MTG Salvation

Yeah, I was considering it even before Assassin's Trophy was spoiled, but I think its rate will go up a lot now.

I've built a BUG deck using Assassin's Trophy+Snapcaster Mage to try it out. I love it and think BUG will be a real contender going forwards in modern. That said, I've played many games with GDS against it, and so far, GDS has a very real upper hand. The fact that Trophy can be countered really does make it a lot worse against us. Honestly, I think the way forwards is to return to 4x stubs in the main, and perhaps 1-2 Spell Snare in the SB against BGx decks.

Our delve threats still blanks much of their removal (apart from Abzan, path+trophy will most likely still be very rough), meaning that we can still rely on them as long as we have counterspells available. Also, trophy doesn't exile, so Kolaghan's is going to be as good as ever.

I think the meta will shift quite a bit, the BUG deck I built actually wanted to go late against UW, since it could run them out of wincons pretty easily. So one of our worst MUs will most likely suffer some. Our BGx MUs should be relatively unchanged.

Just my $0.02.

Here's to hoping for something like a "Surveil Visions, U, Sorcery, Survel 1. draw a card."

With Faithless Looting (and more Lightning Bolts) he leans a bit more on the red than the other builds of the deck, evening out the color pie somewhat, and I think he wants his mana producing lands to account for that.

Spellskite is a weird card, but once you realize how literal it is, there really isn't an issue. You can redirect ANY spell or ability to Spellskite, unless it is a mana ability. In GDS you can do explosive attacks with it in play if you also have a Shadow - cast a spell or use an ability (such as cracking a fetch land) and activate Spellskite for as many times as needed targeting it. The spell or ability only successfully redirects if Spellskite is a legal target, otherwise it will resolve just like Spellskite never even tried to change targets. This way, we can pay 2 life however many times we want, which in turns grows the Shadow incredibly fast.

While playtesting with it I came up against lantern, they landed a bridge against me G1, which is usually a concession since I don't run any MB artifact removal. I had a 1/1 shadow in play, they were unable to cast the last card in hand. Once I attacked, I cracked a fetch land, redirected to spellskite a couple of times and connected for lethal.

I love the idea in theory, going to playtest it as well. Seems mad/hilarious enough to actually work while offering some incidental advantages in some MUs.

I disagree, but my experience with Lingering Souls is pretty limited. I was however pretty underwhelmed since they mostly just managed to push the game further into the lategame, where my deck was weaker than the opponents in the MU's I brought them in. I removed them from my SB after a couple of events. Jace on the other hand has been pretty great so far, Brainstorming into more threats and answers is terrific, and with the number of fetches we run he can usually perform a 'perfect' brainstorm.

I wouldn't play both JTMS and Lingering Souls in the same SB, they come in against similar decks, and there's no need to go with two different SB strategies at once vs midrange and control.

Like tronix says, Angler is just better in GDS since Tasigur's ability is basically useless for us. The extra delve mana is easily offset by running Baubles instead of Opts/Serum Visions, since Baubles become mana positive (cost 0 to play, but adds 1 mana for delve when in the GY).

I run 2x Tarns and replaced one with a Steam Vents in a 17 land build, works well for me.

I T8:ed a 40-person Modern tournament with GDS yesterday, went 4-1-1 with an ID into T8.

My list:

It was my first experience with Baubles instead of Opt, and I'm convinced that's where we want to be. I'll update with a tournament report in a while, but overall I feel that the deck performed great, and there's no reason to advice players to switch from GDS.

The new Mono-U Living End seems like a really good matchup for us. I've run a few games against a friend who built the deck, and dropped a single game of about 6-7 due to him having an absolute god draw. Other than that I was able to both pick apart his hand and counter any As Foretolds he was trying to land in order to secure the wins.

I've got enough Gideons, Geists, Tron and just random annoyances in my meta that having a one-off To the Slaughter in the SB seemed like something worth trying out. So far I've only seen it in the mirror match, where it was a decent response to an Angler (at mana parity with a dismember, since I already was at low life). I look forward to testing it more.

Honestly, 17 lands has been working very well for me with a 3-2 split of Serum Visions and Opt. However, I have basically no land hate in my local meta at all, so it's a decision I've made with that in mind. I still experience more flood than screw, but going for anything lower than 17 seems way too greedy.

Any thoughts on updating the primer? I think we got a lot of good inputs and strategies in this thread that would be nice to have condensed and easily read.

As above, I'm also on a 3-1 split. It's been serving me well.