Thanks for the great work! I will use this as a starting point for my first MP cube for sure.
One thing though, separating in just three categories (creature, spell, reset) seems a bit few at first glance. There's zero targeted removal in black for instance. Is this accounted for when filling in the remaining 10 for each colour?
We've already established that the non-green one is going to be Urza because hype. And since decapitated heads are lame it must be a historic setting. Which means Ice Age which means snow-covered Taiga/Plateau etc is confirmed. You're welcome.
Whoever says 50% win rate is garbage has no idea what they are talking about. Only a couple decks manage more than that (Infect and Affinity are at 51-52ish). Even Eldrazi, which were totally oppressive only managed 55ish.
Jund is not "50/50" against the Field. An abysmal Tron matchup among others lead to an actual win rate of about 48%.
My mtgo win rate with Merfolk is about 65%. But that doesn't mean much since probably 20% of the matches are against T3+ decks like BW tokens and so on. To see actual win rates you need to study massive amounts of data from published tournaments results.
great report, what about the secure+abbey package, does it fit in the deck?
Yeah I think so. It's one of few ways to recover from a sweeper. Or it can get us some blockers when we need just a couple more swings in the air.
i've thinking a lot about including always watching since it makee all of our threats bigger and can close the games out faster, and increases the mana that mausoleum wanderer requires to counter a spell, but turn 3 seems so important in the deck and maybe we want to be doing other stuff
Rattlechains into Always Watching seems fine until your opponent plays Reflector Mage on his T3. Because the mage exists, I think only Humans can play Always Watching right now :-(
I found the new Thalia quite useful in the sideboard.
I took Manfield's "stock" straight-spirits list to FNM today. Some impressions:
The deck is a lot faster than I thought. I hit for more and more damage every turn and my opponents really need to spend their mana right to keep up. But due to the weenie nature of the deck it is very hard to recover from Languish and other sweepers.
Conclusion: I need to be more mana efficient. So declaration in Stone comes in and stasis snare goes out. If they start cracking clues it means the game will soon be over for other reasons.
Unsubstantiate is amazing. It won me several games almost on it's own. The flexibility of being either a remand or an unsommon is a big deal.
Conclusion: I'm going up to three for sure, and will test four.
Bygone Bishop misses the mark. He's a relatively low CMC creature that wants you to play more of those. But the reward being clues pushes you toward a controlling card advantage deck.
Conclusion: he does not fit in the tempo deck. I will test some amount of Avacyns and/or dimensional infiltrators (because everything needs to be instant speed. I think Reflector Mage and Gideon makes us too vulnerable) to replace him.
they're not difficult at all, in fact the match described above with the sick wear/tear+helix+bolt pull is the only match I've lost against them (in about 7 matches). It's never a walkover and I often I feel I need a plan though.
I think it needs to be mainboard because it's MVP against Jund and can give you that little bit of edge against many others (the real value comes from blocking inkmoth.
And as you see from reading my last post I'm obviously already bringing the Chalice hurt. Actually I am starting to feel that is almost approaching cursecatcher value as in it's a big mistake to even consider running 4 in the 75. Because it absolutely shuts down a huge amount of decks (lantern, bogles, suicide, delver) while having lots of value of at least 70% of the rest of the field. It's deader than a dead relic which makes you totally dead when you draw it in the wrong match so it can't really go in the 60 but I absolutely won't leave home without it in the 75.
I've done a bunch of testing lately and participated in a wmcq this weekend. My message to my scaly brethren is to play Kira main! Nahiri is everywhere and Tron often does MD bolts now. Kira have never been better for the time that I've been fishin. Also I tried MD'ing Remand after "those articles that were recently posted". That didn't work for me at all, especially on the draw. I think I sided them out every single match, and most of the time I wished they were a negate. I've noticed few if any play more than two negates in the board but I'm going to start testing 4 now. I think many underestimate the Fishy ability to go full on control in certain situations. Although the sampling is of course relatively small, our wmcq top 8 actually had two storm and one ascendancy deck in the top 8 despite what seemed like half the field playing counter heavy Nahiri decks. So I think we need some hard answers.
I had some "interesting" plays in the wmcq though. I play vial, remand my own vial, activate aether vial for phantasmal image, copy his snapcaster, flashback a remand to remand my own remand... yeah I was pretty desperate at that point. But it was part of the most annyoing game of my life. It went something like this:
He plays ancestral, I chalice for zero. Then chalice for 1 and play a couple of creatures. He has his TWO helixes and kills my two threats. When ancestral is about to hit chalice he plays his singleton wear//tear on my 0 chalice! Grr. Ancestral resolves and he finds THREE lightning bolt. Next turn it's of course snapcaster to tear up my 1-chalice...
So for my next matchup I'm in game three against mardu nahiri. He's at two life with Bitterblossom in play with no cards in hand, goes down to one and draws.... helix... Okay so I'm at 12ish and can take a few hits from those stupid faeries even if has Lilliana at 3. Next turn he goes down to 3 and draws... Timely... AARGH God hates me.
Oh and I met the only Affinity player in my first match, after "correctly" guessing there would be very little Affinity at the tournament, so I didn't use Hurkyl's recall. Life is cruel.
One other thing that strikes me from recent weeks testing and the wmcq is that abzan company really isn't as big of a force as you'd think, and Jund has a lot of targets on it so can get hated out. Despite Affinity's (always relative, always to be respected) decline I think Harbinger is therefore at a decent position right now. Because it has a small chance of saving your ass against Nahiri, and is arguably more useful vs Infect and the various Eldrazi.iterations.
However if you'll notice, both Top 8 Jeskai Nahiri lists are running 3 Colonnades. They don't seem to be wanting to play them early to begin with. Colonnade is best played either turn 1 or later on when you don't need to hit your curve. They seem to be preferring the latter.
That's a good point and certainly changes the equation.
Sacred Mesa is pretty unusual though, right? I think it's too early to label any list optimized just yet, the deck is still developing.
I think the top SCG lists have too many 1cmc spells with 7 blue ones in addition to the removal for my taste. It means you can almost never play a colonnade on T1.
As we just realized, the builds differ with their sweepers. If they have wraths, keeping them from double white seems the way to go. If they run anger, double red should be avoided.
There are also collonades, that need to be handled, so if i,m not sure, i tend to the destroy white plan while hittingtheir collonades.
Most lists have both wrath and anger in the 75, but anger is more common in the 60. Anyway I think spreading seas should be sided out as their mana base really isn't all that vulnerable and they already play islands. Perhaps keep a couple in for colonnade but not all four.
I haven't seen any list with Anticipate making it to a top 8 recently.
That's because so few people think it's good. A lot of people say it's bad even.
If two of the people who think it's good are respectively ranked #1 in the world and at the top of the SCG standings, I think it would be wise not to ignore them.
Hey just jumping in after doing some research in the Merfolk thread. After checking MTGO published decklist win percentages over the past year I noticed Sucide Zoo is the #1 weighted average win % archetype, at 55% (beating Affinity and regular Zoo as #2 and #3), with close to 700 matches recorded. Congratulations
One thing though, separating in just three categories (creature, spell, reset) seems a bit few at first glance. There's zero targeted removal in black for instance. Is this accounted for when filling in the remaining 10 for each colour?
Jund is not "50/50" against the Field. An abysmal Tron matchup among others lead to an actual win rate of about 48%.
My mtgo win rate with Merfolk is about 65%. But that doesn't mean much since probably 20% of the matches are against T3+ decks like BW tokens and so on. To see actual win rates you need to study massive amounts of data from published tournaments results.
My opinion is that any list not running Unsubstantiate is a bad list.
Yeah I think so. It's one of few ways to recover from a sweeper. Or it can get us some blockers when we need just a couple more swings in the air.
Rattlechains into Always Watching seems fine until your opponent plays Reflector Mage on his T3. Because the mage exists, I think only Humans can play Always Watching right now :-(
I found the new Thalia quite useful in the sideboard.
The deck is a lot faster than I thought. I hit for more and more damage every turn and my opponents really need to spend their mana right to keep up. But due to the weenie nature of the deck it is very hard to recover from Languish and other sweepers.
Conclusion: I need to be more mana efficient. So declaration in Stone comes in and stasis snare goes out. If they start cracking clues it means the game will soon be over for other reasons.
Unsubstantiate is amazing. It won me several games almost on it's own. The flexibility of being either a remand or an unsommon is a big deal.
Conclusion: I'm going up to three for sure, and will test four.
Bygone Bishop misses the mark. He's a relatively low CMC creature that wants you to play more of those. But the reward being clues pushes you toward a controlling card advantage deck.
Conclusion: he does not fit in the tempo deck. I will test some amount of Avacyns and/or dimensional infiltrators (because everything needs to be instant speed. I think Reflector Mage and Gideon makes us too vulnerable) to replace him.
I think it needs to be mainboard because it's MVP against Jund and can give you that little bit of edge against many others (the real value comes from blocking inkmoth.
And as you see from reading my last post I'm obviously already bringing the Chalice hurt. Actually I am starting to feel that is almost approaching cursecatcher value as in it's a big mistake to even consider running 4 in the 75. Because it absolutely shuts down a huge amount of decks (lantern, bogles, suicide, delver) while having lots of value of at least 70% of the rest of the field. It's deader than a dead relic which makes you totally dead when you draw it in the wrong match so it can't really go in the 60 but I absolutely won't leave home without it in the 75.
I had some "interesting" plays in the wmcq though. I play vial, remand my own vial, activate aether vial for phantasmal image, copy his snapcaster, flashback a remand to remand my own remand... yeah I was pretty desperate at that point. But it was part of the most annyoing game of my life. It went something like this:
He plays ancestral, I chalice for zero. Then chalice for 1 and play a couple of creatures. He has his TWO helixes and kills my two threats. When ancestral is about to hit chalice he plays his singleton wear//tear on my 0 chalice! Grr. Ancestral resolves and he finds THREE lightning bolt. Next turn it's of course snapcaster to tear up my 1-chalice...
So for my next matchup I'm in game three against mardu nahiri. He's at two life with Bitterblossom in play with no cards in hand, goes down to one and draws.... helix... Okay so I'm at 12ish and can take a few hits from those stupid faeries even if has Lilliana at 3. Next turn he goes down to 3 and draws... Timely... AARGH God hates me.
Oh and I met the only Affinity player in my first match, after "correctly" guessing there would be very little Affinity at the tournament, so I didn't use Hurkyl's recall. Life is cruel.
One other thing that strikes me from recent weeks testing and the wmcq is that abzan company really isn't as big of a force as you'd think, and Jund has a lot of targets on it so can get hated out. Despite Affinity's (always relative, always to be respected) decline I think Harbinger is therefore at a decent position right now. Because it has a small chance of saving your ass against Nahiri, and is arguably more useful vs Infect and the various Eldrazi.iterations.
That's a good point and certainly changes the equation.
I think the top SCG lists have too many 1cmc spells with 7 blue ones in addition to the removal for my taste. It means you can almost never play a colonnade on T1.
Most lists have both wrath and anger in the 75, but anger is more common in the 60. Anyway I think spreading seas should be sided out as their mana base really isn't all that vulnerable and they already play islands. Perhaps keep a couple in for colonnade but not all four.
If two of the people who think it's good are respectively ranked #1 in the world and at the top of the SCG standings, I think it would be wise not to ignore them.