, meaning we are more likely to draw our best cards. If you take that kind of approach, I'd just trim whatever other cards you find lackluster and add the burn/tap effects to get more reach. I think I'm going to take this sort of approach for my Tempo build, running a couple of Baubles and just trimming whatever cards I like least.
What do you all think of Keranos as an anti-Midrange/Control haymaker?
Twin used to run it, and I think some Delver lists did. With Nahiri basically gone, it is really hard to remove. It survives all played removal I can think of (won't be a creature on the board, so it can't be Pathed).
As a creature spell, it is immune to Denial (I'm not sure we want it against Grixis Shadow, but that helps), and can be found off of Traverse.
How do you all feel about our counterspells postboard against midrange? I usually board in such a way that I'm in a better spot in a topdeck war, but I've been keeping counters in as answers to their big plays, such as Lili and Siege Rhino. Should we be trimming counters more aggressively to improve our topdecks? Even taking out a couple postboard could help, while still giving us ways of dealing with their big threats.
For example, against Abzan, I board like this currently:
In: Young Pyromancer (new addition I'm trying over Reveler), 3 Blood Moon, 1 Pyroclasm, 1 Mountain, 1 EE, 1 Flashfreeze, 2 Huntmaster
Huntmaster is a good topdeck, but I still have 7 counters in my deck, all of which are usually poor off the top. Should I be boarding differently here?
Another thought I just had: since Abzan is slower than Jund, should we play the Tempo game instead of trying to grind them out? They have a lot of cards that are good at killing threats, but we might be better equipped to fight them there than on a card advantage axis. Maybe we play more aggressively and use our good topdecks as a sort of insurance against them having plenty of removal.
What do you think, and how do you approach the matchup?
I think both conclusions are perfectly fair. Counter Cat looks more resilient to Push (extra Push targets), while RUG makes bigger Goyfs. Both decks have ways to interact with Push (Denial and Pierce respectively, in addition to Shoal and other counters).
I definitely agree that I haven't been running into that many Pushes lately. Even though it is premium removal, if just 20% of decks run it, you'll only run into such decks once every five matches. If Shadow was extremely dominant, that would be very different.
There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to both, but I think both are playable (having barely touched Cat).
Aside from comparing the decks, I like the discussion about getting around Push. The three methods in the article make sense. I like it.
What did you cut for Delay? My impression from it was it takes Mana Leak's slot (same kind of card as Deprive). Delay does look bad against fast decks, so I could see the comparison to Shoal and Snare (which help against those decks), but for that very reason, cutting them for it sounds like a bad idea. Unless you cut some number of Leak and some number of those?
Grixis is definitely one of the more popular decks in the meta. I'd say the matchup is quite similar to Jund, but it is definitely better than our Jund matchup. Jund has plenty of removal, so it is difficult for us to keep a threat on board. Grixis Shadow runs much less, but still has hand disruption, which is difficult for us.
The matchup is pretty close to even. If they are able to discard away all of our threats, we are in big trouble. If not, try to stick a threat while playing around Delve fatties (we have difficulty removing them, but if you can keep a Goyf on board, they don't matter nearly as much). I like to be fairly aggressive with Delvers because the opponent will need to answer it, which means Goyf is more likely to survive. It's rare that the opponent lets Delver go at their life total to grow Shadow because they want to be in control of their life, and if we get to a spot in which we have some counters up, Delver can close the game despite them having massive creatures.
Postboard, I like Blood Moon and Huntmaster a lot. Maximize your threat density and they will have trouble having enough discard and removal. I've also been trying out Reveler in this matchup since I have it anyways. I'm not sure I like it here, but Grixis is more grindy than DSJ, so I like it in theory. EE is worth running, but I hate that it can't hit Delve threats. I guess it hits Lili, so that's something. I do think we should bring it in.
Fun fact: I tried logging into MTGO this morning to finish up the League before heading to class, and I couldn't log in. Then I realized it was Wednesday, and after much cursing, I accepted that I had to live with Downtime, and wouldn't have a chance to play today. I took to Xmage to jam some games and ran into Humans! I also go destroyed due to making massive misplays, so I guess I got lucky MTGO was down?
@Mikefon It does look like EE is coming in after this League. Melody does not seem as good as I hoped. I was gonna get the first Tarn with that Tix, but alas. The things we do for our percentage points. EE is going to be especially good if Humans does blow up.
I just had a game against Shadow in which I boarded in Blood Moon and Entrancing Melody, drew both, and had milled my second Island. Blood Moon was good enough to stall the game until my board was lethal, but that was a huge tension. Given that Shadow is basically the poster matchup for Melody, I'm pretty sure Melody is coming out of my sideboard. I would much rather be casting Moon most of the time against them. Maybe one day Melody will look good enough.
I like Reveler against classic Midrange decks like Mardu and GBx, but I don't know if there are enough fair decks like that to make it worth the slot again. If Jeskai is really about as popular as MTGGoldfish says (~7%), I could see putting a Reveler back in. Jeskai doesn't run much graveyard hate against us anyways.
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I find the Shadow matchup is pretty even. Sometimes they have a bunch of discard and can stall long enough to land giant threats, sometimes they have a bunch of Shadows and answer our threats just in time, but sometimes we just kill them. I imagine it is even better when you run three Vapor Snag (love it against them, assuming we have a board).
Jund Shadow is so much harder to beat. They just play really hard to the board, and clock without mercy. They also play more Lilis since they don't care about their hand. I haven't played against the version splashing Blue, so I'm not sure how much them having Denial affects the matchup. It does make me want to play the deck though!
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Matt-watsonman, are you asking if this would work in Standard? Because we have no idea, and besides being a similar archetype, it is unrelated.
If you are asking if this kind of deck works in Modern, that is very related. It sort of does. This thread is dedicated to working on a very similar deck, and it can perform. You need to make a lot of good decisions though, so it is very punishing, especially at first.
Edit: Changed how I typed your username because the forum detected the second t and wat as a bad word and bleeped it. I didn't know it had censoring. That's neat.
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I actually like the list a lot. It goes hard on Tempo with 3 bounce spells and great Shoals. 18 1-CMC pitches, and 9 2-CMC pitches, while running 3 Baubles. I will probably steal a bunch of ideas from this to work on my Chart list, which I think is pretty exchangeable with Curiosity, offering a similar effect with a higher floor but lower ceiling.
If anything looks somewhat odd, I'd say the sideboard looks a little out there. Hazoret is something I considered when I mentioned Keranos, but I don't like how cleanly Path answers it. The board has a lot of one-offs that don't see a lot of play these days, but then again, the deck doesn't see a lot of play. I think all of the choices make sense, as they can easily be sorted into land hate, resilient threats, recursion, artifact/enchantment hate, sweepers, and graveyard hate. That all makes sense.
I actually like this list quite a bit. I think it might look weird to us at first glance, especially because we are used to running specific stuff, but I think it all makes sense, and it looks good.
Edit: I was comparing my Chart list to the list that top 16'ed. They have 61 cards, unless my math is off. Notable, but I'm not sure it's really relevant.
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Interested in RUG (Temur) Delver in Modern? Find gameplay with live commentary at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8UcKe8jVh1e2N4CHbd3fhg
You don't have enough life to survive an attack from the opponent. Elspeth can make any of those creatures unlockable and lethal, so they all have to go. That means we are going to fire off the Pyroclasm. Otherwise we die. First though, we are attacking the Elspeth with Huntmaster and the Wolf. They will die to Pyroclasm, so the attack is free. I don't like attacking with Mandrills because they might see the Pyroclasm coming, and decide to trade some tokens for it. A sweeper is our only real out, so they don't have much reason not to take out Mandrills. I want it to survive because it is our only clock, and our only way to take out that Elspeth after.
Pyroclasm will take out whatever tokens don't block, and Cult Leader will die to state-based actions.
On the opponent's turn, they probably make a token to present lethal again. Play Needle naming Elspeth, and go at the opponent's life total. Hold onto the EE in case they make more tokens. You may need to use the EE early to kill the leftover token because it wins the game if left unchecked for a few turns. You can't afford to hold Mandrills back to block because we need to clock them as fast as possible. We don't want them to draw many cards.
That requires the Spell Pierce to protect our threat, them to draw kind of terribly, and us to draw some good stuff (I'm assuming they will hit at least a couple of threats/pieces of removal in five to six turns). I find it extremely unlikely that we win, but it is possible, and I think that line gives us the best chance to win.
What does everyone else think?
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Ob, if you want the reach Alchemist gives you (it sounds like you really like the card), run it. To the point of removal magnets, I think Ashton is right that you are going to want the Push magnet to cost one mana. I actually think that Narnam Renegade is a better option than Swiftspear. Swiftspear looks small here, and deathtouch is both very useful and a magnet for removal. If you are looking to be really aggressive and change up the deck accordingly, Swiftspear might work for you.
Keep us posted on how Tracker performs. It could be very good, but I haven't tried it because I fear we don't have enough lands to make it really work.
I think your list is really interesting because it looks a lot how I imagine my Chart and Shoal deck will look. However, you are still running Traverse. My opinion is more lenient than Ashton's (I think you can play Bauble and Shoal if you don't go straight to playsets), but I don't think you can support Bauble, Shoal, and Traverse. You only have 14 one mana Blue cards to pitch to Shoal. That is really low. You have 9 two mana spells, which is great, but I think you need more one CMC ones. There just isn't room for Bauble and Traverse in a deck looking to support Shoal. Not unless you start cutting Burn, lands, or threats, and I don't think we can afford much of that.
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If that is your main problem, I think cutting Bauble is defensible. I think its benefits outweigh that aspect, but the logic makes sense. I'm working on a more Tempo-focused Shoal build myself that I will hopefully test out soon. Going up on Shoal makes Bauble a lot worse, so I'm going to start by trimming one. I think cutting Bauble is even more defensible when you are actively trying to support Shoal more.
If you aren't aiming at maximizing Shoal's potential, I think that Bauble is something that you want. It can slow us down a bit, but it can also speed us up. The main draw then is the fact that we have a ~56 card deck, meaning we are more likely to draw our best cards. If you take that kind of approach, I'd just trim whatever other cards you find lackluster and add the burn/tap effects to get more reach. I think I'm going to take this sort of approach for my Tempo build, running a couple of Baubles and just trimming whatever cards I like least.
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Twin used to run it, and I think some Delver lists did. With Nahiri basically gone, it is really hard to remove. It survives all played removal I can think of (won't be a creature on the board, so it can't be Pathed).
As a creature spell, it is immune to Denial (I'm not sure we want it against Grixis Shadow, but that helps), and can be found off of Traverse.
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For example, against Abzan, I board like this currently:
In: Young Pyromancer (new addition I'm trying over Reveler), 3 Blood Moon, 1 Pyroclasm, 1 Mountain, 1 EE, 1 Flashfreeze, 2 Huntmaster
Out: Knucks, 3 Scour, 3 Bolt, 1 Shoal, 1 Denial, Breeding Pool
Huntmaster is a good topdeck, but I still have 7 counters in my deck, all of which are usually poor off the top. Should I be boarding differently here?
Another thought I just had: since Abzan is slower than Jund, should we play the Tempo game instead of trying to grind them out? They have a lot of cards that are good at killing threats, but we might be better equipped to fight them there than on a card advantage axis. Maybe we play more aggressively and use our good topdecks as a sort of insurance against them having plenty of removal.
What do you think, and how do you approach the matchup?
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I definitely agree that I haven't been running into that many Pushes lately. Even though it is premium removal, if just 20% of decks run it, you'll only run into such decks once every five matches. If Shadow was extremely dominant, that would be very different.
There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to both, but I think both are playable (having barely touched Cat).
Aside from comparing the decks, I like the discussion about getting around Push. The three methods in the article make sense. I like it.
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The matchup is pretty close to even. If they are able to discard away all of our threats, we are in big trouble. If not, try to stick a threat while playing around Delve fatties (we have difficulty removing them, but if you can keep a Goyf on board, they don't matter nearly as much). I like to be fairly aggressive with Delvers because the opponent will need to answer it, which means Goyf is more likely to survive. It's rare that the opponent lets Delver go at their life total to grow Shadow because they want to be in control of their life, and if we get to a spot in which we have some counters up, Delver can close the game despite them having massive creatures.
Postboard, I like Blood Moon and Huntmaster a lot. Maximize your threat density and they will have trouble having enough discard and removal. I've also been trying out Reveler in this matchup since I have it anyways. I'm not sure I like it here, but Grixis is more grindy than DSJ, so I like it in theory. EE is worth running, but I hate that it can't hit Delve threats. I guess it hits Lili, so that's something. I do think we should bring it in.
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@Mikefon It does look like EE is coming in after this League. Melody does not seem as good as I hoped. I was gonna get the first Tarn with that Tix, but alas. The things we do for our percentage points. EE is going to be especially good if Humans does blow up.
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