I've been running a 1 of skelemental in my mainboard with one more in the sideboard for the UW control matchup and planeswalkers, and have to say, been fairly impressed in limited sample size (12 rounds, 7-3-1 overall record across 3 local tournaments). Sometimes it can be dead (tron or whirza) but I generally find the deck to perform well enough already against those kinds of decks for it to not matter, particularly with 2 mainboard K command (which has also been doing serious work for me). Even if humans dumps a couple creatures in the bin I care more about resolving a living end with enough board state to close the game in 1-2 turns and their creatures are smaller anyway.
I've been debating Skelemental vs. Sandsprinter, as both would serve a similar purpose for me (pressure planewalkers and control decks), with sandsprinter as a more versatile option and less one shot. But skelemental is too sweet for me to pull it right now.
Saw a couple spicy-ish lists recently, one running mainboard seasoned pyromancer and one running mainboard jund charm(?). I assume the pyromancer is to give the deck somewhat of a grindy midrange plan while still advancing your combo game plan, and jund charm is i guess anti-dredge tech and a pyroclasm against humans and thopter tokens? Any thoughts on these two cards? Both seem a little clunky, but im just a jank local combo player.
Also - thoughts on Rotting regisuar for extra pressure / clock when facing counter decks or grave hate? Love it in standard lol.
Rotting regisaur seems too gimmicky--fatal push hits it really well and it puts you down instead of up on cards.
I actually really love the skelemental idea though (because neither stays on the board permanently, I think it's *probably* strictly better than the viashino). It seems like a powerful way to kill the Teferi's that UW Stoneblade tries to control us with and just generally put the screws on them--especially with Kommands to recur it with. According to mtggoldfish, this is about 10% of the meta so that's pretty nice--and it certainly doesn't seem bad to dedicate one slot to it against, say, tron. Could actually be good against Burn too.
As for Jund Charm, it is an ancient include in the deck (the cmc restriction really makes you a sucker for clunky cards) and was for a long time considered a must have for metas with a lot of weenie decks. If memory serves, it became less prominent as more specific answers were printed (anger of the gods was a big deal for us, and if you primarily wanted 2 damage mode, it was typically better to use the theros card) and the weenie decks got a bit bigger to where 2 was often not enough.
I have a really hard time seeing why the rhino is better than more ancestral visions, and why you wouldn't want to play chalice mainboard in this particular list. I do think the As Foretold lists have closed a lot of the gap between them and the traditional jund-based living end builds, but it's a pretty fundamentally different deck. I think if stoneforge continues pushing to modern meta towards fair countermagic decks and non-board combo, it will probably be the better deck. However, if modern moves towards a world where a lot of eldrazi, elves, and stoneforge taxes are running around--i.e. if recent bannings push the format back to being about board battles instead of stack battles--then I think the jund version's ability to cast VO at instant speed and cycle more quickly is going to be far more powerful.
The best eldrazi would be ulamog, right? Otherwise, the creatures are just really big--which seems like a low reward for dedicating somewhere between 7 and 8 cards. In all, if we're desperate for more interaction with the things that stop us from casting Living End, then the haggle package seems like the wrong direction.
Are there other fatties you have in mind to discard? And if we wanna go down that route, why not be U/R with As Foretold and cathartic reunion?
The thing is, the main way we gain value with our living end is by returning a bunch of things. The structure of the deck is not friendly to using the living end as a looping mechanic.
However, as two point of inspiration: there is labratory maniac, if you really just want to burn through the whole deck and then win on the same turn. You're gonna need to focus mainly on a win through the actual living end itself in this version. The other potential kill is with flame-kin zealot, a card once used in an earlier, delirium skeins focused version of the deck.
However, the main problem you'll run into is sctructural, not single card based: living end as a just doesn't lend itself to decks that build up the board progressively. Living end on a stick... kills the stick. You're more likely to keep playing with your dredgvines in some sort of jumanji or zoo deck--perhaps using it with Liliana of the Veil as free discard or Pyromancers to get tokens.
Hey Guys, been away from the game and thread for a long time but I'm returning! These bans and unbans seem huge for us. Our land destruction and access to ingot chewer makes us arguably one of the decks most ambivalent about stoneforge mystic coming back. Hogaak and faithless looting being banned help us both because they'll presumably result in fewer decks running four copies of leyline mainboard, but also because looting will result in fewer decks trying to abuse the yard even harder than us, a situation living end traditionally struggles to deal with.
The major predator I see still troubling us is the tron matchup with four chalice, although that may just mean its time to mainboard 4 ingot chewers.
Hey guys, I've been away a long time but I'm trying to get back into actively following modern, at least.
How are we feeling now that Ironworks is banned? Do we like our position more, or less? Has hollowed one really become so common that it's forcing us to be a deck that has to interact with their graveyard game 1? LD has really fallen off I see; so much of the deck is predicated on having access to a lot of fulminator activations, so I'm very curious if someone can offer an explanation for why the field of bullets is incentivizing slimming on them.
Glad to see Living End still has it's dedicated pilots--we'll terrorize modern yet!
It'd be really helpful to know what your main is, Nash. I do like having as many shriekmaws, ssgs, and boars/etc. that you have in the list in the deck against burn.
Hey just FYI, your proposed "target my fetchland and then sac it" will not work. You will counter your spell because one if its targets became invalid.
RE: the split cards, the issue is that so far none do anything evoke creatures don't do. Turn//Burn Cut//Ribbons are worse unless you've maxed out on maw and can't play dismember because of life cost. Other than that, the cards aren't in our colors. It is a good thing to keep an eye out for though; if a spell that gives us an effect we don't have were printed, we'd definitely want to know.
Hey just FYI, your proposed "target my fetchland and then sac it" will not work. You will counter your spell because one if its targets became invalid.
RE: the split cards, the issue is that so far none do anything evoke creatures don't do. Turn//Burn Cut//Ribbons are worse unless you've maxed out on maw and can't play dismember because of life cost. Other than that, the cards aren't in our colors. It is a good thing to keep an eye out for though; if a spell that gives us an effect we don't have were printed, we'd definitely want to know.
I seriously doubt you need 14 one mana cyclers. 12 is really plenty. I would replace them with a fourth fulminator and a kolaghan's command.
With Kommand maindeck, you'll be able to shave your artifact hate in the board. 3 chewer and 2 grip is a lot; if you want to be that focused on beating decks with important artifacts, Kommand mainboard will do a lot. I would personally recommend just getting rid of lost legacy entirely. I don't really know what's important to name in the meta. Cards like that have a problem of feeling very all-pupose, when really they're very narrow. I would cut Beast Within from the board; it's just not really a sideboard card in this deck. So you've gained 4 new slots. I'd put in some cards to help control and a simian spirit guide for matchups where you'd rather go fast. Hope you found that helpful
Siding in the slaughter games and lost legacy against control doesn't seem right to me. I'd really rather have the fourth beast within and faerie macabre even if you're taking out four cards. Which four cards, for that matter, are you taking out?
For the matchup in general, I find it pretty favorable to us. But it does require significant experience. You're really fighting over their mana in this matchup: trying to resolve living end while they don't have it, reducing it to the point they can't really win, etc. Keep in mind what they're using it for, and play at instant speed as much as possible. With time, you'll probably improve at this matchup a lot.
So leaving aside the massive problems that playing this deck with 0 interaction causes (seriously, how many decks with zero interaction are successful in the current meta? Bogles? That's literally it), why on earth are you playing bloodbraid elf in that deck model? Ardent Plea exists, and if you want so much mana and so many landcyclers, you probably won't find playing it that difficult. If you're going all in on this just living end and cyclers plan, go all in.
As for turn 3 cascade in response to Karn, we do that too. It's just we can also destroy the tron lands before and after.
Again, TWoo is a good player who has come up with some great innovations in the past. Nothing we say here should be considered an insult of him as a player, much less as a person. But the reality is that his suggested innovations to Living End have been very strange and often wildly off-base for some time now. The last major change I remember him arguing for is that we should play 90 cards and five colors in this deck. Before that, he was making a case for Restoration Angel in the deck, on the grounds that instants made your other instants better, while ignoring the basic anti-synergy that a vanilla 3/4 flyer has with this deck. I don't see this bloodbraid elf idea as anything other than another chapter in that story.
In addition to everything that protoaddict just said, if you are proposing that we cut demonic dreads as part of playing bloodbraid elves, we actually just succeeded in making all our cascades cost one more without increasing our number of cascades.
Rotting regisaur seems too gimmicky--fatal push hits it really well and it puts you down instead of up on cards.
I actually really love the skelemental idea though (because neither stays on the board permanently, I think it's *probably* strictly better than the viashino). It seems like a powerful way to kill the Teferi's that UW Stoneblade tries to control us with and just generally put the screws on them--especially with Kommands to recur it with. According to mtggoldfish, this is about 10% of the meta so that's pretty nice--and it certainly doesn't seem bad to dedicate one slot to it against, say, tron. Could actually be good against Burn too.
As for Jund Charm, it is an ancient include in the deck (the cmc restriction really makes you a sucker for clunky cards) and was for a long time considered a must have for metas with a lot of weenie decks. If memory serves, it became less prominent as more specific answers were printed (anger of the gods was a big deal for us, and if you primarily wanted 2 damage mode, it was typically better to use the theros card) and the weenie decks got a bit bigger to where 2 was often not enough.
Are there other fatties you have in mind to discard? And if we wanna go down that route, why not be U/R with As Foretold and cathartic reunion?
However, as two point of inspiration: there is labratory maniac, if you really just want to burn through the whole deck and then win on the same turn. You're gonna need to focus mainly on a win through the actual living end itself in this version. The other potential kill is with flame-kin zealot, a card once used in an earlier, delirium skeins focused version of the deck.
However, the main problem you'll run into is sctructural, not single card based: living end as a just doesn't lend itself to decks that build up the board progressively. Living end on a stick... kills the stick. You're more likely to keep playing with your dredgvines in some sort of jumanji or zoo deck--perhaps using it with Liliana of the Veil as free discard or Pyromancers to get tokens.
The major predator I see still troubling us is the tron matchup with four chalice, although that may just mean its time to mainboard 4 ingot chewers.
What do the other pilots here say?
How are we feeling now that Ironworks is banned? Do we like our position more, or less? Has hollowed one really become so common that it's forcing us to be a deck that has to interact with their graveyard game 1? LD has really fallen off I see; so much of the deck is predicated on having access to a lot of fulminator activations, so I'm very curious if someone can offer an explanation for why the field of bullets is incentivizing slimming on them.
Glad to see Living End still has it's dedicated pilots--we'll terrorize modern yet!
RE: the split cards, the issue is that so far none do anything evoke creatures don't do. Turn//Burn Cut//Ribbons are worse unless you've maxed out on maw and can't play dismember because of life cost. Other than that, the cards aren't in our colors. It is a good thing to keep an eye out for though; if a spell that gives us an effect we don't have were printed, we'd definitely want to know.
RE: the split cards, the issue is that so far none do anything evoke creatures don't do. Turn//Burn Cut//Ribbons are worse unless you've maxed out on maw and can't play dismember because of life cost. Other than that, the cards aren't in our colors. It is a good thing to keep an eye out for though; if a spell that gives us an effect we don't have were printed, we'd definitely want to know.
With Kommand maindeck, you'll be able to shave your artifact hate in the board. 3 chewer and 2 grip is a lot; if you want to be that focused on beating decks with important artifacts, Kommand mainboard will do a lot. I would personally recommend just getting rid of lost legacy entirely. I don't really know what's important to name in the meta. Cards like that have a problem of feeling very all-pupose, when really they're very narrow. I would cut Beast Within from the board; it's just not really a sideboard card in this deck. So you've gained 4 new slots. I'd put in some cards to help control and a simian spirit guide for matchups where you'd rather go fast. Hope you found that helpful
For the matchup in general, I find it pretty favorable to us. But it does require significant experience. You're really fighting over their mana in this matchup: trying to resolve living end while they don't have it, reducing it to the point they can't really win, etc. Keep in mind what they're using it for, and play at instant speed as much as possible. With time, you'll probably improve at this matchup a lot.
Welcome to the deck.
As for turn 3 cascade in response to Karn, we do that too. It's just we can also destroy the tron lands before and after.
Again, TWoo is a good player who has come up with some great innovations in the past. Nothing we say here should be considered an insult of him as a player, much less as a person. But the reality is that his suggested innovations to Living End have been very strange and often wildly off-base for some time now. The last major change I remember him arguing for is that we should play 90 cards and five colors in this deck. Before that, he was making a case for Restoration Angel in the deck, on the grounds that instants made your other instants better, while ignoring the basic anti-synergy that a vanilla 3/4 flyer has with this deck. I don't see this bloodbraid elf idea as anything other than another chapter in that story.