MTG Salvation

If you're getting rekt by land hate and you can't get enough fetches, then your most obvious solution is to play straight Boros. You could just do 8 fetches, 4 vantage, 3 foundry, 3 mountain and 2 battlefield forge as a very reliable budget choice.

I don't think I can stomach the Steam Vents in the mana. It looks like a real stinker. I'm not sure why'd you want it since Strand can just get Foundry and your other fetches can grab Stomping Ground.

Quote from unsterblich856 »

decklist

Speaking of proactive, have you tried Wild Nacatl?

So... I'm gonna cut Retreats for Jace. Card is obviously nuts and is likely gonna be the best card in the format. The race is on to find the best Jace deck out there. We might as well throw ourselves in with the rest of them.

Spell Queller rarely ends up as the worst card in any match. If you encounter Dredge anymore, they are fighting you on a different and unfair axis where Spell Queller can have difficulty finding good targets. Also decks with plenty of removal - like Jund, Abzan, UW control - Queller gets worse but still doesn't leave my deck before Birds and Retreat. I suppose if you have a lot of cards to bring in against Eldrazi Tron, you could trim on Queller. It's only middling against them in my experience.

I am on 4 Unified Will just because it's so good against Eldrazi Tron and I see that deck multiples times a night at my lgs. But even if you're taking this to a GP, you should expect to play unfair and/or big mana decks at some point and this card fills that hole better than Negate imo. Assuming you're on 4 Reflector Mage main, I'd be happy with a sideboard like this for a tournament tomorrow.

From my experience, burn is not a good match up and we have to put specific tools in our sideboard to have greater than 50% chance to win. We can take games off them with just our starting 60, but those games are typically defined by the shortcoming of the burn player and not our ability to stop them (usually them flooding out) nor our ability to combo because it uses our life total. Generally, our sideboard cards are one for one trades against a deck with a very high density of those same style of cards. I've found our clock usually isn't fast enough as we make those trades and they draw the burn needed before I get them dead.

A few pages back, I had mentioned that I don't really like my position against burn and was looking for a card to swing the match up. We could try going back to Worship and put it on the burn player to side in Wear/Tear. Alternatively, the supplementary life gain of Courser, Ooze (we hope), Finks, Blessed Alliance and/or the card I was considering in my sideboard Kor Firewalker could be enough.

While we're on the subject of burn, are you guys siding out a couple Paths for Negates? Thanks to Reflector Mage in the main it would be simply to help with the balance of the way we interact with the stack vs. the board.

I keep Quller in my deck after sideboard most of the time. We can only succeed in the format because we have a base line of interaction with everybody and that is thanks to Spell Queller. I can't imagine starting without it as an improvement.

Have any of you guys felt like Kitchen Finks doesn't have a specific deck it really serves a purpose against? I've been getting the impression lately that I should play a more dedicated burn hate card like Kor Firewalker or more dedicated attrition cards like Tracker + Courser or planeswalkers.

Stony Silence is the way to go for artifact hate. Once it hits play, all their game breaking plays are shut off other than something already equipped with Cranial Plating. And we already have Ref Mage, Pridemage, Path and Staticaster to get rid of whatever is holding it. Plus some number of flying blockers if needed. So do we really need Manglehorn if Stony Silence and Staticaster already plug the missing holes of our main deck?

You already play Township and Wolf Run to do exactly that without using a "real" card slot. I say no.

These are still great visuals that I would highly recommend y'all save. With that said, I will only play CoCo if I have at least 27 creatures in my deck. I'm definitely on the conservative side of this question.

Edit: The third picture has a creature curve of 9 one-drops, 10 two-drops, and 8 three-drops. Our mana advantage would actually be higher, but its in the ballpark and would require coding to fix.

I just finished Kelvin's newest article, and it's a worthwhile read. As are the rest of his Knightfall articles if you haven't read those yet. There's only one minor point I disagreed about. Here is his opinion on cards he tried that did not make the cut.

Quote from Kelvin Chew »

Meddling Mage or Thalia, Guardian of Thraben

I will only play these two cards if I expect a lot of Goryo's Vengeance decks or Puresteel Paladin combo decks. Otherwise, it is too narrow and it is very taxing on your sideboard slots just to accomodate two very narrow uses.

For Meddling Mage, I agree with his point. There aren't many decks beyond Puresteel Paladin.dec that I'd actually want to lean on that card. However, if Thalia, Guardian of Thraben is "too narrow" then so is Negate (both untrue). Having played Thalia in the sideboard of creature decks since her printing, I can attest that card does significant work against a very broad range of decks. That range includes some of our tougher match ups, like Tron, Ad Nauseum and Grixis.

My point isn't that you NEED Thalia in every sideboard. It's simply that she is good enough.

I've been on 2 Thalia and 1 Eidolon in the sb. Those plus your counterspells are hoping to give you a nice aggro-control game against storm.

3 Voice and 3 Finks after sb helps a lot against Grixis. Take out a couple dorks since they are bad top decks and it is gonna be grindy. Take out the combo as you don't want stranded Retreats in play or in hand. Save Path for Tasigur and try to keep Ooze up to stop Snapcaster. The more copies of Selfless Spirit and Negate you have, the better as they'll bring in some Angers.

Also, not playing Ooze or Knight into Bolt is a great way to stretch their removal too thin.