MTG Salvation

Notes from testing different things in BW Eldrazi for GP LA:

Thraben inspector: Unplayable as anything more then a 1-of and still pretty underwhelming there.

Kalitas: Actually good. Makes your midrange and agro matchups much better and changes the texture of the game. Warping the deck around it: mixed results. Makes the deck less taxy, more midrangey and you're likely just a worst jund deck at that point.

Flickerwisp numbers: 4 and 3 where both fine and no major difference as we're locked into 4 displacer, but 2 was just bad. You end up not drawing it enough.

Dismember main: Good maindeck card that makes a lot of matchups better, but not at the expense of the 3rd flickerwisp for reasons above.

Reality Smasher: Fine, but not what we're interested in. Makes your vial on 3 WAY more intimidating though as flickering it in response to removal is a 2-for 0 at least.

Finks numbers: want at least 3 in the 75, 2 main and 2 in the board was kinda gas and a good crutch as we were learning the deck and needed generic good cards.

Shriekmaw out of the board: Excellent. Turns displacer from a tier 1 card into a broken card. Also beats most midrange matchups by itself.

Pithing needle vs. Revoker: needle was generally preferred for being harder to interact with, but revoker is easier to reset since you have the out of displacer in addition to flickerwisp.

23rd land: Gas. Makes the deck infinitely more consistent. This slot is 1 fetid heath and has been marverlous.

Shambling vent numbers: I feel 3 is correct. Best player on our team likes 4, but it leads to too many awkward vent/land/vial/taxer hands that throw the game to variance.

Wall of Resurgence: I don't play it, but one of our guys does and he likes it a lot out of the board. Makes it really easy to make giant creatures and get board dominance.

Still no clue on what the sideboard should like as we're still trying to decide what we're trying to beat. Some needles, some additional removal, lifegain stuff, Gy hate and affinity/artifact hate is the general consensus, but the specifics have been hard to nail down.

This is the general team list now(which I'm off of for the GP, jumped to Jund since that's what I'm most comfortable with, but I have the biggest testing network and it is a team so...)

Oh, and nobody has any idea how many thalia's to play between 3 and 4. The card is great and essential to the early game, but screws with sequencing so much(along with the multiple thalia draw) that we're leaning towards 3.

Still testing stuff for GP LA. Currently on two flickerwisp, two kalitas, two dismember and the fetid Heath as a 23d land. Heavily slanted to beating midrange, aggro, and collected company decks.

Quote from Exatraz »

Quote from Lauphiette Kincey »

If this ends up a bust, we go back to 3 thalia, 2 finks, and 1 flex slot(kalitas, restoration angel, relic of progenitus).

Lastly, how do people like reality smasher? My team largely agrees that while it's a good topdeck, it's out of place in the deck since the card only does one thing.

[/deck]

I'm new to actually playing the archetype (going to pick up the final pieces tonight) but very familiar with how it plays and what it wants to do. I agree that I don't think Reality Smasher is what the deck wants in that flex spot. My current consideration is Archangel Avacyn. She gives you more boardwipe protection, combines with Displacer to make your entire team Indestructible if needed and gives you a 4/4 Vigilance Flier to aid in closing out games. Top all that off with the ability to let one of your less useful creatures die (or potentially kill it yourself by flicking wasteland strangler to process and kill) and then after she flips and in response to her trigger, you flick her to save your board while angering the board and bolting the opponent. I'm a little worried about her being flipped and wiping our own board but in theory that should only happen if we can't flick her in response to a removal spell (meaning our opponent has multiples) or they have a sacrifice mode (in which case you wait for the damage trigger to flip her). What are yalls thoughts on her?

So my friend who won the GPT actually was playing a singleton avacyn. He said the best card about the deck was that he could board it out every game lol.

Friend won a gpt the first time he picked up BW eldrazi without losing a match and now my playgroup is experimenting with the deck in prep for GPLA. Gonna test this build with Inspector tomorrow. Theory is that it makes our vials better, is an engine vs. control/midrange decks with displacer and the deck wanted card draw anyways.

If this ends up a bust, we go back to 3 thalia, 2 finks, and 1 flex slot(kalitas, restoration angel, relic of progenitus).

Lastly, how do people like reality smasher? My team largely agrees that while it's a good topdeck, it's out of place in the deck since the card only does one thing.

Mindwrack demon, aka timwewalked by lol reflector mage demon.

Yup, that was the problem, thanks.

so can you just copy paste from here into the custom sets and save it or is there a special way you need to format?

I tried just pasting everything into the xml and I'm not getting anything to show up

Cast rally the ancestors.

I beat Brad Nelson with it at a gp, what greater pleasure is there?

Don't know who suggested it, but I think sylvan advocate is aweful in abzan agro. I'd rather play any of the other 2 drops. It's better top deck sure, but it's so much worse then the other options in the early game that I don't care.

A 2/3 vigilance for 2 is not playable.

Starting point for Abzan agro post rotation.



Ayli is by far the best 2 drop in this colors for a number of reasons.

1) It's a 2/3. This means it survives wild slash and Kozileks return. Also does a decent job of punking mono-red.
2) It has deathtouch. Heir of the wilds sucks, but was played because deathtouch meant you could force through damage against bigger creatures. Same concept.
3) It gains life. Less likely to come up in this then other deck types(rally for instance) but it's a free-roll and can randomly save things from getting exiled which comes up vs. abzan charm for instance.

The issue is that Ayli is hell on the mana, so to compensate, I went back to a painland manabase. May seem like a big sacrifice, but I think it's worth it since you want more black sources anyways because of wanting to cast flaying tendrils out of the board and you get more consistent early green for warden as a bonus. Also, hissing quagmire.

Hangarback gets the nod as it's playable regardless of your mana situation and is the best 2 against rally. This may seem counterintuitive but as a rally player that playtests with some of the best abzan agro players in So-Cal, I have enough experience+observations to confidently say this. The games abzan loses against rally aside from never drawing anafenza(which are still losable) often involve very aggressive openers that get stalled out from clogged boards via coco's and value rallies. Once hangarbacks on 2 counters, you can always send it in since rallies weak to fliers and you don't care if they get a free block with a catacomb sifter or whatever. Hangarback also along with ayeli makes dromoka's command better and gives you more game vs. kozileks return. You also get some minor ugin insurance.

Only things I'm left wondering are whether or not I can get a tasigur in the main and can I cut a land(highly unlikely). But overall, I think this is one of the major directions abzan agro wants to shift to and Ayli in general helps you a lot across the board.

Did some testing with various builds.

Found the most important thing was having a comeback mechanic. This deck does NOT play from behind well at all.

Basically everytime I tested vs. Abzan midrange, if they where on the play and had Gideon into Wingmate, it was too much to come back from.

For this reason, I think stasis snare is a mando include in the deck and you probably want 3 valorous stances and 3-4 dromoka's commands to go with your raptor package.

Could even see hidden dragonslayer making an appearance. Just rebuild the Kibler agro deck with a better top-end basically.

Another direction is pulling a page out of abzan controls handbook and running a wrath effect. We have walkers and most of our creatures have some recursion/CA built in so it would certainly hurt our opponents more then us. More importantly, it moves us to a high enough spell density where we can get value from jace(the actual best card in standard).

Of course you're sold! Playing atarka's command in this deck makes zero sense logically. It just becomes a bad atarka red deck. If you want to play atarka's command, play atarka red with goblin tokens and a lower land count so you get more payoff.

This is more of an aggressive midrange deck then a pure blitz deck. Very similar to the RG dragon morph deck from last standard. You CAN have very aggressive draws that run people over, but because our card quality is fairly good and because of retreat, we can actually play to the board and dominate combat in the midgame with deathoutch creatures, hasty fliers, and our choice of making our guys either huge or pseudo unblockable.

Did some more testing and found that the languish decks are actually very easy to beat if you draw Firebird and they can't exile it. I'm considering playing a 3rd copy in the board over the second plummet. Also cut a retreat to Kazunda in the board for a feed the clan since getting the immediate 5-10 life can be enough to stabilize you. In the maindeck, I cut the looming spires for the 4th deathmist to increase threat density.

Still beating just about everything except jeskai which feel slightly unfavorable depending on version. I think to make that matchup favorable likely involves some combination of black sideboard cards and outpost siege.

If you don't play atarka's command, the deck becomes much more consistent and you get to add retreat of Valakut which is actually ridiculous:





The reason to go with retreat over Command is the simple fact that you want to play a ton of lands to enable you're landfall guys. For that reason I'm playing 26. 26 is a lot, but with retreat, you can actually top-deck lands for lethal(I've done it several times) and by weaving the modes on it, you can actually get there with just 1 creature. If instead that card was atarka's command, you'd have to go all in at some point and if they have it, you're likely drawing dead.

The raptor/den protector package plays directly into that plan though it's not as powerful in this deck as it normally is but serves it's purpose.

I had roast in the maindeck, but was frustrated a lot by wingmate rocs and mantis riders so switched it to crater's claws which have been much better overall.

Lastly, Blighted Woodlands plus Retreat to Valakut is like cheating. It's 3 land fall triggers if you play and activate it in the same turn and if you wait till you draw a fetchland, you can get 4.

I've played against a wide array of decks and found everything to be favorable or even except UB/UW control. Esper dragons is fine since you have rending volley's and plummets to interact with them postboard and they have to beat you with actual creatures, but control decks that just answer all you're threats and out value you are generally a knightmare and that's where the atarka agro version is better. If you expect control decks like that to be super popular(I don't) you can warp your manabase to include lumbering falls, then you'd probably never lose.

Was talking with friends and was wondering what everyone thinks about Wizards eventually banning cards from burn. Atarka's command for instance is pretty close to a second boros charm which is very powerful.

Burn as a deck is like a narrower version of pod in that by it's nature it limits the kind of red cards WotC can print in the future before the deck gets oversaturated with power.

The decks fine now(if thoroughly unenjoyable to play against), but given a couple more blocks...we'll see.

The Control mirror plays out in a very small amount of ways game 1:

1) someone gets decked

2) someone gets killed by damage.

First thing in your mind should be decking since unless a player has PLA, both players should have enough answers to the threats(6 counters+crux/invocation vs. 4-6 dragons+ugin).

Knowing this, it's almost always incorrect to counter card draw game 1 unless someones way ahead or way behind. You're ideally playing draw go for the first 15+turns and the first one to miss a land drop is the guy that's in trouble. If's he's ingenuiting with a bunch of cards in hand, just let that resolve, especially on turn 6. This puts you ahead on the decking race and now the onus is on him to start forcing through threats eventually as now you can freely draw cards whenever you get to them without worrying about getting decked and you get to save your precious card draw for threats.

In postboard games, you can much more liberally counter card draw(the good stuff like dig) because you also have more interaction and less garbage in your deck so your playing a more normal game of magic instead of the bizzare decking subgame that you get in g1. Again though, only start casting stuff when you start getting behind on land drops as it's pretty easy to end up getting tapped out on your own end step and letting them slam a dragon and having initiative for the rest of the game.