What would you say are bads card in the matchup? Displacer maybe? Or sculler since they have a lot of removal to get their card back? I usually took out one path post sideboard but at times I wish I did have the paths to deal with their beater.
I guess it depends what your sideboard is like, as mine doesn’t have a ton for this matchup nor do I think we have access in our colours to a lot that is really helpful. As an example I prefer Rest In Peace over relics, but wouldn’t bring in Rest In Peace in this matchup so my boarding ends up being fairly minimal. Generally I swap in two Gideon AoZ for the removal heavy matchups and against Jeskai I drop one path and one sculler to make room for them. I probably wouldn’t drop any displacers as them stumbling and letting you untap with a displacer is absolutely brutal for them, and it can attack through snapcasters or spell quellers which is valuable.
I like strangler in the matchup. You also need to kill snapcasters to get damage through and killing those with strangler feels a lot better than trading creatures with it or using your paths. As for the matchup, it’s pretty rough. All their removal is good against almost all of our stuff, you have to disrupt early and pressure and hope to get there, because our late game is awful compared to once they’re able to leverage lots of mana per turn
That was before we had Fatal Push, which means you aren’t getting ramped by PtE on your bear.
The only time storm jams out t2 bear is in a drag race - Dredge, Affinity, counters company, mirror, etc
I think it is a lot more complicated than that. If they have multiples or they don't have a way in hand to interact with our sideboard hate, it can be correct to go for the win as soon as possible versus playing around sorcery speed removal. If their hand is Baral x 2, manamorphose, ritual, gifts and 2 land in play it's probably correct to risk one of the redundant Barals vs giving us more draw steps to find RiP, eidolon of rhetoric or Thalia since they can beat a removal spell on Baral but can't beat resolved hate with that hand. In a perfect world they hold up remand on turn 2, Baral on turn 3 with remand backup, but variance doesn't always cooperate and I've seen a lot of t2 bears without protection on the other side of the table
I don´t run rest in peace at all instead I play a 3 / 2 Split of Relic of progenitus and Cage. Cage comes in vs Living end
You may want to reconsider that plan as cage does not work against Living End. Their creatures do not enter the battlefield from the graveyard, they enter from exile, bypassing cage entirely.
I feel you’re playing green I think it’s a mistake not to have e witness somewhere in the 75. Blinking it with resto or flickerwisp to keep getting back the same path to exile is backbreaking against the creature matchups and it gives you a lot of grind against the midrange matchups.
EDIT: actually with double green you probably can’t cast it off 8 green sources, nm
I mean, the list won so there is obviously something there, but I'm not personally ready to give up my RIPs and Silences even if they are my only non human cards in the sideboard
Collins is going to the finals. The deck has looked great on camera and Mantis Rider seems really strong in the shell. He's just gotta get through gifts storm and Humans is gonna take it all
Hi all, long time Death and Taxes player, haven't played the deck for a long time and I've been itching to sleeve up my noble heirarchs again. Looking long and hard at humans since kite sail got printed, wondering if the deck is fast enough to get under stuff like Eldrazi Tron and Valakut or if it's primarily a deck that preys on the fair matchups. There's a lot of Eldrazi Tron and Valakut in the meta, how well do you guys feel the deck is positioned to attack those strategies?
As far as Smallpox goes, it's good when it's good, no arguments about that. But the problem is that it's never actually good. Here, take a look at the Modern metagame. Try to list all decks it's good against, all decks it's mediocre against and all decks it's bad against. If you understand matchups correctly or have ever actually played 8Rack against any of these decks (seriously beginning to doubt that, but let's stay positive here) you will know that it's absolutely irrelevant a third of the time, it hurts the player who casts it more another third of the time and against the other third of the decks it's effectiveness is questionable at best. Even against Tron (eldrazi version or not) it's a lot worse than people make it out to be, because the majority of the discussion is based around the theory that making them sac a land and a creature will somehow immediately win you the match, blissfully ignoring the symmetry of the effect. If you want to support your claim, do like others have and bring back some results.
Off the top of my head;
Death shadow (all variants)
Elves
Merfolk
Burn
Eldrazi Tron
Counters Company
Gifts Storm
Are all common matchups where smallpox is great. You mention Eldrazi Tron and the symmetrical effect of smallpox which is interesting because it is the matchup where we are able to break the symmetry to greatest effect. Assuming an Eldrazi Temple in play, reality smasher represents a 5 card investment to get on the board (4 lands + the smasher), End Bringer requires a 6 card investment. Our cards require between 1 - 3 lands with most being in the 1 land range. Smallpox allows us to trade 3 cards for 3 of their cards, and our deck is simply far better at working with limited resources than the deck we want to smallpox. To simplify, with 4 cards we can cast Liliana of the Veil. With 4 cards Eldrazi Tron can't do a lot of the things their deck wants to do, and those they can do such as TKS aren't particularly difficult for us to deal with.
Death shadow is a pretty good matchup, just make sure you're running a few dismembers and not relying too heavily on fatal push as it misses tasigur and angler. Most likely it's just needing practice with the matchup.
Counters company you want to hit them hard with discard so they aren't sitting on 4 mana waiting to top deck a collected company. Ideally you want them empty handed by their 2nd land, and smallpox is big here. This is a matchup where I greatly prefer to be on the play as hitting a mana dork and a land on your turn 2 is backbreaking for them. Flaying tendrils out of the board helps a lot. Use your discard to hit kitchen finks preferably and let your ravens crimes and wrench minds and smallpox take care of the companies and chords
I still want two flaying tendrils as voice of resurgence and kitchen finks still show up from time to time and are a headache to deal with.
Based on my experience with damnation, im not sure I even want Bontu's reckoning. Decks that play tons of small creatures fast are usually killable with tendrils. Decks that play lots of creatures that get above 2 CMC are usually slow enough that we make them discard the majority of their stuff and they have trouble mustering enough lands and cards to make a board wipe attractive for us. For sweepers I'm sticking with two tendrils in the board
Esperino> Fortunately for us we already have a really good matchup against Death's Shadow with monoblack, so I see absolutely no reason at all to go white to play Lingering Souls instead of keeping it monoblack and painless as BrandonJames16 stated.
Yeah, white has some really good SB-options we don't get by playing monoblack, but it also comes at a steep price. It's just ignorant to keep ignoring that fact.
SirFrancois> Yeah, but the problem with Bloodghast is that he wants us to play lands, otherwise he'll just stay in the graveyard... And in our deck we rarely wanna go more than 3 lands in play, the rest is kept as a fuel for Raven's Crime to keep our opponent in Hellbent-mode, so that our wincons do what they are meant to be doing.
What?! If 8Rack is so good against Death's Shadow decks, that would mean it's one of the best decks in the format and people should be winning Shadow-infested events left and right with it. We must let everybody know!
Honestly I do feel it's one of the better decks in the format right now as long as lingering souls and dredge don't pick up significantly.
Get a hand that can quickly power out a lodestone golem and try to kill them fast. Enduring ideal decks are pretty slow to get online anyway, pinching their mana is going to be effective against them
Only enchantment I've found to be a problem was leyline, and that dodges thoughtseize. In a non blood moon build I've splashed white for wear/tear, but in a blood moon BR deck I pretty much hope they don't draw their leylines. Non leyline enchantments usually get snagged by discard/Lilly in my experience
I guess it depends what your sideboard is like, as mine doesn’t have a ton for this matchup nor do I think we have access in our colours to a lot that is really helpful. As an example I prefer Rest In Peace over relics, but wouldn’t bring in Rest In Peace in this matchup so my boarding ends up being fairly minimal. Generally I swap in two Gideon AoZ for the removal heavy matchups and against Jeskai I drop one path and one sculler to make room for them. I probably wouldn’t drop any displacers as them stumbling and letting you untap with a displacer is absolutely brutal for them, and it can attack through snapcasters or spell quellers which is valuable.
I think it is a lot more complicated than that. If they have multiples or they don't have a way in hand to interact with our sideboard hate, it can be correct to go for the win as soon as possible versus playing around sorcery speed removal. If their hand is Baral x 2, manamorphose, ritual, gifts and 2 land in play it's probably correct to risk one of the redundant Barals vs giving us more draw steps to find RiP, eidolon of rhetoric or Thalia since they can beat a removal spell on Baral but can't beat resolved hate with that hand. In a perfect world they hold up remand on turn 2, Baral on turn 3 with remand backup, but variance doesn't always cooperate and I've seen a lot of t2 bears without protection on the other side of the table
You may want to reconsider that plan as cage does not work against Living End. Their creatures do not enter the battlefield from the graveyard, they enter from exile, bypassing cage entirely.
EDIT: actually with double green you probably can’t cast it off 8 green sources, nm
Off the top of my head;
Death shadow (all variants)
Elves
Merfolk
Burn
Eldrazi Tron
Counters Company
Gifts Storm
Are all common matchups where smallpox is great. You mention Eldrazi Tron and the symmetrical effect of smallpox which is interesting because it is the matchup where we are able to break the symmetry to greatest effect. Assuming an Eldrazi Temple in play, reality smasher represents a 5 card investment to get on the board (4 lands + the smasher), End Bringer requires a 6 card investment. Our cards require between 1 - 3 lands with most being in the 1 land range. Smallpox allows us to trade 3 cards for 3 of their cards, and our deck is simply far better at working with limited resources than the deck we want to smallpox. To simplify, with 4 cards we can cast Liliana of the Veil. With 4 cards Eldrazi Tron can't do a lot of the things their deck wants to do, and those they can do such as TKS aren't particularly difficult for us to deal with.
Counters company you want to hit them hard with discard so they aren't sitting on 4 mana waiting to top deck a collected company. Ideally you want them empty handed by their 2nd land, and smallpox is big here. This is a matchup where I greatly prefer to be on the play as hitting a mana dork and a land on your turn 2 is backbreaking for them. Flaying tendrils out of the board helps a lot. Use your discard to hit kitchen finks preferably and let your ravens crimes and wrench minds and smallpox take care of the companies and chords
Based on my experience with damnation, im not sure I even want Bontu's reckoning. Decks that play tons of small creatures fast are usually killable with tendrils. Decks that play lots of creatures that get above 2 CMC are usually slow enough that we make them discard the majority of their stuff and they have trouble mustering enough lands and cards to make a board wipe attractive for us. For sweepers I'm sticking with two tendrils in the board
Tron is just hopeless
Honestly I do feel it's one of the better decks in the format right now as long as lingering souls and dredge don't pick up significantly.