Ensnaring Bridge is a bad card. It's the exact opposite of being proactive. It's extremely meta based. What else do I say? It's a waste of a card a lot of the time, and it runs games into attrition wars which you will most likely just lose to a single Maelstrom Pulse.
So the original thread really began with some extremely idealistic wizard tribal shenanigans that were going nowhere, so here's the most streamlined version of the deck I have refined over a sporadic period of testing. (Although the probes are admittedly a bit sketchy)
The question is, is there a real answer to making MUM work in modern?
To start off, let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way. Ideally, the deck would be running Foils, Force of Wills, and Misdirections, but as they aren't real things in modern, let's just try to stick what we can.
Other versions of the deck have been trying to build in the style of the fringe deck "Ninja-Bear-Delver", which has realistically dropped its "unique" application of the card Disrupting Shoal, sometimes in favor of fewer counts of the card or dropping it altogether in favor of Red.
This deck is; however, not a tempo deck like NBD is, nor does it combo off in any like the legacy version does with Flutterstorm and Nivmagus Elemental. This is just pure control. Although you may have the game on lockdown early enough, you will not win with MUM within the first five turns.
What are the advantages to the deck? Nothing, really. You get to put more effort into your plays for equal payoff. The satisfaction of playing with the deck is in its legacy style plays in which one is really prepared. This deck is card advantage on steroids. This deck beats Dark Confidant in card advantage, though not necessarily card quality.
People were originally discussing "Finishers" in this deck as its main problem, and so I've built up a deck which just goes balls deep into its unique playstyle. Want to play Gush in modern? You have Gush now in the form of Fathom Seer, a hidden gem. This, along with the 8 other card engines of Sky Hussar and Ninja of the Deep Hours creates a deck in which synergy builds up the entire deck ie. Wingcrafter --> Hussar Engine & Ninja, Ninja of the Deep Hours ---> Cycling Fathom Seer ----> Hussar Engine effectively drawing Five-Six etc. etc, which is something seen very little of in modern. Using these engines, Commandeer is now incredibly viable as a Trump Card, making your card quality as good as the opponent's is. You're playing 12 "free" spells. Snapback, Disrupting Shoal, and Commandeer, though admittedly Snapback is for the most part hardcast or pitched.
The deck is overall, incredibly easy to trip up on, but has a very rewarding sense of playstyle. The deck folds to aggro, and cries to a resolved Voice or other large beater. However, the deck does have a nearly unbeatable lategame inevitability like Tron does. Is it a good deck? Who knows. After extensive testing, I've found that your matchups average up a solid 50% across the board, with your game favoring the combo and control matchups. Let's all be real though, the only reason you're playing this deck is to finally be able to legitimately draw three cards per turn, steal an opponent's Karn off of a Commandeer, or play Legacy in modern.
I run the 8 Ninja/Hussar engine with 16 1 drops to ensure I get the card advantage going. I run Wingcrafter, which has currently been over-performing lately with the ninja engine, allowing less Snapbacks and Vapor snags to be played, giving me better card quality. The amount of one drops lets the ninja engine keep getting in while dropping in 1's for the Sky Hussar engine, giving more and more ammo. This lets me drop the Aether Vial reliance and lets me run hard counters. I dropped the wizard tribal altogether, giving me access to stronger spells and dropping my double reliance on Voidmage Prodigy with Aether Vials. This also lets me up my land count, enabling access to stronger spells like Cryptic Command.
Do you just use incremental damage to win? I think the thing missing from the Modern version is either
B. Some other low mana finisher. Maybe Jace's Phantasm like some people have suggested or some similar creature.
Yes, there is no need to get large amounts of damage in when Wingcrafter gets in Ninja of the Deep Hours and everything else into the air.
Having a double reliance on Nivmagus Elemental dumping my hard earned card advantage does not seem like a good way to go when Abrupt Decay exists in this format.
Yeah, the Elemental seems fragile with all of the removal in the format. What led you to choose Mana Leak over the other popular counter spells?
I'm kind of partial between Mana Leak and Spell Pierce since the creature set up is really the most important part, but I figured the most commonly expected good draws are one drops into Ninja of the Deep Hours or one drops into the Sky Hussar engine, and I don't have the mana to spare in the Ninja of the Deep Hours set up for Spell Pierce, much less for Mana Leak, while I do with the Sky Hussar setup for either, but getting in another 1 drop after you have the Sky Hussar setup isn't ALL that important, so all I get out of Mana Leak is plus, correct?
Furthermore, if am using Mana Leak and I have a ninja setup on board, I have the luxury of being mana efficient by dropping in Wingcrafter and still keeping mana open for Mana Leak, yeah?
The main point of running Mana Leak over Spell Pierce is one, about keeping my engines live, and two, being mana efficient when I have the luxury and not overextending. The flexibility of hitting creatures is also an important factor, although not as important as the first two.
I run the 8 Ninja/Hussar engine with 16 1 drops to ensure I get the card advantage going. I run Wingcrafter, which has currently been over-performing lately with the ninja engine, allowing less Snapbacks and Vapor snags to be played, giving me better card quality. The amount of one drops lets the ninja engine keep getting in while dropping in 1's for the Sky Hussar engine, giving more and more ammo. This lets me drop the Aether Vial reliance and lets me run hard counters. I dropped the wizard tribal altogether, giving me access to stronger spells and dropping my double reliance on Voidmage Prodigy with Aether Vials. This also lets me up my land count, enabling access to stronger spells like Cryptic Command.
Do you just use incremental damage to win? I think the thing missing from the Modern version is either
B. Some other low mana finisher. Maybe Jace's Phantasm like some people have suggested or some similar creature.
Yes, there is no need to get large amounts of damage in when Wingcrafter gets in Ninja of the Deep Hours and everything else into the air.
Having a double reliance on Nivmagus Elemental dumping my hard earned card advantage does not seem like a good way to go when Abrupt Decay exists in this format.
I run the 8 Ninja of the Deep Hours/Sky Hussar engine with 16 1 drops to ensure I get the card advantage going. I run Wingcrafter, which has currently been over-performing lately with the Ninja of the Deep Hours engine, allowing less Snapbacks and Vapor snags to be played, giving me better card quality. The amount of one drops lets the ninja engine keep getting in while dropping in 1's for the Sky Hussar engine, giving more and more ammo. This lets me drop the Æther Vial reliance and lets me run hard counters. I dropped the wizard tribal altogether, giving me access to stronger spells and dropping my double reliance on Voidmage Prodigy with Æther Vials. This also lets me up my land count, enabling access to stronger spells like Cryptic Command.
This is truly a hilarious deck. My god voidmage prodigy is just a middle finger. However, I've noticed that the deck dies pretty quickly to early removal.
I've won without dropping games vs u/x tron/tron anything, but tempo is really hard.
Yeah lately this has been running pretty well for me,
except for a few matchups I have a problem winning against:
Affinity Jund Red Deck Wins Zoo Hatebear Merfolk Aura Hexproof UR Aggro Junk Gruul Aggro 4/5c Good Stuff Aggro Loam RUG Aggro Dredgevine UWx Midrange UW Control UrzaTron Gift Control Faeries The Rock Martyr Life BUG Teaching Control Birthing Pod Twin Exarch Scapeshift UR Storm Infect Combo Bloom Titan Living End and Ad Nauseam,
but that's expected since I'm a pretty new pilot.
One game I did extraordinarily well. I actually won turn 1 with my play of spoils the vault that my opponent cast. I thought I played that matchup pretty well. I'm really liking it. I hope you bring this to a GP; with a little practice, I'm sure anyone can run this smoothly!
Farhaven and Wood Elves is wrong. You want a turn 3 Gifts asap. I've been playing this deck for a very. very. very. very. long time. Rampant Growth is better than Farhaven Elf by a long shot.
I've found that in games 2/3, you pretty much always side in Krosan Grip or Wipe Away and keep at least 1 Gigadrowse. But yeah, the chains are pretty simple once you've memorized the deck. Just remember that if you have the mana to spare, Get all your Heartbeats on board mainphase post Enter the Infinite, untap your lands, drowse their lands, and then kill them mainphase two. And yeah also place the mountain on top of your deck post Enter the Infinite so you can get it in play that turn if you already played a land.
I don't really understand the DRS ban. DRS wasn't an engine card. It didn't present particular problems except for graveyard based decks.
Sure normal decks can easily hand a DRS, but graveyard decks die and roll over to a turn one deathrite shaman. When one card completely destroys an archetype (in this case more than 1), it's stifling the format and reducing diversity. It's not what you called 'warping the format' ala 40% participation rate, but rather extinguishing an unseen amount of the metagame.
Then why did Wizards of the Coast not choose to mention this in the banning rationale? That's the big issue: I can think of a whole lot of better reasons to ban Deathrite Shaman than the reason (if you can even call it a reason) that they gave.
Having a strong attrition-based deck as a large portion of the metagame makes it difficult for decks that are based on synergies between cards instead of individually powerful cards. We believe that removing Deathrite Shaman from the format will leave more room for future innovation.
What part of graveyard strategy exactly does card synergy not resonate with you?
And what part of allowing format innovation does not speak increasing metgame diversity to you?
DRS was keeping archetypes at bay, simple as that.
If you really don't understand how Loam decks (ergo an archetype) completely vanished overnight then I encourage you to find tournament winnings with Loam post DRS.
I don't really understand the DRS ban. DRS wasn't an engine card. It didn't present particular problems except for graveyard based decks.
Sure normal decks can easily hand a DRS, but graveyard decks die and roll over to a turn one deathrite shaman. When one card completely destroys an archetype (in this case more than 1), it's stifling the format and reducing diversity. It's not what you called 'warping the format' ala 40% participation rate, but rather extinguishing an unseen amount of the metagame.
The question is, is there a real answer to making MUM work in modern?
Maindeck
18 Island
Creatures
4 Cursecatcher
4 Martyr of Frost
4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
4 Sky Hussar
4 Judge's Familiar
4 Wingcrafter
4 Fathom Seer
2 Gitaxian Probe
4 Disrupting Shoal
4 Snapback
4 Commandeer
Tentative Sideboard
Sideboard
3 Hibernation
3 Vedalken Shackles
2 Negate
3 Steel Sabotage
To start off, let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way. Ideally, the deck would be running Foils, Force of Wills, and Misdirections, but as they aren't real things in modern, let's just try to stick what we can.
Other versions of the deck have been trying to build in the style of the fringe deck "Ninja-Bear-Delver", which has realistically dropped its "unique" application of the card Disrupting Shoal, sometimes in favor of fewer counts of the card or dropping it altogether in favor of Red.
This deck is; however, not a tempo deck like NBD is, nor does it combo off in any like the legacy version does with Flutterstorm and Nivmagus Elemental. This is just pure control. Although you may have the game on lockdown early enough, you will not win with MUM within the first five turns.
What are the advantages to the deck? Nothing, really. You get to put more effort into your plays for equal payoff. The satisfaction of playing with the deck is in its legacy style plays in which one is really prepared. This deck is card advantage on steroids. This deck beats Dark Confidant in card advantage, though not necessarily card quality.
People were originally discussing "Finishers" in this deck as its main problem, and so I've built up a deck which just goes balls deep into its unique playstyle. Want to play Gush in modern? You have Gush now in the form of Fathom Seer, a hidden gem. This, along with the 8 other card engines of Sky Hussar and Ninja of the Deep Hours creates a deck in which synergy builds up the entire deck ie. Wingcrafter --> Hussar Engine & Ninja, Ninja of the Deep Hours ---> Cycling Fathom Seer ----> Hussar Engine effectively drawing Five-Six etc. etc, which is something seen very little of in modern. Using these engines, Commandeer is now incredibly viable as a Trump Card, making your card quality as good as the opponent's is. You're playing 12 "free" spells. Snapback, Disrupting Shoal, and Commandeer, though admittedly Snapback is for the most part hardcast or pitched.
The deck is overall, incredibly easy to trip up on, but has a very rewarding sense of playstyle. The deck folds to aggro, and cries to a resolved Voice or other large beater. However, the deck does have a nearly unbeatable lategame inevitability like Tron does. Is it a good deck? Who knows. After extensive testing, I've found that your matchups average up a solid 50% across the board, with your game favoring the combo and control matchups. Let's all be real though, the only reason you're playing this deck is to finally be able to legitimately draw three cards per turn, steal an opponent's Karn off of a Commandeer, or play Legacy in modern.
I'm kind of partial between Mana Leak and Spell Pierce since the creature set up is really the most important part, but I figured the most commonly expected good draws are one drops into Ninja of the Deep Hours or one drops into the Sky Hussar engine, and I don't have the mana to spare in the Ninja of the Deep Hours set up for Spell Pierce, much less for Mana Leak, while I do with the Sky Hussar setup for either, but getting in another 1 drop after you have the Sky Hussar setup isn't ALL that important, so all I get out of Mana Leak is plus, correct?
Furthermore, if am using Mana Leak and I have a ninja setup on board, I have the luxury of being mana efficient by dropping in Wingcrafter and still keeping mana open for Mana Leak, yeah?
The main point of running Mana Leak over Spell Pierce is one, about keeping my engines live, and two, being mana efficient when I have the luxury and not overextending. The flexibility of hitting creatures is also an important factor, although not as important as the first two.
Yes, there is no need to get large amounts of damage in when Wingcrafter gets in Ninja of the Deep Hours and everything else into the air.
Having a double reliance on Nivmagus Elemental dumping my hard earned card advantage does not seem like a good way to go when Abrupt Decay exists in this format.
Maindeck
18 Island
Creatures
4 Cursecatcher
4 Martyr of Frost
4 Ninja of the Deep Hours
4 Sky Hussar
4 Judge's Familiar
4 Wingcrafter
4 Gitaxian Probe
2 Vapor Snag
4 Disrupting Shoal
4 Mana Leak
2 Cryptic Command
2 Snapback
Sideboard
3 Steel Sabotage
4 Hibernation
2 Vedalken Shackles
2 Negate
I run the 8 Ninja of the Deep Hours/Sky Hussar engine with 16 1 drops to ensure I get the card advantage going. I run Wingcrafter, which has currently been over-performing lately with the Ninja of the Deep Hours engine, allowing less Snapbacks and Vapor snags to be played, giving me better card quality. The amount of one drops lets the ninja engine keep getting in while dropping in 1's for the Sky Hussar engine, giving more and more ammo. This lets me drop the Æther Vial reliance and lets me run hard counters. I dropped the wizard tribal altogether, giving me access to stronger spells and dropping my double reliance on Voidmage Prodigy with Æther Vials. This also lets me up my land count, enabling access to stronger spells like Cryptic Command.
I've won without dropping games vs u/x tron/tron anything, but tempo is really hard.
except for a few matchups I have a problem winning against:
Affinity Jund Red Deck Wins Zoo Hatebear Merfolk Aura Hexproof UR Aggro Junk Gruul Aggro 4/5c Good Stuff Aggro Loam RUG Aggro Dredgevine UWx Midrange UW Control UrzaTron Gift Control Faeries The Rock Martyr Life BUG Teaching Control Birthing Pod Twin Exarch Scapeshift UR Storm Infect Combo Bloom Titan Living End and Ad Nauseam,
but that's expected since I'm a pretty new pilot.
One game I did extraordinarily well. I actually won turn 1 with my play of spoils the vault that my opponent cast. I thought I played that matchup pretty well. I'm really liking it. I hope you bring this to a GP; with a little practice, I'm sure anyone can run this smoothly!
http://www.reddit.com/r/Roguedeckbuilder/comments/1r0oh6/rogue_deck_of_the_month_infinite_heartbeat_combo/
Here's the list I've tuned.
I've found that in games 2/3, you pretty much always side in Krosan Grip or Wipe Away and keep at least 1 Gigadrowse. But yeah, the chains are pretty simple once you've memorized the deck. Just remember that if you have the mana to spare, Get all your Heartbeats on board mainphase post Enter the Infinite, untap your lands, drowse their lands, and then kill them mainphase two. And yeah also place the mountain on top of your deck post Enter the Infinite so you can get it in play that turn if you already played a land.
What part of graveyard strategy exactly does card synergy not resonate with you?
And what part of allowing format innovation does not speak increasing metgame diversity to you?
DRS was keeping archetypes at bay, simple as that.
If you really don't understand how Loam decks (ergo an archetype) completely vanished overnight then I encourage you to find tournament winnings with Loam post DRS.
Sure normal decks can easily hand a DRS, but graveyard decks die and roll over to a turn one deathrite shaman. When one card completely destroys an archetype (in this case more than 1), it's stifling the format and reducing diversity. It's not what you called 'warping the format' ala 40% participation rate, but rather extinguishing an unseen amount of the metagame.