could also use Board the Weatherlight, since it can hit artifacts as well as Karn. stirrings is a lot better though because it can hit lands and can be cast for one less.
i suppose you could play something like The Antiquities War to synergise with it better.
i had considered cerebral vortex, since it can be tutored by merchant scroll. i feel like the merits of a two-colour manabase's stability are important, particularly for a deck suited to playing the longer game (control-combo).
furthermore, the engine piece itself, smothering tithe, fits more appropriately in a controlling, taxing shell - slowing down the opponent here and there until we reach our combo potential. the deck, if it lands a solid tithe without the draw-sevens, uses the enchantment to eke out small amounts of value every turn. if it only has the timetwisters, we can pitch them to chemister's insights to dig further, all while preserving our instant-speed tempo.
however, if a fun red-based version that tries to go all-in on the combo using all-star faithless looting, i'd be more than happy to give it a whirl!
1. play like a typical control deck until you resolve a smothering tithe.
2. play any timetwister effect. the seven draws will proc the aforementioned enchantment, very likely obtaining you 7 treasures.
3. if desired, continue chaining draw-sevens. use pull from eternity to give yourself another shot, given one more draw-seven exists in your library or hand.
4. after two or more smothering tithes, you will generate a net positive for mana by leaps and bounds. use this extra mana to find a blue sun's zenith and make your opponent know so much that they die.
other considerations - esper, for revel in riches/access to black for whatever it is black mages do
the #1 reason i saw to play rug was the ability to run invert//invent and expansion // explosion. the former is basically a more expensive version of teachings, but is really neat if you run merchant scroll, and the latter is a slot-in over blue sun's zenith. another neat piece of tech is research // development which is a nice way to close out the game with tokens and turns, gain card advantage, or tutor in silver bullets, but is weak to the fact that it gives your opponent a choice. still, i found the lack of teachings to be a huge weakness to the BUGX lists.
i've been running a bant + black list, only using only 1 watery grave for teachings flashback. the main point of it is to be able to run glittering wish as a flexible way to find the answers you need.
i'd actually considered conjurer's bauble while brewing. i think the reason i took it out was because considering an empty library, it would be neat to be able to pop a card into the library to be able to play it... but then you draw it off and you can't play it because of frenzy's hand-cast clause. then i wished there was a card that had dredge 0, haha. but now that i think about it... 0 mana draw is pretty solid, and helps outside of the combo to dig a little deeper. chromatic star is 1 mana to draw and in the early stages of the combo, the difference between 0 and 1 mana is like night and day.
while we can't have future sight in modern, we do have experimental frenzy (and precognition field, but that's a story for another time)! the power in being able to churn through your deck is incredibly powerful. while the 4-mana red enchantment may look like nothing more than a glorified draw engine, the ability to play directly from the library has huge synergies with effects like noxious revival or frantic salvage. the downside is of course getting "blocked" by lands and other undesirable spells. lanternless frenzy attempts to utilise the upsides of experimental frenzy while mitigating its downsides by 1. playing as little lands as possible; we use rituals to generate our extra mana (though simian spirit guide is a nonbo with experimental frenzy) and 2. by playing cards that help you manipulate the top card(s) of your library. like codex shredder and ghoulcaller's bell. combined with cards that reduce the cost of your artifacts, we turn these 1 mana artifacts into cheerios, and those cheerios in turn help dig through our library by milling off cards we can't or don't want to play. without further ado, here is the decklist for lanternless frenzy:
the playthrough of the deck is as follows: in the early game, start by playing a couple 1-mana or 2-mana millers. get down a cloud key, naming artifact, and then resolve an experimental frenzy. at this point, you should be ready to go off. play as many rituals and discounted artifacts off the top as you can, milling off lands and other expensive spells with your codexes, wands, etc. with a grinding station in play, the deck feels much smoother; each artifact you play lets you reset the grinding station to sac off tapped bells and wands to continue digging. if you have two cloud keys in play, it's a good idea to name instant with the next key, so that they act as electromancers for your rituals. at this point you should have a critical mass of mana and eventually an empty library. it's highly likely that you've milled off grapeshot. in this case, use the other activated abilities of perpetual timepiece and (an untapped) wand of vertebrae to shuffle grapeshot (and other cards you may need to support the finisher, such as more rituals or milled timepieces/wands) into your library. since you can play off the top of your library, just keep casting and eventually cast your grapeshot for lethal. you can also win by milling, in case the opponent has an infinite life engine and/or hexproof. if the opponent does not have hexproof, shuffle in all your artifacts and rituals with timepiece and keep proccing grinding station on the opponent as you reset it with artifacts off the top. if they happen to have a yard shuffle effect, have tormod's crypt at the ready to wipe them away. if the opponent has hexproof, it's a bit more complicated, but still winnable by looping bells with an elixir.
post-board games can get more difficult because this deck is vulnerable to both yard and artifact/enchantment hate. leyline of sanctity is a non-issue on its own; if someone is interested, i can write out the process to win through hexproof. rest in peace, leyline of the void, relic of progenitus, tormod's crypts, and surgicals all have the potential to ruin the combo by disrupting key pieces in the graveyard. the permanents can be played around by bringing in wear/tears or needles. surgical is a combo breaker; there is almost nothing we can do about it other than hope the opponent doesn't have it (which i will admit isn't a strong position to play.) white predominantly has the most potential hate cards; thalia is a huge road bump, and stony silence + rest in peace nullifies the combo. bring in glare of heresy to deal with these troubling permanents, or ghirapur aether grid to counter stony. grafdigger's cage is uniquely prohibitive to our deck because it says that player's can't cast spells in libraries. thankfully, they can easily be dealt with through wear/tear or engineered explosives. damping sphere also hurts the combo; bring in artifact hate like before, or use explosives.
anyways, that's the gist of the combo. just curious what ideas anyone else has been exploring with this concept or frenzy in general. suggestions to the deck would also be welcome.
i just played against this deck, and it's miles ahead of any rug variant i could concoct. teaching is an absolute house; the fact that teachings can be played at instant speed, AND also tutors for clutch of the undercity which can be transmuted for wilderness reclamation is just clutch. against the mirror, that is. not sure how it would fare against faster decks with a significant clock - i assume black helps it give it a stronger edge than red would, because burning the opponent with bolt and electrolyze isn't the goal of the deck.
hate to rain on the blue parade, but i've thought a lot about cutting the blue, adding red and going experimental frenzy.
it might be sacrilegious but hear me out. i love the ug list, and trying it with precognition field just made things feel a lot smoother. however, the deck being highly uninteractive felt difficult at times, as well as hitting "bricks", such as lands and other unplayables like dictate of karametra and heartbeat of spring. thankfully, the combo was able to produce enough mana to put the activated ability to exile cards to good use. still, the lost value can still be felt sometimes, and the downside of being unable to play from hand can be mitigated by having graveyard-castable spells.
the idea is to ramp and/or dig in the first few turns to hit a mana doubler and a frenzy. from there, the game plays like green sun's zenith: untap your lands, see more cards, cast an x-spell and win. the means of doing so are slightly different here, however. instead of reality spasm, rude awakening is played. it also has the upside of being a win condition on its own if the opponent lacks blockers and/or faces lethal with your ramped manabase of 2/2s. instead of cantrips and draw-sevens, methods of playing multiple lands are added, such as explore, search for tomorrow, and journey of discovery to help blow through or shuffle away potential blocks on top of the library. faithless looting can help unclog the top of the library from the graveyard, and act on impulse acts as a very interesting way to "draw cards" and play them without actually drawing the cards. the downside is that the card is relatively weak outside of combo turns or the turn of setting up the combo. past in flames lets us do it all over again.
finally, instead of blue sun's zenith, the deck plays a banefire to present lethal, though red sun's zenith is a prospective option depending on your meta, and would more aptly fit the deck's origins.
one final touch to the deck i'd like to point out is the inclusion of two blood moons. playing a lot of basics for early harvest also allows the deck to dip into the moon gameplay. game one, can catch a lot of opponents off-guard, and depending on the matchup, you can bring in up to two more to hose the opposition more consistently, or you can cut it in favour of other answers.
let's talk about nexus of fate. considering the atrocity that is being a buy-a-box promo, standard has demonstrated that nexus is a very powerful card in the right deck. the current type 2 turbo fog deck features gift of paradise, teferi, hero of dominaria, and nexus of fate to cast time walks at instant speed on their end step by floating the enchanted land mana, then using the untap trigger from teferi's +1 to generate enough mana in that one phase to cast nexus.
i thought about shifting that paradigm to modern, where our card pool is much greater, but i suppose one must also consider that disruption in this format is also greater. i still believe that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and so far i've been trying a list as follows:
i admit though that this is still a work-in-progress, most notably the sideboard and win conditions. the manabase could use some help too, but right now i feel it's fine.
the main win condition of the deck is by milling through sphinx's tutelage, which is a bit fragile since there is definitely the possibility of decking oneself through all the mine effects. the best way to prevent a suicidal end is to stop playing mine effects once you reach about four, then use teferi's minus to tuck our own mines away once we are very close to decking, then loop draws with shuffled nexus of fates.
second, aside from maybe the vault skirge and legionnaire, the cards aren't very good. if you can find your rage extractor and make it stick, it definitely seems nice, but you don't have any pentad prisms or mana ramp of any kind to get it on the battlefield sooner. by the time you get to 4 mana to cast it and pay life, you're probably going to be at less than half life against most fair decks, and then paying even more life to get the value out of the extractor might be a suicidal play. the options for reactive disruption seem okay but i think it might be better to have permanents that can really stall the game for you while you get your engine online
Storage Matrix is another consideration.
i think Ensnaring Bridge is miles ahead of most of these cards though. if you really want a Ghostly Prison effect though, there's always Norn's Annex
i suppose you could play something like The Antiquities War to synergise with it better.
furthermore, the engine piece itself, smothering tithe, fits more appropriately in a controlling, taxing shell - slowing down the opponent here and there until we reach our combo potential. the deck, if it lands a solid tithe without the draw-sevens, uses the enchantment to eke out small amounts of value every turn. if it only has the timetwisters, we can pitch them to chemister's insights to dig further, all while preserving our instant-speed tempo.
however, if a fun red-based version that tries to go all-in on the combo using all-star faithless looting, i'd be more than happy to give it a whirl!
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Flooded Strand
4 Hallowed Fountain
6 Island
7 Plains
Instant - 22
3 Emergency Powers
2 Path to Exile
1 Pull from Eternity
1 Condemn
4 Chemister's Insight
3 Remand
1 Settle the Wreckage
2 Cryptic Command
1 Aetherize
2 Spell Snare
1 Blue Sun's Zenith
1 Disallow
1 Merchant Scroll
2 Supreme Verdict
3 Time Reversal
2 Idyllic Tutor
Enchantment - 4
4 Smothering Tithe
Instant/Sorcery - 1
1 Commit // Memory
1 Silence
3 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Suppression Field
2 Dispel
2 Aura of Silence
1 Negate
3 Spreading Seas
1 Detention Sphere
1. play like a typical control deck until you resolve a smothering tithe.
2. play any timetwister effect. the seven draws will proc the aforementioned enchantment, very likely obtaining you 7 treasures.
3. if desired, continue chaining draw-sevens. use pull from eternity to give yourself another shot, given one more draw-seven exists in your library or hand.
4. after two or more smothering tithes, you will generate a net positive for mana by leaps and bounds. use this extra mana to find a blue sun's zenith and make your opponent know so much that they die.
other considerations - esper, for revel in riches/access to black for whatever it is black mages do
i've been running a bant + black list, only using only 1 watery grave for teachings flashback. the main point of it is to be able to run glittering wish as a flexible way to find the answers you need.
2 Breeding Pool
2 Celestial Colonnade
1 Field of Ruin
3 Flooded Strand
2 Forest
2 Hallowed Fountain
4 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
3 Plains
1 Temple Garden
1 Watery Grave
2 Windswept Heath
Instant
2 Path to Exile
3 Opt
1 Spell Snare
3 Remand
4 Growth Spiral
2 Settle the Wreckage
1 Chemister's Insight
3 Mystical Teachings
2 Cryptic Command
1 Nexus of Fate
1 Emergency Powers
1 Logic Knot
1 March of the Multitudes
3 Glittering Wish
1 Wargate
Creature
3 Snapcaster Mage
Planeswalker
1 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
Enchantment
3 Wilderness Reclamation
1 Glare of Heresy
3 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Dispel
1 Negate
1 Detention Sphere
1 Supreme Verdict
1 Emergency Powers
1 Sundering Growth
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
1 March of the Multitudes
1 Bring to Light
1 Wargate
absolutely, just like teferi +1
4 Arid Mesa
2 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
4 Mountain
2 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
Artifact (33):
4 Mox Opal
1 Tormod's Crypt
4 Codex Shredder
4 Ghoulcaller's Bell
3 Wand of Vertebrae
1 Elixir of Immortality
2 Grinding Station
4 Perpetual Timepiece
4 Cloud Key
3 Ensnaring Bridge
2 Engineered Explosives
4 Pyretic Ritual
4 Desperate Ritual
Sorcery (1):
1 Grapeshot
Enchantment (4):
4 Experimental Frenzy
1 Glare of Heresy
3 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Blood Moon
2 Ghirapur Aether Grid
1 Anger of the Gods
2 Wear // Tear
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Pithing Needle
2 Defense Grid
the playthrough of the deck is as follows: in the early game, start by playing a couple 1-mana or 2-mana millers. get down a cloud key, naming artifact, and then resolve an experimental frenzy. at this point, you should be ready to go off. play as many rituals and discounted artifacts off the top as you can, milling off lands and other expensive spells with your codexes, wands, etc. with a grinding station in play, the deck feels much smoother; each artifact you play lets you reset the grinding station to sac off tapped bells and wands to continue digging. if you have two cloud keys in play, it's a good idea to name instant with the next key, so that they act as electromancers for your rituals. at this point you should have a critical mass of mana and eventually an empty library. it's highly likely that you've milled off grapeshot. in this case, use the other activated abilities of perpetual timepiece and (an untapped) wand of vertebrae to shuffle grapeshot (and other cards you may need to support the finisher, such as more rituals or milled timepieces/wands) into your library. since you can play off the top of your library, just keep casting and eventually cast your grapeshot for lethal. you can also win by milling, in case the opponent has an infinite life engine and/or hexproof. if the opponent does not have hexproof, shuffle in all your artifacts and rituals with timepiece and keep proccing grinding station on the opponent as you reset it with artifacts off the top. if they happen to have a yard shuffle effect, have tormod's crypt at the ready to wipe them away. if the opponent has hexproof, it's a bit more complicated, but still winnable by looping bells with an elixir.
post-board games can get more difficult because this deck is vulnerable to both yard and artifact/enchantment hate. leyline of sanctity is a non-issue on its own; if someone is interested, i can write out the process to win through hexproof. rest in peace, leyline of the void, relic of progenitus, tormod's crypts, and surgicals all have the potential to ruin the combo by disrupting key pieces in the graveyard. the permanents can be played around by bringing in wear/tears or needles. surgical is a combo breaker; there is almost nothing we can do about it other than hope the opponent doesn't have it (which i will admit isn't a strong position to play.) white predominantly has the most potential hate cards; thalia is a huge road bump, and stony silence + rest in peace nullifies the combo. bring in glare of heresy to deal with these troubling permanents, or ghirapur aether grid to counter stony. grafdigger's cage is uniquely prohibitive to our deck because it says that player's can't cast spells in libraries. thankfully, they can easily be dealt with through wear/tear or engineered explosives. damping sphere also hurts the combo; bring in artifact hate like before, or use explosives.
anyways, that's the gist of the combo. just curious what ideas anyone else has been exploring with this concept or frenzy in general. suggestions to the deck would also be welcome.
i just played against this deck, and it's miles ahead of any rug variant i could concoct. teaching is an absolute house; the fact that teachings can be played at instant speed, AND also tutors for clutch of the undercity which can be transmuted for wilderness reclamation is just clutch. against the mirror, that is. not sure how it would fare against faster decks with a significant clock - i assume black helps it give it a stronger edge than red would, because burning the opponent with bolt and electrolyze isn't the goal of the deck.
considering a bant bent on this, with glittering wish to get wargate for WR
it might be sacrilegious but hear me out. i love the ug list, and trying it with precognition field just made things feel a lot smoother. however, the deck being highly uninteractive felt difficult at times, as well as hitting "bricks", such as lands and other unplayables like dictate of karametra and heartbeat of spring. thankfully, the combo was able to produce enough mana to put the activated ability to exile cards to good use. still, the lost value can still be felt sometimes, and the downside of being unable to play from hand can be mitigated by having graveyard-castable spells.
11 mountain
2 wooded foothills
2 noxious revival
3 past in flames
1 banefire
1 journey of discovery
3 search for tomorrow
3 explore
3 faithless looting
3 act on impulse
2 blood moon
3 dictate of karametra
3 heartbeat of spring
3 rude awakening
4 early harvest
3 experimental frenzy
3 eidolon of the great revel
2 blood moon
3 anger of the gods
2 seal of primordium
1 nature's claim
2 shatterstorm
2 boil
the idea is to ramp and/or dig in the first few turns to hit a mana doubler and a frenzy. from there, the game plays like green sun's zenith: untap your lands, see more cards, cast an x-spell and win. the means of doing so are slightly different here, however. instead of reality spasm, rude awakening is played. it also has the upside of being a win condition on its own if the opponent lacks blockers and/or faces lethal with your ramped manabase of 2/2s. instead of cantrips and draw-sevens, methods of playing multiple lands are added, such as explore, search for tomorrow, and journey of discovery to help blow through or shuffle away potential blocks on top of the library. faithless looting can help unclog the top of the library from the graveyard, and act on impulse acts as a very interesting way to "draw cards" and play them without actually drawing the cards. the downside is that the card is relatively weak outside of combo turns or the turn of setting up the combo. past in flames lets us do it all over again.
finally, instead of blue sun's zenith, the deck plays a banefire to present lethal, though red sun's zenith is a prospective option depending on your meta, and would more aptly fit the deck's origins.
one final touch to the deck i'd like to point out is the inclusion of two blood moons. playing a lot of basics for early harvest also allows the deck to dip into the moon gameplay. game one, can catch a lot of opponents off-guard, and depending on the matchup, you can bring in up to two more to hose the opposition more consistently, or you can cut it in favour of other answers.
i thought about shifting that paradigm to modern, where our card pool is much greater, but i suppose one must also consider that disruption in this format is also greater. i still believe that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and so far i've been trying a list as follows:
5 Island
3 Forest
3 Plains
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Flooded Strand
2 Windswept Heath
2 Breeding Pool
1 Temple Garden
2 Hallowed Fountain
1 Scavenger Grounds
Creature:
3 Snapcaster Mage
3 Angelsong
4 Nexus of Fate
Sorcery:
3 Exhaustion
1 Supreme Verdict
4 Time Warp
Enchantment:
3 Utopia Sprawl
3 Fertile Ground
2 Sphinx's Tutelage
3 Rites of Flourishing
4 Dictate of Kruphix
Planeswalker:
3 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
2 Dispel
2 Disenchant
3 Leyline of Sanctity
1 Damping Sphere
2 Path to Exile
2 Stony Silence
2 Settle the Wreckage
1 Supreme Verdict
i admit though that this is still a work-in-progress, most notably the sideboard and win conditions. the manabase could use some help too, but right now i feel it's fine.
the main win condition of the deck is by milling through sphinx's tutelage, which is a bit fragile since there is definitely the possibility of decking oneself through all the mine effects. the best way to prevent a suicidal end is to stop playing mine effects once you reach about four, then use teferi's minus to tuck our own mines away once we are very close to decking, then loop draws with shuffled nexus of fates.
just use a runed halo. name karma
second, aside from maybe the vault skirge and legionnaire, the cards aren't very good. if you can find your rage extractor and make it stick, it definitely seems nice, but you don't have any pentad prisms or mana ramp of any kind to get it on the battlefield sooner. by the time you get to 4 mana to cast it and pay life, you're probably going to be at less than half life against most fair decks, and then paying even more life to get the value out of the extractor might be a suicidal play. the options for reactive disruption seem okay but i think it might be better to have permanents that can really stall the game for you while you get your engine online