Battlebond
TL;DR up front - Artifacts are weak and uninspiring. Honestly, the best card in the set from my perspective is likey Stolen Strategy, and its not great if you can afford superior enchantments.
Blue
- Zndrsplt, Eye of Wisdom - I am not super excited about this card, but it does provide another means of drawing cards for us. If you run a more chaotic Mishra and include Krark's Thumb, this could be a great card for you.
- Chakram Retriever - With the right mana dorks, this card could be very abusable in a storm variant. That said, at 5cmc its very expensive for a non artifact.
- Fumble - Meta specific, but my god is this strong against voltrons.
- Spellseeker - great card, though idk if it fits Mishra.
Red
- Okaun, Eye of Chaos - Again, if you are going hard on chaos and rocking the thumb, this guy MIGHT work well in Mishra, but not without his partner.
- Stolen Strategy - oh man, this one has legs. We could steal an artifact and get value. Not consistent, but would be a great budget card for mishra!
Black
- Thrilling Encore - Only really useful card I've seen in this set for Mishra, could help us recover from a board wipe. That said, not a trick i want to hold 5 mana for unless I am running a VERY creature heavy variant.
Colorless
- Sentinel Tower - Frankly, the only card worthy of mention, and its really just useful in a storm / eggs mishra deck, and considering that we build up storm count via artifact cycling, its really not useful. Artifacts in general are a dud from this set.
Multicolor
- Last One Standing - 3 mana board wipe can be pretty damn clutch, even if 1 creature sneaks by. Most decks in my meta are go wide, and rarely have a single key creature.
Lands
Nothing to see here
Let me know if you think I missed a noteworthy card and why and i'll add it to this list!
1
It went from an average of $10-$11 to $35 -_-* Without a doubt for that very reason.
1
lol I just mentioned like two posts back that I switched from that weird deck to elves. Btw it's called 8rack. 2 or less cards in hand and the rack does 1-3 damage and 1 or less cards in hand and shrieking affliction does 3 flat damage. It's my favorite deck but I can definitely see how it could be a poor match up for elves.
1
Round 1) Won vs Grixis Control(midrange) 2/0.
Game 1: Used smallpox early to lock him out of crucial land. Dropped necrogen mists and kept his hand empty until the racks and mutavaults did their job.
Game 2: Had to mull to five due to lands hating me, then basically the same strategy only he got enough lands to activate his creeping tar pit so we ended up racing damage. Then I drew another smallpox and that 1 damage just barely put me ahead in damage for the win.
Round 2) Lost to Junk 2/1
Game 1) Won game 1, locked him out of mana early with smallpox and drew really well to keep his hand empty while racks did their job.
Game 2) Collected company + eternal witness + kitchen finks = outpacing my everything. Also blocked two of my mutavaults with snapcasters cause "why not" as he so eloquently put it.
Game 3) Almost the same as above only he almost at the classic pod combo on the field before he killed me, told me after the game that his sideboard more or less turns his deck into melera/afenza infinite.
Round 3) Won vs lantern control 2/1
Game 1) Lost this round. Admittedly I wasn't expecting to see the deck last night so I spent game one learning the mechanics of the deck and doing my best to hamper him in the process. Got 1 rack out but it wasn't enough.
Game 2) Got a rack out turn 1, and an affliction out turn 2. He destroyed one with Abrupt Decay but didn't have an answer for the other. I already had him to 6 before he drew the red spellbomb.
Game 3) opening hand had an affliction, a rack, and a Nyxathid. Dropped the affliction and rack turns 1 and 2 to bait out the abrupt decay. ended up getting thoughseize turn three so I removed it from his hand instead. dropped Nyxathid turn 4, by then he had one land in hand. And from that point on I just let all three cards work their magic till I had the game.
Round 4) lost to Esper Control. 2/0
Game 1) This was a strange hybrid of Esper control and Esper aggro. Looked like he was running Esper Control build with 2-3 Tasigur for the lols. Anyways he kept his hand at 5-6 the whole game so the racks never went off. Beat me down with colonnade.
Game 2) Almost the same as above only he seemed to like the irony of using esper charms to make me discard 2 as "punishment" for making me play discard. (his words not mine) In the end I Couldn't out damage Tasigur.
Still think smallpox is a ridiculously underrated card for this deck. It practically sets your opponent to turn zero if you go first and you play it turn 2. And since most decks are 2+ color in the format so smallpox hurts them a lot. I think to a degree it also messes with you opponent since they know you have the capability to play smallpox so they are more likely to keep a larger land hand then normal or mull down to try and get a particularly optimal hand. This seems to be the case at least from my observations at my local FNM.
2
Your english is perfectly fine my friend. As for smallpox yes its situational but its helped me so many times. If played against Say Infect, Zoo, or Burn it can severely set them back. Usually these decks will keep a low land hand figuring they will just empty in on the field in a few turns. Its their usual strategy and admittedly it usually works. But we are definitely not the sort of deck they usually expect. And that I would say is a definite advantage.
1
I don't like going up against BloomTitan. A dislike that was re-enforced even further last week when I got killed by a Titan turn 2 round one. And then two Titans Turn two of the following round thanks to some stupid hi jinks with two amulets on the field and trigger tricks. I don't know, I understand that there are answers to the Titan deck. That it's hugely based on luck. And that they can ironically enough mana screw themselves. But I still feel the deck would be a whole lot fairer if the Amulet were removed.
1
This man has my vote
1
Yeah I get the same reaction from players. I have probably had a quarter of the players at my LCS tell me I was a horrible person for playing the deck. And I think quite a few of them aren't lying, you can kinda see it in a person's demeanor and their eyes. I have hit the point, as of recent, where if I'm asked to not play it I will more often them not switch decks. In the end I go to FNM to have fun, if other people can't expect to have roughly the same experience I feel like i'm doing something wrong. However I will play it if I know someone is playing storm because its my leave favorite deck to play against.
2
I am very new to this deck and sadly cannot afford what I only can consider the best make or break cards (aka Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Liliana of the Veil) to make this absolutely fantastic as adding a playset of each would more then quadruple the current cost of my deck. So my choices, in my mind, are try to find substitutions to fill in the gaps or just say screw it and play a different deck.
But what I do know is that in my local meta, I have have had several people tell me that I am the worst kind of person for playing this type of deck. And on top of that I frustrated one of the top players in my area to the point of dropping after out after his match with my sub par deck. So I take that to mean I'm doing something right.
Granted I see where you are coming from, running sub optimal-irrelevantly under powered cards doesn't usually help people improve. But at the same time new decks cannot be discovered without experimentation and someone has to be willing to fail to see how their idea does in a real match. Otherwise everyone would be running Artifact Affinity, some variation of Zoo, or some variation of Tron cause those are proven decks. But it would also be a very dull game if this were the case.
And with that said I do not pretend to be the best player in the world. I often forget the upkeep trigger for Wolf-Skull Shaman in my Elf deck. I say I end my turn and realize that I forgot to play a land that turn. I know that I still have much to learn about this game. But I still like to see other people's ideas toward this archetype. Because it's through these sorts of interactions I feel that this game improves. "Looking at a card suggestion and saying to one's self "heh I never would have thought of that."
I shall get off my soap box now.
1
Yeah I wish I had grabbed a playset of IoK before they spiked. Now they are ever so slightly out of my price range for the moment. Then again I also wish I had bought Thoughtseize at $11 dollars when the RTR rotated out. But I didn't have the foresight and was running Elves exclusively at the time. Oh well.
Infinite Obliteration Is an interesting card. Though personally I'm not sure why you would use that over Surgical Extraction or Extirpate since it cost 2 more, only hits a creature, and is sorcery speed.
1
It worked surprisingly well. Since metas tend to run multiples I would Despise them then turn around and Surgical Extraction something hopefully useful. Or wait a few turns, get some cards in their graveyard them take my pick.
As for the Death Cloud/Haunting Echoes. It's kinda a place holder for the moment. I wasn't really sure what to put there. Though I can say that both games that I won week two were in large part due to me holding out to turn 5-10 then dropping haunting Echoes on the field and tearing their deck apart. So for now it's carrying its weight till I can find something else.