Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace is sorcery speed, so it can't be used to vent your hand prior to your upkeep. Pack rat checks out though.
I think Asylum Visitor is interesting and warrants some time for experimentation. The madness and the 3 power are what draw my attention. Madness simply because it allows us to sidestep discarding a card with lili. 3 power because we can potentially sneak in a lot of damage early in the game if our T1 TS/IOK removes the opponent's ability to block/remove a T2 creature. It can also trade with a lot if we need a kill something via blocking.
The biggest difference being that if they top deck a lightning bolt or some other piece of spot removal, it is game over for the vamp that we spent a good deal of resources to get into the air. While if they top deck a lightning bolt against pack rat on any turn past the creation of your first pack rat token, then they just slow the swarm down a bit.
That's why pack rat has some appeal for 8rack. As a whole spot removal isn't very useful against 8rack because we don't run many creatures. Additionally, a common theme among the creatures that have drawn 8rack's attention in the past is that they all shrug off spot removal in some fashion. Pack rat swarms just keep growing if they can't answer the first rat immediately. Manlands are safely lands until we get a chance to drain the opponent's hand. Bitterblossom fairy tokens and lingering souls spirit tokens are ultimately expendable and of little consequence individually. Nyxathid grows too big for burn, which is the matchup that we bring it in for.
Ofcourse. It doesn't matter how good a deck can take advantage of a specific mechanic if WotC prints a bunch of garbage cards. Using flashback as an example, flashback is a powerful mechanic and Lingering Souls is a great card. The card is usable for either cost, and being able to use both over the course of the game is great. But for every card like lingering souls, we have a tons of flotsam like Fires of Undeath that are just terrible all around.
We just have to hope that we get some linger-souls-like madness cards where the convetional cost is reasonable and the madness cost is a superb deal.
With flagstones. Without it we lose a land and 8rack runs so few lands that losing one to smallpox can easily backfire on us. If you're playing a T2 smallpox into a T3 cmc 3 spell like ensnaring bridge or liliana of the veil, then you really need Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, Flagstones of Trokair, and Smallpox. When that happens, it's undoubtedly great. But the odds of it happening are skewed against you. More often you won't get a chance to exploit Flagstones/smallpox until T3 or later.
I love smallpox. It's probably my favorite black card. It's essentially won me some games on its own by throwing a massive wrench into my opponent's plans on T2, but it's also blown up in my face just as often. My opinion is that, right now at least, 8rack doesn't break the synergy of smallpox enough for it to be worth the risk of it backfiring. However, I don't think we're too many cards away from making it worth the gambit though.
Generally 8rack breaks the smallpox synergy with the following:
1: We dodge the edict because we generally either don't play creatures, or our creatures are some combination of disposable tokens or manlands.
2: We sidestep the discard effect because we have some cards that provide value from the graveyard. Raven's Crime and Dakmor Salvage are the near universally played cards. Maybe syphon life if you've got it in your 75. In the white splash you still get some value from lingering souls. Also, to a degree, we want to decrease our hand size to utilize ensnaring bridge.
3: The land sac effect really hurts us because we run low land counts and generally need to hit 3 mana sources to play lili or bridge. Dakmor Salvage can get around this because we'd rather have it in our hand or our graveyard anyway. In the white splash Flagstones of Trokair can get around this problem.
To save room above, anything with Delve benefits from all 3 of smallpox's effects that place cards in a graveyard. Doubly so for lands if you float the mana before saccing it. Assming smallpox on T3 and a singular spell played on both T1 and T2, your T3 smallpox will set you up to Delve 5. If you made a land drop every turn, that's enough to let you play cmc 6 delve cards like Tasigur's Cruelty or Tasigur, the Golden Fang on T3 in addition to your smallpox. Tasigur's cruelty is probably the most applicable delve card for 8rack, and a T3 smallpox->Delved Cruelty should obliterate their hand and might make your opponent want to flip the table. IMO the smallpox/delve interaction is so strong that any deck that opts to run smallpox needs to run at least a few delve cards in it.
I am a little hopeful that INN 2.0 might bring some madness cards to the table that both interest 8rack and synergize with smallpox. A hypothetical new "not-hymn to tourach" like wrench mind / tasigur's cruelty with a readily payable madness cost like B or some life points would IMO be interesting. A madness-Hero's Downfall or madness-infest might be interesting as well.
Strong madness cards are something that would interest 8rack under normal circumstances since LotV will frequently allow us to play it for the madness cost. Additionally we can target ourselves with out other discard spells if the need to play the madness spell is absolutely dire. But, if the madness cost is cheap enough, the new madness card might enable a smallpox->madness play that is very disheartening to our opponent.
I guess the tl;dr is that I don't think it is worth playing smallpox in 8rack right now but that it might be in the future if 8rack gets some new cards that either don't care if they're in the graveyard (like Raven's Crime and some flashback spells) or spells that smallpox helps enable into a powerful play (like playing both smallpox/Tasigur's cruelty on T3)
One of the things worth mentioning about pack rat is that it has the potential to just steal games and snowball out of control if the opponent doesn't have an immediate answer for it.
Our turn one play is almost always looking at our opponent's hand and stealing a card with either TS or IoK. If we see that they can not answer a pack rat, we can often go all-in on rat and spiral out of control. The presence of mutavault lets the rats ramp up in size a full turn ahead of schedule.
As for waste not, as was mentioned a few posts ago, it does have some synergy with mikokoro, center of the sea. The two on the board alongside a discard engine like LotV or Raven's Crime places us in a bit of a win/win scenario. If the opponent plays their topdeck, then we get an extra card off mikokoro and more often than not our opponent will be unable to use their mikokoro-drawn card before our discard engine rips it away and gains us some advantage via waste not. If the opponent hoards their topdeck in hand, then the opponent loses out on whatever advantage they would have gained by playing the card and we reap some extra advantage from waste not when our discard engine rips the card away.
It was cheap before the scalpers bought out the stock and the price jumped 200% practically over night. It sucks, but when brewing up deck lists you can't really take secondary market costs into account. Otherwise you just hobble yourself.
Did it literally jump in value in the past few days? If so, that sucks. I'd be fine if it was a $15-$20 card, but it looks like it's around a $35 card now, which is pretty hefty. But I'll probably spring for it, or try to do some trading or selling to cover it. Seems a pretty important piece right now.
Yes. It was ~$12 this past Sunday, February 7. It was in the 30's by Tuesday. There are discussions about the secondary market elsewhere on MTGS, but in short painter's servant is one of many cards that have been spiking like this in the recent weeks.
It was cheap before the scalpers bought out the stock and the price jumped 200% practically over night. It sucks, but when brewing up deck lists you can't really take secondary market costs into account. Otherwise you just hobble yourself.
As a land, it has some leniency to not make use of its extra utility all of the time because it still pulls double duty as a mana source. Some games we find ourselves in situations where it isn't beneficial to turn mutavault or blinkmoth nexus into a creature. That doesn't make those lands bad just because we can't always make use of their utility effect.
The same is true for sea gate wreckage. Why might not always be able to draw cards off of it, but we're hellbent pretty often and we'll occasionally be able to draw cards that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to draw. The big catch is that you need to be able to support colorless mana to use the ability. If think it is doable with either filters or painlands depending on your preference, but it does make our manabase less resilient to the likes of blood moon (although I suppose blood moon wouldn't matter much if our splash is red).
Also, like I mentioned a few pages back, there is Mikokoro, Center of the sea if you want to experiment with something that trades the colorless requirement, the hellbent restriction, and reduces the cost by 1 mana for legendary status and the opponent drawing a card as well. Though I suppose in practice that replaces the personal hellbent restriction with a soft restriction of your opponent being hellbent.
Again, I tried searching the thread for discussions about Mikokoro and couldn't find any. I also could only find dead links for the old thread and couldn't see if we had discussed it there before or not. Barring the opponent drawing an instant, any of our discard engines should be able to force the opponent to discard their card before they can gain any benefit from it.
5 cmc is a significant issue. There is a huge gulf between 5 and the 2-3 for pack rat / nyxathid
In the Tron match up it loses to wurmcoil and karn (it has no protection from activated abilities).
We don't run many creatures, so it is vulnerable to edicts. Lilli is probably the most played edict.
5/5 isn't exactly stellar by modern standards, so any aggro or midrange decks can likely just kill it in combat (presuming they don't simply out race us). Some of the bigger creatures like tarmogoyf and the eldrazi can defeat it in battle single handedly.
And this bears repeating again, 5 cmc is a ton for us.
I personally don't like it because it practically has the same problem as Megrim and Megrim-like cards. Megrim is worthless after you've forced the opponent into topdeck mode because they'll simply play their topdeck every turn before you get an opportunity to make them discard anything.
While an active Quest for the Nihil Stone can do work while the opponent is in topdeck mode, an inactive one will likely never become active. That makes a topdecked Quest for the Nihil Stone after the opponent is in topdeck mode a dead card.
A lesser concern is that it only inflicts life loss when the opponent has zero cards. While that's well within the grasp of this deck when it gets going, it is still harder to achieve than the 1-2 cards necessary for Shrieking Affliction and The Rack to start chipping away at their health.
I'm interested in seeing what happens to the metagame going forward, but I fear that these bans were bad for us.
The bans seem very beneficial to Tron, which is arguably our worst matchup. I wonder if the meta will shift to Tron and ultra-fast decks that can race tron. Matchups against fast aggro decks can be a bit of a tossup for us. We can shut them down if we get a bridge or something out, but we have fewer ways to interact with an opponent's side of the board than many decks and a bunch of quickly resolved efficient beaters can be threatening to us. The presence of twin hurt those decks because they were forced to slow down and play Twin's tempo game or risk getting instantly blown out on T3 to the Twin combo.
I'm interested in trying out splashes again with sea gate wreckage and the filter lands. I don't know which color I should try to splash. White grants access to some godlike sideboard tech such as Stony Silence that can shut down affinity, but red grants access to some better land hate and stuff like kolaghan's command and blightning. Although when faced up against Tron++ and the ultra-fast decks trying to outrace Tron, I don't know if Sea Gate Wreckage will ever get an opportunity to build up incremental advantage for us.
Land destruction trips up tron a bit, but they're so efficient at digging through their deck to find their tron lands that we're not doing much more than slowing them down unless we also manage to connect with an extirpate effect.
I think Asylum Visitor is interesting and warrants some time for experimentation. The madness and the 3 power are what draw my attention. Madness simply because it allows us to sidestep discarding a card with lili. 3 power because we can potentially sneak in a lot of damage early in the game if our T1 TS/IOK removes the opponent's ability to block/remove a T2 creature. It can also trade with a lot if we need a kill something via blocking.
That's why pack rat has some appeal for 8rack. As a whole spot removal isn't very useful against 8rack because we don't run many creatures. Additionally, a common theme among the creatures that have drawn 8rack's attention in the past is that they all shrug off spot removal in some fashion. Pack rat swarms just keep growing if they can't answer the first rat immediately. Manlands are safely lands until we get a chance to drain the opponent's hand. Bitterblossom fairy tokens and lingering souls spirit tokens are ultimately expendable and of little consequence individually. Nyxathid grows too big for burn, which is the matchup that we bring it in for.
We just have to hope that we get some linger-souls-like madness cards where the convetional cost is reasonable and the madness cost is a superb deal.
I love smallpox. It's probably my favorite black card. It's essentially won me some games on its own by throwing a massive wrench into my opponent's plans on T2, but it's also blown up in my face just as often. My opinion is that, right now at least, 8rack doesn't break the synergy of smallpox enough for it to be worth the risk of it backfiring. However, I don't think we're too many cards away from making it worth the gambit though.
Generally 8rack breaks the smallpox synergy with the following:
1: We dodge the edict because we generally either don't play creatures, or our creatures are some combination of disposable tokens or manlands.
2: We sidestep the discard effect because we have some cards that provide value from the graveyard. Raven's Crime and Dakmor Salvage are the near universally played cards. Maybe syphon life if you've got it in your 75. In the white splash you still get some value from lingering souls. Also, to a degree, we want to decrease our hand size to utilize ensnaring bridge.
3: The land sac effect really hurts us because we run low land counts and generally need to hit 3 mana sources to play lili or bridge. Dakmor Salvage can get around this because we'd rather have it in our hand or our graveyard anyway. In the white splash Flagstones of Trokair can get around this problem.
To save room above, anything with Delve benefits from all 3 of smallpox's effects that place cards in a graveyard. Doubly so for lands if you float the mana before saccing it. Assming smallpox on T3 and a singular spell played on both T1 and T2, your T3 smallpox will set you up to Delve 5. If you made a land drop every turn, that's enough to let you play cmc 6 delve cards like Tasigur's Cruelty or Tasigur, the Golden Fang on T3 in addition to your smallpox. Tasigur's cruelty is probably the most applicable delve card for 8rack, and a T3 smallpox->Delved Cruelty should obliterate their hand and might make your opponent want to flip the table. IMO the smallpox/delve interaction is so strong that any deck that opts to run smallpox needs to run at least a few delve cards in it.
I am a little hopeful that INN 2.0 might bring some madness cards to the table that both interest 8rack and synergize with smallpox. A hypothetical new "not-hymn to tourach" like wrench mind / tasigur's cruelty with a readily payable madness cost like B or some life points would IMO be interesting. A madness-Hero's Downfall or madness-infest might be interesting as well.
Strong madness cards are something that would interest 8rack under normal circumstances since LotV will frequently allow us to play it for the madness cost. Additionally we can target ourselves with out other discard spells if the need to play the madness spell is absolutely dire. But, if the madness cost is cheap enough, the new madness card might enable a smallpox->madness play that is very disheartening to our opponent.
I guess the tl;dr is that I don't think it is worth playing smallpox in 8rack right now but that it might be in the future if 8rack gets some new cards that either don't care if they're in the graveyard (like Raven's Crime and some flashback spells) or spells that smallpox helps enable into a powerful play (like playing both smallpox/Tasigur's cruelty on T3)
Our turn one play is almost always looking at our opponent's hand and stealing a card with either TS or IoK. If we see that they can not answer a pack rat, we can often go all-in on rat and spiral out of control. The presence of mutavault lets the rats ramp up in size a full turn ahead of schedule.
As for waste not, as was mentioned a few posts ago, it does have some synergy with mikokoro, center of the sea. The two on the board alongside a discard engine like LotV or Raven's Crime places us in a bit of a win/win scenario. If the opponent plays their topdeck, then we get an extra card off mikokoro and more often than not our opponent will be unable to use their mikokoro-drawn card before our discard engine rips it away and gains us some advantage via waste not. If the opponent hoards their topdeck in hand, then the opponent loses out on whatever advantage they would have gained by playing the card and we reap some extra advantage from waste not when our discard engine rips the card away.
Yes. It was ~$12 this past Sunday, February 7. It was in the 30's by Tuesday. There are discussions about the secondary market elsewhere on MTGS, but in short painter's servant is one of many cards that have been spiking like this in the recent weeks.
The same is true for sea gate wreckage. Why might not always be able to draw cards off of it, but we're hellbent pretty often and we'll occasionally be able to draw cards that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to draw. The big catch is that you need to be able to support colorless mana to use the ability. If think it is doable with either filters or painlands depending on your preference, but it does make our manabase less resilient to the likes of blood moon (although I suppose blood moon wouldn't matter much if our splash is red).
Also, like I mentioned a few pages back, there is Mikokoro, Center of the sea if you want to experiment with something that trades the colorless requirement, the hellbent restriction, and reduces the cost by 1 mana for legendary status and the opponent drawing a card as well. Though I suppose in practice that replaces the personal hellbent restriction with a soft restriction of your opponent being hellbent.
Again, I tried searching the thread for discussions about Mikokoro and couldn't find any. I also could only find dead links for the old thread and couldn't see if we had discussed it there before or not. Barring the opponent drawing an instant, any of our discard engines should be able to force the opponent to discard their card before they can gain any benefit from it.
In the Tron match up it loses to wurmcoil and karn (it has no protection from activated abilities).
We don't run many creatures, so it is vulnerable to edicts. Lilli is probably the most played edict.
5/5 isn't exactly stellar by modern standards, so any aggro or midrange decks can likely just kill it in combat (presuming they don't simply out race us). Some of the bigger creatures like tarmogoyf and the eldrazi can defeat it in battle single handedly.
And this bears repeating again, 5 cmc is a ton for us.
While an active Quest for the Nihil Stone can do work while the opponent is in topdeck mode, an inactive one will likely never become active. That makes a topdecked Quest for the Nihil Stone after the opponent is in topdeck mode a dead card.
A lesser concern is that it only inflicts life loss when the opponent has zero cards. While that's well within the grasp of this deck when it gets going, it is still harder to achieve than the 1-2 cards necessary for Shrieking Affliction and The Rack to start chipping away at their health.
The bans seem very beneficial to Tron, which is arguably our worst matchup. I wonder if the meta will shift to Tron and ultra-fast decks that can race tron. Matchups against fast aggro decks can be a bit of a tossup for us. We can shut them down if we get a bridge or something out, but we have fewer ways to interact with an opponent's side of the board than many decks and a bunch of quickly resolved efficient beaters can be threatening to us. The presence of twin hurt those decks because they were forced to slow down and play Twin's tempo game or risk getting instantly blown out on T3 to the Twin combo.
I'm interested in trying out splashes again with sea gate wreckage and the filter lands. I don't know which color I should try to splash. White grants access to some godlike sideboard tech such as Stony Silence that can shut down affinity, but red grants access to some better land hate and stuff like kolaghan's command and blightning. Although when faced up against Tron++ and the ultra-fast decks trying to outrace Tron, I don't know if Sea Gate Wreckage will ever get an opportunity to build up incremental advantage for us.
Land destruction trips up tron a bit, but they're so efficient at digging through their deck to find their tron lands that we're not doing much more than slowing them down unless we also manage to connect with an extirpate effect.