Well I made top 8 of the ptq and then got clowned by dredge. I ended up beating UW miracles, esper shadow, storm, humans, and esper gifts and lost to storm before seeing the one dude on dredge in the room in the top 8. No new information sadly, just more reps with the deck against tilt. Bolas was stellar all day, the body was supremely relevant and the discard was priceless every time I got the trigger. This is all before the seven mana mode even was a consideration and I still managed to flip him 4 times throughout the day. Each time he flipped I was a bit flooded and wanted something powerful to do with my mana. Great play on turn four. Game winning play on turn fifteen.
The only change I made to my previous list was putting in two brutality in the main because there is a heavy burn presence in the area (there was at least seven of them in the room today) in place of my two scours. I never missed the scours and was never short of a hefty yard to do all the stuff with the things. Knot, Tas, Search etc always had as much food as they needed to work just by playing the game. Sort of like how you don't need to put in extra work to make tarmogoyf good, just play the game naturally and they'll work as intended.
I still hold that bolas belongs in the deck and that grixis Hard Control is a solid tier 1 deck that just doesn't have many eyes on it. Each of the matches I won were comically easy . We have answers to literally everything in the format and we have enough overlap that we can at least be 50/50 against the field with a number of match ups where we are run away favorites. It seems to me after all of this time and adding in a great value threat with bolas, if anybody is trying to play fair it's our match to lose and the unfair decks just have to hope we didn't adequately prepare. Deck is great. Bolas is bae.
Good job!
I'm struggling against Mardu Pyromancer and Hollow One in my LGS games recently, any suggestions?
i have to admit my first instinct is some sort of TiTi delver deck though, add 2 copies of young pyromancer, possibly slot in a pair of blood moon, and voila
I actually don't think ATing a JTMS is a net tempo gain, depending on what you do with it. if your first activation is a brainstorm, then you are up +1 card and +1 land, your opponent -1 card. If your first activation is a fateseal, then yeah i guess that'd be a slight tempo loss. I don't think JTMS is THAT bad being answered by AT TBH.
BTW, lets take a look at that new izzet double sided card, expansion//explosion. looks like a nice counter war tool + an instant speed finisher. could definitely use 1 or 2 of those
I wouldn't mind either if my JTMS gets destroyed by AT, you just need to brainstorm and its good CA.
The new izzet card is horrible IMO, explosion does close to nothing because you need at least 7 mana before it's decent. Expansion is just too cute, what does it hit in modern? not much. (looks fun against storm tho, if it works like I think it does)
well against control, it hits all their counters except for spell snare, especially cryptic command. against decks that don't run counters, just use the other half at 7 mana, it's 1 mana overcosted for sure, but it does help us close down games.
Well, if you hit only counterspells, why not play dispel ? haha and 7 mana is irrelevant in most matchups... If you get there, you already won (cruel ultimatum does much better here)
it's one of those flex spots where depending on situation one card does two different things. dispel won't provide you the opportunity to reload your hand while hitting your opponent/removing a creature, while cruel ultimatum does nothing if you dont hit 7 mana. In fact if format does slow down as a result of AT's introduction, and especially if tron takes a hit at the same time, cruel ultimatum will become viable
I actually don't think ATing a JTMS is a net tempo gain, depending on what you do with it. if your first activation is a brainstorm, then you are up +1 card and +1 land, your opponent -1 card. If your first activation is a fateseal, then yeah i guess that'd be a slight tempo loss. I don't think JTMS is THAT bad being answered by AT TBH.
BTW, lets take a look at that new izzet double sided card, expansion//explosion. looks like a nice counter war tool + an instant speed finisher. could definitely use 1 or 2 of those
I wouldn't mind either if my JTMS gets destroyed by AT, you just need to brainstorm and its good CA.
The new izzet card is horrible IMO, explosion does close to nothing because you need at least 7 mana before it's decent. Expansion is just too cute, what does it hit in modern? not much. (looks fun against storm tho, if it works like I think it does)
well against control, it hits all their counters except for spell snare, especially cryptic command. against decks that don't run counters, just use the other half at 7 mana, it's 1 mana overcosted for sure, but it does help us close down games.
im trying to picture how a game with this card will look, and what it will hit out of my deck. One key aspect that may make this card totally fine for us imo is that the land we get enters UNTAPPED. Its counterable, so a typical scenario may look like us T2 Azcanta, they kill it on their turn and we get to scour/bolt/push in their endstep as well as untap with a land up which nets us 2 mana by the time we untap on turn 3. Thats a huge deal. Our turn 3 might look something like: make land drop and hold up Cryptic which is already terrible for GBx, or cast Pyromancer and represent Logic Knot or 2 instant spells / tokens.
JTMS becomes all but unplayable in grixis since Assasin's Trophy hugely trades UP in tempo with him. But as long as we dont play permanents that allow Trophy to trade at tempo parity, we should be fine. The aspect of our gameplan that makes GBx a good matchup really is our Command/Kommand/Snappy-Plan, which 1) doesnt care about Trophy att all and 2) is very mana hungry, which means Trophy ramps us towards our GBx-overwhelming late-game.
I may be wrong, but I think we'll be just fine.
And yes, If this card pushes Tron out of the meta (Tron has historically been GBx's worst matchup) and reintroduces Jund and Junk, yay for that.
Thought on Tasigur being hit: Against UWx Control, Tasigur getting pathed is already a profitable trade for us. If they pay 2 mana instead and we get an UNTAPPED land i the trade while loosing more tempo, thank you very much!
I may be wrong, but this card looks like a good thing for us rather than a bad one. It just shifts our game plan a tad towards tempo (which I love and embrace), and it may improve the field for us by hating on big mana (Trophy also hates on Valakut, eg.e.)
I actually don't think ATing a JTMS is a net tempo gain, depending on what you do with it. if your first activation is a brainstorm, then you are up +1 card and +1 land, your opponent -1 card. If your first activation is a fateseal, then yeah i guess that'd be a slight tempo loss. I don't think JTMS is THAT bad being answered by AT TBH.
BTW, lets take a look at that new izzet double sided card, expansion//explosion. looks like a nice counter war tool + an instant speed finisher. could definitely use 1 or 2 of those
expansion looks like a playable card, one half helps you win counter wars, the other half is the reverse Sphinx's Revelation that helps you close games.
Erm, looks like the best removal ever printed has...just been printed. With the release of Assassin's Trophy I think we might need to get off the azcanta train since it's going to be a bit unreliable now. I fully expect BGx to come out in force and with a set of these our typical draw engines are mostly defunct. This leads me to believe that we'll probably have to go back to running AV to pull ahead on raw card count. Still stupid early to be making any significant claims, but I like to be prepared in advance. And with the PTQ season being modern I want to get as much info together and theory crafting done as possible. Gods I wish we could just run 4c and not start the game at 11 life to splash for just this to start making tron a non-issue.
Anybody else have thoughts on BGx being able to turn all of our trump cards into basic lands?
I wouldn't be too concerned, i mean if they main deck 4 of those it'll hit something anyways. could be azcanta, could be your tar pits, could be your jaces, who knows. But I like your idea of having AVs back in the list. If BGx end up pushing some faster decks out of the format, I think i'll even go back to Cruel Ultimatum, now that's sick
When i say fair I mean more in the sense of bias from WOTC Development. Ie Boros in color pie could get removal this good but never does meanwhile Golgari is always handed the good stuff. Or how this is perfectly fair and balanced according to WOTC but Blue still cannot get a 2 CMC unconditional counter spell. The power is not so much an issue the double standards are in my book.
double standards are built in game from day 1.
look at teferi, hero of dominaria and ob nixilis reignited, both 5 mana walkers, teferi's +1 untaps 2 lands as he nets you a card, while ob nixilis drains 1 life. teferi's -3 answers non land permanent, ob nixilis only answers creatures. teferi's ult exiles when you draw, ob nixilis? gimme a break.
@Aeonsz
I would like to add too that my 4 pyromancer build is pretty favored against UW, and I've tested it against both traditional lists (Jura + Secure the wastes) and the newfangled one with Teferi. I would surmise that it is indeed pyromancer that, similar to delver, comes down early and creates an insurmountable advantage that they can only defeat with path + counterspells to counter your own countermagic, and even then they will have to deal with the tokens that emerge from that stack battle. Or, they can wipe, but with Claim // Fame and Kommand they just can't pull away from it.
My curve being much lower, my plan for their celestial colonnades is 2-of alpine moon. Depending on what I see, I may name Colonnade or Field of Ruin first, to either shut off their manlands or protect my own. The moons replace the terminates, which have no real targets.
Sounds very reasonable, although I tend to move away from YP now.
My reason is that YP isn't a card that we can exploit at no cost, it's an engine that needs to be built around, and for that, Mardu Pyromancer simply does the job better. When I used to play 1-2 copies though i was always happy seeing it, and did wonder if I needed more copies of YP. I currently play vendilion clique in YP's spot as a 1-of, I haven't kept a playing record like Alex though, can't really provide any robust analysis. maybe i'll move back to YP after toying with clique.
@Aeonsz
I would like to add too that my 4 pyromancer build is pretty favored against UW, and I've tested it against both traditional lists (Jura + Secure the wastes) and the newfangled one with Teferi. I would surmise that it is indeed pyromancer that, similar to delver, comes down early and creates an insurmountable advantage that they can only defeat with path + counterspells to counter your own countermagic, and even then they will have to deal with the tokens that emerge from that stack battle. Or, they can wipe, but with Claim // Fame and Kommand they just can't pull away from it.
My curve being much lower, my plan for their celestial colonnades is 2-of alpine moon. Depending on what I see, I may name Colonnade or Field of Ruin first, to either shut off their manlands or protect my own. The moons replace the terminates, which have no real targets.
Sounds very reasonable, although I tend to move away from YP now.
My reason is that YP isn't a card that we can exploit at no cost, it's an engine that needs to be built around, and for that, Mardu Pyromancer simply does the job better. When I used to play 1-2 copies though i was always happy seeing it, and did wonder if I needed more copies of YP. I currently play vendilion clique in YP's spot as a 1-of, I haven't kept a playing record like Alex though, can't really provide any robust analysis. maybe i'll move back to YP after toying with clique.
This is the current list (I actually dont know if it has changed since i last posted an iteration of it).
I think I talked about the UWx matchup before. The gist of it is that first, especially against UW Control, Pyromancer is great because they cant cleanly answer him outside a sweeper which puts us up a lot of tempo (which his key), much like getting Tasigur/pyromancer
pathed nets us tempo. After they have dealt with our early pressure, were often up 1-2 lands and can capitalize on that for 3-4 turns, where we can simply cast more spells than them. Second (and a similar idea) Fulminator Mage is, at least for me, a powerhouse against them. It shuts down Azcanta and Colonnade and thwarts their development into their big planeswalkers, all of which is gamewinning. And generally, we want to get ahead with exchanges like "Spell Snare counters Negate" and "Countersquall counters Teferi". Keep them on the ground and trade up in tempo. In other words, we play permanent answers that also provide tempo (as opposed to stuff like Remand).
Thanks for the tips. I do find UWx control a somewhat favorable MU, just not to your degree, thought it'd be a good idea to ask for some tips.
It feels really weird to call this Grixis Control with no Cryptics... but I'm sorta blending R/U TiTi with Grixis & Mardu strategies. Maybe this belongs in Deck Creation or some TiTi thread someplace. *shrug*
Sooo... moving away from Cryptic in favor of hand-destruction, ala Mardu, hoping to stick an early TiTi. Between Faithless & Scour I have no problems turning through my deck and filling the GY, which is good for Snappy/KCommand shenanigans and sorta fuels Bedlam Reveler the same way it would Tasigur. It's going to be a little slower (no T2 Rev), but the upside is maybe worth it. Cryptic was sorta my concession to this strategy; can't have 4cmc spells in my hand and play Rev.
On the up side the interaction between Awoken Horrow & Snappy/Rev is pretty much straight gas. I was kinda worried about not being able to refill my hand without something like Ancestral Vision or Think Twice, but so far the incremental card gain has been solid.
Main deck Surgical probably looks weird... but I think it's justified in the current meta with Bridgevine being the current hotness, along with the likes of Mardu, Hollow One, U/W Control & KCI all being Tier 1 or 2. Plus it's a "free" spell for TiTi and prowess enabler for Rev. In bad matchups I can always loot/brutality it away.
Being on the maindeck Surgical plan I opted for Ghost Quarter, running 1 main and 3 in board to hit Tron. The board needs a lot of work, but tried to shore up matchups with Burn and other hypo aggro decks like Elves, Affinity, Infect, etc.
So far in testing I'm enjoying it and having moderate success... but man does it feel strange not having Cryptic. Not really sure if I should still have Thought Scour filing my GY with no Logic Knot/Tasigur, etc or if I should maybe switch to Opt/Serum Visions. I guess I'm just having a hard time completely breaking from my normal Grixis Control roots; it's ingrained in me that Thought Scour is criminally underrated by the MTG community at large lol.
This build seems very interesting, although it fits into more of a mid range archetype.
Really interested to see the chemistry between TiTi and Reveler
I've been keeping track of a slightly modified version of my earlier Pyromancer Control list, so far I'm 132 matches in. My winrate is 83/50 or 62,4%. So far 3 things are significant:
1) The overall win rate. I only reccord matches in competitive settings, mostly in medium sized paper events. I'm pretty satisfied with that rate.
2) in 132 matches, I have faced a whopping 48 different decks, and by that I dont mean 38 yank brews, but 48 well-known archetypes that either are tiered right now or have been in the past (I don't include matches against brews). The diversity is INSANE in modern right now.
3) The first matchup that is approaching a reasonable number is UW/UWx control, though throwing UW and jeskai together is already questionable. I'm 7-0 against UW Control and 8-2 against Jeskai or 15-2 agsint UWx control. Its still a laughable sample size, but weirdly enough a) I dont miss Jace at all in these matches, b) pyromancer is unexpectedly good in both matchups, especially UW control.
What's your most recent build? I was wondering how you can consistently prey upon UWx control decks. Maybe pyromancer is the secret recipe?
Getting cards like Baleful Strix is a great idea, but if you get an upgrade of baleful strix every year and your new toy sits there useless after 6 months, it defeats the purpose of a non rotating format. Another channel of introducing cards into the format is absolutely wonderful, as long as they get the balance right, and don't take it too far.
Good job!
I'm struggling against Mardu Pyromancer and Hollow One in my LGS games recently, any suggestions?
i have to admit my first instinct is some sort of TiTi delver deck though, add 2 copies of young pyromancer, possibly slot in a pair of blood moon, and voila
it's one of those flex spots where depending on situation one card does two different things. dispel won't provide you the opportunity to reload your hand while hitting your opponent/removing a creature, while cruel ultimatum does nothing if you dont hit 7 mana. In fact if format does slow down as a result of AT's introduction, and especially if tron takes a hit at the same time, cruel ultimatum will become viable
well against control, it hits all their counters except for spell snare, especially cryptic command. against decks that don't run counters, just use the other half at 7 mana, it's 1 mana overcosted for sure, but it does help us close down games.
I actually don't think ATing a JTMS is a net tempo gain, depending on what you do with it. if your first activation is a brainstorm, then you are up +1 card and +1 land, your opponent -1 card. If your first activation is a fateseal, then yeah i guess that'd be a slight tempo loss. I don't think JTMS is THAT bad being answered by AT TBH.
BTW, lets take a look at that new izzet double sided card, expansion//explosion. looks like a nice counter war tool + an instant speed finisher. could definitely use 1 or 2 of those
they should've just reprinted undermine... 4 undermine + 4 countersquall + snapcaster mage = counter till you die
I wouldn't be too concerned, i mean if they main deck 4 of those it'll hit something anyways. could be azcanta, could be your tar pits, could be your jaces, who knows. But I like your idea of having AVs back in the list. If BGx end up pushing some faster decks out of the format, I think i'll even go back to Cruel Ultimatum, now that's sick
double standards are built in game from day 1.
look at teferi, hero of dominaria and ob nixilis reignited, both 5 mana walkers, teferi's +1 untaps 2 lands as he nets you a card, while ob nixilis drains 1 life. teferi's -3 answers non land permanent, ob nixilis only answers creatures. teferi's ult exiles when you draw, ob nixilis? gimme a break.
Sounds very reasonable, although I tend to move away from YP now.
My reason is that YP isn't a card that we can exploit at no cost, it's an engine that needs to be built around, and for that, Mardu Pyromancer simply does the job better. When I used to play 1-2 copies though i was always happy seeing it, and did wonder if I needed more copies of YP. I currently play vendilion clique in YP's spot as a 1-of, I haven't kept a playing record like Alex though, can't really provide any robust analysis. maybe i'll move back to YP after toying with clique.
Sounds very reasonable, although I tend to move away from YP now.
My reason is that YP isn't a card that we can exploit at no cost, it's an engine that needs to be built around, and for that, Mardu Pyromancer simply does the job better. When I used to play 1-2 copies though i was always happy seeing it, and did wonder if I needed more copies of YP. I currently play vendilion clique in YP's spot as a 1-of, I haven't kept a playing record like Alex though, can't really provide any robust analysis. maybe i'll move back to YP after toying with clique.
Thanks for the tips. I do find UWx control a somewhat favorable MU, just not to your degree, thought it'd be a good idea to ask for some tips.
This build seems very interesting, although it fits into more of a mid range archetype.
Really interested to see the chemistry between TiTi and Reveler
What's your most recent build? I was wondering how you can consistently prey upon UWx control decks. Maybe pyromancer is the secret recipe?
Getting cards like Baleful Strix is a great idea, but if you get an upgrade of baleful strix every year and your new toy sits there useless after 6 months, it defeats the purpose of a non rotating format. Another channel of introducing cards into the format is absolutely wonderful, as long as they get the balance right, and don't take it too far.