MTG Salvation

@Nickums AV is definitely powerful and can be worth running depending on meta imo. It has immense use as a midrange mirror-breaker but it also suffers from being a terrible topdeck. Basically, when it's good it's really good, but when it's bad it's awful. Some people find success with it, some people think it's too slow.

Honestly it looks to me like they had a G/B Delirium deck in Standard and decided to play it in Modern with more powerful cards.

Ok this might be horrible but I'm going to pick up the pieces I'm missing for this tomorrow and try it out over the weekend:



61 cards with 21 lands is probably sketchy, might cut the bauble just to have 22 lands, and even that might be too few. The main reason why I'm doing this is due to wanting to play at least 4 discard with Cryptic/Spell Snare/Leak. It's not likely to work but I just thought I'd try it. It probably works much better with actual Tarmogoyfs.

Is there any merit to a hybrid between "Cryptic BUG" and Midrange BUG or is there simply not enough deck space to accommodate both?

Yeah the match up just feels awful. I'm hoping a few Thought Scour might help but most likely it won't.

I wish there was a way to combine counterspells and discard in a single maindeck but that might be impossible without Goyf

Haha, I would run LotV if I could afford it, although I would probably need goyfs first. But I have been looking to alter this deck to make room for counterspells as well, although it seems impossible the more I look at it.

Guess I just need to work on cutting cards for Thought Scour then. Thank you.

Alright, I'm stuck. I played the following list with a few friends of mine:



In my testing the biggest thing I've found that even with this mess of card types I don't hit delirium nearly as early as I would want. This definitely contributes to me getting completely bowled over in every game 1 against G/R Tron due to being unable to represent a decent clock.

Because of this I'm currently looking for cuts to put in some Thought Scour and maybe 1 Grapple the Past to just dump cards for delirium, but I'm having trouble deciding. It will probably end up being 1 Serum Visions, 1 removal spell, and 1 other thing for 3 Thought Scour but I'm not sure.

Also, what do you guys think of Profane Command as a 1 or 2 of for psuedo-reach (fear + drain) or a kill spell + reanimate? It's probably garbage but I just thought I'd mention it.

Do you guys believe that a budget BUG deck (no goyfs, replaced with flayers) requires a card like Architects of Will to function or can I get by with what I have which includes 2 Bitterblossom ~3 planeswalkers and 2 courser?

We talk a lot in this thread about the reason to be playing Blue and I think it might be helpful to define that a little bit more. As far as I can tell, a lot of us play Sultai because there's something about this color combo that is just appealing to play. Several times earlier in the thread people have suggested that it isn't worthwhile to play blue over Red/White or even straight G/B. Answers so far have included:

- Snapcaster Mage: Buying back spells makes us grindier than Jund, maybe on par with Abzan(?) Versatile.

- Counter-spells: Hit or miss, some people love them and some people think they're mediocre. I've found that it's difficult to find a shell using both counters and discard, but that might just be because I don't have access to Goyf and need to use slots enabling Flayer instead. Bringing in counters against Tron or random combo always feels nice.

- Ancestral Vision/Serum Visions/etc. Card draw and filtering. A resolved AV usually means we win the game but it's an awful topdeck. Serum Visions is nice to alleviate the problem that G/B/x sometimes have of "drawing the wrong half" of the deck.

There must be some that I missed and/or some obscure ones like having Thought Scour to power out Tasigurs or fuel Goyf/Snap.

Certainly interesting. I don't think blue gives chord enough bullets to really be worthwhile over white but it looks fun to play. I would at least replace Identity Thief with Clever Impersonator. Ninja is also a little strange, but I think it's for reusing coiling oracle and snappy/ewitt for value?

EDIT: off topic but has anyone ever shown you this? http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea .

Big thing I see is mainboard fulminator mages which probably aren't necesarry in most cases and you could probably replace them with threats like Kalitas and Finks.

As for your testing has you considered trying XMage or Cockatrice? Both are free and pretty easy to use imo.

I am so hyped for this spoiler: http://imgur.com/EoAkWtn

We finally got our 1 mana removal spell and it's very good imo. Hits manlands too. Fetchlands also trigger Revolt.

Do you think that we can run 3 of these and some Go for the Throat without fearing affinity anymore? I imagine a removal package like:

2-3 Abrupt Decay
3-4 Fatal Push
1-2 Go for the Throat
1-2 Damnation
1 Maelstrom Pulse
Etc.

Could be decent?

Depending on the build, I've found Darkblast to be decent against Infect as well. Unfortunately it's only really good against that and Affinity.

At first glance it's probably way too slow. A while back Frank Lepore posted an article about U/B Control here: http://www.numotgaming.com/modern-monday-ub-control/ so if you want to play true control I'd probably look there. The reason is that adding green in a control deck doesn't give us Pernicious Deed or Deathrite Shaman like in Legacy. In Modern adding green gives us Tarmogoyf, Abrupt Decay, Kitchen Finks, and other midrangey cards.

Jace and LH together give you obscene graveyard synergy/value from my limited testing. Problem is I don't like running 4x Jace with the meta being like this so it's hard to have both on the field at once except in very very grindy matches (although you are nearly guaranteed to win if this occurs). Jace doesn't play super well with counters, but in general it's fine, especially if you have cryptic. LH is fine with them in my experience.