To be clear, I have not done more than theorycraft the mono-white list I described, so everything I say relating to cards unique to it should not be worth one tenth of what your actual experience counts for. That being said, when a sample hand generator spat out a sequence in which Flickerwisp had nothing to blink by turn 3, I immediately dropped the card again to put in the third maindeck Hour of Revelation, which I wanted to enable more often anyway.
Other things which random goldfish samples seem more positive on are the fact that The birth of Meletis gives multiple permanents for the "city's Blessing" discount on Hour, and the fact that the manabase is as pure as the driven snow on the basics which it should optimally be running. (Arcum's Astrolabe or Chained to the Rocks are at least an option when you have Snow lands, and there are other synergies that these open up post-board.) This aside brings up a question: has anyone tried a manabase using only duals and Arcum's Astrolabe to enable their splash? This could allow several versions of the deck to eliminate the heinous necessary evil of a non-Plains basic land. The immediate problem I foresee is that the deck equity required is significant, but perhaps the gain in velocity compensates.
To your next point, Brought Back is an objectively inconsistent effect, probably best considered by imagining a double Renegade Rallier trigger with a far worse fail-case, but this version has enough card advantage built into its permanents that I believe the list can support at least one copy. The questions, as always, are then how much it can do on average, and specifically what it can do against a given opponent.
The problem of a multiple non-Plains curve with two or more Emeria which you alluded to is truly one of the great regrettable anti-synergies of any variant, but when I conceived the deck it was with the idea of replacing the Wraths at 4-mana with a full set of Solemn Simulacrum in addition to one or two Burnished Hart, which were progressively trimmed as the low end of the curve grew to support Flickerwisp and Charming Prince earlier in the game. I had hoped that these would enable the full playset of Emeria, The Sky Ruin, in addition to the curve not requiring untapped sources as much on turns 4 and 5, but I agree that the default position of 3 copies has essentially been cemented by this exercise as well, in my mind.
In a more serious point of discussion, I would strongly challenge your definition of Ranger-Captain of Eos as being "irreplaceable", on three counts. First, what are the decks (if any) that the card beats on its own? We are not talking about interactions with other cards, Sun Titan and Emeria loops being win-more circumstances which offer an extra 5-10% in "locks" when we would clearly be "winning the game" 80% of the time without them regardless. Second, I hope that you will agree with me when I say that the card comes with severe implications for the curve. Not only is he a 3-drop in one of the most hotly contested slots in the colour, he also demands more card equity at the 1-mana end of the spectrum, which comes with certain compromises attached (Thraben Inspector being sub-optimal to devote control deck space towards). Third, his body and utility are far more useful and relevant when backing up more consistent pressure, which warps the game away from the strengths of the namesake card of this deck. My experience is that when I am trying to manage the board, he either attacks and blocks, OR he is used as a situational pseudo-counterspell, forcing another card to be drawn and asking more of the deck in a bad situation. In either case, his "value" over other options is completely dependent on the narrow 1-drop he is able to tutor up, which then depends on the ability to cast and use THAT card effectively. As a final point, he plays quite poorly with Wrath of God, and cannot be relied upon to answer problems long-term, which eats up even more space in the 75 to support him. He does buy a turn against combo, which is a real advantage, but to me this makes his position much more reliably valuable when brought in as part of a plan when those decks are guaranteed, to substitute directly for the Day of Judgement effect when it is dead. In order not to be close-minded, I will concede the validity of his maindeck inclusion as a metagame call, but more generally I think all these points combine such that the Ranger-Captain of Eos should be seen much more frequently as a sideboard card).
Curiously enough, your question about Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Walking Ballista seems to bring up an advantageous intersection of the dynamics that Ranger-Captain of Eos provides. Being two devotion on his own that can disappear at a moment's notice, he is already worthy of consideration if making use of the lower right hand side of your legendary enchantment creature appeals to you, but he also tutors up the other half of the combo on his ETB, and could possibly sacrifice himself in response to his own trigger to prevent interaction before the Walking Ballista even enters your hand. This would disguise your intentions against unprepared opponents, or defeat a Kolaghan's Command from a savvy one. The pressure he applies might already draw some of the flak away from the major pieces on its own, and Heliod gains a target for his activated ability in regular games, but his protection ability is obviously a much greater advantage in a shell looking to kill in a single turn. There is definitely something there, particularly if you want to build a version that curves up from a tutorable Giver of Runes to Lumithread Field to make the combo more mana-efficient since Ballista for X=1 could now represent lethal with a Heliod in play. The 2/2 Morph might even be useful in assisting the Ranger-Captain beatdown. This is an entirely different deck, though, and Emeria has nothing to offer such a strategy.
Thank you for the questions, and please tell me if your experience with Ranger-captain has differed from mine in some significant way!
To answer your questions chronologically, I can see your hesitation with Flickerwisp as if it does not have a target to blink the card is bad. Three redeeming qualities in the unlikely eventuality that you have no targets of your own to blink, It is a 3/1 flying creature which ends games quickly, and you can blink troublesome permeants your opponents control. Things like Ensnaring Bridge, a blocker, or an opposing planeswalker about to ultimate. It can also be recurred with a Sun Titan to create a loop.
Your experience with a sample hand generator is subjective, but with my build running the numbers through a hypergeometric calculator their is a %89.5 chance of having a permanent to flicker by turn three on the play and a %92.5 of it on the play.
Population Size - 60 (cards in deck)
Sample Size - 8 to 9 (7 in the opener plus an additional 1 - 2 drawsteps)
Honestly, I would question any hand kept without a permanent played before turn three and likely mulligan that hand. In addition, even so you don't have to cast Flickerwisp on curve and have the option wait until draw into a permanent to blink. You're right though, it's not good on it's own and that's why I tend to sideboard all of them out in matches like GDS or Jund which involving copious amounts of hand disruption and removal.
To answer your suggestion regarding Chained to the Rocks, or what I'm assuming you meant On Thin Ice I like the card and have played it in the past. However I wouldn't want to play On Thin Ice and Hour of Revelation in the same 60, I tested with On Thin Ice and have played them both in the 75. I feel like it's good in specific scenario's in specific matchups and can act as a fifth Path to exile effect. For example I liked it in the on turn two on the draw against a Dark Confidant or Goblin Electromancer as it denied them the additional resources Path to Exile would have given but dealt with a must kill threat.
As for Arcum's Astrolabe I'm not sure if anyone in the community has really tested it before and I can't deny it usefulness. I would need to test it but would personally rather max out on another synergistic permeant like Charming Prince or Birth of Meletis before I played the first Arcum's Astrolabe.
I want to make it clear I have no problem with Brought Back, I've played it in the past and it's been good to me. The games I ran away with using it were when I had it early and was able to use Brought Back to recur double fetchland early in the game. That said the surprise factor of recurring a permeant your opponent thought was dealt with is also game breaking.
I think that we'll just have to disagree about Ranger-Captain of Eos, to answer what matchups it's essential in.
UW Control
- Having it will allow you to not only provide pressure and accrue card advantage via Thraben Inspector but play around countermagic and allowing resolving an essential threat like Sun Titan which will take over the game.
Dredge
- It's very difficult for them to kill us in combat after we've established a board presence and RCoE can tutor a Kami of False Hope but in game one you will die to a Conflagrate without it looping.
Tron
- This sequence has won me many games, turn 3 activate Field of Ruin, turn 4 cast RCoE and tutor for Hope of Ghirapur, Turn 6 cast Sun Titan. Essentially FoR into RCoE into Sun Titan, you only need 3 cards one of which is a land.
Storm
- I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to explain, in game one unless your opponent is extraordinarily unlucky and you have a fast clock you will die without Ranger-Captain of Eos.
It's also good but not essential against most aggressive or midrange styles.
In regards to the Heliod, Walking Ballista combo, I don't think I'd be prepared to play a card like Lumithread Field to facilitate it. I do like the idea of a backdoor combo but with two pieces that are individually powerful on their own. I was thinking 1 - 2 heliod and a ballista
Thanks for the considered response, I appreciate it.
First off, I would like to clarify that the Mono-White list I posted was not intended as a serious contender, but to illustrate a few concepts. The hand with Flickerwisp in question was something like 3 land, a Path to Exile, a Winds of Abandon, and a Sun Titan. If I had that opener in a tournament, I would have kept the hand with a Wall of Omens or The Birth of Meletis instead of the Wisp. I completely understand that the odds are strongly against this occurring, as I mentioned in my minimum cutoff numbers for even including it, but I believe that the fact that it even has a "fail case" at all is a massive point against it. The fact that people can and do interact in Modern should be a strength for Emeria's attrition plan, and not a weakness. As to your other arguments for it, they are all valid, and I have situational experiences in which I appreciated the effect the card provides, but none dovetail from or into the plan that emphasizes the strength of Emeria, the Sky Ruin. As an attitudinal argument, I am particularly (almost obsessively) risk-averse when it comes to control decks that I intend to play against the highest level of competition, particularly when I have no access to countermagic. This is my breaking point, and if your attitude differs you will likely have wins that I will never achieve, but my strength (if I can be said to have one) has always been deck construction. Please take that for whatever it means when I say that, as far as I am concerned, Flickerwisp costs games overall. I am not willing to allow that the best players will keep hands where a 3-mana 3/1, backed up by no significant disruption, will carry enough game wins to matter in a format where Arclight Phoenix exists as a metagame threat beginning on turn 1.
On a different note, thank you for catching me on Chained to the Rocks, that was indeed meant to be On thin Ice, and I agree wholesale with your subsequent analysis of it. We appear to have had similar experiences with Brought Back as well, experiences which I might add were made slightly more rosy when considering self-sacrificing creatures, but which ultimately amounted to a moderately playable card with memorably impressive blowout potential. I also generally agree where the theoretical applications of Arcum's Astrolabe are concerned, but I might have to assume the question is still valid until we can get the impressions of someone who has actually tried it.
For the Walking Ballista combo deck, that was again in a speculative alternative list. If someone would like to discuss it, I would suggest a new thread be started to workshop things, and in that vein I would start with the simplest manabase and see what other colours brought to the table over the following:
Getting back to the meat and potatoes of this thread (W/u), I appreciate your finer analysis on Ranger-Captain of Eos. With specific examples to work with, this is the kind of debate that it is both useful and productive to have.
Against U/W control, then, the pressure you speak of is much less relevant than the clocks they are designed to deal with, and the body onThraben Inspector is essentially an annoyance against them which they can safely ignore until a chain of Cryptic Command protects - or clears the path for - whatever finisher they choose to run with. In addition, the interaction with countermagic is simply better covered by Teferi, Time Raveler, in my opinion, and the eventual ability to have a Titan in play is a power which Emeria grants us passively in the matchup already. I think that the card is fine here, but not a telling advantage, and can sometimes be irrelevant.
Where Dredge is concerned, you make my point for me. Dredge will almost always see as much of its library as it wants to against Emeria in game 1, and so I thank you for not ducking the question when you say that it cannot fully stop Conflagrate on its own pre-board. I agree. They will generally win through it, which means that the Ranger-Captain of Eos is not a significant advantage until after sideboarding, or paired with a meta call, which is in fact what I see the card as best for (as per my previous post).
For Tron, the sequence you showed is a good one, and I do not doubt that it has won you games, but the Hope of Ghirapur is once again stronger as a sideboard card. On top of that, they can still trump or break out of your disruption by having creatures such as Wurmcoil Engine, World Breaker, or even Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger if they re-establish Tron. My advice is to focus on winning the games where you can shut off their mana advantage, which can be done without Ranger-Captain. Your inclusion of the card gives you a possibly relevant line of play, and it is my turn to concede a little by admitting that the creatures I mentioned are far easier to deal with than their Planeswalkers and Oblivion Stone, but will this speculative advantage win you a match? Even if you get your multiple card sequence off without a hitch, there is no guarantee that it will. Perhaps I am wrong, though, and I promise to write a retraction admitting my error if you can tell me that you feel happy to be paired against Urza's Power Plant.
Where Storm is concerned, I agree wholeheartedly that I will die almost every time without access to Ranger-Captain of Eos. This is absolutely the case, but my question is whether you feel that you generally will not, even should you draw it. First, they can kill you before you resolve it. Unlikely, but especially possible on the draw. Second, they can interact with it through countermagic and/or Lightning Bolt if they have access to those. Third, It is my experience that a good pilot will be able to kill you through a single soft Orim's Chant effect regardless, since whenever they threaten to kill you, you are forced to give them more time by losing a chunk of your pressure. The Sun Titan lock is real, but their Remand is turned on whenever you Silence their turn out of respect for the combo, so your attempting to cast him will frequently lead to the lone open turn they need to kill you. I think that the Strip Mine lock from Path to Exile and Ghost Quarter is a 10% plan - the opportunity for which must sometimes be given up on to cast the 3/3 Human Soldier in the first place - but if yours is a 30% plan it comes (as you say) at a cost in the midrange matchups. Similar to my previous statement on Tron, if you find that the pairing is favourable I will admit that there is a chance I am wrong, but the bottom line here is that again the Ranger-Captain of Eos guarantees nothing game-breaking unless we are already in the realm of corner cases.
If you believe these are the places that the card has the most value in, I would say that my attitude is unchanged towards its inclusion unless you can show that it is, in fact, the unfailing panacea that Gideon of the Trials was once hoped to be in at least two of these four matchups. Otherwise, I believe you are spending mana on a card that does not necessarily buy a turn, does not necessarily draw a card, and does not necessarily make your opponent incapable of interacting. The card has a purely average fail case (and even worse than that given my attitude), does these things intermittently at best, and takes up deck space and card equity to do so. I do not deny that its abilities can win, but to my way of thinking it simply doesn't change the fact that if these decks are dominating your metagame, I would still suggest to a friend that they pilot a different strategy. If they are in a midrange metagame, or if the pairings simply run that way, I would maintain that advising them to adopt Ranger-Captain of Eos will be to their detriment overall.
Thank you again for your help and passion, I hope these issues are worth the time we are spending.
No problem, and I definitely think that any issue is worth discussion and we're both passionate about Emeria. It's been a long term deck for us that we've played off and on.
For Ranger-Captain of Eos, I was thinking we were talking about a strictly mono white build. Some of the biggest draws towards UW variant in Emeria are the inclusion of countermagic and Teferi, Time Raveler. I also agree with you, in the control matchup if I had to choose between the two TTR is the one I'd pick. However, I have to quasi disagree with you about Thraben Inspctor. The reason is because while you are right in that it is an annoyance that will get swept away by a wrath or a cryptic chain, I think that you are undervaluing the amount of that annoyance. I've played both on the side of stock UW control and W(x) Emeria. Control players don't like using a card to 1 for 1 with an annoyance that has already drawn a card, especially when said annoyance comes down early and has already chipped damage. A single Thraben Inspector can make up the bulk of my damage in a control matchup (7 - 8) before my opponents deal with it using a wrath effect. It got to the point where my friend at a local LGS who often piloted UW control would jokingly say they'd concede if I revealed a hand with three Thraben Inspector.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent and going back to RCoE. In control matchups card advantage matters, lets say I have a RCoE I play it and it gets me a Thraben Inspector. It has now cantripped and if my opponent removes this threat on a 1 for 1 basis they'll likely have 2 for 1 themselves because their spot removal won't draw a card. I play Thraben Inspector, if they remove this on a 1 for 1 basis as well they have now spent 2 cards to deal with my single RCoE, and I have a clue. If I crack that clue, I can safely say that my one card, RCoE, has drawn two cards if my opponent has spent 2 cards to deal with it that's a potential 4 card swing.
Obviously a good control opponent will likely not spend 2 pieces of spot removal and instead wait for a wrath effect. However if we're assuming competence we have apply it equally. In that we assume the Emeria player will also not play into a wrath effect and use RCoE to disrupt the opponent at key intervals. Those being utilizing it's ability to disrupt the opponent at the most opportune time, i.e. when the opponent is setting up to cast a Teferi, Hero of Domenaria or to play around countermagic. I think your undervaluing the importance of looping RCoE with Emeria, the Sky Ruin in those matchups too, because games often go so long we often see the majority of our deck in game one.
Moving on,
I'm not sure what point I made for you in regards to the dredge matchup, can you clarify? My point was that game one is pointless without RCoE because Conflagrate will eventually kill after you've established a strong board presence. The only way you don't die is to continually sacrifice a Ranger-Captain of Eos on upkeep via looping with a Sun Titan or Emeria, the Sky Ruin because their Conflagrate is sorcery speed. I have done this, and it's relatively easy to pull off, it turns a matchup were you in game one you're %0 into a roughly even one.
As for Tron your right, Hope of Ghirapur is a sideboard card. I was attempting to highlight the utility of RCoE, replace HoG with either an additional Field of Ruin or Ranger-Captain of Eos for game one. Tron is dance, we need to apply early pressure backed by disruption. You're right that they have still have trump creatures in World Breaker, or even Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, usually 1 - 2 of each but I have very rarely lost because my opponent cast a Wurmcoil Engine. This is because either 1) I'll have exile based removal, 2) I'll have flying creatures to attack over for lethal, or 3) I'll transition into a defensive role and focus on disruption, i.e. block and use FoR and RCoE until you can cast a Sun Titan to recur either. Or have just have an active Emeria to recur Ranger-Captain of Eos and cut them off of key threats like Oblivion Stone, Ugin, the Sprit Dragon, and Karn Liberated. All of those cards are harder to interact with and recover from than World Breaker or Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and also make up around 9 - 10 cards as opposed to 3 - 4. To answer your question, yes I am happy when paired against an opponent playing Urza's Power Plant. That could be due in no small part because I have a high degree of familiarity and am comfortable in that matchup.
I have made my point with combo and you agree so there's no point debating that but I will concede that a good combo player will likely be able to take better lines and thus maintain a higher win percentage. This still means that by slowing them down and forcing them adapt to these line of play you are still buying yourself an extra .5 to 2 turns to kill them.
To answer your question regarding a Ghost Quarter or Field of Ruin lock, it is not a reasonable plan against storm in my experience. I have done it but it takes time because your opponent plays basic lands. Meaning you need a GQ specifically (which has seen consistently less play in our archetype since the printing of FoR, usually a 1 - 2 of). What I'm saying is that I often need too much to go right.
If we assume that my storm opponent plays 4 basic lands and consistently only has 1 - 2 non-basic lands in play when we begin our plan and makes no further land drops, this means that it will still take a total of 5 - 6 turns before we can start actually denying them recourses. You can half that if you take them off a single color specifically but remember that they still have accessManamorphose to color fix. The reason why this is a bad strategy against storm is because it needs a long time to set up and our opponents need so little mana in to go off b/c of their rituals.
The games where I have used this strategy to success are when I've already disrupted my opponent to the point where we've entered the late game and both of us have stagnated and are drawing air. I think you should still utilize this strategy because every percentage point matters but I don't rely on it as a primary game plan.
I don't find Storm to be a fun matchup, and I am not happy to see it but that's mainly because only one player taking game actions for the majority of our time with little to no interaction isn't fun for me. From what I remember RCoE helped a lot, in the sense that it turned one of our worst matchups into a much better one. If you look back in the thread archive date from when RCoE was released you may be able to find an unbiased write up comparing the before and after.
We don't agree with Ranger-Captain of Eos and that's okay, this will actually help a lot by forcing us to remain objective and not give in to complacency. It also means that with both of us adopting different play styles towards Emeria we'll be able to trail blaze into different lines of play, and hopefully post about it. Which is very useful when trying to discover new cards or strategies.
Thanks for all of your imput, I'm glad to see it and your dedication to this thread!
I am very glad you chose to focus on the value this argument brings towards continually re-evaluating our own biases. This is a huge part of maintaining competitive relevance, being able to identify relative weaknesses and strengths to adapt to the pressures of new cards and metagame shifts. I am happy to be working on this issue with you as well!
For the record, this is the list that I would, in fact, recommend beginning to test if I were preparing for a GP at the moment:
You will note that my list includes no counterspells whatsoever. As I have stated in a previous post in the middle of page 65 of this thread, I believe that given the presence of Veil of Summer, the only strategically viable countermagic for this deck is Glen Elendra Archmage.
Back into the battle of ideas, then! Here is the top placing recent list according to MTGgoldfish, which has been suggested elsewhere as a good standard. If you have no objections, I will proceed on the assumption that future discussion of the matchup takes this list as the default we are playing against.
Your points about the Thraben Inspector dynamics against U/W control against average opposition can be safely discounted if we wish to focus on the games that actually matter for winning tournaments. Setting those aside, then, let us speak of the card in the context of Ranger-Captain of Eos against a well-prepared and intelligent opponent. In the first place, the 3-mana play lines up poorly with their countermagic, so it is not impossible that the value will not even become a factor, but let us assume that you resolve the card. Your 1/2 body comes at a cost of W, and your clue comes at the cost of 2. Their equivalent play is Snapcaster mage into Opt, which they cannot break into two turns, but comes 100% at instant-speed. This is a clean exchange, but leaves them at advantage generally because of its higher power dictating the better trading options, and its flexibility better addressing the nature of your threats.
You present threats only at sorcery speed, and your curve requires you to be playing much more aggressively as a stance, plus because of the presence of Thraben Inspector, Flickerwisp, Charming Prince, and Ranger-Captain of Eos your density of non-cantrip threats leaves you essentially compelled to be the one pushing to end the game, so that you do not expose your value plays to interaction. The 4 Field of Ruin on either side essentially wash clean on both sides, leaving manabase advantage to them in the mid and late game by +1 threat. Your Emeria recursion will be much stronger than these effects, though they will be coming online later and suspect in general due to the presence of Wasteland effects overall, but also because of your two Blast Zone counting against Emeria when you draw them. Let us try to approach clarity by assuming their card selection is better on average. Whether their land that survives after the dust settles in the midgame is a Celestial Colonnade or a Castle Vantress, your Thraben Inspector will soon begin to be outclassed, and if I allow even a full 10 damage to have happened to them by turn 5 between poking and their manabase, they are still in great position to start threatening a small Planeswalker + removal or countermagic, and using card selection every time they feel able to start digging for Supreme Verdict or other relevant resources.
Their gameplan is now to use these cheap permanent sources of advantage to distract from their life total while they build up to either Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria plus protection, untapping into a sweeper the next turn. Sacrificing the Ranger-Captain of Eos is very difficult to time correctly here, and will often be good news for them even if it does stop the play you were looking to stop. You are working blind, and without using the Ranger-captain liberally they have full control over the stack, plus occasional Vendilion Clique peeks at your hand and Timely Reinforcements being live to stabilize whenever time is to be bought.
I do not see where in the optimal pressure-reliant sequences you are finding time to crack clues. This is a case where your tempo advantage is so powerfully dictated by your deck design that taking the time to sacrifice 2 mana for a card with no other effect is difficult to do during the turns where you want them to interact with you most, and leads to opportunities for them to get ahead on efficiency. I much prefer the W/u Emeria list's consistency, because Mortarpod, Teferi, Time Raveler, andCrucible of Worlds punish or pressure their plays much more severely. Additionally, the Emerias are turned on with a greater ease. The Batterskull package is real as well, and the cheapness of Stoneforge Mystic and Mortarpod control loyalty while combining with a smoother curve to threaten any tapouts, turning Wall of Omens into a significant body, and getting Emeria, the Sky Ruin online more effectively. Exposing cards to Wrath of God is much more of a choice here as well, and Detention Sphere is a clean answer to their single Teferi, Hero of Dominaria when an extra Ghost Quarter effect can control their Blast Zone.
Against Dredge, the point was that the deck would hurt you enough with chip damage and Creeping Chill that Conflagrate would kill you if you didn't draw the Ranger-Captain of Eos, and would probably still do so unless you drew specifically Sun Titan, which leaves you open to lethal combat damage again if you cannot squeeze in Kami of False Hope. Your statement that the matchup is 0% without Ranger-Captain runs absolutely counter to my experience. I believe I am still an underdog pre-board, but only around a rate of around 40% to their 60%. Settle the Wreckage and Detention Sphere are very strong here, as is cutting them off of colours with the Crucible of Worlds and naturally drawn Ghost Quarter effects.
Tron and Storm have been covered well at this point, and I feel that we are in agreement on the major points, but I will stress that I have been comfortable with my maindeck win percentage against the Urza Lands since I went up to 5 pieces of land disruption in tandem with the artifact to recur them, backing up free incidental pressure from Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull. The advantages of focusing on your lands are well justified by a more consistent and a stronger Emeria, the Sky Ruin whenever it is called for, and if you count Crucible of Worlds as part of the manabase the only truly dead cards this build has against control are the 4 sorcery-speed sweepers. Everything else accrues tangible value in the face of removal as or more cheaply than Thraben Inspector and with better tempo than Kami of False Hope loops, disrupting the curve less than Ranger-Captain of Eos, while requiring less to go right than Flickerwisp and Charming Prince.
In essence, the focus of this W/u version is more cohesive and steamlined, to me, and the average topdeck is more consistently rewarding to play patterns that extend the game. Wall of Omens will never directly help contribute to offense, and the more this deck accepts that the better I have found it to run. When the body is irrelevant, the best option is to lean into the velocity the card provides to steer every corner-case game towards the situations which put Emeria, as a deck, into a position to care about its lands again.
I hope this explains my perspective, and invite you to try it out for yourself.
First, addressing your concern about Manamorphose; although it is their major combo colour Storm plays very few basic Mountains (usually only one), which is why that is the colour I go after with Ghost Quarter - of which I have two plus three Field of Ruin to go with the maindeck Crucible of Worlds - and can look for much more aggressively with the Court Hussar that I am am able to play over Ranger-Captain of Eos. If their mana creature is Goblin Electromancer, the chances of them being able to go off from an empty board using a single topdecked red source is low, and as the game goes on exhausting their Islands also becomes possible to the point of locking them completely at 1 land maximum. Although I agree that it is a bad strategy, I do not feel that warping the maindeck to fight on the axis they interact on will win more matches overall. To exaggerate my point for clarity, it is functionally identical to the argument against including Enchantment destruction in the starting 60 of Boros Burn. Sure, that Fragmentize could beat Bant Spirits with maindeck Worship, but what if a) you don't play against Spirits, b) you don't draw it against them, and c) you draw it against someone else?
We are playing a deck running Wall of Omens, and there are cards that are being included in the maindeck on the justification they help some small amount against spell-based combo decks. This is a trap. Emeria rewards consistent attrition, and spending 6 mana to draw a card through getting a Thraben Inspector (which is already only possible by shoehorning aggressive creatures into slots which are critical for setting up stabilizing plays) does not strike me as the best way to emphasize that fact. In particular, losing the percentage points against Jund and the like is too much of a cost for me to be interested in the benefit that Ranger-Captain brings. If we are not demolishing midrange, why are we playing this tapland that rewards seven basics to be in play in a colour with little to no acceleration? There is nothing I have yet found in the Human Soldier that improves on the Ghost Quarter lock as our main pre-sideboard strategy, especially since it does not beat them on its own, and cannot even interact with a turn 3 combo on the play, which means we are still fighting an uphill battle strategically against the draws they want to maximize. Since we cannot avoid relying on corner cases to justify a maindeck inclusion, I choose to embrace that fact so as not to throw good money after bad.
Second, and more importantly, I have an official retraction to make. My experiences must have been outliers with the card, and so when you say that you are happy to face Tron I will keep my promise and apologize for my error. I will still choose not to include the creature in my build because of its effects on the curve in addition to the arguments I presented above, but the value of the card is clearly high enough to you that I must accept your sincerity. To be clear, then, I am reversing my position outright on the strength of your recommendations, and going forward we are treating the following statement as true in this thread: "The presence of Ranger-Captain of Eos in the maindeck turns Tron into a favourable matchup for Emeria control". Are there any caveats as to numbers or card support you would like to add to that phrase, or would you say that it can stand on its own as a blanket statement?
Please let me know if you have any objections or clarifications to make!
My first Magic in quite a while happened with W/u Emeria control at the Saskatoon Face-to-Face Open yesterday, and the tournament report should be helpful. Since I don't test nearly as much as I used to, I will be trying to use the notes I took to be more objective about my results. My list on the day, for reference:
Three things became quite obvious to me during the tournament. 1) I was very slow. Being out of practice, specifically when new sideboarding problems were presented, was a major time loss. In addition to two draws, I had to win during extra turns in round 6, and at least some of that would have been entirely avoidable if I hadn't been so indecisive on what to take out. 2) Compounding issue number one, my sideboard Specter's Shroud was untested, and I cost myself at least two games by convincing myself to try out the shiny new toy against decks where its utility was questionable at best. I am still debating whether the card is good enough to be worth the slot, but I need at least a few matchup repetitions where it might be relevant before I rule it out completely. 3) Related to issue number two, I never faced Tron, UW control, Scapeshift, or fast combo, and I think those are a piece of the puzzle that might still need to be solved by Aven Mindcensor and the Shroud.
The problem is that I think that the surprise factor of the search restriction will probably win the first game where it shows up, but I do not know whether these decks can adjust for it properly in game 3. If they have to dilute their plans to deal with my 2/1 flier, I will consider it a win, but I don't know if they are obligated to do so. I was hoping to play at least one of those decks to see how they adjust to it after it makes itself known as a threat, but alas I was not able to judge that dynamic well enough to recommend the card for the current metagame one way or another.
Overall, I had a reasonable showing, but a very disappointing one due to my own mistakes.
A decisive game 1 victory was guaranteed by an uncontested Emeria, the Sky Ruin, after a few early exchanges.
For game 2, I removed the 5 sweepers for 2 Aven Mindcensor, 2 Pithing Needle, and 1 Specter's Shroud, which felt speculative, but justifiable. An unfortunate missed land drop on turn 4 threatened to let him untap into Jace, the Mind Sculptor +2 uncontested, which I tried to prevent by end-step Mindcensor into main phase Ghost Quarter. He hit a basic Island in the top 4, then did actually untap into Jace. I still had the Mindcensor for pressure, but his next turn was Ice-fang Coatl into Ashiok, Dream Render. Since I missed on land once more, I conceded two turns later to save time.
Game three was close, and ended very frustratingly after I fought back on the draw from massive early pressure due to an early Stoneforge Mystic putting a Batterskull into play, then enabling an Ice-fang Coatl to connect with a Sword of Feast and Famine, which immediately put an Elspeth, Sun's Nemesis in play to follow up. My final board state left me dead to a single piece of interaction after I had stabilized at 2 using Pithing Needle, spot removal, and my own Batterskull (about to attack). He was out of cards, and I had just drawn a Sun Titan with seven land in play and a graveyard full of cantripping blockers, so if I had faded this single draw step I believe I would have swung the board back to a commanding position. Instead, he drew a Jace to -1 bounce my lifelinker, and attacked for lethal.
Several interactive options were available to me over each of multiple turns in the last game, so ultimately I felt reasonable about the matchup. It was relatively even overall, with the threat of Emeria being a major factor beyond that, but Ashiok plus pressure felt like one potential issue going forward. The Specter's Shroud was unimpressive when I drew it, but was still a huge improvement over a four-mana sweeper. I would experiment with other options if I played the match again.
ROUND 2 (Bant Spirits) (2-0 win) (1-1 overall)
In game 1, my hand was two Path to Exile and two Wall of Omens, which allowed me the luxury to accelerate if the blocker was irrelevant. Instead, my 0/4 held back a pair of Unsettled Mariner for an extra two turns before I cast a Path on a Spell Queller that tried to stop my 3-for-1 Wrath of God. Cleaned up easily afterwards.
For game 2, I removed the Crucible of Worlds and a Batterskull for two Pithing Needle to name Aether Vial and Mutavault. He had sideboarded in Worship and Ashiok, Dream Render, which were both in play to force a standoff in which I had Emeria active for 7 turns. I eventually drew a needle to immobilize his Mutavault, and swept the board. My lone Batterskull, tutored up on turn 2, had been enough to ignore the graveyard entirely. I told him after the game that I believe the enchantment, at the very least, was a huge liability for him, and possibly the planeswalker as well, though I wasn't certain on that front. The fact that they were not threats in the early game was more important to me than the time they bought him when the board was in my favour, since I believe Spirits' explosiveness is the key to the matchup.
I never felt remotely close to losing in either game, since I was never caught unprepared by Spell Queller tempo. Aside from random Aether Vial nut draws, the matchup is a very good one for Emeria unless they manage to force a sweeper early into a tempo Queller.
ROUND 3 (Jund) (1-1-1 Draw) (1-1-1 overall)
Game 1 was a typical grind, where an active Emeria, the Sky Ruin eventually overpowered his Wrenn and Six emblem. If Scavenging Ooze had shown up, things might have been different, but a healthy life total gave me plenty of options in the face of recurring Kolaghan's Command.
In game 3 I put both Detention Sphere back in, over the Specter's Shroud and a Crucible of Worlds, because Wrenn and Six had gotten very close to an emblem again. His turn 3 Inquisition of Kozilek missed on a hand with two lands, a Supreme Verdict, a Batterskull, and a Sun Titan, then the next turn his Bloodbraid Elf cascaded into a Tireless Tracker after he had already played his fourth land, so I was up an 0-for-1 and a clean 2-for-1 (on the draw) by the time I started casting relevant spells. Card advantage being the name of the game here, I was in a very good position when time was called, and uncharacteristically went for lethal on turns 3 and 5. Unfortunately, his topdecked Fatal Push on my Germ token and Terminate on my Sun Titan forced the draw.
I think this result was just, on the whole, since I had wasted too much time in sideboarding, and had brought in a losing card due to lack of testing. The sequences still often line up favourably for Emeria, although the matchup is not quite as good as it was before the inclusion of Wrenn and Six. I would like a third flexible answer to it and Liliana of the Veil, but one that Abrupt Decay cannot hit, and one that can come in elsewhere. Something like a third Celestial Purge perhaps, but three of those would be too many for my liking.
This is an even better matchup than Spirits, since very few of their creatures have evasion or flash, but they do make better use of Vial. The layers of Meddling Mage effects can infrequently be problematic through a healthy diversity of answers, but typically only if they have Freebooters to peek (hence the Purges that also hedge against their hasty flier as seen in game 2).
Game 1 felt dangerous, but well in hand, keeping Path to Exile open the whole game as insurance while using Mortarpod to control the mana creatures and combos (once flashing in the 'Pod with Stoneforge Mystic in response to my opponent removing the first counter from his Spike Feeder, pinging it to take advantage of state-based actions before he could gain infinite life; the same on-board trick held back a 2/2 Ballista in game 2). The Birds of Paradise being gone turned on an easy win for a surprise Batterskull afterwards, since his mana had been killing him slowly with 3 Horizon Canopy and a basic plains.
In game 2 I removed 2 Stoneforge Mystic and 1 Batterskull, plus 1 Teferi, Time Raveler and 1 Crucible of Worlds, to bring in 2 Pithing Needle, 1 Aven Mindcensor, 1 Remorseful Cleric and 1 Aura of Silence. His early combo was thwarted by Mortarpod, so he was on the beatdown plan from turn 4 or so. He had 1 card in hand and 5 land in play when I stabilized. At 3 life with an Aura of Silence in play and time about to be called, I cast a Detention Sphere and destroyed it with the trigger on the stack using the Aura so that I could get both of his Kitchen Finks off of the table without him increasing my clock when I cast the Wrath of God that would then sweep his board clear for my Sun Titan to take over the next turn. Since he was at 9, I was thinking that I wouldn't want him to go to 13 to increase my clock to 3 turns if time was called. This was a catastrophic error, since now with no Sphere of Resistance effect in play he untapped, drew a shockland, and cast the Walking Ballista in his hand for X=3 for the win.
He was a young kid I had met before, excited to be playing in a bigger tournament. Since the second draw would almost certainly knock us both out of the top 8 at this point, I told him so, and asked him if he would be willing to concede. He said "no", so I signed the match slip 2-1 for him and wished him luck. Hugely disappointing game loss on three counts. First and foremost, I gave my opponent an out. I cannot fault them for walking through my kitchen when I opened the door. Second, my clock was not relevant, since I was up a game. Only his was. Third, I was again indecisive with my sideboarding, and would have benefited from testing or theorycrafting ahead of time, which would have given me more time to think through #1 and #2. The match felt tricky, and might warrant a cleaner answer to Heliod, Sun-Crowned. If there is overlap between a white enchantment and a red-green Planeswalker, I would love to hear any ideas! The third Pithing Needle effect might need to come back in as an imperfect solution if not.
ROUND 6 (Dredge) (2-1 Win) (3-2-1 overall)
Game 1 was an interesting one, wherein I came close to stabilizing with a Batterskull, but then unfortunately gave him a second red source for his Ox of Agonas when I used Ghost Quarter to cut him off of his basic Forest for Life from the Loam. With one Mountain in play and another in his graveyard, I was confident he was out of basics unless he had a Swamp. As it turns out, he was only too happy to show me both a Swamp before the extra Mountain still in his deck quoting that "I hate losing value to Path to Exile". I told him I was of a similar mind, and we shared a laugh when I showed him what I meant by using a superfluous Path to get an extra Plains off of my own Germ token when he presented well over lethal damage the turn after his Ox fuelled an enormous dredge for 15.
In game 3, I brought back in a Stoneforge Mystic over a Mortarpod, which I like to think may have been the one I drew to put two Batterskull in play. The game was quite back and forth, Conflagrate cleaning up multiple blockers only for Lone Missionary to pull me out of danger, and I eventually found a Celestial Purge to clear his hardcast Stinkweed Imp as a blocker when I ultimately got enough mana to equip the dead Batterskull to a live one for lethal damage.
The match was competitive, and there was tension between going aggressive with accelerating out Batterskull post-board and trying to manage Bloodghast and Narcomoeba with Mortarpod. The incremental damage of these latter two Dredge payoffs add up to very interesting decisions later in the game, but in the end I think I am happy with 5 cards that give me access to each equipment's effect post-board. The configuration may need tweaking though, and I still spent too much time deciding.
ROUND 7 (Dredge) (2-1 Win) (4-2-1 overall)
In game 1 I was able to prove to my own satisfaction that Stoneforge Mystic into Batterskull is a certifiable trump sequence if unanswered in the matchup, grinding out an average-looking mixture of Bloodghast, Narcomoeba, and Prized Amalgam, and then trading with an Ox of Agonas when that eventually showed up as well. Path to Exile did reasonable work, and Detention Sphere was as excellent in pre-board games as it usually is.
This time for game 2 I removed two Mortarpod, and kept in an extra Stoneforge Mystic, just to see if this was sufficient. I wasn't really pleased with the result, since I came up short on a target for Emeria, The Sky Ruin for a loss, and might have appreciated an extra sacrifice outlet. I think this is probably a moot point, however, since the circumstances where Emeria is online AND access to Remorseful Cleric is not certain crop up so rarely. Ox of Agonas being a creature allowed it to Escape through the restrictions of Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and there was little my hand could do to prevent being run over by the waves of of Bloodghast and Prized Amalgam it unlocked.
In game 3, I put the extra Mortarpod back in over a Crucible of Worlds, and felt much better for it. The lategame Field of Ruin are often excellent without backup already once they have dredged their deck, but if their Life From the Loam is active, it is very difficult for them to be relevant. In this game, after a very rare Mulligan to 5, I learnt to equip any Remorseful Cleric that I intended to pass the turn on with Mortarpod, if possible. My opponent had drawn a Darkblast to force the timing on Cleric to his advantage, but luckily my Settle the Wreckage was able to catch a very good portion of his creatures when he tried to punish my awkward stumbles to fix my own mana. Without being able to find his last Bloodghast, his Amalgams waited in the graveyard long enough that I was able to clear them with the Cleric to seal the game when brought back and backed up with Sun Titan.
Again, the match felt competitive, but with Dredge being at the mercy of how explosive their first two turns are, the battle to dictate strategic play is mostly on the side of Emeria. This is definitely not an easy match to play, but I believe Emeria is favoured, especially if it can win the often competitive game one.
So, in total, I had a final record of four wins, two losses, and a draw. Though I was less than thrilled with my play, I made a little store credit in prizes, and felt very solid about the maindeck and 12 of the 15 sideboard cards. One of the losses was a draw in actual games played, and even that might not have been the case if I had been more efficient with my time. My other draw was a very near escape for my opponent, and again I could have gotten more out of smoother and less indecisive play, particularly in sideboarding, where I may also have thrown away a game. My loss was a tight match, where I gave myself as good a chance as I could have asked for from a massive early deficit, but my opponent's aggressive play to punish my defensive stance deserves the credit for giving them the win.
I did not get to have a true measure of Aven Mindcensor, sadly, and so I will have to keep it in on a provisional basis. The Specter's Shroud had no opportunity to be relevant, and is in a similar boat, but may be replaced by an Angelic Purge or an extra answer to Wrenn and Six. It is an ugly prospect, but if anyone has thoughts on what else Angelic hits cleanly in the format (Starting with Finks, Amalgam, and Heliod, Sun-Crowned from this tournament alone), I would appreciate a collection of cards to look at. If the list gets long enough, I will give it a shot. Ultimately, if this is too poor, I will try out a speculative Forsake The Worldly, which at least gives instant-speed options in addition to covering Gods, even if both modes are inefficient. One other possibility for the sideboard is that the Disenchant could be replaced by a Seal of Cleansing, which I thought was not Modern-legal until someone told me it had been reprinted in Modern Masters. There is a debate to be had here though, and I will be happy to have it if anyone is interested.
I would not side in Pithing Needle against Aether Vial decks. This seems to be a little loose as it is only great in the opening hand. Could you explain your thought process on this?
Planeswalkers are a problem and unfortunately I do not have any great options for them. You already have two copies of Celestial Purge. I would keep the Detention Sphere in even if it dies to a removal spell. Assassin's Trophy gives us a land which can be beneficial.
As for my thought process on Pithing Needle against Aether Vial, I would be happy to share. I have a very different experience from yours, it appears, because I have found that the only angle that tribal decks without reach can use to outmaneuver Emeria is by controlling their timing to play around Wrath effects. When it comes to Spirits in particular, they have Mutavault and Selfless Spirit to name anyway, and so I bring in both copies, but against Humans the only real thing I care about is their ability to play a "flash" game. Needle is therefore a very nice card to draw in many midgame situations as insurance that can also disrupt, since if they can choose what to commit and when they can sometimes steal games that would be locked up otherwise.
Beyond that logic, these decks are sometimes fast enough on the play that a single Meddling Mage or Kitesail Freebooter can be used to put off a sweeper for the one turn they need to win. Their normal goldfish gets pushed back by half a turn or more for every weak soft-lock creature they play, though, which means this is rarely possible unless they accelerate. Aether Vial counts as acceleration for this, since it can essentially tap for 6 mana or more in their best draws, and so I like having access to more than four pieces of 1-mana interaction for the only real operational threat they can leverage. If I find myself in game three on the draw, I take this to be an important enough consideration that I even board in the second copy against Humans.
The more relevant question is why I only bring in one copy normally against them. The answer is because Aether Vial is a poor topdeck, and can be sideboarded out by some opponents. These decks are frequently desperate for either pressure or space post-board against Emeria, and they sometimes will conclude that Vial is to be cut, but until I am certain of that the Pithing Needle does its job very well, as far as I am concerned. A single card from my 60 can turn 4 of theirs into completely dead draws unless they choose to slow themselves down again, creating positive strategic dynamics for Emeria. The risk that they might win the staring contest over whether Needle can name Vial profitably leads me to leave things at one copy until I have confirmed the presence of their artifact, since after I name the backup target of Horizon Canopy, they may literally have no other activated abilities to prevent.
As for Detention Sphere, I think that if I were to play Jund today, I would leave them in post-board and remove the Teferi, Time Raveler and the Settle the Wreckage to bring in the two Celestial Purge, and leave it at that. If I had a better option, I would like to remove the Spheres to avoid giving them tempo/flash plays with Abrupt Decay or Maelstrom Pulse, although I agree that Assassin's Trophy is actually a liability for them. A small additional consideration is that being able to take out Enchantment from the deck after sideboarding reduces the average Tarmogoyf power, but this is more of a luxury than a necessity. As it stands, then, I think things are fine. Having a permanent solution to Jund's non-creature threats is better than a short-term one, but not essential unless it comes at minimal cost to other matchups.
I hope that this explains things a little for you!
I was thrilled to discover, upon waking with a niggling feeling of unease this morning, that this forum has provided me a context to write about W/u Emeria which has led to a better understanding into the nature of my own unconscious selective processes where this deck is concerned. This realization was triggered partly by my most recent conversation with dm3pine (whom I must therefore thank for his questions), and partly by my re-reading of the comments I made which felt incomplete. I would like to share the insight I have gained with you, and I hope it helps you to come to your own conclusions about the strategy I am advocating.
I have previously mentioned that I rarely activate Stoneforge Mystic, effectively using it at every opportunity as a glorified chump blocker that increases the consistency of the mid- and late-game. In particular, even when I tutor the card up, I prefer to hardcast Batterskull post-Wrath. One reason for this is that I expect the lategame to be better for my chances at any rate, a second is that I wish to fill my curve as seamlessly as possible, and yet another is that I do not wish to depend upon a card for survival which could expose me to tempo loss.
Repeating myself again, the strategic viability of Emeria as a deck assumes that playing taplands into Wall of Omens is a good thing to do. Having made that decision and sleeved up the cards for a tournament, it is logically inconsistent to devote deck space to anything that does not play into the expectations that entails. In particular, I mentioned that the deck should not try to "push for a win". To better explain myself, though, this is only true in the deckbuilding sense, where the primary strength of the deck is the reason for its existence strategically. I have consistently good results with Emeria whenever pushing for a win is not necessary, but pairings and incorrect metagame calls are real. As competitors, it is therefore incumbent on us all to try to find avenues to win against our bad matchups. Obviously, in-game I can and will make use of opportunistic paths to victory, and this is where Batterskull is best enabled by the mana cheating ability of Stoneforge Mystic.
Returning to deck theory, this build essentially concedes the early game, dropping its defenses initially, and therefore challenging the opposition to prove that it can kill it before it begins to enact its oppressively consistent and massively redundant lategame. I accept my unavoidable average share of losses on turns 1, 2, and 3 in order to begin a winning fight for the rest of a potentially infinite number of turns afterwards, having built up a minuscule advantage towards an established aim which my plays cannot help but contribute to. Pressing that advantage by relying on the engine of the deck carrying me through to the finish line is my byword, one which involves the assumption that the ensemble of my draw steps will trump whatever flurry of spells they hope to combine at any subsequent point. By playing this deck, I essentially dare opponents to pit the volatility of their best opening hand against the certain knowledge of my every draw step's consistency, and my results seem to bear out the fact that this is a winning gamble overall.
This holistic view gives some justification not only to the inclusion of the "draft chaff", but also to the exclusion of every maindeck card that is considered purely with upside in mind. In my list, I assume the worst-case scenario of "facing a lone attacker empty-handed on an otherwise clear board with six Plains and an Emeria in play" for every card when I draw it, and then I ask myself if it is still worth including. The fail case on Pilgrim's Eye is a colourless 1/1 flier for 3 that puts me ahead another tangible resource, or forces my opponent to trade a card. Both outcomes are acceptable. The fail case on Flickerwisp is an easier to kill Insectile Aberration that adds nothing else. This is irrelevant. In the entire deck as I have built it, in fact, there would only be 5 cards (6 if I assume Crucible of Worlds has no targets) that would be truly dead in that situation. The other five of them are land. Of these, two are Ghost Quarter which eliminate all the others as further blanks the following draw step, and can themselves no longer be bricks if drawn the turn after.
When the whole deck is examined this way, and indeed when I consider the entire deck laid out in front of me in the theoretical exercise of an arbitrarily extended game, the long-term thinking is that during construction I have minimized my fail cases when everything has gone as poorly as it could possibly have gone, and yet I still find myself alive with an active Emeria. If that land was literally the last card I had left to draw, I would draw it, and I would put it into play. Assuming access to my Mistveil Plains, I would reanimate Sun Titan on my next upkeep, return Stoneforge Mystic to play, and before my draw step I would put a Wrath of God or a Settle the Wreckage from my graveyard to the bottom of my (otherwise nonexistent) library. I can and do feel good about my chances of winning any game thereafter. Other than superfluous copies of Flooded Strand once I was out of targets, I could imagine every single other card in my deck to have contributed to getting me to this point, even through the worst-case scenario I mentioned above.
On the long road toward this "every part of the buffalo" approach, the only concession to the opponent comes from the Wrath effects and the Detention Sphere that prompted this rumination. The logic is that the problem of giving this deck more draw steps naturally forces undesirable trades from the opponent, and the two enchantments are the only maindeck cards that might offer more live draws to an empty-handed opponent in dire straits. Removing them where they are at risk of being exploited against me fits into the sideboard desires of such a strategy, which should be designed to ensure that nothing threatens its inevitability, and seek to clamp down on any avenues for opposing strategies to wriggle through the net that such a drawn-out final state implies. Carving out an inexorable path towards this vision in an expanding range of scenarios is the shining beacon by which I guide every inclusion into the 75, and presents one of the top ten most satisfying deckbuilding puzzles I have ever tried to solve. The goal is simply to keep extending the game; to play more Magic. A realistic chance at victory should literally always exist so long as lethal has not been presented from a deck design perspective, and almost every other scenario is left purely up to gamesmanship.
In preparation for a team trios event, I ran my version of the deck through a 4-round Modern tournament, and went 3-1, losing a very hotly contested game one in the finals.
Round one (2-0, 1-0 overall) saw me paired against a Jeskai control player, where he seemed to draw the wrong series of answers against my sequence of threats at every turn. In game one he was forced to Path to Exile my early Stoneforge Mystic, then he had to Detention Sphere the Batterskull when I cast it a few turns later. In game two, he had to Lightning Bolt my Sun Titan twice using Snapcaster Mage, which my Supreme Verdict mopped up when he tried to press a Geist of Saint Traft through. Emeria, the Sky Ruin was active in game 1, and game 2 his double Rest in Peace sat rather anemically in play as I kept casting threats that it could not completely shut off.
A good matchup, especially given that their basic land count is often low enough to make colours an issue through Field of Ruin in the midgame. Be wary of Remand and Spell Queller tempo plays in these colours, but otherwise it should be smooth sailing.
Round 2 (2-1, 2-0 overall) was against U/R Pyromancer Ascension, also running Aria of Flame in the maindeck. His slow start in our first game gave me hope that my Detention Sphere could buy me the time I needed when I caught an Ascension with it, but the Aria he cast the next turn went uncontested for too long as I struggled to resolve a Court Hussar for an answer through multiple Remand. In the second game, I landed a second-turn Stoneforge Mystic, which was joined by another to find the backup Batterskull to keep on the pressure through his Abrade. Remorseful Cleric then landed to cut off a few outs and apply more beatings, then Teferi, Time Raveler bounced his Ascension to remove his last window of opportunity. In game three, he sideboarded into a creature plan with Crackling Drake, Thing in the Ice, and Pteramander, but Celestial Purge, Path to Exile, and Mortarpod were more than up to the task of keeping those under control while a hardcast Batterskull joined a Remorseful Cleric again.
A dangerous matchup, but much more beatable than typical storm, since this version often had to pass the turn after resolving its enchantments. I am not certain if he should have tried the creature plan, since it seemed to give me more outs, but I believe he was trying not to run into Dovin's Veto.
Round 3 (2-1, 3-0 overall) I played against Dredge, who had very bad luck in game 1 by not hitting any payoffs before turn 4, but still managed a kill by finding all his Creeping Chill a turn after I missed on stabilizing the board against his random assortment of creatures. Game two was a similar affair, but with Batterskull and his twin brother on the table, things went a lot better for me and I avoided the necessity of showing my true sideboard plan by finishing him off with Ghost Quarter and Aven Mindcensor to cut out his green mana for the Ancient Grudge lurking in his graveyard to shut off equipment. This became relevant in game three when a timely Remorseful Cleric cut him off of both his Ox of Agonas before he could Escape them. Wit his draws reduced to smaller Dredge turns by the midgame, things went smoothly from then on out.
Once again, Batterskull was excellent against the Dredge strategy, as long as turn 4 and 5 came around without the threat of lethal damage due to speed bumps and sufficient disruption. Still a few tricky calculations to be made getting to that point, but overall very winnable.
A matchup where Emeria's manabase advantage allows for very clear sequencing, I believe this should be a favourable pairing overall. My opponent was extremely deliberate, though, with his turns taking approximately twice as long as mine to play half as many spells, but he was new to the deck or else I would have been more mercenary about guarding against stalling. In a tournament setting, there were three clear points where after I mentioned this to him, I would have had to call over a judge to watch our pace of play.
A fair tournament overall, tying for second place with the Dredge player I had defeated in round 3, and a solid performance both for the deck and for my level of decision-making in real-time. I am looking forward to one more outing on Sunday, especially since I will get to watch Legacy and Pioneer matchups from the B-seat of our table in the team event.
I played my version of the deck again in the team trios event, as I mentioned in my previous post. The turnout was quite modest, so only three rounds, but my team was not able to string together wins evenly enough to take it down. For the record, my 75 for the event:
I have nothing truly groundbreaking to report, since my opponents' plans were mostly marred by inconsistency issues, but as an old-school deckbuilder I take pride in the fact that I had seven opening hands, and all were keepable. It is not a consistent plan against anyone to rely on this fact, but I do take satisfaction when I am essentially up a resource for free on my opposition once every three or four games. Here is a quick breakdown of my results:
ROUND 1 (2-1 Elves) (1-0 overall).
ROUND 2 (2-0 Jund) (2-0 overall).
ROUND 3 (2-0 Ballista Combo) (3-0 overall).
For the majority, these are strategies which I have covered elsewhere, and good matchups in general. I missed a line of play against the Elves opponent that I was very disappointed with throwing away an advantage against, but I won the game in question so it was not a telling mistake, and other than that I was satisfied with my level of focus. The sideboard was solid, but I have no news to report there either, other than the fact that the Mindcensors and extra Equipment felt clean when I wanted to bring them in. Their ultimate value is still in question.
If anyone would like a breakdown of any game in specific, please let me know!
thank you for sharing that tournament report. Congrats on getting second place in one tourney, and your team doing well on another. Added your tournament report to the primer.
looks like Batterskull served you well. I think it's a good alternate win con when people bring in gy removal against Emeria in game 2.
also I notice you're playing the full set of Pilgrim's Eye. Are they doing good work for you?
Hello (The) Fluff, I am glad you found something useful in my tournament reports!
Before I address your points, I want to stress that I often want my opponents to bring in graveyard hate, since the majority of it does not affect the board and therefore increases the chance of lategames (almost every flavour of which are to Emeria's advantage) by polluting the average opposing draws. What does not kill us literally makes our strategy stronger.
Turning to Batterskull, then, as a bridge to Sun Titan the card has several weaknesses when compared directly to its closest rivals (which are led, in my opinion, by Geist-Honored Monk). It is worse at stabilizing on turns 5+6+7, though as a small compensation it does get slightly better after that, particularly after turn 10. It also provides less pressure by being a slower midgame clock (the Monk and its tokens typically hit for 7 or more damage on the first combat step they contribute to). It cannot deal with fliers under most circumstances, is vulnerable to otherwise awkward spot removal in several important tempo situations, does not turn on Mistveil Plains, and it allows clean sideboarding for those who have solid proactive artifact disruption.
To offset these concerns it does bring a few positive attributes, chief among them being much more consistent access to lifegain, buying extra turns and sometimes shutting down midgame outs, and not being cleanly opposed on an empty board by a single Plague Engineer or Orzhov Pontiff. It is also much better at setting up and leaving value through Wrath of God, forcing overextension while buffering life totals before a sweeper. This value is also extremely cleanly wedded to the deck's assumption of an increasingly strong lategame starting on turn 8, since if an active Emeria, The Sky ruin is not yet available the beginning of turn-8 inevitability is now complemented by the mana situation required to cast and then bounce the Equipment.
Since these considerations do not by themselves outweigh the downsides of the card, the real value of its inclusion is actually tied to the deck's hunger for an alternative card-advantageous 2-drop to complement Wall of Omens. Stoneforge Mystic takes the cake here over such clearly lacklustre alternatives as Lone Missionary and Charming Prince, and maximizing the early portion of the curve must take precedence over anything sequenced after the 4-mana "sweeper" turn. Though clearly inferior to the Wall since it cannot hunt for an all-important land drop, its role being able to search for different equipment effectively makes it a modal spell, which expands the range of keepable hands in the dark and can push key advantages across the gamut of matchups. The boost in consistency the Kor Artificer provides, unsupported, on turn two after a tapland, is a massive upgrade clearly worth making concessions for.
In combination, the two cards often make sideboarding decisions a little more difficult, but compensate for it by combining effectively to gain free wins against stumbling opponents in a fashion that does not have to sacrifice the lategame, very quickly threatening a serious advantage when exploiting tactical openings. Operationally, I actively try to avoid this plan because this is an avenue which should never be relied upon, but the option to break sequencing has won me a few games games against mulligans from uninteractive strategies or bad matchups. In addition, extra access to Mortarpod can be a crippling blow against certain matchups, and the potential activation of the Mystic effectively masks Settle the Wreckage while giving an incentive for the types of attacks that card preys on.
When it comes to Pilgrim's Eye, I will refer you back to first the advice about turns leading up to the fourth land drop mentioned in the second paragraph above this one, and then to my first posts in this thread in the middle of page 65 and my subsequent defense of the card when pressed for more detail in the page(s) afterward. It does everything I am trying to do - guarantee land number 4, chump block, provide card advantage or attrition, and enable Titan and Emeria while harassing Planeswalkers - and it does it all without asking for any setup other than three colourless mana. In my hundreds (approaching thousands) of matches with this archetype, I can remember only three or four in which I ever trimmed the card after sideboarding once I had moved to the full playset in the maindeck. If it is not good, it is almost certain that Wall of Omens is not good, which means that Emeria is probably not in a good position and I have made an incorrect metagame call. Conversely, when Emeria's strategy is viable, Pilgrim's Eye is the best and most consistent enabler currently available at 3 mana.
I agree that Batterskull is a good bridge on getting to our titan.
As for Pilgrim's Eye and Mortarpod. They are cards used since the birth of the deck in Standard so many years ago. At one point, they were considered obsolete.. then I saw them make a comeback in the list that reached top 4, and now I see you making good use of them. I guess they can still be useful on the deck. Mortarpod even has synergy with the sfm in your build.
And lastly, you seem to have played against Dredge a good bit. I'm in the process of updating the primer. If you want.. you can write a short summary on how to play against Dredge. I will include it in the matchups section, and credit you as the contributor.
For the record, the pilot of "the list that made the top 4" was actually me, and the tournament report you have featured is coincidentally from the same Open tournament a year later. Other than the fact that I wish the equip ability could be instant-speed sometimes, I have absolutely no complaints about Mortarpod, and I have played up to four in the maindeck before Stoneforge Mystic was yet available, with only minor regrets.
Just to clarify, the main point of my last post was intended to say that although Batterskull is, as you say, a good bridge to Sun Titan, it is actually not the best option when considered on its own. If you choose not to run Stoneforge Mystic, I think that Geist-Honored Monk is by far a better use of the slot, followed closely by Gideon Jura, whose easy mono-white casting costs put both a clear step ahead of the next best option in Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. After these I put all of the other 5-drops on roughly even footing whether it be Archon of Justice, Angel of Sanctions, Angel of Invention, Lavinia of the Tenth, or another strong defensive stabilizing play that can serve as a finisher in games you do not draw the Titan. I have not personally tested Cavalier of Dawn here, but because the ETB trigger can pressure fliers or Planeswalkers while having 7 power worth of synergy with Wall of Omens and recursion, plus the fact that the LTB might provide card advantage, it may be one of the top 3 best options here as well.
The list you have on the front page is a reasonable one, I have gone 6-1 in games played with it since I made my most recent changes, but the Aven Mindcensor and the Shadowspear numbers are purely speculative because it has been long since I have had time for rigorous playtesting. In the dark, I would replace those three cards by a mix of the effects that I have had direct personal experience with in the sideboard flex slots: one or two Glen Elendra Archmage, plus a Stonecloaker, and/or a Sorcerer's Spyglass. I will send this message to the address you listed above.
As for your offer of writing a Dredge breakdown, I would be happy to, and it will follow this post within 24 hours.
Matchups and sideboarding section. I removed the guides how to play vs. Scaled Affinity, Arclight Phoenix, and Hollow One. Because those decks are not to be found much anymore in modern. I still have the guides about them saved, in case those decks come back.
I also moved how to play against Amulet Titan guide to the top of the matchups section, because Amulet is a tier 1 deck right now.
As promised, here are my thoughts on the Dredge matchup currently:
The way that Dredge is played as of the printing of Ox of Agonas makes the pre-sideboarded games difficult, but currently winnable. If Emeria can manage to take game one, the matchup is excellent, and the sideboarded games bring enough improvement that winning games two and three is still a legitimate plan. For game one, then, the key factor is up to what kind of permanent advantage their deck can threaten before the third land hits the table on either side. This more or less means Narcomoeba or Bloodghast enabling some number of Prized Amalgam to attack on or before turn three. Their deck is very consistent, so Wall of Omens or Path to Exile will almost certainly be required to keep pace with their average draws, and multiple of these backed up by Detention Sphere might be necessary just to stay in the game against their better Dredges. The bad news is that their very best sequences are literally overwhelming on the play, but these are extremely rare (3+ Amalgams in play on turn 2, for example). Compounding this issue is that Creeping Chill and Conflagrate go from almost totally useless in their early phase to outright stealing games in their later angles, either by turning on the haste on Bloodghast when stabilization is near at hand, or by representing literal lethal damage.
The good news is that the vast majority of games will involve the two halves of their deck (the permanent advantages and the reach) being drawn as a mixture, which brings things safely into Emeria's bread-and-butter midrange grasp. This is a matchup where situational awareness is very important, since the way their graveyard is set up makes life total vary from almost completely irrelevant to critical. When they have no board state but a full graveyard and access to a land for their turn, using Ghost Quarter on your own fetchlands or Path to Exile on your own creatures can be winning plays if they keep you above 10 life, but the same play could set you back a crucial resource if their graveyard is lacklustre and the game appears to be going long. Mortarpod is a very important role-player here, since it can chump-block an Amalgam while pinging their x-1's, and Pilgrim's Eye should also block aggressively, making Sun Titan value infrequently meaningful while the sorcery-speed sweepers can sometimes reset their Amalgams to good effect, but none of these are where the real battle is fought.
The best cards, the ones which Court Hussar and Wall of Omens are digging to find as soon as possible, are Stoneforge Mystic or the real heavy hitters in Batterskull and Settle the Wreckage. Since it preserves whatever pressure Emeria has managed to muster by being one-sided, the mass exile effect is frequently devastating, and a premium should be placed on recycling it with Mistveil Plains before a shuffle effect if it has already been cast once. Where the equipment is concerned, it is extremely difficult for Dredge's creatures to beat a 4/4 vigilant lifelinker on most boards, and they will often be forced to spend their Conflagrate on it just to get back to even footing. Due to Dredge cards quickly replacing explosive plays in their hand by the nature of how their strategy functions, the later game will favour Emeria more and more, but although Emeria, the Sky Ruin does still sometimes matter, it is frequently the case that the game is over (either for better or for worse) before it can trigger profitably.
Life From the Loam makes it tricky (although not impossible) to attack their manabase, but its more important function is to build up cards in hand for their 7-12 point Conflagrate as a finishing blow, which - barring odd Dredge circumstances - they will always have two Basic Mountains to fuel. Harassing their green sources is therefore the primary goal of Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter, but Crucible of Worlds is almost completely irrelevant before this happens, and I often abandon this plan outright as soon as two ways to find Green mana are available. Post-board, they can sometimes have a Blast Zone, which is usually a more relevant target in any case. WARNING: always make certain you have a plan for Bloodghast every time you think about giving Dredge a free landfall trigger.
During sideboarding, I remove the Crucible, the four Wrath effects, the Teferi and and one Emeria to bring in three Remorseful Cleric, two Celestial Purge, a Lavinia, Azorius Renegade and a Lone Missionary. Their only important gains are made by trimming a mixture of cards (typically starting with one or two Creeping Chill) to gain access to Ancient Grudge and maybe Nature's Claim. The Grudges are a concession to the power of Batterskull to close the door on their lategame, so the Missionary and the Lavinia join the party to help with controlling Conflagrate. Purge is essentially a better Path to Exile for stopping early Amalgam aggression, and also breaks free of any potential Leyline of the Void or Magus of the Moon once the game is well in hand.
Apart from these subtleties, the play patterns are virtually identical between maindeck and sideboard games except that both players are better prepared. This is excellent for Emeria, since their deck does not significantly improve. On the other side of things we gain a much higher density of relevant draws, plus the ability to interact with the graveyard in Remorseful Cleric, which can often be brought back with Sun Titan as a crippling soft-lock typically set up soon enough to matter. The timing on the first Cleric activation requires situational awareness once again, but the threat sitting in play is already enough to slow games down a great deal for them. Equip it with Mortarpod whenever possible to play around Darkblast, and watch for potential Lightning Axe, but the Spirit is frequently the nail in the coffin (Sorry!) allowing Emeria to win comfortably given a nominal amount of pressure.
To be clear, I have not done more than theorycraft the mono-white list I described, so everything I say relating to cards unique to it should not be worth one tenth of what your actual experience counts for. That being said, when a sample hand generator spat out a sequence in which Flickerwisp had nothing to blink by turn 3, I immediately dropped the card again to put in the third maindeck Hour of Revelation, which I wanted to enable more often anyway.
Other things which random goldfish samples seem more positive on are the fact that The birth of Meletis gives multiple permanents for the "city's Blessing" discount on Hour, and the fact that the manabase is as pure as the driven snow on the basics which it should optimally be running. (Arcum's Astrolabe or Chained to the Rocks are at least an option when you have Snow lands, and there are other synergies that these open up post-board.) This aside brings up a question: has anyone tried a manabase using only duals and Arcum's Astrolabe to enable their splash? This could allow several versions of the deck to eliminate the heinous necessary evil of a non-Plains basic land. The immediate problem I foresee is that the deck equity required is significant, but perhaps the gain in velocity compensates.
To your next point, Brought Back is an objectively inconsistent effect, probably best considered by imagining a double Renegade Rallier trigger with a far worse fail-case, but this version has enough card advantage built into its permanents that I believe the list can support at least one copy. The questions, as always, are then how much it can do on average, and specifically what it can do against a given opponent.
The problem of a multiple non-Plains curve with two or more Emeria which you alluded to is truly one of the great regrettable anti-synergies of any variant, but when I conceived the deck it was with the idea of replacing the Wraths at 4-mana with a full set of Solemn Simulacrum in addition to one or two Burnished Hart, which were progressively trimmed as the low end of the curve grew to support Flickerwisp and Charming Prince earlier in the game. I had hoped that these would enable the full playset of Emeria, The Sky Ruin, in addition to the curve not requiring untapped sources as much on turns 4 and 5, but I agree that the default position of 3 copies has essentially been cemented by this exercise as well, in my mind.
In a more serious point of discussion, I would strongly challenge your definition of Ranger-Captain of Eos as being "irreplaceable", on three counts. First, what are the decks (if any) that the card beats on its own? We are not talking about interactions with other cards, Sun Titan and Emeria loops being win-more circumstances which offer an extra 5-10% in "locks" when we would clearly be "winning the game" 80% of the time without them regardless. Second, I hope that you will agree with me when I say that the card comes with severe implications for the curve. Not only is he a 3-drop in one of the most hotly contested slots in the colour, he also demands more card equity at the 1-mana end of the spectrum, which comes with certain compromises attached (Thraben Inspector being sub-optimal to devote control deck space towards). Third, his body and utility are far more useful and relevant when backing up more consistent pressure, which warps the game away from the strengths of the namesake card of this deck. My experience is that when I am trying to manage the board, he either attacks and blocks, OR he is used as a situational pseudo-counterspell, forcing another card to be drawn and asking more of the deck in a bad situation. In either case, his "value" over other options is completely dependent on the narrow 1-drop he is able to tutor up, which then depends on the ability to cast and use THAT card effectively. As a final point, he plays quite poorly with Wrath of God, and cannot be relied upon to answer problems long-term, which eats up even more space in the 75 to support him. He does buy a turn against combo, which is a real advantage, but to me this makes his position much more reliably valuable when brought in as part of a plan when those decks are guaranteed, to substitute directly for the Day of Judgement effect when it is dead. In order not to be close-minded, I will concede the validity of his maindeck inclusion as a metagame call, but more generally I think all these points combine such that the Ranger-Captain of Eos should be seen much more frequently as a sideboard card).
Curiously enough, your question about Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Walking Ballista seems to bring up an advantageous intersection of the dynamics that Ranger-Captain of Eos provides. Being two devotion on his own that can disappear at a moment's notice, he is already worthy of consideration if making use of the lower right hand side of your legendary enchantment creature appeals to you, but he also tutors up the other half of the combo on his ETB, and could possibly sacrifice himself in response to his own trigger to prevent interaction before the Walking Ballista even enters your hand. This would disguise your intentions against unprepared opponents, or defeat a Kolaghan's Command from a savvy one. The pressure he applies might already draw some of the flak away from the major pieces on its own, and Heliod gains a target for his activated ability in regular games, but his protection ability is obviously a much greater advantage in a shell looking to kill in a single turn. There is definitely something there, particularly if you want to build a version that curves up from a tutorable Giver of Runes to Lumithread Field to make the combo more mana-efficient since Ballista for X=1 could now represent lethal with a Heliod in play. The 2/2 Morph might even be useful in assisting the Ranger-Captain beatdown. This is an entirely different deck, though, and Emeria has nothing to offer such a strategy.
Thank you for the questions, and please tell me if your experience with Ranger-captain has differed from mine in some significant way!
-Stéphane Gérard
To answer your questions chronologically, I can see your hesitation with Flickerwisp as if it does not have a target to blink the card is bad. Three redeeming qualities in the unlikely eventuality that you have no targets of your own to blink, It is a 3/1 flying creature which ends games quickly, and you can blink troublesome permeants your opponents control. Things like Ensnaring Bridge, a blocker, or an opposing planeswalker about to ultimate. It can also be recurred with a Sun Titan to create a loop.
Your experience with a sample hand generator is subjective, but with my build running the numbers through a hypergeometric calculator their is a %89.5 chance of having a permanent to flicker by turn three on the play and a %92.5 of it on the play.
Population Size - 60 (cards in deck)
Sample Size - 8 to 9 (7 in the opener plus an additional 1 - 2 drawsteps)
Successes in Population - 14 (4 Thraben Inspector, 3 Birth of Meletis, 3 Charming Prince, 4 Wall of Omens)
Successes in Sample - 1
Honestly, I would question any hand kept without a permanent played before turn three and likely mulligan that hand. In addition, even so you don't have to cast Flickerwisp on curve and have the option wait until draw into a permanent to blink. You're right though, it's not good on it's own and that's why I tend to sideboard all of them out in matches like GDS or Jund which involving copious amounts of hand disruption and removal.
To answer your suggestion regarding Chained to the Rocks, or what I'm assuming you meant On Thin Ice I like the card and have played it in the past. However I wouldn't want to play On Thin Ice and Hour of Revelation in the same 60, I tested with On Thin Ice and have played them both in the 75. I feel like it's good in specific scenario's in specific matchups and can act as a fifth Path to exile effect. For example I liked it in the on turn two on the draw against a Dark Confidant or Goblin Electromancer as it denied them the additional resources Path to Exile would have given but dealt with a must kill threat.
As for Arcum's Astrolabe I'm not sure if anyone in the community has really tested it before and I can't deny it usefulness. I would need to test it but would personally rather max out on another synergistic permeant like Charming Prince or Birth of Meletis before I played the first Arcum's Astrolabe.
I want to make it clear I have no problem with Brought Back, I've played it in the past and it's been good to me. The games I ran away with using it were when I had it early and was able to use Brought Back to recur double fetchland early in the game. That said the surprise factor of recurring a permeant your opponent thought was dealt with is also game breaking.
I think that we'll just have to disagree about Ranger-Captain of Eos, to answer what matchups it's essential in.
UW Control
- Having it will allow you to not only provide pressure and accrue card advantage via Thraben Inspector but play around countermagic and allowing resolving an essential threat like Sun Titan which will take over the game.
Dredge
- It's very difficult for them to kill us in combat after we've established a board presence and RCoE can tutor a Kami of False Hope but in game one you will die to a Conflagrate without it looping.
Tron
- This sequence has won me many games, turn 3 activate Field of Ruin, turn 4 cast RCoE and tutor for Hope of Ghirapur, Turn 6 cast Sun Titan. Essentially FoR into RCoE into Sun Titan, you only need 3 cards one of which is a land.
Storm
- I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to explain, in game one unless your opponent is extraordinarily unlucky and you have a fast clock you will die without Ranger-Captain of Eos.
It's also good but not essential against most aggressive or midrange styles.
In regards to the Heliod, Walking Ballista combo, I don't think I'd be prepared to play a card like Lumithread Field to facilitate it. I do like the idea of a backdoor combo but with two pieces that are individually powerful on their own. I was thinking 1 - 2 heliod and a ballista
Thanks for the considered response, I appreciate it.
First off, I would like to clarify that the Mono-White list I posted was not intended as a serious contender, but to illustrate a few concepts. The hand with Flickerwisp in question was something like 3 land, a Path to Exile, a Winds of Abandon, and a Sun Titan. If I had that opener in a tournament, I would have kept the hand with a Wall of Omens or The Birth of Meletis instead of the Wisp. I completely understand that the odds are strongly against this occurring, as I mentioned in my minimum cutoff numbers for even including it, but I believe that the fact that it even has a "fail case" at all is a massive point against it. The fact that people can and do interact in Modern should be a strength for Emeria's attrition plan, and not a weakness. As to your other arguments for it, they are all valid, and I have situational experiences in which I appreciated the effect the card provides, but none dovetail from or into the plan that emphasizes the strength of Emeria, the Sky Ruin. As an attitudinal argument, I am particularly (almost obsessively) risk-averse when it comes to control decks that I intend to play against the highest level of competition, particularly when I have no access to countermagic. This is my breaking point, and if your attitude differs you will likely have wins that I will never achieve, but my strength (if I can be said to have one) has always been deck construction. Please take that for whatever it means when I say that, as far as I am concerned, Flickerwisp costs games overall. I am not willing to allow that the best players will keep hands where a 3-mana 3/1, backed up by no significant disruption, will carry enough game wins to matter in a format where Arclight Phoenix exists as a metagame threat beginning on turn 1.
On a different note, thank you for catching me on Chained to the Rocks, that was indeed meant to be On thin Ice, and I agree wholesale with your subsequent analysis of it. We appear to have had similar experiences with Brought Back as well, experiences which I might add were made slightly more rosy when considering self-sacrificing creatures, but which ultimately amounted to a moderately playable card with memorably impressive blowout potential. I also generally agree where the theoretical applications of Arcum's Astrolabe are concerned, but I might have to assume the question is still valid until we can get the impressions of someone who has actually tried it.
For the Walking Ballista combo deck, that was again in a speculative alternative list. If someone would like to discuss it, I would suggest a new thread be started to workshop things, and in that vein I would start with the simplest manabase and see what other colours brought to the table over the following:
3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
1 Thalia, Heretic Cathar
1 Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit
3 Kitchen Finks
1 Hope of Ghirapur
1 Karn, Scion of Urza
1 Elspeth Conquers Death
1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch
1 Mox Amber
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Legion's Landing
2 Lumithread Field
1 Giver of Runes
1 Hidden Dragonslayer
4 Ranger-captain of Eos
4 Heliod, Sun-Crowned
4 Board the Weatherlight
3 Path to Exile
1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1 Eiganjo Castle
1 Gemstone Caverns
1 Boseiju, Who shelters All
1 Hall of Heliod's Generosity
1 Inventors' Fair
1 Miren, The Moaning Well
1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1 Hall of the Bandit Lord
8 Plains
There are several synergies here which will ultimately be irrelevant in the long-term, but deserve at least provisional assessment. Most of these were included almost exclusively to enable Board the Weatherlight to look for mana or other payoffs when it can't find combo pieces, and so if anyone has other high-value Artifacts they wish to suggest, this would be a good place to start. Looking into the disruptive, resilient, or aggressive legendary subsection of the "Historic" synergies, other options for mono-white might include Shalai, Voice of Plenty, Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle, Hokori, Dust Drinker, Linvala, Keeper of Silence, Celestial Kirin, Eight-and-a-half-Tails, Godsend, Shadowspear, Isamaru, hound of Konda, Rhys the Redeemed, and Kytheon, Hero of Akros.
Getting back to the meat and potatoes of this thread (W/u), I appreciate your finer analysis on Ranger-Captain of Eos. With specific examples to work with, this is the kind of debate that it is both useful and productive to have.
Against U/W control, then, the pressure you speak of is much less relevant than the clocks they are designed to deal with, and the body onThraben Inspector is essentially an annoyance against them which they can safely ignore until a chain of Cryptic Command protects - or clears the path for - whatever finisher they choose to run with. In addition, the interaction with countermagic is simply better covered by Teferi, Time Raveler, in my opinion, and the eventual ability to have a Titan in play is a power which Emeria grants us passively in the matchup already. I think that the card is fine here, but not a telling advantage, and can sometimes be irrelevant.
Where Dredge is concerned, you make my point for me. Dredge will almost always see as much of its library as it wants to against Emeria in game 1, and so I thank you for not ducking the question when you say that it cannot fully stop Conflagrate on its own pre-board. I agree. They will generally win through it, which means that the Ranger-Captain of Eos is not a significant advantage until after sideboarding, or paired with a meta call, which is in fact what I see the card as best for (as per my previous post).
For Tron, the sequence you showed is a good one, and I do not doubt that it has won you games, but the Hope of Ghirapur is once again stronger as a sideboard card. On top of that, they can still trump or break out of your disruption by having creatures such as Wurmcoil Engine, World Breaker, or even Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger if they re-establish Tron. My advice is to focus on winning the games where you can shut off their mana advantage, which can be done without Ranger-Captain. Your inclusion of the card gives you a possibly relevant line of play, and it is my turn to concede a little by admitting that the creatures I mentioned are far easier to deal with than their Planeswalkers and Oblivion Stone, but will this speculative advantage win you a match? Even if you get your multiple card sequence off without a hitch, there is no guarantee that it will. Perhaps I am wrong, though, and I promise to write a retraction admitting my error if you can tell me that you feel happy to be paired against Urza's Power Plant.
Where Storm is concerned, I agree wholeheartedly that I will die almost every time without access to Ranger-Captain of Eos. This is absolutely the case, but my question is whether you feel that you generally will not, even should you draw it. First, they can kill you before you resolve it. Unlikely, but especially possible on the draw. Second, they can interact with it through countermagic and/or Lightning Bolt if they have access to those. Third, It is my experience that a good pilot will be able to kill you through a single soft Orim's Chant effect regardless, since whenever they threaten to kill you, you are forced to give them more time by losing a chunk of your pressure. The Sun Titan lock is real, but their Remand is turned on whenever you Silence their turn out of respect for the combo, so your attempting to cast him will frequently lead to the lone open turn they need to kill you. I think that the Strip Mine lock from Path to Exile and Ghost Quarter is a 10% plan - the opportunity for which must sometimes be given up on to cast the 3/3 Human Soldier in the first place - but if yours is a 30% plan it comes (as you say) at a cost in the midrange matchups. Similar to my previous statement on Tron, if you find that the pairing is favourable I will admit that there is a chance I am wrong, but the bottom line here is that again the Ranger-Captain of Eos guarantees nothing game-breaking unless we are already in the realm of corner cases.
If you believe these are the places that the card has the most value in, I would say that my attitude is unchanged towards its inclusion unless you can show that it is, in fact, the unfailing panacea that Gideon of the Trials was once hoped to be in at least two of these four matchups. Otherwise, I believe you are spending mana on a card that does not necessarily buy a turn, does not necessarily draw a card, and does not necessarily make your opponent incapable of interacting. The card has a purely average fail case (and even worse than that given my attitude), does these things intermittently at best, and takes up deck space and card equity to do so. I do not deny that its abilities can win, but to my way of thinking it simply doesn't change the fact that if these decks are dominating your metagame, I would still suggest to a friend that they pilot a different strategy. If they are in a midrange metagame, or if the pairings simply run that way, I would maintain that advising them to adopt Ranger-Captain of Eos will be to their detriment overall.
Thank you again for your help and passion, I hope these issues are worth the time we are spending.
-Stéphane Gérard
For Ranger-Captain of Eos, I was thinking we were talking about a strictly mono white build. Some of the biggest draws towards UW variant in Emeria are the inclusion of countermagic and Teferi, Time Raveler. I also agree with you, in the control matchup if I had to choose between the two TTR is the one I'd pick. However, I have to quasi disagree with you about Thraben Inspctor. The reason is because while you are right in that it is an annoyance that will get swept away by a wrath or a cryptic chain, I think that you are undervaluing the amount of that annoyance. I've played both on the side of stock UW control and W(x) Emeria. Control players don't like using a card to 1 for 1 with an annoyance that has already drawn a card, especially when said annoyance comes down early and has already chipped damage. A single Thraben Inspector can make up the bulk of my damage in a control matchup (7 - 8) before my opponents deal with it using a wrath effect. It got to the point where my friend at a local LGS who often piloted UW control would jokingly say they'd concede if I revealed a hand with three Thraben Inspector.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent and going back to RCoE. In control matchups card advantage matters, lets say I have a RCoE I play it and it gets me a Thraben Inspector. It has now cantripped and if my opponent removes this threat on a 1 for 1 basis they'll likely have 2 for 1 themselves because their spot removal won't draw a card. I play Thraben Inspector, if they remove this on a 1 for 1 basis as well they have now spent 2 cards to deal with my single RCoE, and I have a clue. If I crack that clue, I can safely say that my one card, RCoE, has drawn two cards if my opponent has spent 2 cards to deal with it that's a potential 4 card swing.
Obviously a good control opponent will likely not spend 2 pieces of spot removal and instead wait for a wrath effect. However if we're assuming competence we have apply it equally. In that we assume the Emeria player will also not play into a wrath effect and use RCoE to disrupt the opponent at key intervals. Those being utilizing it's ability to disrupt the opponent at the most opportune time, i.e. when the opponent is setting up to cast a Teferi, Hero of Domenaria or to play around countermagic. I think your undervaluing the importance of looping RCoE with Emeria, the Sky Ruin in those matchups too, because games often go so long we often see the majority of our deck in game one.
Moving on,
I'm not sure what point I made for you in regards to the dredge matchup, can you clarify? My point was that game one is pointless without RCoE because Conflagrate will eventually kill after you've established a strong board presence. The only way you don't die is to continually sacrifice a Ranger-Captain of Eos on upkeep via looping with a Sun Titan or Emeria, the Sky Ruin because their Conflagrate is sorcery speed. I have done this, and it's relatively easy to pull off, it turns a matchup were you in game one you're %0 into a roughly even one.
As for Tron your right, Hope of Ghirapur is a sideboard card. I was attempting to highlight the utility of RCoE, replace HoG with either an additional Field of Ruin or Ranger-Captain of Eos for game one. Tron is dance, we need to apply early pressure backed by disruption. You're right that they have still have trump creatures in World Breaker, or even Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, usually 1 - 2 of each but I have very rarely lost because my opponent cast a Wurmcoil Engine. This is because either 1) I'll have exile based removal, 2) I'll have flying creatures to attack over for lethal, or 3) I'll transition into a defensive role and focus on disruption, i.e. block and use FoR and RCoE until you can cast a Sun Titan to recur either. Or have just have an active Emeria to recur Ranger-Captain of Eos and cut them off of key threats like Oblivion Stone, Ugin, the Sprit Dragon, and Karn Liberated. All of those cards are harder to interact with and recover from than World Breaker or Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and also make up around 9 - 10 cards as opposed to 3 - 4. To answer your question, yes I am happy when paired against an opponent playing Urza's Power Plant. That could be due in no small part because I have a high degree of familiarity and am comfortable in that matchup.
I have made my point with combo and you agree so there's no point debating that but I will concede that a good combo player will likely be able to take better lines and thus maintain a higher win percentage. This still means that by slowing them down and forcing them adapt to these line of play you are still buying yourself an extra .5 to 2 turns to kill them.
To answer your question regarding a Ghost Quarter or Field of Ruin lock, it is not a reasonable plan against storm in my experience. I have done it but it takes time because your opponent plays basic lands. Meaning you need a GQ specifically (which has seen consistently less play in our archetype since the printing of FoR, usually a 1 - 2 of). What I'm saying is that I often need too much to go right.
If we assume that my storm opponent plays 4 basic lands and consistently only has 1 - 2 non-basic lands in play when we begin our plan and makes no further land drops, this means that it will still take a total of 5 - 6 turns before we can start actually denying them recourses. You can half that if you take them off a single color specifically but remember that they still have accessManamorphose to color fix. The reason why this is a bad strategy against storm is because it needs a long time to set up and our opponents need so little mana in to go off b/c of their rituals.
The games where I have used this strategy to success are when I've already disrupted my opponent to the point where we've entered the late game and both of us have stagnated and are drawing air. I think you should still utilize this strategy because every percentage point matters but I don't rely on it as a primary game plan.
I don't find Storm to be a fun matchup, and I am not happy to see it but that's mainly because only one player taking game actions for the majority of our time with little to no interaction isn't fun for me. From what I remember RCoE helped a lot, in the sense that it turned one of our worst matchups into a much better one. If you look back in the thread archive date from when RCoE was released you may be able to find an unbiased write up comparing the before and after.
We don't agree with Ranger-Captain of Eos and that's okay, this will actually help a lot by forcing us to remain objective and not give in to complacency. It also means that with both of us adopting different play styles towards Emeria we'll be able to trail blaze into different lines of play, and hopefully post about it. Which is very useful when trying to discover new cards or strategies.
Thanks for all of your imput, I'm glad to see it and your dedication to this thread!
I am very glad you chose to focus on the value this argument brings towards continually re-evaluating our own biases. This is a huge part of maintaining competitive relevance, being able to identify relative weaknesses and strengths to adapt to the pressures of new cards and metagame shifts. I am happy to be working on this issue with you as well!
For the record, this is the list that I would, in fact, recommend beginning to test if I were preparing for a GP at the moment:
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Pilgrim's Eye
3 Court Hussar
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
2 Batterskull
3 Sun Titan
3 Mortarpod
2 Detention Sphere
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Supreme Verdict
1 Wrath of God
1 Settle the Wreckage
4 Path to Exile
7 Plains
3 Field of Ruin
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Prairie Stream
1 Island
1 Mistveil Plains
4 Flooded Strand
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Remorseful Cleric
2 Aven Mindcensor
1 Damping Sphere
1 Lone Missionary
1 Lavinia, Azorius Renegade
2 Pithing Needle
2 Celestial Purge
1 Blessed Alliance
1 Disenchant
1 Aura of Silence
For clarity, the deck that you would be willing to defend as a candidate list for a GP is this one, as far as I can tell:
(Marinojuk's Mono-White)
4 Thraben Inspector
3 Charming Prince
4 Wall of Omens
4 Flickerwisp
4 Ranger-Captain of Eos
3 Sun Titan
4 Path to Exile
2 Winds of Abandon
2 Wrath of God
2 Hour of Revelation
3 The Birth of Meletis
2 Blast Zone
3 Emeria, the Sky Ruin
4 Field of Ruin
15 Snow-Covered Plains
1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
1 Hope of Ghirapur
4 Remorseful Cleric
2 Stony Silence
2 Damping Sphere
1 Sorcerous Spyglass
2 Generous Gift
1 Crucible of Worlds
You will note that my list includes no counterspells whatsoever. As I have stated in a previous post in the middle of page 65 of this thread, I believe that given the presence of Veil of Summer, the only strategically viable countermagic for this deck is Glen Elendra Archmage.
Back into the battle of ideas, then! Here is the top placing recent list according to MTGgoldfish, which has been suggested elsewhere as a good standard. If you have no objections, I will proceed on the assumption that future discussion of the matchup takes this list as the default we are playing against.
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Narset, Parter of Veils
2 Teferi, Time Raveler
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
4 Opt
4 Path to Exile
2 Spell Snare
1 Dovin's Veto
2 Mana Leak
1 Winds of Abandon
1 Archmage's Charm
3 Force of Negation
1 Timely Reinforcements
2 Cryptic Command
2 Supreme Verdict
1 Detention Sphere
1 Blast Zone
1 Castle Vantress
3 Celestial Colonnade
4 Field of Ruin
4 Flooded Strand
1 Glacial Fortress
2 Hallowed Fountain
5 Island
1 Mystic Sanctuary
2 Plains
2 Celestial Purge
2 Disdainful Stroke
2 Rest in Peace
1 Stony Silence
1 Ashiok, Dream Render
2 Monastery Mentor
1 Mystical Dispute
1 Timely Reinforcements
1 Baneslayer Angel
Your points about the Thraben Inspector dynamics against U/W control against average opposition can be safely discounted if we wish to focus on the games that actually matter for winning tournaments. Setting those aside, then, let us speak of the card in the context of Ranger-Captain of Eos against a well-prepared and intelligent opponent. In the first place, the 3-mana play lines up poorly with their countermagic, so it is not impossible that the value will not even become a factor, but let us assume that you resolve the card. Your 1/2 body comes at a cost of W, and your clue comes at the cost of 2. Their equivalent play is Snapcaster mage into Opt, which they cannot break into two turns, but comes 100% at instant-speed. This is a clean exchange, but leaves them at advantage generally because of its higher power dictating the better trading options, and its flexibility better addressing the nature of your threats.
You present threats only at sorcery speed, and your curve requires you to be playing much more aggressively as a stance, plus because of the presence of Thraben Inspector, Flickerwisp, Charming Prince, and Ranger-Captain of Eos your density of non-cantrip threats leaves you essentially compelled to be the one pushing to end the game, so that you do not expose your value plays to interaction. The 4 Field of Ruin on either side essentially wash clean on both sides, leaving manabase advantage to them in the mid and late game by +1 threat. Your Emeria recursion will be much stronger than these effects, though they will be coming online later and suspect in general due to the presence of Wasteland effects overall, but also because of your two Blast Zone counting against Emeria when you draw them. Let us try to approach clarity by assuming their card selection is better on average. Whether their land that survives after the dust settles in the midgame is a Celestial Colonnade or a Castle Vantress, your Thraben Inspector will soon begin to be outclassed, and if I allow even a full 10 damage to have happened to them by turn 5 between poking and their manabase, they are still in great position to start threatening a small Planeswalker + removal or countermagic, and using card selection every time they feel able to start digging for Supreme Verdict or other relevant resources.
Their gameplan is now to use these cheap permanent sources of advantage to distract from their life total while they build up to either Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria plus protection, untapping into a sweeper the next turn. Sacrificing the Ranger-Captain of Eos is very difficult to time correctly here, and will often be good news for them even if it does stop the play you were looking to stop. You are working blind, and without using the Ranger-captain liberally they have full control over the stack, plus occasional Vendilion Clique peeks at your hand and Timely Reinforcements being live to stabilize whenever time is to be bought.
I do not see where in the optimal pressure-reliant sequences you are finding time to crack clues. This is a case where your tempo advantage is so powerfully dictated by your deck design that taking the time to sacrifice 2 mana for a card with no other effect is difficult to do during the turns where you want them to interact with you most, and leads to opportunities for them to get ahead on efficiency. I much prefer the W/u Emeria list's consistency, because Mortarpod, Teferi, Time Raveler, andCrucible of Worlds punish or pressure their plays much more severely. Additionally, the Emerias are turned on with a greater ease. The Batterskull package is real as well, and the cheapness of Stoneforge Mystic and Mortarpod control loyalty while combining with a smoother curve to threaten any tapouts, turning Wall of Omens into a significant body, and getting Emeria, the Sky Ruin online more effectively. Exposing cards to Wrath of God is much more of a choice here as well, and Detention Sphere is a clean answer to their single Teferi, Hero of Dominaria when an extra Ghost Quarter effect can control their Blast Zone.
Against Dredge, the point was that the deck would hurt you enough with chip damage and Creeping Chill that Conflagrate would kill you if you didn't draw the Ranger-Captain of Eos, and would probably still do so unless you drew specifically Sun Titan, which leaves you open to lethal combat damage again if you cannot squeeze in Kami of False Hope. Your statement that the matchup is 0% without Ranger-Captain runs absolutely counter to my experience. I believe I am still an underdog pre-board, but only around a rate of around 40% to their 60%. Settle the Wreckage and Detention Sphere are very strong here, as is cutting them off of colours with the Crucible of Worlds and naturally drawn Ghost Quarter effects.
Tron and Storm have been covered well at this point, and I feel that we are in agreement on the major points, but I will stress that I have been comfortable with my maindeck win percentage against the Urza Lands since I went up to 5 pieces of land disruption in tandem with the artifact to recur them, backing up free incidental pressure from Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull. The advantages of focusing on your lands are well justified by a more consistent and a stronger Emeria, the Sky Ruin whenever it is called for, and if you count Crucible of Worlds as part of the manabase the only truly dead cards this build has against control are the 4 sorcery-speed sweepers. Everything else accrues tangible value in the face of removal as or more cheaply than Thraben Inspector and with better tempo than Kami of False Hope loops, disrupting the curve less than Ranger-Captain of Eos, while requiring less to go right than Flickerwisp and Charming Prince.
In essence, the focus of this W/u version is more cohesive and steamlined, to me, and the average topdeck is more consistently rewarding to play patterns that extend the game. Wall of Omens will never directly help contribute to offense, and the more this deck accepts that the better I have found it to run. When the body is irrelevant, the best option is to lean into the velocity the card provides to steer every corner-case game towards the situations which put Emeria, as a deck, into a position to care about its lands again.
I hope this explains my perspective, and invite you to try it out for yourself.
-Stéphane Gérard
First, addressing your concern about Manamorphose; although it is their major combo colour Storm plays very few basic Mountains (usually only one), which is why that is the colour I go after with Ghost Quarter - of which I have two plus three Field of Ruin to go with the maindeck Crucible of Worlds - and can look for much more aggressively with the Court Hussar that I am am able to play over Ranger-Captain of Eos. If their mana creature is Goblin Electromancer, the chances of them being able to go off from an empty board using a single topdecked red source is low, and as the game goes on exhausting their Islands also becomes possible to the point of locking them completely at 1 land maximum. Although I agree that it is a bad strategy, I do not feel that warping the maindeck to fight on the axis they interact on will win more matches overall. To exaggerate my point for clarity, it is functionally identical to the argument against including Enchantment destruction in the starting 60 of Boros Burn. Sure, that Fragmentize could beat Bant Spirits with maindeck Worship, but what if a) you don't play against Spirits, b) you don't draw it against them, and c) you draw it against someone else?
We are playing a deck running Wall of Omens, and there are cards that are being included in the maindeck on the justification they help some small amount against spell-based combo decks. This is a trap. Emeria rewards consistent attrition, and spending 6 mana to draw a card through getting a Thraben Inspector (which is already only possible by shoehorning aggressive creatures into slots which are critical for setting up stabilizing plays) does not strike me as the best way to emphasize that fact. In particular, losing the percentage points against Jund and the like is too much of a cost for me to be interested in the benefit that Ranger-Captain brings. If we are not demolishing midrange, why are we playing this tapland that rewards seven basics to be in play in a colour with little to no acceleration? There is nothing I have yet found in the Human Soldier that improves on the Ghost Quarter lock as our main pre-sideboard strategy, especially since it does not beat them on its own, and cannot even interact with a turn 3 combo on the play, which means we are still fighting an uphill battle strategically against the draws they want to maximize. Since we cannot avoid relying on corner cases to justify a maindeck inclusion, I choose to embrace that fact so as not to throw good money after bad.
Second, and more importantly, I have an official retraction to make. My experiences must have been outliers with the card, and so when you say that you are happy to face Tron I will keep my promise and apologize for my error. I will still choose not to include the creature in my build because of its effects on the curve in addition to the arguments I presented above, but the value of the card is clearly high enough to you that I must accept your sincerity. To be clear, then, I am reversing my position outright on the strength of your recommendations, and going forward we are treating the following statement as true in this thread: "The presence of Ranger-Captain of Eos in the maindeck turns Tron into a favourable matchup for Emeria control". Are there any caveats as to numbers or card support you would like to add to that phrase, or would you say that it can stand on its own as a blanket statement?
Please let me know if you have any objections or clarifications to make!
-Stéphane Gérard
My first Magic in quite a while happened with W/u Emeria control at the Saskatoon Face-to-Face Open yesterday, and the tournament report should be helpful. Since I don't test nearly as much as I used to, I will be trying to use the notes I took to be more objective about my results. My list on the day, for reference:
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Pilgrim's Eye
3 Court Hussar
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
2 Batterskull
3 Sun Titan
3 Mortarpod
2 Detention Sphere
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Supreme Verdict
1 Wrath of God
1 Settle the Wreckage
4 Path to Exile
7 Plains
3 Field of Ruin
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Prairie Stream
1 Island
1 Mistveil Plains
4 Flooded Strand
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Remorseful Cleric
2 Aven Mindcensor
1 Specter's Shroud
1 Lone Missionary
1 Lavinia, Azorius Renegade
2 Pithing Needle
2 Celestial Purge
1 Blessed Alliance
1 Disenchant
1 Aura of Silence
Three things became quite obvious to me during the tournament. 1) I was very slow. Being out of practice, specifically when new sideboarding problems were presented, was a major time loss. In addition to two draws, I had to win during extra turns in round 6, and at least some of that would have been entirely avoidable if I hadn't been so indecisive on what to take out. 2) Compounding issue number one, my sideboard Specter's Shroud was untested, and I cost myself at least two games by convincing myself to try out the shiny new toy against decks where its utility was questionable at best. I am still debating whether the card is good enough to be worth the slot, but I need at least a few matchup repetitions where it might be relevant before I rule it out completely. 3) Related to issue number two, I never faced Tron, UW control, Scapeshift, or fast combo, and I think those are a piece of the puzzle that might still need to be solved by Aven Mindcensor and the Shroud.
The problem is that I think that the surprise factor of the search restriction will probably win the first game where it shows up, but I do not know whether these decks can adjust for it properly in game 3. If they have to dilute their plans to deal with my 2/1 flier, I will consider it a win, but I don't know if they are obligated to do so. I was hoping to play at least one of those decks to see how they adjust to it after it makes itself known as a threat, but alas I was not able to judge that dynamic well enough to recommend the card for the current metagame one way or another.
Overall, I had a reasonable showing, but a very disappointing one due to my own mistakes.
Match breakdowns to follow this post.
A decisive game 1 victory was guaranteed by an uncontested Emeria, the Sky Ruin, after a few early exchanges.
For game 2, I removed the 5 sweepers for 2 Aven Mindcensor, 2 Pithing Needle, and 1 Specter's Shroud, which felt speculative, but justifiable. An unfortunate missed land drop on turn 4 threatened to let him untap into Jace, the Mind Sculptor +2 uncontested, which I tried to prevent by end-step Mindcensor into main phase Ghost Quarter. He hit a basic Island in the top 4, then did actually untap into Jace. I still had the Mindcensor for pressure, but his next turn was Ice-fang Coatl into Ashiok, Dream Render. Since I missed on land once more, I conceded two turns later to save time.
Game three was close, and ended very frustratingly after I fought back on the draw from massive early pressure due to an early Stoneforge Mystic putting a Batterskull into play, then enabling an Ice-fang Coatl to connect with a Sword of Feast and Famine, which immediately put an Elspeth, Sun's Nemesis in play to follow up. My final board state left me dead to a single piece of interaction after I had stabilized at 2 using Pithing Needle, spot removal, and my own Batterskull (about to attack). He was out of cards, and I had just drawn a Sun Titan with seven land in play and a graveyard full of cantripping blockers, so if I had faded this single draw step I believe I would have swung the board back to a commanding position. Instead, he drew a Jace to -1 bounce my lifelinker, and attacked for lethal.
Several interactive options were available to me over each of multiple turns in the last game, so ultimately I felt reasonable about the matchup. It was relatively even overall, with the threat of Emeria being a major factor beyond that, but Ashiok plus pressure felt like one potential issue going forward. The Specter's Shroud was unimpressive when I drew it, but was still a huge improvement over a four-mana sweeper. I would experiment with other options if I played the match again.
ROUND 2 (Bant Spirits) (2-0 win) (1-1 overall)
In game 1, my hand was two Path to Exile and two Wall of Omens, which allowed me the luxury to accelerate if the blocker was irrelevant. Instead, my 0/4 held back a pair of Unsettled Mariner for an extra two turns before I cast a Path on a Spell Queller that tried to stop my 3-for-1 Wrath of God. Cleaned up easily afterwards.
For game 2, I removed the Crucible of Worlds and a Batterskull for two Pithing Needle to name Aether Vial and Mutavault. He had sideboarded in Worship and Ashiok, Dream Render, which were both in play to force a standoff in which I had Emeria active for 7 turns. I eventually drew a needle to immobilize his Mutavault, and swept the board. My lone Batterskull, tutored up on turn 2, had been enough to ignore the graveyard entirely. I told him after the game that I believe the enchantment, at the very least, was a huge liability for him, and possibly the planeswalker as well, though I wasn't certain on that front. The fact that they were not threats in the early game was more important to me than the time they bought him when the board was in my favour, since I believe Spirits' explosiveness is the key to the matchup.
I never felt remotely close to losing in either game, since I was never caught unprepared by Spell Queller tempo. Aside from random Aether Vial nut draws, the matchup is a very good one for Emeria unless they manage to force a sweeper early into a tempo Queller.
ROUND 3 (Jund) (1-1-1 Draw) (1-1-1 overall)
Game 1 was a typical grind, where an active Emeria, the Sky Ruin eventually overpowered his Wrenn and Six emblem. If Scavenging Ooze had shown up, things might have been different, but a healthy life total gave me plenty of options in the face of recurring Kolaghan's Command.
For game 2 I removed two Detention Sphere and a Settle the Wreckage (the first are liabilities against Assassin's Trophy, the second against Thoughtseize), for 2 Celestial Purge and a speculative Specter's Shroud. I immediately regretted the decision when I drew it instead of a blocker after a Liliana of the Veil ultimate when facing down a typical enemy, a 6/7 Tarmogoyf.
In game 3 I put both Detention Sphere back in, over the Specter's Shroud and a Crucible of Worlds, because Wrenn and Six had gotten very close to an emblem again. His turn 3 Inquisition of Kozilek missed on a hand with two lands, a Supreme Verdict, a Batterskull, and a Sun Titan, then the next turn his Bloodbraid Elf cascaded into a Tireless Tracker after he had already played his fourth land, so I was up an 0-for-1 and a clean 2-for-1 (on the draw) by the time I started casting relevant spells. Card advantage being the name of the game here, I was in a very good position when time was called, and uncharacteristically went for lethal on turns 3 and 5. Unfortunately, his topdecked Fatal Push on my Germ token and Terminate on my Sun Titan forced the draw.
I think this result was just, on the whole, since I had wasted too much time in sideboarding, and had brought in a losing card due to lack of testing. The sequences still often line up favourably for Emeria, although the matchup is not quite as good as it was before the inclusion of Wrenn and Six. I would like a third flexible answer to it and Liliana of the Veil, but one that Abrupt Decay cannot hit, and one that can come in elsewhere. Something like a third Celestial Purge perhaps, but three of those would be too many for my liking.
ROUND 4 (5C Humans) (2-0 win) (2-1-1 overall)
Game 1 was very satisfying, ending with a Meddling Mage naming Path, another Meddling Mage on Supreme Verdict, a Noble Hierarch, a Reflector Mage, a Kitesail Freebooter hiding a D-sphere, a Phantasmal Image copy of which held a Settle the Wreckage, and a Deputy of Detention with two batterskull under it all being swept away by a surprise Mortarpod from Stoneforge Mystic mid-combat, which released my Settle to prompt a concession.
For game 2 I removed a Teferi, Time Raveler, a Crucible of Worlds, and one Batterskull to fit in one Pithing Needle for Aether Vial and the two Celestial Purge. Another complicated board state resolved in my favour when two Stoneforge Mystic activated on his end step to ping away the Gaddock Teeg that was locking down my Wrath of God and Supreme Verdict. His Collector Ouphe was unable to help. At 3 life, I waited for three extra turns before casting Batterskull so that I could make sure I left open the Celestial Purge he had seen from a Kitesail Freebooter while he held onto a single card. After I connected with the lifelinker, he conceded and showed me his Mantis Rider.
This is an even better matchup than Spirits, since very few of their creatures have evasion or flash, but they do make better use of Vial. The layers of Meddling Mage effects can infrequently be problematic through a healthy diversity of answers, but typically only if they have Freebooters to peek (hence the Purges that also hedge against their hasty flier as seen in game 2).
Round 5 (1-1 Draw) (concession) (G/W Heliod/Ballista) (2-2-1 overall)
Game 1 felt dangerous, but well in hand, keeping Path to Exile open the whole game as insurance while using Mortarpod to control the mana creatures and combos (once flashing in the 'Pod with Stoneforge Mystic in response to my opponent removing the first counter from his Spike Feeder, pinging it to take advantage of state-based actions before he could gain infinite life; the same on-board trick held back a 2/2 Ballista in game 2). The Birds of Paradise being gone turned on an easy win for a surprise Batterskull afterwards, since his mana had been killing him slowly with 3 Horizon Canopy and a basic plains.
In game 2 I removed 2 Stoneforge Mystic and 1 Batterskull, plus 1 Teferi, Time Raveler and 1 Crucible of Worlds, to bring in 2 Pithing Needle, 1 Aven Mindcensor, 1 Remorseful Cleric and 1 Aura of Silence. His early combo was thwarted by Mortarpod, so he was on the beatdown plan from turn 4 or so. He had 1 card in hand and 5 land in play when I stabilized. At 3 life with an Aura of Silence in play and time about to be called, I cast a Detention Sphere and destroyed it with the trigger on the stack using the Aura so that I could get both of his Kitchen Finks off of the table without him increasing my clock when I cast the Wrath of God that would then sweep his board clear for my Sun Titan to take over the next turn. Since he was at 9, I was thinking that I wouldn't want him to go to 13 to increase my clock to 3 turns if time was called. This was a catastrophic error, since now with no Sphere of Resistance effect in play he untapped, drew a shockland, and cast the Walking Ballista in his hand for X=3 for the win.
He was a young kid I had met before, excited to be playing in a bigger tournament. Since the second draw would almost certainly knock us both out of the top 8 at this point, I told him so, and asked him if he would be willing to concede. He said "no", so I signed the match slip 2-1 for him and wished him luck. Hugely disappointing game loss on three counts. First and foremost, I gave my opponent an out. I cannot fault them for walking through my kitchen when I opened the door. Second, my clock was not relevant, since I was up a game. Only his was. Third, I was again indecisive with my sideboarding, and would have benefited from testing or theorycrafting ahead of time, which would have given me more time to think through #1 and #2. The match felt tricky, and might warrant a cleaner answer to Heliod, Sun-Crowned. If there is overlap between a white enchantment and a red-green Planeswalker, I would love to hear any ideas! The third Pithing Needle effect might need to come back in as an imperfect solution if not.
ROUND 6 (Dredge) (2-1 Win) (3-2-1 overall)
Game 1 was an interesting one, wherein I came close to stabilizing with a Batterskull, but then unfortunately gave him a second red source for his Ox of Agonas when I used Ghost Quarter to cut him off of his basic Forest for Life from the Loam. With one Mountain in play and another in his graveyard, I was confident he was out of basics unless he had a Swamp. As it turns out, he was only too happy to show me both a Swamp before the extra Mountain still in his deck quoting that "I hate losing value to Path to Exile". I told him I was of a similar mind, and we shared a laugh when I showed him what I meant by using a superfluous Path to get an extra Plains off of my own Germ token when he presented well over lethal damage the turn after his Ox fuelled an enormous dredge for 15.
For game 2 I removed all sweepers other than the Settle the Wreckage, plus one Emeria, the Sky Ruin, one Teferi, Time Raveler, and two Stoneforge Mystic to bring in 3 Remorseful Cleric, 2 Celestial Purge, 1 Lone Missionary, and 1 Lavinia, Azorius renegade. Beginning the second game on the play, I was able to use Lavinia to stop his flashback of a Conflagrate he had played for 0 on turn one to start discarding his dredge cards. While he played fair Magic behind on land drops for two or three turns, my u/w legend chipped in enough damage to make things awkward for him once he finally found a Life from the Loam for no value to put in his bin. This time, Field of Ruin combined with Ghost Quarter to successfully knock him off of green mana as my two copies of Remorseful Cleric had been committed to join the attack instead of exiling his graveyard. Detention Sphere took care of a Golgari Thug he put on the table, and that was enough for the win.
In game 3, I brought back in a Stoneforge Mystic over a Mortarpod, which I like to think may have been the one I drew to put two Batterskull in play. The game was quite back and forth, Conflagrate cleaning up multiple blockers only for Lone Missionary to pull me out of danger, and I eventually found a Celestial Purge to clear his hardcast Stinkweed Imp as a blocker when I ultimately got enough mana to equip the dead Batterskull to a live one for lethal damage.
The match was competitive, and there was tension between going aggressive with accelerating out Batterskull post-board and trying to manage Bloodghast and Narcomoeba with Mortarpod. The incremental damage of these latter two Dredge payoffs add up to very interesting decisions later in the game, but in the end I think I am happy with 5 cards that give me access to each equipment's effect post-board. The configuration may need tweaking though, and I still spent too much time deciding.
ROUND 7 (Dredge) (2-1 Win) (4-2-1 overall)
In game 1 I was able to prove to my own satisfaction that Stoneforge Mystic into Batterskull is a certifiable trump sequence if unanswered in the matchup, grinding out an average-looking mixture of Bloodghast, Narcomoeba, and Prized Amalgam, and then trading with an Ox of Agonas when that eventually showed up as well. Path to Exile did reasonable work, and Detention Sphere was as excellent in pre-board games as it usually is.
This time for game 2 I removed two Mortarpod, and kept in an extra Stoneforge Mystic, just to see if this was sufficient. I wasn't really pleased with the result, since I came up short on a target for Emeria, The Sky Ruin for a loss, and might have appreciated an extra sacrifice outlet. I think this is probably a moot point, however, since the circumstances where Emeria is online AND access to Remorseful Cleric is not certain crop up so rarely. Ox of Agonas being a creature allowed it to Escape through the restrictions of Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and there was little my hand could do to prevent being run over by the waves of of Bloodghast and Prized Amalgam it unlocked.
In game 3, I put the extra Mortarpod back in over a Crucible of Worlds, and felt much better for it. The lategame Field of Ruin are often excellent without backup already once they have dredged their deck, but if their Life From the Loam is active, it is very difficult for them to be relevant. In this game, after a very rare Mulligan to 5, I learnt to equip any Remorseful Cleric that I intended to pass the turn on with Mortarpod, if possible. My opponent had drawn a Darkblast to force the timing on Cleric to his advantage, but luckily my Settle the Wreckage was able to catch a very good portion of his creatures when he tried to punish my awkward stumbles to fix my own mana. Without being able to find his last Bloodghast, his Amalgams waited in the graveyard long enough that I was able to clear them with the Cleric to seal the game when brought back and backed up with Sun Titan.
Again, the match felt competitive, but with Dredge being at the mercy of how explosive their first two turns are, the battle to dictate strategic play is mostly on the side of Emeria. This is definitely not an easy match to play, but I believe Emeria is favoured, especially if it can win the often competitive game one.
So, in total, I had a final record of four wins, two losses, and a draw. Though I was less than thrilled with my play, I made a little store credit in prizes, and felt very solid about the maindeck and 12 of the 15 sideboard cards. One of the losses was a draw in actual games played, and even that might not have been the case if I had been more efficient with my time. My other draw was a very near escape for my opponent, and again I could have gotten more out of smoother and less indecisive play, particularly in sideboarding, where I may also have thrown away a game. My loss was a tight match, where I gave myself as good a chance as I could have asked for from a massive early deficit, but my opponent's aggressive play to punish my defensive stance deserves the credit for giving them the win.
I did not get to have a true measure of Aven Mindcensor, sadly, and so I will have to keep it in on a provisional basis. The Specter's Shroud had no opportunity to be relevant, and is in a similar boat, but may be replaced by an Angelic Purge or an extra answer to Wrenn and Six. It is an ugly prospect, but if anyone has thoughts on what else Angelic hits cleanly in the format (Starting with Finks, Amalgam, and Heliod, Sun-Crowned from this tournament alone), I would appreciate a collection of cards to look at. If the list gets long enough, I will give it a shot. Ultimately, if this is too poor, I will try out a speculative Forsake The Worldly, which at least gives instant-speed options in addition to covering Gods, even if both modes are inefficient. One other possibility for the sideboard is that the Disenchant could be replaced by a Seal of Cleansing, which I thought was not Modern-legal until someone told me it had been reprinted in Modern Masters. There is a debate to be had here though, and I will be happy to have it if anyone is interested.
Let me know what you all think!
I would not side in Pithing Needle against Aether Vial decks. This seems to be a little loose as it is only great in the opening hand. Could you explain your thought process on this?
Planeswalkers are a problem and unfortunately I do not have any great options for them. You already have two copies of Celestial Purge. I would keep the Detention Sphere in even if it dies to a removal spell. Assassin's Trophy gives us a land which can be beneficial.
As for my thought process on Pithing Needle against Aether Vial, I would be happy to share. I have a very different experience from yours, it appears, because I have found that the only angle that tribal decks without reach can use to outmaneuver Emeria is by controlling their timing to play around Wrath effects. When it comes to Spirits in particular, they have Mutavault and Selfless Spirit to name anyway, and so I bring in both copies, but against Humans the only real thing I care about is their ability to play a "flash" game. Needle is therefore a very nice card to draw in many midgame situations as insurance that can also disrupt, since if they can choose what to commit and when they can sometimes steal games that would be locked up otherwise.
Beyond that logic, these decks are sometimes fast enough on the play that a single Meddling Mage or Kitesail Freebooter can be used to put off a sweeper for the one turn they need to win. Their normal goldfish gets pushed back by half a turn or more for every weak soft-lock creature they play, though, which means this is rarely possible unless they accelerate. Aether Vial counts as acceleration for this, since it can essentially tap for 6 mana or more in their best draws, and so I like having access to more than four pieces of 1-mana interaction for the only real operational threat they can leverage. If I find myself in game three on the draw, I take this to be an important enough consideration that I even board in the second copy against Humans.
The more relevant question is why I only bring in one copy normally against them. The answer is because Aether Vial is a poor topdeck, and can be sideboarded out by some opponents. These decks are frequently desperate for either pressure or space post-board against Emeria, and they sometimes will conclude that Vial is to be cut, but until I am certain of that the Pithing Needle does its job very well, as far as I am concerned. A single card from my 60 can turn 4 of theirs into completely dead draws unless they choose to slow themselves down again, creating positive strategic dynamics for Emeria. The risk that they might win the staring contest over whether Needle can name Vial profitably leads me to leave things at one copy until I have confirmed the presence of their artifact, since after I name the backup target of Horizon Canopy, they may literally have no other activated abilities to prevent.
As for Detention Sphere, I think that if I were to play Jund today, I would leave them in post-board and remove the Teferi, Time Raveler and the Settle the Wreckage to bring in the two Celestial Purge, and leave it at that. If I had a better option, I would like to remove the Spheres to avoid giving them tempo/flash plays with Abrupt Decay or Maelstrom Pulse, although I agree that Assassin's Trophy is actually a liability for them. A small additional consideration is that being able to take out Enchantment from the deck after sideboarding reduces the average Tarmogoyf power, but this is more of a luxury than a necessity. As it stands, then, I think things are fine. Having a permanent solution to Jund's non-creature threats is better than a short-term one, but not essential unless it comes at minimal cost to other matchups.
I hope that this explains things a little for you!
I was thrilled to discover, upon waking with a niggling feeling of unease this morning, that this forum has provided me a context to write about W/u Emeria which has led to a better understanding into the nature of my own unconscious selective processes where this deck is concerned. This realization was triggered partly by my most recent conversation with dm3pine (whom I must therefore thank for his questions), and partly by my re-reading of the comments I made which felt incomplete. I would like to share the insight I have gained with you, and I hope it helps you to come to your own conclusions about the strategy I am advocating.
I have previously mentioned that I rarely activate Stoneforge Mystic, effectively using it at every opportunity as a glorified chump blocker that increases the consistency of the mid- and late-game. In particular, even when I tutor the card up, I prefer to hardcast Batterskull post-Wrath. One reason for this is that I expect the lategame to be better for my chances at any rate, a second is that I wish to fill my curve as seamlessly as possible, and yet another is that I do not wish to depend upon a card for survival which could expose me to tempo loss.
Repeating myself again, the strategic viability of Emeria as a deck assumes that playing taplands into Wall of Omens is a good thing to do. Having made that decision and sleeved up the cards for a tournament, it is logically inconsistent to devote deck space to anything that does not play into the expectations that entails. In particular, I mentioned that the deck should not try to "push for a win". To better explain myself, though, this is only true in the deckbuilding sense, where the primary strength of the deck is the reason for its existence strategically. I have consistently good results with Emeria whenever pushing for a win is not necessary, but pairings and incorrect metagame calls are real. As competitors, it is therefore incumbent on us all to try to find avenues to win against our bad matchups. Obviously, in-game I can and will make use of opportunistic paths to victory, and this is where Batterskull is best enabled by the mana cheating ability of Stoneforge Mystic.
Returning to deck theory, this build essentially concedes the early game, dropping its defenses initially, and therefore challenging the opposition to prove that it can kill it before it begins to enact its oppressively consistent and massively redundant lategame. I accept my unavoidable average share of losses on turns 1, 2, and 3 in order to begin a winning fight for the rest of a potentially infinite number of turns afterwards, having built up a minuscule advantage towards an established aim which my plays cannot help but contribute to. Pressing that advantage by relying on the engine of the deck carrying me through to the finish line is my byword, one which involves the assumption that the ensemble of my draw steps will trump whatever flurry of spells they hope to combine at any subsequent point. By playing this deck, I essentially dare opponents to pit the volatility of their best opening hand against the certain knowledge of my every draw step's consistency, and my results seem to bear out the fact that this is a winning gamble overall.
This holistic view gives some justification not only to the inclusion of the "draft chaff", but also to the exclusion of every maindeck card that is considered purely with upside in mind. In my list, I assume the worst-case scenario of "facing a lone attacker empty-handed on an otherwise clear board with six Plains and an Emeria in play" for every card when I draw it, and then I ask myself if it is still worth including. The fail case on Pilgrim's Eye is a colourless 1/1 flier for 3 that puts me ahead another tangible resource, or forces my opponent to trade a card. Both outcomes are acceptable. The fail case on Flickerwisp is an easier to kill Insectile Aberration that adds nothing else. This is irrelevant. In the entire deck as I have built it, in fact, there would only be 5 cards (6 if I assume Crucible of Worlds has no targets) that would be truly dead in that situation. The other five of them are land. Of these, two are Ghost Quarter which eliminate all the others as further blanks the following draw step, and can themselves no longer be bricks if drawn the turn after.
When the whole deck is examined this way, and indeed when I consider the entire deck laid out in front of me in the theoretical exercise of an arbitrarily extended game, the long-term thinking is that during construction I have minimized my fail cases when everything has gone as poorly as it could possibly have gone, and yet I still find myself alive with an active Emeria. If that land was literally the last card I had left to draw, I would draw it, and I would put it into play. Assuming access to my Mistveil Plains, I would reanimate Sun Titan on my next upkeep, return Stoneforge Mystic to play, and before my draw step I would put a Wrath of God or a Settle the Wreckage from my graveyard to the bottom of my (otherwise nonexistent) library. I can and do feel good about my chances of winning any game thereafter. Other than superfluous copies of Flooded Strand once I was out of targets, I could imagine every single other card in my deck to have contributed to getting me to this point, even through the worst-case scenario I mentioned above.
On the long road toward this "every part of the buffalo" approach, the only concession to the opponent comes from the Wrath effects and the Detention Sphere that prompted this rumination. The logic is that the problem of giving this deck more draw steps naturally forces undesirable trades from the opponent, and the two enchantments are the only maindeck cards that might offer more live draws to an empty-handed opponent in dire straits. Removing them where they are at risk of being exploited against me fits into the sideboard desires of such a strategy, which should be designed to ensure that nothing threatens its inevitability, and seek to clamp down on any avenues for opposing strategies to wriggle through the net that such a drawn-out final state implies. Carving out an inexorable path towards this vision in an expanding range of scenarios is the shining beacon by which I guide every inclusion into the 75, and presents one of the top ten most satisfying deckbuilding puzzles I have ever tried to solve. The goal is simply to keep extending the game; to play more Magic. A realistic chance at victory should literally always exist so long as lethal has not been presented from a deck design perspective, and almost every other scenario is left purely up to gamesmanship.
I hope this has been informative,
-Stéphane
In preparation for a team trios event, I ran my version of the deck through a 4-round Modern tournament, and went 3-1, losing a very hotly contested game one in the finals.
Round one (2-0, 1-0 overall) saw me paired against a Jeskai control player, where he seemed to draw the wrong series of answers against my sequence of threats at every turn. In game one he was forced to Path to Exile my early Stoneforge Mystic, then he had to Detention Sphere the Batterskull when I cast it a few turns later. In game two, he had to Lightning Bolt my Sun Titan twice using Snapcaster Mage, which my Supreme Verdict mopped up when he tried to press a Geist of Saint Traft through. Emeria, the Sky Ruin was active in game 1, and game 2 his double Rest in Peace sat rather anemically in play as I kept casting threats that it could not completely shut off.
A good matchup, especially given that their basic land count is often low enough to make colours an issue through Field of Ruin in the midgame. Be wary of Remand and Spell Queller tempo plays in these colours, but otherwise it should be smooth sailing.
Round 2 (2-1, 2-0 overall) was against U/R Pyromancer Ascension, also running Aria of Flame in the maindeck. His slow start in our first game gave me hope that my Detention Sphere could buy me the time I needed when I caught an Ascension with it, but the Aria he cast the next turn went uncontested for too long as I struggled to resolve a Court Hussar for an answer through multiple Remand. In the second game, I landed a second-turn Stoneforge Mystic, which was joined by another to find the backup Batterskull to keep on the pressure through his Abrade. Remorseful Cleric then landed to cut off a few outs and apply more beatings, then Teferi, Time Raveler bounced his Ascension to remove his last window of opportunity. In game three, he sideboarded into a creature plan with Crackling Drake, Thing in the Ice, and Pteramander, but Celestial Purge, Path to Exile, and Mortarpod were more than up to the task of keeping those under control while a hardcast Batterskull joined a Remorseful Cleric again.
A dangerous matchup, but much more beatable than typical storm, since this version often had to pass the turn after resolving its enchantments. I am not certain if he should have tried the creature plan, since it seemed to give me more outs, but I believe he was trying not to run into Dovin's Veto.
Round 3 (2-1, 3-0 overall) I played against Dredge, who had very bad luck in game 1 by not hitting any payoffs before turn 4, but still managed a kill by finding all his Creeping Chill a turn after I missed on stabilizing the board against his random assortment of creatures. Game two was a similar affair, but with Batterskull and his twin brother on the table, things went a lot better for me and I avoided the necessity of showing my true sideboard plan by finishing him off with Ghost Quarter and Aven Mindcensor to cut out his green mana for the Ancient Grudge lurking in his graveyard to shut off equipment. This became relevant in game three when a timely Remorseful Cleric cut him off of both his Ox of Agonas before he could Escape them. Wit his draws reduced to smaller Dredge turns by the midgame, things went smoothly from then on out.
Once again, Batterskull was excellent against the Dredge strategy, as long as turn 4 and 5 came around without the threat of lethal damage due to speed bumps and sufficient disruption. Still a few tricky calculations to be made getting to that point, but overall very winnable.
Round 4 (0-1, 3-1 overall) was against 5-colour Niv-Mizzet Bring to Light. This was a very dynamic match-up, and Ghost Quarter plus Field of Ruin played a prominent role in keeping his mana unable to produce all 5 colours for a while, but eventually his Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath forced my Path To Exile to turn on his Bring to Light. Over the course of the next half hour, I fought through all four of those, plus three of his Niv-Mizzet Reborn, a Teferi, Time Raveler, a Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves, and a Wrenn and Six, but in the end his third copy of Uro connected once to turn on double Lightning Helix to the head for lethal damage. I felt that I was winning until the very last turn, and so even with my best effort I had to accept the result when I was told we had only five minutes to finish the match after sideboarding. Of note, I saw no Emeria, the Sky Ruin, no Sun Titan, no Court Hussar, no Crucible of Worlds, and no Teferi, Time Raveler of my own in all of those turns, and the only seven cards left in my deck at that point other than those were two Flooded Strand, one Ghost Quarter, two Path to Exile, one Detention Sphereand one Supreme Verdict, so I am attributing this loss mostly to variance.
A matchup where Emeria's manabase advantage allows for very clear sequencing, I believe this should be a favourable pairing overall. My opponent was extremely deliberate, though, with his turns taking approximately twice as long as mine to play half as many spells, but he was new to the deck or else I would have been more mercenary about guarding against stalling. In a tournament setting, there were three clear points where after I mentioned this to him, I would have had to call over a judge to watch our pace of play.
A fair tournament overall, tying for second place with the Dredge player I had defeated in round 3, and a solid performance both for the deck and for my level of decision-making in real-time. I am looking forward to one more outing on Sunday, especially since I will get to watch Legacy and Pioneer matchups from the B-seat of our table in the team event.
Let me know if you have any questions!
I played my version of the deck again in the team trios event, as I mentioned in my previous post. The turnout was quite modest, so only three rounds, but my team was not able to string together wins evenly enough to take it down. For the record, my 75 for the event:
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Pilgrim's Eye
3 Court Hussar
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
2 Batterskull
3 Sun Titan
3 Mortarpod
2 Detention Sphere
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Supreme Verdict
1 Wrath of God
1 Settle the Wreckage
4 Path to Exile
7 Plains
3 Field of Ruin
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Prairie Stream
1 Island
1 Mistveil Plains
4 Flooded Strand
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Remorseful Cleric
2 Aven Mindcensor
1 Shadowspear
1 Lone Missionary
1 Lavinia, Azorius Renegade
2 Pithing Needle
2 Celestial Purge
1 Blessed Alliance
1 Disenchant
1 Aura of Silence
I have nothing truly groundbreaking to report, since my opponents' plans were mostly marred by inconsistency issues, but as an old-school deckbuilder I take pride in the fact that I had seven opening hands, and all were keepable. It is not a consistent plan against anyone to rely on this fact, but I do take satisfaction when I am essentially up a resource for free on my opposition once every three or four games. Here is a quick breakdown of my results:
ROUND 1 (2-1 Elves) (1-0 overall).
ROUND 2 (2-0 Jund) (2-0 overall).
ROUND 3 (2-0 Ballista Combo) (3-0 overall).
For the majority, these are strategies which I have covered elsewhere, and good matchups in general. I missed a line of play against the Elves opponent that I was very disappointed with throwing away an advantage against, but I won the game in question so it was not a telling mistake, and other than that I was satisfied with my level of focus. The sideboard was solid, but I have no news to report there either, other than the fact that the Mindcensors and extra Equipment felt clean when I wanted to bring them in. Their ultimate value is still in question.
If anyone would like a breakdown of any game in specific, please let me know!
thank you for sharing that tournament report. Congrats on getting second place in one tourney, and your team doing well on another. Added your tournament report to the primer.
looks like Batterskull served you well. I think it's a good alternate win con when people bring in gy removal against Emeria in game 2.
also I notice you're playing the full set of Pilgrim's Eye. Are they doing good work for you?
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Before I address your points, I want to stress that I often want my opponents to bring in graveyard hate, since the majority of it does not affect the board and therefore increases the chance of lategames (almost every flavour of which are to Emeria's advantage) by polluting the average opposing draws. What does not kill us literally makes our strategy stronger.
Turning to Batterskull, then, as a bridge to Sun Titan the card has several weaknesses when compared directly to its closest rivals (which are led, in my opinion, by Geist-Honored Monk). It is worse at stabilizing on turns 5+6+7, though as a small compensation it does get slightly better after that, particularly after turn 10. It also provides less pressure by being a slower midgame clock (the Monk and its tokens typically hit for 7 or more damage on the first combat step they contribute to). It cannot deal with fliers under most circumstances, is vulnerable to otherwise awkward spot removal in several important tempo situations, does not turn on Mistveil Plains, and it allows clean sideboarding for those who have solid proactive artifact disruption.
To offset these concerns it does bring a few positive attributes, chief among them being much more consistent access to lifegain, buying extra turns and sometimes shutting down midgame outs, and not being cleanly opposed on an empty board by a single Plague Engineer or Orzhov Pontiff. It is also much better at setting up and leaving value through Wrath of God, forcing overextension while buffering life totals before a sweeper. This value is also extremely cleanly wedded to the deck's assumption of an increasingly strong lategame starting on turn 8, since if an active Emeria, The Sky ruin is not yet available the beginning of turn-8 inevitability is now complemented by the mana situation required to cast and then bounce the Equipment.
Since these considerations do not by themselves outweigh the downsides of the card, the real value of its inclusion is actually tied to the deck's hunger for an alternative card-advantageous 2-drop to complement Wall of Omens. Stoneforge Mystic takes the cake here over such clearly lacklustre alternatives as Lone Missionary and Charming Prince, and maximizing the early portion of the curve must take precedence over anything sequenced after the 4-mana "sweeper" turn. Though clearly inferior to the Wall since it cannot hunt for an all-important land drop, its role being able to search for different equipment effectively makes it a modal spell, which expands the range of keepable hands in the dark and can push key advantages across the gamut of matchups. The boost in consistency the Kor Artificer provides, unsupported, on turn two after a tapland, is a massive upgrade clearly worth making concessions for.
In combination, the two cards often make sideboarding decisions a little more difficult, but compensate for it by combining effectively to gain free wins against stumbling opponents in a fashion that does not have to sacrifice the lategame, very quickly threatening a serious advantage when exploiting tactical openings. Operationally, I actively try to avoid this plan because this is an avenue which should never be relied upon, but the option to break sequencing has won me a few games games against mulligans from uninteractive strategies or bad matchups. In addition, extra access to Mortarpod can be a crippling blow against certain matchups, and the potential activation of the Mystic effectively masks Settle the Wreckage while giving an incentive for the types of attacks that card preys on.
When it comes to Pilgrim's Eye, I will refer you back to first the advice about turns leading up to the fourth land drop mentioned in the second paragraph above this one, and then to my first posts in this thread in the middle of page 65 and my subsequent defense of the card when pressed for more detail in the page(s) afterward. It does everything I am trying to do - guarantee land number 4, chump block, provide card advantage or attrition, and enable Titan and Emeria while harassing Planeswalkers - and it does it all without asking for any setup other than three colourless mana. In my hundreds (approaching thousands) of matches with this archetype, I can remember only three or four in which I ever trimmed the card after sideboarding once I had moved to the full playset in the maindeck. If it is not good, it is almost certain that Wall of Omens is not good, which means that Emeria is probably not in a good position and I have made an incorrect metagame call. Conversely, when Emeria's strategy is viable, Pilgrim's Eye is the best and most consistent enabler currently available at 3 mana.
I hope this answers your questions,
-Stéphane
First of all, I'm glad there still people like you who spend time fine tuning and playing this deck.
Added your Stoneforge list as another sample decklist near the top of the primer, it's just below Fincown's sample list. If you want to make changes, just let me know. https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/modern/established-modern/control/757085-azorius-titan-emeria-control?comment=1
I agree that Batterskull is a good bridge on getting to our titan.
As for Pilgrim's Eye and Mortarpod. They are cards used since the birth of the deck in Standard so many years ago. At one point, they were considered obsolete.. then I saw them make a comeback in the list that reached top 4, and now I see you making good use of them. I guess they can still be useful on the deck. Mortarpod even has synergy with the sfm in your build.
And lastly, you seem to have played against Dredge a good bit. I'm in the process of updating the primer. If you want.. you can write a short summary on how to play against Dredge. I will include it in the matchups section, and credit you as the contributor.
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For the record, the pilot of "the list that made the top 4" was actually me, and the tournament report you have featured is coincidentally from the same Open tournament a year later. Other than the fact that I wish the equip ability could be instant-speed sometimes, I have absolutely no complaints about Mortarpod, and I have played up to four in the maindeck before Stoneforge Mystic was yet available, with only minor regrets.
Just to clarify, the main point of my last post was intended to say that although Batterskull is, as you say, a good bridge to Sun Titan, it is actually not the best option when considered on its own. If you choose not to run Stoneforge Mystic, I think that Geist-Honored Monk is by far a better use of the slot, followed closely by Gideon Jura, whose easy mono-white casting costs put both a clear step ahead of the next best option in Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. After these I put all of the other 5-drops on roughly even footing whether it be Archon of Justice, Angel of Sanctions, Angel of Invention, Lavinia of the Tenth, or another strong defensive stabilizing play that can serve as a finisher in games you do not draw the Titan. I have not personally tested Cavalier of Dawn here, but because the ETB trigger can pressure fliers or Planeswalkers while having 7 power worth of synergy with Wall of Omens and recursion, plus the fact that the LTB might provide card advantage, it may be one of the top 3 best options here as well.
The list you have on the front page is a reasonable one, I have gone 6-1 in games played with it since I made my most recent changes, but the Aven Mindcensor and the Shadowspear numbers are purely speculative because it has been long since I have had time for rigorous playtesting. In the dark, I would replace those three cards by a mix of the effects that I have had direct personal experience with in the sideboard flex slots: one or two Glen Elendra Archmage, plus a Stonecloaker, and/or a Sorcerer's Spyglass. I will send this message to the address you listed above.
As for your offer of writing a Dredge breakdown, I would be happy to, and it will follow this post within 24 hours.
Thanks for your interest!
ah, so you're the player in that tournament. Nice to have you here.
Alright, will wait for your short guide on how to play vs. dredge.
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Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Matchups and sideboarding section. I removed the guides how to play vs. Scaled Affinity, Arclight Phoenix, and Hollow One. Because those decks are not to be found much anymore in modern. I still have the guides about them saved, in case those decks come back.
I also moved how to play against Amulet Titan guide to the top of the matchups section, because Amulet is a tier 1 deck right now.
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
As promised, here are my thoughts on the Dredge matchup currently:
The way that Dredge is played as of the printing of Ox of Agonas makes the pre-sideboarded games difficult, but currently winnable. If Emeria can manage to take game one, the matchup is excellent, and the sideboarded games bring enough improvement that winning games two and three is still a legitimate plan. For game one, then, the key factor is up to what kind of permanent advantage their deck can threaten before the third land hits the table on either side. This more or less means Narcomoeba or Bloodghast enabling some number of Prized Amalgam to attack on or before turn three. Their deck is very consistent, so Wall of Omens or Path to Exile will almost certainly be required to keep pace with their average draws, and multiple of these backed up by Detention Sphere might be necessary just to stay in the game against their better Dredges. The bad news is that their very best sequences are literally overwhelming on the play, but these are extremely rare (3+ Amalgams in play on turn 2, for example). Compounding this issue is that Creeping Chill and Conflagrate go from almost totally useless in their early phase to outright stealing games in their later angles, either by turning on the haste on Bloodghast when stabilization is near at hand, or by representing literal lethal damage.
The good news is that the vast majority of games will involve the two halves of their deck (the permanent advantages and the reach) being drawn as a mixture, which brings things safely into Emeria's bread-and-butter midrange grasp. This is a matchup where situational awareness is very important, since the way their graveyard is set up makes life total vary from almost completely irrelevant to critical. When they have no board state but a full graveyard and access to a land for their turn, using Ghost Quarter on your own fetchlands or Path to Exile on your own creatures can be winning plays if they keep you above 10 life, but the same play could set you back a crucial resource if their graveyard is lacklustre and the game appears to be going long. Mortarpod is a very important role-player here, since it can chump-block an Amalgam while pinging their x-1's, and Pilgrim's Eye should also block aggressively, making Sun Titan value infrequently meaningful while the sorcery-speed sweepers can sometimes reset their Amalgams to good effect, but none of these are where the real battle is fought.
The best cards, the ones which Court Hussar and Wall of Omens are digging to find as soon as possible, are Stoneforge Mystic or the real heavy hitters in Batterskull and Settle the Wreckage. Since it preserves whatever pressure Emeria has managed to muster by being one-sided, the mass exile effect is frequently devastating, and a premium should be placed on recycling it with Mistveil Plains before a shuffle effect if it has already been cast once. Where the equipment is concerned, it is extremely difficult for Dredge's creatures to beat a 4/4 vigilant lifelinker on most boards, and they will often be forced to spend their Conflagrate on it just to get back to even footing. Due to Dredge cards quickly replacing explosive plays in their hand by the nature of how their strategy functions, the later game will favour Emeria more and more, but although Emeria, the Sky Ruin does still sometimes matter, it is frequently the case that the game is over (either for better or for worse) before it can trigger profitably.
Life From the Loam makes it tricky (although not impossible) to attack their manabase, but its more important function is to build up cards in hand for their 7-12 point Conflagrate as a finishing blow, which - barring odd Dredge circumstances - they will always have two Basic Mountains to fuel. Harassing their green sources is therefore the primary goal of Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter, but Crucible of Worlds is almost completely irrelevant before this happens, and I often abandon this plan outright as soon as two ways to find Green mana are available. Post-board, they can sometimes have a Blast Zone, which is usually a more relevant target in any case. WARNING: always make certain you have a plan for Bloodghast every time you think about giving Dredge a free landfall trigger.
During sideboarding, I remove the Crucible, the four Wrath effects, the Teferi and and one Emeria to bring in three Remorseful Cleric, two Celestial Purge, a Lavinia, Azorius Renegade and a Lone Missionary. Their only important gains are made by trimming a mixture of cards (typically starting with one or two Creeping Chill) to gain access to Ancient Grudge and maybe Nature's Claim. The Grudges are a concession to the power of Batterskull to close the door on their lategame, so the Missionary and the Lavinia join the party to help with controlling Conflagrate. Purge is essentially a better Path to Exile for stopping early Amalgam aggression, and also breaks free of any potential Leyline of the Void or Magus of the Moon once the game is well in hand.
Apart from these subtleties, the play patterns are virtually identical between maindeck and sideboard games except that both players are better prepared. This is excellent for Emeria, since their deck does not significantly improve. On the other side of things we gain a much higher density of relevant draws, plus the ability to interact with the graveyard in Remorseful Cleric, which can often be brought back with Sun Titan as a crippling soft-lock typically set up soon enough to matter. The timing on the first Cleric activation requires situational awareness once again, but the threat sitting in play is already enough to slow games down a great deal for them. Equip it with Mortarpod whenever possible to play around Darkblast, and watch for potential Lightning Axe, but the Spirit is frequently the nail in the coffin (Sorry!) allowing Emeria to win comfortably given a nominal amount of pressure.
Hope this helps!