I have been waiting for a few more madness cards, but even without them I have been contemplating a Jeskai Midrange shell. With the spoiling of Goldnight Castigator, I figured I would open up a thread to see what others might think of Jeskai Midrange looking ahead. I believe that Jace, Vryn's Prodigy with madness and backed up by Reflector Mage can allow for some powerful cards from Jeskai to make their way into the fold.
I suspect these two creatures are staples in Jeskai, as they are early board presence and can help you keep your midrange advantage against decks that are a bit lower to the ground. Getting to cast spells with Madness off Jace, Vryn's Prodigy for 1 mana, can be great value, and being able to make your turn 3 play of Reflector Mage curve into your midrange game, you are able to set up some serious threats, or at least ones with some utility.
Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is capable of being both a defensive card, and an offensive card and gan give you a flexible edge against both aggro decks, and control decks. Nahiri, the Harbinger can act as padding by removing a creature, and cal also give you additional madness outlets as well as some card filtering during long grindy games. Being able to ult into an Ojuta means she is replacing herself with another card, getting you in for 5 damage, and giving you the ability to replay Dragonlord Ojutai as a blocker. Chandra, Flamecaller at the top of the curve can give you some burst damage and sweeps for small teams of tokens if you need it. All of these cards as a follow up to Reflector Mage give you some really solid board presence and versatility to adjust to the game state.
Nothing super impressive, but they are fairly priced spells to keep you alive or build the board into a more advantageous position. They give you added value to your discard requirements as well, and for the cheap madness cost - they are worth the slots.
Initially, I was not entirely impressed with Goldnight Castigator, but she can snowball really quickly. being able to block a lot of creatures is also a great perk to have. With Reflector Mage and your madness spells, in theory you should be able to be ahead with Goldnight Castigator on curve. Adding Dragonlord Ojutai to the mix means you can play between 4 and 6, get some evasive beats in, and have built in card advantage on a connect. It also gives you slots for Silumgar's Scorn for additional control elements if necessary. There are even other threat options like Linvala, the Preserver which can help you recoup life in the late game.
Just tossing out some ideas and thoughts. Feel free to chime in.
Crackling Doom may be rotating, but To the Slaughter is splashable, and in what is likely to be the most flexible color moving forward. The card is also a hard hitting value card. We tested dragons, and the deck is about as marginal as anything else we have tried. It is really weak to WB strategies which has actually been one of the better decks in our testing.
The issue that I have with your analysis is that Hangarback walker and token strategies are going to also be very prevalent in the format. Its why we settled on only 2 foul-tongue invocation and why we dont think that to the slaughter will see much play. From what we gather is if a sac a creature effect is going to see play it will be Fleshbag Marauder, as it is a zombie and interacts well with other quick aggro decks that are playing with their graveyards. As it stands we choose foul-tongue over to the slaughter because we have lots of answers for planeswalkers already and more often than not we wanted to gain the life foul-tongue gives you.
What on earth are your black gauntlet decks looking like that they do not have ample other answers to tokens?
Gah I hate when people do this. Punishing others and pissing and moaning about it because you met an ******** this one time is stupid. You aren't doing it for the dicks for doing it for the non dicks. I'm often said dick when rubbed the wrong way, we all are, though I am certain this individual was not influenced by me as I haven't played in a week or two. As such I will "pay it forward" because I had to script the check lands to playtest.
I am not punishing anyone. Nobody here is in a worse off position than they were had I not started patching in the first place. It was not just one person, it was a handful of them - and I am not pissing and moaning, I am making it known that I will not be producing the content patch anymore.
I do not owe any of you anything, and that is a fact. If people want to ***** because I update the patch an hour later than I did the previous day, I don't want to hear it, and that is why I am not doing it anymore.
Crackling Doom may be rotating, but To the Slaughter is splashable, and in what is likely to be the most flexible color moving forward. The card is also a hard hitting value card. We tested dragons, and the deck is about as marginal as anything else we have tried. It is really weak to WB strategies which has actually been one of the better decks in our testing.
I see the appeal of returning all creatures to their owners hand, I really do. But I cannot justify the investment to make it work with TITI, I would rather just run Engulf the Shore - which admittedly may not be all that horrible of an card to mise with.
I would consider dropping Command in favor of some sweepers. If you want Gideon, run Planar Outburst, since you know you will be focusing more on WW. I have tried a number of different threat packages, and while I like aspects of man of them - I do prefer to just use a well placed Sorin, Grim Nemesis and threaten Jace ultimates. Below is my current dragonless shell, which I am more fond of.
Game 1 can be pretty grindy and time consuming. It is likely that I will cut a Vryn's Prodigy for another threat, but I have not decided which it will be. It may just be as simple as me adding in Day's Undoing for the reshuffle threats value. I enjoy being able to get a walker on board, use the abilities when the board is clear, and reset hands with mana up. In all likely-hood though, it may just end up being Linvala, the Preserver
If you are convinced that it has a big pay off, you must not play control much. I am going to attempt to put this in perspective for you, in a different way - since you seem to not understand how much it actually takes to get TITI to go off with a marginal result.
TITI is often looking to flip around turn 6-8 and sometimes even well beyond that. Your spells and mana are leaving you bottlenecked, and you can only do so much in a turn during the mid game.
This card cost 4 mana and on turns 6-8, it is generally going to do the exact same thing that TITI is going to do, without the devoted slots, without the marginal plays to keep it alive, without the hastle of having to time it correctly, and without the problems of the creature flipping on your opponent's turn, leaving it open to sorcery speed removal on top of all of the instant removal it does not dodge. Best of all, it is an instant - making a cleaner EOT effect an easy achievement.
So, testing today has shown that While Jace is good, you deffo don't need him in Esper control matchups. Especially since between Ob and Sorin you generally get really far ahead by late game
He has a lot of value still. The more counters and creatures you run, the worse he gets. But his ability to flash back an Anguished Unmaking or a To the Slaughter, especially with late game Delirium, is really beneficial. He also provides extra threat density in a control vs control match. I took him out for a while, and I put him back in and I even run 3x Jace, Unraveler of Secrets alongside 4x Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and I still have not found myself disliking it. I feel like his slot is fairly volatile though, sometimes I feel like he can go, other times I feel like he needs to be in there, if not for flashing back spells, at least for the ability to loot and start optimizing your hand early on in a game.
I think you make some valid points, but your also assuming the deck's pilot is a bad player. Who's to say we are wasting resources protecting TITI? I would much prefer letting him die to a piece of spot removal, and then countering a creature and bringing him back with Ojutai Command. Let them waste their removal, and spend their resources worrying about his potential flip, as I set myself up for the actual win.
I think AT LEAST this card is incredible sideboard material, since I think madness vampires will be a thing, and esper will have difficultly handling its' speed.
You really should think about what a card is worth - in terms of resources.
As already stated, TITI could be any other card that is less reliant on investing time into it, or additional resources. TITI may seem like a card that gets value by doing what your deck is doing, but it has some steep stipulations to having a marginal payout. It requires time. Something you don't always have a lot of. It also requires that time to be punctual when it comes to getting a valuable trigger, and because it is not a may ability, being punctual with it does not always happen.
Other things to greatly consider, is that exile effects are abundant, edicts are abundant, Ojutai's Command is a good card because the targets it has (Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, and Dragonmaster Outcast) have a higher reward ceiling in the event they do not eat EOT removal after your command resolves - the kind that turn games around. Any control or midrange strategy not using TITI, means you are going to have a rough time against them if TITI is using up otherwise valuable space. DTR is not always a valid argument, but it is valid when you are investing resources into something and you have little leeway with protecting it. A vanilla creature fails the DTR argument, and a vanilla creature that takes 4+ turns to actually do anything at all, fails that test even more. There is a reason ETB triggers are valuable, and they become more important when you are light on threat density because a single removal spell does that much more work against you.
TITI is not a big payoff, it really is not. Especially for the very fact that walkers and removal are likely to saturate the format. Sure, you can counter the removal... but you have to counter it 4 times with 4-6 counters able to do so.
Back to talking about what a card is worth, you realize that TITI requires 5 cards in order to get a soft sweeper and 7 damage right? It also cost you 8-20 mana. Languish cost you only 1 card and 4 mana for a soft sweep, and Planar Outburst cost you 1 card and 5 mana for a hard sweep. Is the 7 damage really worth the 8-12 mana and 4 other cards? You could spend another 6 mana for 5 damage, a potential 3/3 flying angel token AND potentially another 5 life for only 1 card.
Look man, I am not trying to be a bad guy. But your thread is going to get buried by another Esper thread where people want to talk about actually making the deck better and you likely will be reposting your list in that thread trying to get feedback and wondering why people have begun ignoring you.
I'm not really using Thing for his return creature to hand ability, it's more for the 7/8 creature part. The return to hand is icing on the cake.
And I don't see where TITI would work better than in a control deck, you cast him on turn 2 (when you would normally have nothing to cast) and just in the process of doing what it is control decks do (casting instants and sorceries) he can flip into a beast.
I could see trading Myth for more card draw but I'm not sure if I want to stack painful truths because, well, they are painful.
If you want to use TITI, then by all means. I think it is garbage, and what I have seen of people playing him in control decks, is incredibly lackluster. I have seen many games where he flips and returned 1 or 2 creatures hit for 7, the opponent removed him and came back because the control player spent too many resources protecting him to get minimal value out of the flip and have too few reserves for protecting the closing part of the deal.
There are far more times where it simply did not flip because it was killed before it could flip.
The card is bad in a format where you cannot quickly cycle through cards for a flip. You are far better off using a reliable sweeper and a more robust, multifaceted finisher.
There really is only so many ways to explain the same problem with TITI, but if you want to run him - by all means. Sometimes you just have to figure it out the hard way, and I understand that, I have to do it a lot.
In other words, you are better off using a sweeper spell to create real value than hoping to get a timely flip on TITI which has been on the board for multiple turns, somehow completely unmolested.
The white splash is easier than I had anticipated. It does not splash for much, but what it does splash for gives you a big game. Sorin does a lot of work helping you recoup life, kill creatures, and punch in some extra damage. He is super sick.
Turn 4 Delirium seems typical so far. Between Concoction, Evolving Wilds, and Hangarback Walker - a self mill off Demon is almost always a Delirium trigger. Removal spells also slow you down a bit, but help you turn on Delirium without having to run something like Gather the Pack.
Traverse the Ulvenwald should not only give you more endgame reach but also allow you to splash white. Like I said, I am not a fan of cards that are aimed at turning on Delirium. I think your best bet is to let it just ride out its course and turn itself on and play the ground game using a broad spectrum of card types.
Declaration in Stone is a broad removal card and many token producers are residual. I doubt we will see many Angel tokens, and you can just use typical spot removal on them. Esper also does not have the draw power to be super selective with how it uses its removal.
I dislike Gather the Pack. It gets Delirium off much more quickly, but it is 2 mana and your threats cost 4 mana. I feel like those beaters should be backed by more pressure instead of trying to meet Delirium requirements. Delirium is probably best met by playing a midrange value game or a long control game. Speed does not really do anything other than make your threats more vulnerable to removal and your game plan more linear.
I also dislike Dead Weight. If you want more enchantments to help get Delirium online, perhaps Oath of Nissa is better. You get to replace the card and you can do it for 1 mana. It gives you better card quality options, and you can use the Legendary rule to your advantage. You could also consider a W splash and use Dromoka's Command + Demonic Pact. Pact can be an aggressive value card or a grindy attrition card. It is an enchantment, and splashing into W for Dromoka's Command can let you get a bit more flexibility on your spells - doubling as removal, an answer to Demonic Pact, and a means for getting in extra damage with the pump. The other benefit of W is that you can then splash for Sorin, Grim Nemesis as a good top end. He can spike for 4 off a Delirium beater or a Pact, and that combined with a Mindwrack Demon beat and a Demonic Pact drain can add up quickly.
I suspect these two creatures are staples in Jeskai, as they are early board presence and can help you keep your midrange advantage against decks that are a bit lower to the ground. Getting to cast spells with Madness off Jace, Vryn's Prodigy for 1 mana, can be great value, and being able to make your turn 3 play of Reflector Mage curve into your midrange game, you are able to set up some serious threats, or at least ones with some utility.
Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is capable of being both a defensive card, and an offensive card and gan give you a flexible edge against both aggro decks, and control decks. Nahiri, the Harbinger can act as padding by removing a creature, and cal also give you additional madness outlets as well as some card filtering during long grindy games. Being able to ult into an Ojuta means she is replacing herself with another card, getting you in for 5 damage, and giving you the ability to replay Dragonlord Ojutai as a blocker. Chandra, Flamecaller at the top of the curve can give you some burst damage and sweeps for small teams of tokens if you need it. All of these cards as a follow up to Reflector Mage give you some really solid board presence and versatility to adjust to the game state.
Nothing super impressive, but they are fairly priced spells to keep you alive or build the board into a more advantageous position. They give you added value to your discard requirements as well, and for the cheap madness cost - they are worth the slots.
Initially, I was not entirely impressed with Goldnight Castigator, but she can snowball really quickly. being able to block a lot of creatures is also a great perk to have. With Reflector Mage and your madness spells, in theory you should be able to be ahead with Goldnight Castigator on curve. Adding Dragonlord Ojutai to the mix means you can play between 4 and 6, get some evasive beats in, and have built in card advantage on a connect. It also gives you slots for Silumgar's Scorn for additional control elements if necessary. There are even other threat options like Linvala, the Preserver which can help you recoup life in the late game.
Just tossing out some ideas and thoughts. Feel free to chime in.
What on earth are your black gauntlet decks looking like that they do not have ample other answers to tokens?
I am not punishing anyone. Nobody here is in a worse off position than they were had I not started patching in the first place. It was not just one person, it was a handful of them - and I am not pissing and moaning, I am making it known that I will not be producing the content patch anymore.
I do not owe any of you anything, and that is a fact. If people want to ***** because I update the patch an hour later than I did the previous day, I don't want to hear it, and that is why I am not doing it anymore.
I would consider dropping Command in favor of some sweepers. If you want Gideon, run Planar Outburst, since you know you will be focusing more on WW. I have tried a number of different threat packages, and while I like aspects of man of them - I do prefer to just use a well placed Sorin, Grim Nemesis and threaten Jace ultimates. Below is my current dragonless shell, which I am more fond of.
4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
Planeswalker
1 Narset Transcendent
3 Jace, Unraveler of Secrets
2 Sorin, Grim Nemesis
Disruption
3 Clash of Wills
2 Scatter to the Winds
Removal
3 To the Slaughter
3 Anguished Unmaking
3 Declaration in Stone
4 Languish
Other
4 Anticipate
2 Epiphany at the Drownyard
4 Sunken Hollow
4 Prairie Stream
3 Evolving Wilds
2 Swamp
2 Plains
2 Island
2 Caves of Koilos
2 Blighted Cataract
1 Shambling Vent
2 Choked Estuary
2 Port Town
3 Negate
2 Virulent Plague
1 Declaration in Stone
2 Startled Awake
2 Pick the Brain
2 Surge of Righteousness
2 Flaying Tendrils
1 Linvala, the Preserver
Game 1 can be pretty grindy and time consuming. It is likely that I will cut a Vryn's Prodigy for another threat, but I have not decided which it will be. It may just be as simple as me adding in Day's Undoing for the reshuffle threats value. I enjoy being able to get a walker on board, use the abilities when the board is clear, and reset hands with mana up. In all likely-hood though, it may just end up being Linvala, the Preserver
TITI is often looking to flip around turn 6-8 and sometimes even well beyond that. Your spells and mana are leaving you bottlenecked, and you can only do so much in a turn during the mid game.
This card cost 4 mana and on turns 6-8, it is generally going to do the exact same thing that TITI is going to do, without the devoted slots, without the marginal plays to keep it alive, without the hastle of having to time it correctly, and without the problems of the creature flipping on your opponent's turn, leaving it open to sorcery speed removal on top of all of the instant removal it does not dodge. Best of all, it is an instant - making a cleaner EOT effect an easy achievement.
TITI is bad. Sorry man.
He has a lot of value still. The more counters and creatures you run, the worse he gets. But his ability to flash back an Anguished Unmaking or a To the Slaughter, especially with late game Delirium, is really beneficial. He also provides extra threat density in a control vs control match. I took him out for a while, and I put him back in and I even run 3x Jace, Unraveler of Secrets alongside 4x Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and I still have not found myself disliking it. I feel like his slot is fairly volatile though, sometimes I feel like he can go, other times I feel like he needs to be in there, if not for flashing back spells, at least for the ability to loot and start optimizing your hand early on in a game.
You really should think about what a card is worth - in terms of resources.
As already stated, TITI could be any other card that is less reliant on investing time into it, or additional resources. TITI may seem like a card that gets value by doing what your deck is doing, but it has some steep stipulations to having a marginal payout. It requires time. Something you don't always have a lot of. It also requires that time to be punctual when it comes to getting a valuable trigger, and because it is not a may ability, being punctual with it does not always happen.
Other things to greatly consider, is that exile effects are abundant, edicts are abundant, Ojutai's Command is a good card because the targets it has (Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, and Dragonmaster Outcast) have a higher reward ceiling in the event they do not eat EOT removal after your command resolves - the kind that turn games around. Any control or midrange strategy not using TITI, means you are going to have a rough time against them if TITI is using up otherwise valuable space. DTR is not always a valid argument, but it is valid when you are investing resources into something and you have little leeway with protecting it. A vanilla creature fails the DTR argument, and a vanilla creature that takes 4+ turns to actually do anything at all, fails that test even more. There is a reason ETB triggers are valuable, and they become more important when you are light on threat density because a single removal spell does that much more work against you.
TITI is not a big payoff, it really is not. Especially for the very fact that walkers and removal are likely to saturate the format. Sure, you can counter the removal... but you have to counter it 4 times with 4-6 counters able to do so.
Back to talking about what a card is worth, you realize that TITI requires 5 cards in order to get a soft sweeper and 7 damage right? It also cost you 8-20 mana. Languish cost you only 1 card and 4 mana for a soft sweep, and Planar Outburst cost you 1 card and 5 mana for a hard sweep. Is the 7 damage really worth the 8-12 mana and 4 other cards? You could spend another 6 mana for 5 damage, a potential 3/3 flying angel token AND potentially another 5 life for only 1 card.
Look man, I am not trying to be a bad guy. But your thread is going to get buried by another Esper thread where people want to talk about actually making the deck better and you likely will be reposting your list in that thread trying to get feedback and wondering why people have begun ignoring you.
If you want to use TITI, then by all means. I think it is garbage, and what I have seen of people playing him in control decks, is incredibly lackluster. I have seen many games where he flips and returned 1 or 2 creatures hit for 7, the opponent removed him and came back because the control player spent too many resources protecting him to get minimal value out of the flip and have too few reserves for protecting the closing part of the deal.
There are far more times where it simply did not flip because it was killed before it could flip.
The card is bad in a format where you cannot quickly cycle through cards for a flip. You are far better off using a reliable sweeper and a more robust, multifaceted finisher.
There really is only so many ways to explain the same problem with TITI, but if you want to run him - by all means. Sometimes you just have to figure it out the hard way, and I understand that, I have to do it a lot.
We are not too far off in the main 60, from each other.
4 Kytheon, Hero of Akros
4 Thalia's Lieutenant
3 Topan Freeblade
4 Knight of the White Orchid
3 Archangel of Tithes
4 Expedition Envoy
4 Consul's Lieutenant
3 Hidden Dragonslayer
3 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar
Artifact
3 Captain's Claws
Spells
3 Secure the Wastes
Lands
20 Plains
2 Blighted Steppe
4 Hangarback Walker
4 Mindwrack Demon
4 Soul Swallower
2 Priest of the Blood Rite
Planeswalker
3 Sorin, Grim Nemesis
Spells
3 Traverse the Ulvenwald
4 Oath of Nissa
4 Sinister Concoction
2 Anguished Unmaking
2 Pick the Brain
3 To the Slaughter
3 Hissing Quagmire
3 Caves of Koilos
2 Plains
4 Swamp
4 Forest
1 Blighted Woodland
1 Blighted Fen
4 Evolving Wilds
3 Canopy Vista
2 Duress
2 Transgress the Mind
3 Thought-Knot Seer
2 Declaration in Stone
1 Virulent Plague
2 Ultimate Price
1 Anguished Unmaking
2 Languish
Is where I am at right now.
The white splash is easier than I had anticipated. It does not splash for much, but what it does splash for gives you a big game. Sorin does a lot of work helping you recoup life, kill creatures, and punch in some extra damage. He is super sick.
Turn 4 Delirium seems typical so far. Between Concoction, Evolving Wilds, and Hangarback Walker - a self mill off Demon is almost always a Delirium trigger. Removal spells also slow you down a bit, but help you turn on Delirium without having to run something like Gather the Pack.
I am liking it a lot so far.
I also dislike Dead Weight. If you want more enchantments to help get Delirium online, perhaps Oath of Nissa is better. You get to replace the card and you can do it for 1 mana. It gives you better card quality options, and you can use the Legendary rule to your advantage. You could also consider a W splash and use Dromoka's Command + Demonic Pact. Pact can be an aggressive value card or a grindy attrition card. It is an enchantment, and splashing into W for Dromoka's Command can let you get a bit more flexibility on your spells - doubling as removal, an answer to Demonic Pact, and a means for getting in extra damage with the pump. The other benefit of W is that you can then splash for Sorin, Grim Nemesis as a good top end. He can spike for 4 off a Delirium beater or a Pact, and that combined with a Mindwrack Demon beat and a Demonic Pact drain can add up quickly.