The number of decks reported in wizards data dump with Jace in them isn’t really representative of anything though since they only report decks that are differentiated by at least twenty cards in the 75. So even if this week had 800 UW control decks with Jace 5-0, it would only show up as one of those twelve one time.
Not making any conclusion on Jace at this time, simply saying that the “only 12 decks were running JTMS” can be misleading
And DeCandio won the entire event. Curious to see whether his next article is gonna be about how great Modern is right now.
He'll be talking all about his sick plays. Because putting yourself to 7 without a Shadow in hand is always a good idea. Even Overturf commented tongue-in-cheek a number of times about the "skill" it took for him to "decide to draw" the perfect card at the perfect time throughout the match. He played SUPER loose and lucked into amazing draws. Will be interesting to see how he writes about it.
Or maybe he actually understood the deck well and played to his outs and roles in matchups, I'm not sure which ones he was putting himself to 7 without a death's shadow against but from what I saw he played the deck aggresively because he needed to in those matchups. If he waits around against eldrazi tron the deck is going to go over the top of him, its what a tron deck does, especially when it plays walking ballista. Not enough players play to their outs or game plan, if your deck can't win a matchup realistically without a quick large deaths shadow, you should aggresively play for it more often than not even if you don't have it in your opening hand, the deck has a lot of card draw.
Considering this is the same guy that brought a green stompy deck to his last event and writes extremely questionable articles about Modern, that's giving him quite a lot of credit. It was already told to us that someone who knew Modern much better than he did gave him that deck to play and likely gave him a brief rundown. So if his mantra was "play loose and hope for the best," then sure, he took a huge risk and got paid off with extremely good variance luck. There are a lot of Modern decks that benefit from these kinds of play lines. Sometimes they get horribly punished, and sometimes they win big tournaments.
The fact that he played a bad mono green devotion deck or that I generally really don’t respect his opinion on the format doesn’t change the fact that in a lot of matchups where you’re not at risk of being burned out it’s usually correct to put yourself into decently sized shadow range as your fetches are a limited resource that you can’t pay more life for after the fact when you top deck a deaths shadow at 12 life. It’s not about playing loose and hoping to top deck, it’s simply how the deck plays and it’s usually going to be correct to optimize your future draws.
Honestly if Jace really takes off and we see enough blue based decks to warrant sideboard slots, Choke in the board with discard to clear the way will net enough free wins combined with our bad but not unwinnable game 1s that I am not too worried about Blue based control pushing us out of viability. Back when Twin was a thing choke was a card you could run that would shore up your blue matchups immensely. I'm more concerned with how we beat BBE Jund but honestly it's too early to say. Tomorrow night I'm gonna board in some chokes, lean on lingering souls for the Jund matchup and just run what I've been running for the past few weeks until we have an idea of what we really need to be adjusting for.
Considering the amount of Glacial Fortresses, Seachrome Coasts and Celestial Colonnades in UW decks these days, I think you're massively overrating Choke's effectiveness.
Honestly if Jace really takes off and we see enough blue based decks to warrant sideboard slots, Choke in the board with discard to clear the way will net enough free wins combined with our bad but not unwinnable game 1s that I am not too worried about Blue based control pushing us out of viability. Back when Twin was a thing choke was a card you could run that would shore up your blue matchups immensely. I'm more concerned with how we beat BBE Jund but honestly it's too early to say. Tomorrow night I'm gonna board in some chokes, lean on lingering souls for the Jund matchup and just run what I've been running for the past few weeks until we have an idea of what we really need to be adjusting for.
Considering the amount of Glacial Fortresses, Seachrome Coasts and Celestial Colonnades in UW decks these days, I think you're massively overrating Choke's effectiveness.
The most recent Jeskai list from the top 8 at Lyon ran 6 non island blue sources in 24 lands. For a deck running a number of double blue casting cost spells, they’re more often going to lose to choke than just draw multiple sulfur falls and be able to fetch around choke while being able to play their spells. Choke absolutely swings the matchup enough to be worth 1 or 2 sideboard slots IMo
EDIT: I don’t know what happened with the quote, my apologies
You want 13-14 colourless sources to be sure to have one on turn 2, hence 4 groves, 4 karplussan forest, 4 temple and then a handful of other sources like wolf run and mind stone.
Honestly if Jace really takes off and we see enough blue based decks to warrant sideboard slots, Choke in the board with discard to clear the way will net enough free wins combined with our bad but not unwinnable game 1s that I am not too worried about Blue based control pushing us out of viability. Back when Twin was a thing choke was a card you could run that would shore up your blue matchups immensely. I'm more concerned with how we beat BBE Jund but honestly it's too early to say. Tomorrow night I'm gonna board in some chokes, lean on lingering souls for the Jund matchup and just run what I've been running for the past few weeks until we have an idea of what we really need to be adjusting for.
In a deck filled with better creatures, better disruption and dark confidant, vial will end up being bad in the grindy game. Thoughtseize and IoK stops your "blank this removal" move. He won't spend removal into a resto or flickerwisp. Flickerwisp will be IoK'd and resto will end up being your better creature that doesn't block or race an opposing Tarmogoyf.
I'm not the best player with the deck, but I can consider myself a bit experienced with GBx matchups since it's the MU that I've played the most. They're hard to outvalue, although it's not impossible. I highly recommend to side out vials because surprise factor will be lost and that's our worse topdeck in that MU. And we're the aggro deck here.
Crusader is not always enough to win the game. Many junds has Bolt and/or Grim Lavamancer in their 75, if he doesn't get caught by any discard spell. It's still a beast, but not always enough
That's all just my opinion.
I've been finding that GBx has been removing hand disruption against me for more removal personally.
I agree that vial makes our grindy game worse against GBx, but generally speaking I feel like we always lose those games if we don't get ahead on tempo anyway. We need to get ahead, disrupt them, and overwhelm their ability to answer our stuff before they lose and vial helps with that immensely. In the late game once the board is stabilized the top of our deck is so much worse than the top of their deck that I've come around to the idea of keeping in vials and not trying to play the long game as it's not something we can win on a card per card basis
I prefer RiP. It completely neuters the GW value/Bant or Saheeli decks, its powerful enough against tarmogoyf decks to be worth the card disadvantage, and is much more powerful against Dredge than relic.
The downside is that because of the card disadvantage it is far less good against snapcaster decks (I would bring relic in against Jeskai, I don't bring RiP against them) and it is obviously better to draw multiple relics than RiPs.
That is correct. You cannot respond to your opponent paying two mana to avoid arbiters effect, however you can say "after you pay 2 and I receive priority before the search resolves, I cast restoration angel targeting leonin arbiter". You will always receive priority again after your opponent pays 2 for arbiter and before a search effect resolves
can some one give me a better explanation why when i blink my leonin arbiter my opponent must pay 2 more (so the total is 4 ?)
when the leonin is blinked, the game looks at it as a new creature, and so his tax must be paid (the 2 Mana already paid are lost). However, mind it that you can't, say, ghost quarter your opponent, and after they pay two, you blink the leonin. Paying two Mana is a special action that does not use the stack, and is activated when they have priority, so you do not get priority back if he let the GQ resolve.
This is incorrect. Though paying for arbiters ability does not use the stack, it is still considered to be taking an action, and therefore the stack does not resolve until both players pass priority without taking an action. If your opponent pays 2 mana for arbiter, you will receive priority again and be able to blink arbiter before the stack resolves.
Hi all, quick question regarding the correct way to communicate that I want to move to assigning first strike damage at Comp REL without giving away that I may have actions between first strike and regular damage. Specifically, if I say "move to assign damage" is it understood that I'm short cutting through all damage, or would I be able to say "move to assign damage?" and opponent says "sure" and then say "after first strike damage" to indicate I'm taking an action or is it assumed that by passing priority and saying "move to assign damage" I am offering a shortcut to the end of the assign combat damage phase?
Played the above linked mono white Eldrazi list to a 2-0-1 finish tonight, going to time against Hollow One funny enough. The deck feels great and very consistent while still having access to displacer shenanigans which is the main draw to playing temple IMO. One element I did notice is that closing games against creature heavy decks can be tricky due to the reduced number of flyers compared to mono white and the lack of processors. There were a few times where my opponent couldn't get through a wall of Thalia's and golems but I likewise couldn't attack through their Goyf or giant Tireless tracker until finding a flickerwisp or displacer. It's probably a meta call but I definitely wouldn't cut smugglers copter as the ability to get in for damage in the air in those situations is crucial.
That said, if you're on BW but struggling against the copious blood moons in the meta, the deck is a solid consideration.
I beat Junk and Saheeli combo and went to time against hollow one
Slaughter the strong seems good against traditionally difficult matchups for non black Taxes. Being able to narrow the opponents board down and then have a splicer and golem in play is going to make it hard for whatever is left to attack through profitably, and from there our creatures are just better once we're down to individual top decks compared to Humans or Elves or Merfolk. I'm optimistic that it will be good in testing
I've been hitting a lot of blood moons on BW Eldrazi Taxes and am going to be trying this out. In my current meta I feel like resilience against blood moon is a bit stronger than what black gives us aside from Bob, and it still has some of the more powerful interactions like displacer and flickerwisps or TKS.
The number of decks reported in wizards data dump with Jace in them isn’t really representative of anything though since they only report decks that are differentiated by at least twenty cards in the 75. So even if this week had 800 UW control decks with Jace 5-0, it would only show up as one of those twelve one time.
Not making any conclusion on Jace at this time, simply saying that the “only 12 decks were running JTMS” can be misleading
The fact that he played a bad mono green devotion deck or that I generally really don’t respect his opinion on the format doesn’t change the fact that in a lot of matchups where you’re not at risk of being burned out it’s usually correct to put yourself into decently sized shadow range as your fetches are a limited resource that you can’t pay more life for after the fact when you top deck a deaths shadow at 12 life. It’s not about playing loose and hoping to top deck, it’s simply how the deck plays and it’s usually going to be correct to optimize your future draws.
The most recent Jeskai list from the top 8 at Lyon ran 6 non island blue sources in 24 lands. For a deck running a number of double blue casting cost spells, they’re more often going to lose to choke than just draw multiple sulfur falls and be able to fetch around choke while being able to play their spells. Choke absolutely swings the matchup enough to be worth 1 or 2 sideboard slots IMo
EDIT: I don’t know what happened with the quote, my apologies
https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-how-many-colored-mana-sources-do-you-need-to-consistently-cast-your-spells/
This is probably the go to article most people use for constructing manabases. It's worth a read
EDIT: I guess cavern kind of messes up the math a bit on account of being colourless mostly but not when you want to play through counterspells.
I've been finding that GBx has been removing hand disruption against me for more removal personally.
I agree that vial makes our grindy game worse against GBx, but generally speaking I feel like we always lose those games if we don't get ahead on tempo anyway. We need to get ahead, disrupt them, and overwhelm their ability to answer our stuff before they lose and vial helps with that immensely. In the late game once the board is stabilized the top of our deck is so much worse than the top of their deck that I've come around to the idea of keeping in vials and not trying to play the long game as it's not something we can win on a card per card basis
The downside is that because of the card disadvantage it is far less good against snapcaster decks (I would bring relic in against Jeskai, I don't bring RiP against them) and it is obviously better to draw multiple relics than RiPs.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-rulings/magic-rulings-archives/543598-special-actions-and-passing-priority
This is incorrect. Though paying for arbiters ability does not use the stack, it is still considered to be taking an action, and therefore the stack does not resolve until both players pass priority without taking an action. If your opponent pays 2 mana for arbiter, you will receive priority again and be able to blink arbiter before the stack resolves.
That said, if you're on BW but struggling against the copious blood moons in the meta, the deck is a solid consideration.
I beat Junk and Saheeli combo and went to time against hollow one
http://www.mtgtop8.com/event?e=18013&d=311788&f=MO
I've been hitting a lot of blood moons on BW Eldrazi Taxes and am going to be trying this out. In my current meta I feel like resilience against blood moon is a bit stronger than what black gives us aside from Bob, and it still has some of the more powerful interactions like displacer and flickerwisps or TKS.