What's strange is that he's merely using staple cards, Worship aside. Maybe I need to suck it up and get those Flagstones after all...
What's really strange is his lower number of sisters than usual. No Auriok (thank god) and 3 Martyrs and 3 Attendants? Hmm. I wanna try it.
All of that said, what I am thinking is that he has a certain way of piloting the deck; some kind of interaction trick we're not aware of. I wonder if there are any videos of him playing.
Once Nahiri comes down, you have 3 turns before they use her to fetch Ulamog or Emrakul. Which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't counter every blasted thing I put down. The only real chance I can see myself having is by getting a turn 2 Ascendant that they can't stop.
I also used an Aven Mindcensor to counter Nahiri, but it doesn't mean much if they counter that too.
I'm giving 3 Ajani's Pridemate/4 Serra Ascendant and 3 Ghost Quarter/3 Windbrisk Heights a try for FNM tonight. Will report back with results.
I'll be at my usual LGS though, so I may not be as successful as I was last week-- I'm probably going to be seeing a lot of Jeskai/Mardu Nahiri decks. Sigh.
EDIT: Reporting in:
Very tough competition today.
Overall, I went 2-2, but just as I predicted...
Game 1: vs. Jeskai Nahiri, loss 0-2
I may as well have just scooped. If we don't win this before Nahiri comes down, it's over. Do we have any solid answers to this disaster of a deck?
Game 2: Mono-white Hatebears, win 2-1
I lost round 1, but bringing in Stony Silence against his Aether Vial slowed him down massively. Sorin did work in round 2, as I ulted him and made the opponent sac a card every turn, but he got to flickering a Blade Splicer with Eldrazi Displacer and sacrificing the golem every turn. Eventually I pulled a Path and dropped the Displacer. He actually had the upper hand against me until I played Return to the Ranks about 20 turns into the game. He scooped. Round 3 went a bit faster.
Game 3: Mono-black Blood Artist Something-or-Other, win 2-0
Very annoying, but he had very little power against me. Round 2 had a winning play of playing Archangel of Thune before the winning turn, and then spawning a ton of tokens by double-Windbrisk-casting Spectral Procession. The guy was cool enough to let me play it out.
Game 4: Esper Control, loss 0-2
I can't wait for my damned Leylines to get here. Liliana is just the worst.
I think I'm going to go back to mono-white, though. BW Sisters is fun, but the manabase is just not anywhere near as consistent and I simply don't need 8 token generators.
@Potato_Wizard: Yeah, I suppose so. I'll keep my eye on it, but I'd rather focus on the more vital pieces I'm missing first. Not having Leylines and Mark of Asylum is really getting my ass kicked more than it should be, so those are my priority at the moment-- and my paycheck is a week away still with rent and bills coming up, so I should abstain, especially if Flagstones aren't crucial to the deck rather than just being really nice to have.
@Bobo: True, but at the same time, they have a slight deck-thinning effect, and those ambushes can be really brutal. On more than one occasion, popping out a Spectral Procession or Archangel of Thune has won me the game. But yeah, taplands really do slow you down. That said, that's a similar issue to what I'm having with running Ghost Quarter as a 4-of-- they're useful, I absolutely won't deny that, but when I need the white mana, it just stops me dead in my tracks. The best I can really do in such situations is to tap a white mana, Ghost Quarter it away, grab a new Plains, and tap that. Which, yes, is good for thinning the deck out, but it would have just been better if I had the extra Plains to begin with, you know? And I actually like Hideaway a lot because in a way, it lets me pick the best card that I would be to draw in the next 4 turns and ditch the ones that would not have been as useful, which seems to be somewhat often. I play it and think "oh yeah, I don't think those are too crucial to the board state" and send them to the bottom of the deck. Kind of useful, at any rate.
If I had Flagstones, Ghost Quarter would no doubt be a 4-of just because of that great synergy, but as it is, I feel like I'm just not getting a lot of value from them with my current setup. Flagstones would also be nice to pair with Godless Shrine or something too, if I were to continue running B/W.
Mrgh, I didn't really want to spend the money on them, but you're not wrong. I'll see where I am after my mileage reimbursement check tomorrow and decide on pulling the trigger or not. I still need to buy Leylines and Ghostly Prisons too.
EDIT: Nah, I really can't swing it right now. I can't imagine the price jumping anytime soon though, right?
I was thinking a 3/3 split on Ghost Quarters and Windbrisk Heights, myself. With all of those extra tokens I get from including Lingering Souls, it's much easier to activate it.
And yeah, running 3 Ascendants instead of 4 just doesn't feel right. Frankly, since I don't run Auriok Champions, I'm half tempted to drop one of my Pridemates for a full playset of Ascendants. Ajani's Pridemate is fantastic, but if your small Sisters are getting removed faster than you can build him up with, he's not as much of a threat as he could and should be. Most of my wins tend to be from swinging away with Serra Ascendant(s) and Honor-beefed Spirits.
2 is what I was running before trying Bobo's build, yeah. I might still go back to that. As far as I'm aware, no one in my area really ever plays Tron or Infect, and the only Affinity players I'm aware of are the guy I played with last night (and he said he was considering selling it for something else), some guy who occasionally comes around with his young sons and lets them use it (but they don't know all the strategies with the deck so they're not a huge threat), and myself-- and I use a super budget build with no Ink/Blinkmoth Nexus, Glimmervoid, Mox Opals, Arcbound Ravagers, and so on (which means I'm not too scared of Stony Silence either, but that's aside from the point).
Hrm. I'm just concerned; while playtesting I always seem to get opening hands with Ghost Quarters and not anything that generates white mana in playtesting, here. It's a useful card, but it's seeming to be more a hindrance than a benefit.
EDIT: Played a little at my LGS today.
Game 1: Red Deck Wins, lost 1-2
It's just too fast. It didn't help that I wasn't able to consistently get Martyr/Ascendant online. I really need some Leylines and Mark of Asylum...
Game 2: Affinity, win (guy had to go after one round)
Kind of had the dream hand. Martyr on turn 1, Ascendant turn 2, and consistently dropped tokens for chump blocking his Arcbound Ravagers while I pinged him down by 6 every turn.
Bobo, I picked up a Sorin today just to try your build out. Will report in on Friday with results. (I'll be back at my usual LGS, so it'll be a better (and much tougher) example of my local meta to see how well it does.)
But I like your setup a lot, so I have a feeling it'll be great.
Note: I'm making some changes for cards of yours I don't have like Leyline, Spellskite, and Auriok Champions. Probably run 8 of the regular sisters and pop in an extra Martyr or something, or a Return to the Ranks.
EDIT: Question: Is it really necessary to be running a full playset of Ghost Quarter these days? Personally I barely ever see Tron or Infect in my neck of the woods, and the only real use I think I really get out of it is getting rid of annoyances like Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade and such. I guess I could always use it to blow up my own tapped land to get a fresh land for a surprise Path to Exile or just for the sake of deck thinning, but that just seems silly.
Scapeshift doesn't seem that threatening as long as you can pull off Martyr fairly fast.
Ad Nauseam and Kiki-Chord are annoying, though.
Combo decks really frustrate me, especially infinite combos like you get from Kiki-Chord. It just defeats the point of the whole game, turning it into your own little game of Solitaire/Go Fish without interacting with the opponent. :/
I prefer a playset of Martyr, myself. Should probably drop her down, but she's golden for dealing with some bad matchups, giving me more time to set up. They're usually the matchups where just throwing down fliers with Honor of the Pure is the win condition, anyway.
In fairness, I was at a different LGS than my usual. My usual is disgustingly heavy on bleeding-edge $800+ netdecks and heavy removal control, so I would not have done anywhere near as well. But dang, if every tournament at this other place is that easy to deal with, then I wanna go there more often... <_<;
Very true. I ran Return of the Ranks tonight, and had a largely successful night where it literally saved me in the last round of the last game!
Game 1: vs Merfolk, 2-1
I've never actually faced Merfolk before. Wasn't so bad, but I can tell that either he had some really bad draws, or just was not a seasoned pilot of the deck. Stony Silence shut down Aether Vial, but I still lost that round. But won rounds 1 and 3!
Game 2: vs Jeskai Ascendancy, 0-2
I've finally found a deck that I hate facing more than 8-Rack. So damn miserable. He was so slow, and his combo took almost 20 minutes for a single turn. I was so mad by the end. But I didn't want to let him just have the win. If I had to suffer through his boring snoozefest deck, so did he.
Game 3: vs Norin Sisters, 2-0
I actually felt bad for this dude, because his deck had a ton of potential, but it was unfinished. He was a fun pseudo-mirror to play against though.
Final Game: vs... Blue/Black Ninjas or something 2-0
This guy had some pretty rough combos, but he fizzled out both rounds. In the second round, he was able to kill off all of my creatures, but I brought them all back at once with Return to the Ranks, scoring the final win.
What's really strange is his lower number of sisters than usual. No Auriok (thank god) and 3 Martyrs and 3 Attendants? Hmm. I wanna try it.
All of that said, what I am thinking is that he has a certain way of piloting the deck; some kind of interaction trick we're not aware of. I wonder if there are any videos of him playing.
I also used an Aven Mindcensor to counter Nahiri, but it doesn't mean much if they counter that too.
I'll be at my usual LGS though, so I may not be as successful as I was last week-- I'm probably going to be seeing a lot of Jeskai/Mardu Nahiri decks. Sigh.
EDIT: Reporting in:
Very tough competition today.
Overall, I went 2-2, but just as I predicted...
Game 1: vs. Jeskai Nahiri, loss 0-2
I may as well have just scooped. If we don't win this before Nahiri comes down, it's over. Do we have any solid answers to this disaster of a deck?
Game 2: Mono-white Hatebears, win 2-1
I lost round 1, but bringing in Stony Silence against his Aether Vial slowed him down massively. Sorin did work in round 2, as I ulted him and made the opponent sac a card every turn, but he got to flickering a Blade Splicer with Eldrazi Displacer and sacrificing the golem every turn. Eventually I pulled a Path and dropped the Displacer. He actually had the upper hand against me until I played Return to the Ranks about 20 turns into the game. He scooped. Round 3 went a bit faster.
Game 3: Mono-black Blood Artist Something-or-Other, win 2-0
Very annoying, but he had very little power against me. Round 2 had a winning play of playing Archangel of Thune before the winning turn, and then spawning a ton of tokens by double-Windbrisk-casting Spectral Procession. The guy was cool enough to let me play it out.
Game 4: Esper Control, loss 0-2
I can't wait for my damned Leylines to get here. Liliana is just the worst.
I think I'm going to go back to mono-white, though. BW Sisters is fun, but the manabase is just not anywhere near as consistent and I simply don't need 8 token generators.
@Bobo: True, but at the same time, they have a slight deck-thinning effect, and those ambushes can be really brutal. On more than one occasion, popping out a Spectral Procession or Archangel of Thune has won me the game. But yeah, taplands really do slow you down. That said, that's a similar issue to what I'm having with running Ghost Quarter as a 4-of-- they're useful, I absolutely won't deny that, but when I need the white mana, it just stops me dead in my tracks. The best I can really do in such situations is to tap a white mana, Ghost Quarter it away, grab a new Plains, and tap that. Which, yes, is good for thinning the deck out, but it would have just been better if I had the extra Plains to begin with, you know? And I actually like Hideaway a lot because in a way, it lets me pick the best card that I would be to draw in the next 4 turns and ditch the ones that would not have been as useful, which seems to be somewhat often. I play it and think "oh yeah, I don't think those are too crucial to the board state" and send them to the bottom of the deck. Kind of useful, at any rate.
If I had Flagstones, Ghost Quarter would no doubt be a 4-of just because of that great synergy, but as it is, I feel like I'm just not getting a lot of value from them with my current setup. Flagstones would also be nice to pair with Godless Shrine or something too, if I were to continue running B/W.
EDIT: Nah, I really can't swing it right now. I can't imagine the price jumping anytime soon though, right?
And yeah, running 3 Ascendants instead of 4 just doesn't feel right. Frankly, since I don't run Auriok Champions, I'm half tempted to drop one of my Pridemates for a full playset of Ascendants. Ajani's Pridemate is fantastic, but if your small Sisters are getting removed faster than you can build him up with, he's not as much of a threat as he could and should be. Most of my wins tend to be from swinging away with Serra Ascendant(s) and Honor-beefed Spirits.
EDIT: Played a little at my LGS today.
Game 1: Red Deck Wins, lost 1-2
It's just too fast. It didn't help that I wasn't able to consistently get Martyr/Ascendant online. I really need some Leylines and Mark of Asylum...
Game 2: Affinity, win (guy had to go after one round)
Kind of had the dream hand. Martyr on turn 1, Ascendant turn 2, and consistently dropped tokens for chump blocking his Arcbound Ravagers while I pinged him down by 6 every turn.
But I like your setup a lot, so I have a feeling it'll be great.
Note: I'm making some changes for cards of yours I don't have like Leyline, Spellskite, and Auriok Champions. Probably run 8 of the regular sisters and pop in an extra Martyr or something, or a Return to the Ranks.
EDIT: Question: Is it really necessary to be running a full playset of Ghost Quarter these days? Personally I barely ever see Tron or Infect in my neck of the woods, and the only real use I think I really get out of it is getting rid of annoyances like Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade and such. I guess I could always use it to blow up my own tapped land to get a fresh land for a surprise Path to Exile or just for the sake of deck thinning, but that just seems silly.
Ad Nauseam and Kiki-Chord are annoying, though.
Combo decks really frustrate me, especially infinite combos like you get from Kiki-Chord. It just defeats the point of the whole game, turning it into your own little game of Solitaire/Go Fish without interacting with the opponent. :/
Game 1: vs Merfolk, 2-1
I've never actually faced Merfolk before. Wasn't so bad, but I can tell that either he had some really bad draws, or just was not a seasoned pilot of the deck. Stony Silence shut down Aether Vial, but I still lost that round. But won rounds 1 and 3!
Game 2: vs Jeskai Ascendancy, 0-2
I've finally found a deck that I hate facing more than 8-Rack. So damn miserable. He was so slow, and his combo took almost 20 minutes for a single turn. I was so mad by the end. But I didn't want to let him just have the win. If I had to suffer through his boring snoozefest deck, so did he.
Game 3: vs Norin Sisters, 2-0
I actually felt bad for this dude, because his deck had a ton of potential, but it was unfinished. He was a fun pseudo-mirror to play against though.
Final Game: vs... Blue/Black Ninjas or something 2-0
This guy had some pretty rough combos, but he fizzled out both rounds. In the second round, he was able to kill off all of my creatures, but I brought them all back at once with Return to the Ranks, scoring the final win.
Final Rank: 4th of 18