Comparing brain in a jar to Smallpox? Really? I get that you don't like it, but the fact of the matter is that people have been using smallpox with success.
Asking again. What about Tectonic Edge over Ghost Quarter? Pre Eye it was to slow but I wonder if it is still to slow now that Eye is gone.
My opinion is that ghost quarter is the better choice because I believe that it is already too late if they have 4 lands.
Personally I'd like WotC to experiment some more on making "fixed" wastelands, but that's probably unlikely to happen any time soon since LD is on their big list of unfun things.
Geth's Verdict is another solid removal spell for when edicts are desired, but we generally don't touch it in 8rack since lili provides us with plenty of access to edicts.
Tragic Slip also deserves a spot in your deck-building binder. -1/-1 hits a lot of things on its own, and it essentially kills everything if morbid ever triggers, and morbid isn't exactly the hardest condition to fulfill in the game.
We throw enough stuff in our yard that we can feasibly cast a few delve cards at minimum cost. This is especially true if you like playing a smallpox variant of the deck.
Terror pre-dates Doom blade in the 2cmc to kill most things department, but it is quite eclipsed by alternative options these days.
I'm also disappointed that Darkblast wasn't mentioned in the removal roundup.
Does modern have an 8Rack thread for a white splash? If not would anyone else be interested in one?
I'm not sure if one is necessary. Do you think that the white splashes change up gameplan sufficiently to warrant distinguishing it in its own thread?
For at least the vast majority of 8rack brews with white splashes that I've seen, the core decision behind the splash is to adopt white's superb arsenal of sideboard cards. As far as maindeck changes are concerned, usually the white splash directly replaces a black card with a white card that fulfills the same role. The two most common changes that I've seen are replacing some of black's removal spells with Path to Exile, or replacing Pack Rat/Bitterblossom with Lingering Souls. Different for sure, but still fundamentally doing the same things.
In contrast 8rackdos evolved to have a distinctly more aggressive playstyle that set itself apart from 8rack. IMO comparing 8rackdos and 8rack is almost akin to comparing RGTron and Mono-U Tron. Decks that play distinctly differently but still share the same roots, while 8rack and 8rack with a white splash are more closely related and still have the same core gameplan.
The filters could lead to tempo loss if you have no black or white sources in your opening hand...but that's a hand that you probably will mulligan away 99% of the time.
Still, you're 100% golden if you have a swamp or an Urborg in your opening hand. I haven't crunched the numbers precisely, but the odds of success are pretty darn good.
They'll probably be in topdeck mode before the time counters run out. The the question becomes whether or not they draw anything immediately meaningful or not. Then right back to topdeck mode they go.
Yes. While a lot of decks have the means to answer a bridge, most of them are still stonewalled and are unable to achieve victory until they find their answer. That's still pretty meaningful.
Well you've noticed that 8rack is creature light, so that conflicts with flipping Heretical healer and weakens the effectiveness of her resurrection ability and her ultimate. I do intend to try and use her alongside asylum visitor and some of the more aggressive black creatures in standard though, but that's another discussion.
Lastly. Has anyone ever shoved in this guy Dimir House Guard for its Transmute ability of 1BB to tutor up a Lily or Bridge (and in my deck Kolaghan's Command as well)? Seems like it could be copies 5 and 6 of Lily or Bridge but it seems VERY slow.
It's already been stated that Dimir House Card transmutes for 4 cmc, but I believe that someone experimented doing the same thing with Dimir Machinations a year or two ago. The reasoning was transmute to tutor lili or a bridge, and cast it to try to dig through the top of your deck to find anything else. I don't believe that their results were particularly impressive at the time, but Kommand might not have been printed yet either, so you might get more mileage out of it from a toolbox perspective now than back then.
You can get by with one lili if you're a leprechaun and with enough luck to deny probability and always draw it. We run 4 to bolster our odds of finding the strongest card in our deck.
Because this isn't the budget forum. When theorycrafting new decklists, price is not a factor whatsoever. You can mention budget alternatives, but that's a footnote at best.
I'm not trying to be rude here. It's literally in the rules for the Modern forum. Too much budget discussion muddies the waters when trying to develop flagship versions of a deck.
Only discuss budget lists/card choices/ideas in the Budget subforum
Budget lists need to go in the Budget forum. Do not post a budget question in the main version of a deck. For instance, do not ask about budget replacements to Tarmogoyf in the Junk thread.
Users who post about budget lists, cards, or options outside of the Budget subforum will be warned/infracted accordingly.
edit:
As for lili, it is fine to run less than 4 if you can justify it. "Budget" is not a justification. Not here. Running 3 to try to avoid duplicates and the "planeswalker" rule is one justification, but IMO a very weak one.
At one point I tried to brew up a deck that utilized Suppression Field and I tried to use 8rack as a baseline because for the most part the deck is for lack of a better term "solid state" with few activated abilities. I removed lili in favor of necrogen mists because there was no way that I'd be able to afford lili's activation costs with suppression field in play. But after a few casual sample games I realized that I was barking up the wrong tree. Lili is just too versatile as a combination of discard engine, removal, and game ending clock. Playing an extra copy of her is almost always worth invoking the wrath of the planeswalker rule just to get an extra activation of her abilities off.
?Rack? effect 9 through 12? Ultra-Budget Lily replacement? Better or worse than Necrogen Mists?
High casting cost for sure. Initial impressions?
I'd rather play gibbering descent if I were looking for some sort of hybrid rack/discard engine. Gibbering descent is reliably 4 cmc in a deck like 8rack. Gibbering descent also always ticks for life loss where creeping dread randomly ticks for life loss and ultimately stops ticking for lifeloss once the opponent has entered topdeck mode (because no opponent is going to keep a card in hand at EoT just to promptly lose it to Creeping Dread and potentially get bolted when they could have just played their topdeck to reap some advantage during their turn).
Gibbering descent is generally not good enough to make the cut, so I personally rank Creeping Dread in some distant place far behind it.
My opinion on Call the bloodline is that it might be interesting alongside bitterblossom and lingering souls in bridgeless variants with a white splash that use token spam as a combination of ablative defense and a means to slip extra damage in. The lifelinking vamps would be the first creatures thrown under the bus to offset to some extent the lifeloss from bitterblossom while preserving the evasive tokens swinging in the air.
I'm most interested if some combination of card draw sources such as asylum visitor, Sea gate Wreckage or Mikokoro, Center of the Sea can reliably come online and give us more card advantage. If they do, then we'll find ourselves with some more lands in the mid-late game than we're used to and we can potentially expand our horizons to effects that were simply beyond our means on one card draw per turn. For example, a white splash variant might actually be able to afford to activate Vault of the Archangel if we're drawing extra cards each turn, which would quite rapidly pull a deck out of a life loss tailspin.
I wouldn't define "win-more" as getting the opponent into topdeck mode first. Most 8rack lists have ~20 sources of discard and several of them can be re-used multiple times or force the opponent to discard multiple cards at a time. Getting an opponent into topdeck mode isn't a Herculean feat in 8rack, it's the meat and potatoes of the deck that is simply step one of our game plan and elicits groans from our adversaries once they realize that whatever plan they had in mind when they kept their opening hand is now completely ruined. It's frequently game over for their hand the moment we stick lili or a dakmor salvage/raven's crime combo.
The frustratingly maddening scenario for 8rack is where we've knocked out their hand but are unable to either find a rack to take out their life total or find a means to shutdown the enemy's offensive (ensnaring bridge for the classic list). We can depend on our discard abilities since it is such a huge percentage of the deck, but occasionally we get trolled by statistics and simply come up short for finding or racks/bridges that we need to act as our wincon or complete our lock. That's why our interest is piqued whenever we see a new card that we can potentially shoehorn into the list to increase our ability to dig through our deck faster. It increases the odds that we'll find what we need prior to our opponent pulling the lucky topdeck that he needs to stabilize and win the game against us.
I'd be hesitant to get greedy for the double draw. Even if we only get one extra card a turn, there is a boon in that we get a card during the opponent's upkeep instead of it needing to survive to our next upkeep.
If my math is right, from a raw card advantage standpoint, we always come out ahead when we cast it while the opponent is in top deck mode.
The general worst case scenario is they draw removal and immediately kill it right? We will have spent a card and gained a card for a net gain of zero cards. They'll have spent a card for a net loss of one card. Everything beyond that is gravy.
Arguably the removal would have been dead against us a lot of the time, but frequently we have rats, fairies, or spirits that would have been killed.
Situationally we get ahead on card advantage immediately simply by playing it via madness off of lily's mutual discard ability.
Personally I'd like WotC to experiment some more on making "fixed" wastelands, but that's probably unlikely to happen any time soon since LD is on their big list of unfun things.
Tragic Slip also deserves a spot in your deck-building binder. -1/-1 hits a lot of things on its own, and it essentially kills everything if morbid ever triggers, and morbid isn't exactly the hardest condition to fulfill in the game.
Terror pre-dates Doom blade in the 2cmc to kill most things department, but it is quite eclipsed by alternative options these days.
I'm also disappointed that Darkblast wasn't mentioned in the removal roundup.
I'm not sure if one is necessary. Do you think that the white splashes change up gameplan sufficiently to warrant distinguishing it in its own thread?
For at least the vast majority of 8rack brews with white splashes that I've seen, the core decision behind the splash is to adopt white's superb arsenal of sideboard cards. As far as maindeck changes are concerned, usually the white splash directly replaces a black card with a white card that fulfills the same role. The two most common changes that I've seen are replacing some of black's removal spells with Path to Exile, or replacing Pack Rat/Bitterblossom with Lingering Souls. Different for sure, but still fundamentally doing the same things.
In contrast 8rackdos evolved to have a distinctly more aggressive playstyle that set itself apart from 8rack. IMO comparing 8rackdos and 8rack is almost akin to comparing RGTron and Mono-U Tron. Decks that play distinctly differently but still share the same roots, while 8rack and 8rack with a white splash are more closely related and still have the same core gameplan.
That's my opinion at least.
Still, you're 100% golden if you have a swamp or an Urborg in your opening hand. I haven't crunched the numbers precisely, but the odds of success are pretty darn good.
edit:
It's already been stated that Dimir House Card transmutes for 4 cmc, but I believe that someone experimented doing the same thing with Dimir Machinations a year or two ago. The reasoning was transmute to tutor lili or a bridge, and cast it to try to dig through the top of your deck to find anything else. I don't believe that their results were particularly impressive at the time, but Kommand might not have been printed yet either, so you might get more mileage out of it from a toolbox perspective now than back then.
Alternative tutor options at ~3cmc are Beseech the Queen and Infernal Tutor.
I'm not trying to be rude here. It's literally in the rules for the Modern forum. Too much budget discussion muddies the waters when trying to develop flagship versions of a deck.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/modern/649273-modern-forum-rules
edit:
As for lili, it is fine to run less than 4 if you can justify it. "Budget" is not a justification. Not here. Running 3 to try to avoid duplicates and the "planeswalker" rule is one justification, but IMO a very weak one.
At one point I tried to brew up a deck that utilized Suppression Field and I tried to use 8rack as a baseline because for the most part the deck is for lack of a better term "solid state" with few activated abilities. I removed lili in favor of necrogen mists because there was no way that I'd be able to afford lili's activation costs with suppression field in play. But after a few casual sample games I realized that I was barking up the wrong tree. Lili is just too versatile as a combination of discard engine, removal, and game ending clock. Playing an extra copy of her is almost always worth invoking the wrath of the planeswalker rule just to get an extra activation of her abilities off.
2 Pack Rat
Instants and Sorceries
4 Victim of Night
4 Wrench Mind
4 Thoughtseize
4 Raven's Crime
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
Artifacts
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 The Rack
3 Liliana of the Veil
Enchantments
3 Shrieking Affliction
1 Necrogen Mists
Lands
1 Dakmor Salvage
3 Mutavault
4 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
15 swamp
1 Drown in Sorrow
1 Shrieking affliction
2 Bile Blight
2 Darkblast
3 Nyxathid
1 Pack Rat
2 Pithing Needle
3 Surgical Extraction
edit:
There were apparently a few typos in the original list, as mentioned in the next few posts.
I'd rather play gibbering descent if I were looking for some sort of hybrid rack/discard engine. Gibbering descent is reliably 4 cmc in a deck like 8rack. Gibbering descent also always ticks for life loss where creeping dread randomly ticks for life loss and ultimately stops ticking for lifeloss once the opponent has entered topdeck mode (because no opponent is going to keep a card in hand at EoT just to promptly lose it to Creeping Dread and potentially get bolted when they could have just played their topdeck to reap some advantage during their turn).
Gibbering descent is generally not good enough to make the cut, so I personally rank Creeping Dread in some distant place far behind it.
My opinion on Call the bloodline is that it might be interesting alongside bitterblossom and lingering souls in bridgeless variants with a white splash that use token spam as a combination of ablative defense and a means to slip extra damage in. The lifelinking vamps would be the first creatures thrown under the bus to offset to some extent the lifeloss from bitterblossom while preserving the evasive tokens swinging in the air.
I'm most interested if some combination of card draw sources such as asylum visitor, Sea gate Wreckage or Mikokoro, Center of the Sea can reliably come online and give us more card advantage. If they do, then we'll find ourselves with some more lands in the mid-late game than we're used to and we can potentially expand our horizons to effects that were simply beyond our means on one card draw per turn. For example, a white splash variant might actually be able to afford to activate Vault of the Archangel if we're drawing extra cards each turn, which would quite rapidly pull a deck out of a life loss tailspin.
The frustratingly maddening scenario for 8rack is where we've knocked out their hand but are unable to either find a rack to take out their life total or find a means to shutdown the enemy's offensive (ensnaring bridge for the classic list). We can depend on our discard abilities since it is such a huge percentage of the deck, but occasionally we get trolled by statistics and simply come up short for finding or racks/bridges that we need to act as our wincon or complete our lock. That's why our interest is piqued whenever we see a new card that we can potentially shoehorn into the list to increase our ability to dig through our deck faster. It increases the odds that we'll find what we need prior to our opponent pulling the lucky topdeck that he needs to stabilize and win the game against us.
I'd be hesitant to get greedy for the double draw. Even if we only get one extra card a turn, there is a boon in that we get a card during the opponent's upkeep instead of it needing to survive to our next upkeep.
If my math is right, from a raw card advantage standpoint, we always come out ahead when we cast it while the opponent is in top deck mode.
The general worst case scenario is they draw removal and immediately kill it right? We will have spent a card and gained a card for a net gain of zero cards. They'll have spent a card for a net loss of one card. Everything beyond that is gravy.
Arguably the removal would have been dead against us a lot of the time, but frequently we have rats, fairies, or spirits that would have been killed.
Situationally we get ahead on card advantage immediately simply by playing it via madness off of lily's mutual discard ability.