I'm pretty sure that Notion Thief is the worst offender vs Jace. It's probably also one of the best sideboard cards against our deck. Jace's Defeat is just a bad Negate or Disdainful Stroke (they can hit Karn and Scapeshift).
I was not aware that a card such as Invasive Surgery existed. It is really good, specially with Search for Azcanta builds.
That being said, I'm not very worried about mostly blue decks. I think we are favored against them, at least g1 because they have a lot of dead cards. They are the beatdown and they're not very good beatdown decks.
G2-3 is a different beast. There's the gamble of bringing Thing in the Ice, as they're pretty much siding out Wraths.
I think Ancestral Vision builds of Turns will be more successful if the metagame is full of discard spells and these miracles decks, because of the inevitability of winning the card draw battle. You have the better lategame than them. It's actually worse if they just try to aggro you out instead of grinding. That being said, BBE into Kolaghan's Command is still a backbreaker.
On the topic of Leylines: I hate them. Whenever I side them in and have a decent hand I feel the pressure to mulligan to look out for one. And if I keep, I always have the impression of topdecking one in the worst possible time. I just don't like the extra stress and variance they add to your games and I will always advise against it.
I think your calculation also doesn't consider that you have to be on the draw for Caverns, so not every game is elligible.
Oh, what a fool I am. I forgot completely that it only works in the draw. Yes, (4+-1) sounds about right. I guess Mr. Wong was just about average lucky, so no need to feel bad about being a lucksack.
Lucksacked the Gemstone CavernsFOUR TIMES in 13 rounds played (32 games, not sure how many were on the draw). That is a hell of a lot of luck dude! Good finish, solid report. Lets keep taking those turns
Since I was a little bit bored, I did a hypergeometric distribution calculation on the chance to see Gemstone Caverns, when you have 2 on your deck. The calculation does not consider mulligans.
So, the chance to see exactly one Caverns in your starting hand is a little bit shy of 21%. The chance to see one or two is a little bit over 22%.
So if we plug this data in a binomial distribution and use a Student's t distribution to calculate the confidence interval, in average after 32 games you would have seen (7 +- 1) Gemstone Caverns for 95% accuracy. Looks like our friend is either VERY unlucky to only have seen that many Gemstone Caverns or he is not shuffling his deck enough times to reach a sufficiently random state.
OTOH: 2 Gemstone Caverns really seems the sweet spot. Running just 1 makes the probability of seeing one on your starting hand go down to 11.6% and going to three, soars it up to 28%, with the caveat of having a risk of seeing doubles on the starting hand to 31% and multiples across the game to be very likely to happens (something we do not want).
This post has been sponsored by my procrastination to finish a presentation. I hope you liked it.
Edit3: The calculation assumes a normal distribution approximation. To correctly calculate the confidence interval of a binomial distribution, it is a more complicated process. I also was pretty lax on the confidence intervals, as I just did a z=2 for 95%. That is a rough approximation.
Edit4: The chance to only see 4 Gemstone Caverns in 32 games is funnily, one in 33. This means that what happened on the GP for Mr. Wong happens only about 3% of the time. Talk about unlucky!
When Jace hits, I'll probably go -1 Approach, -1 Cryptic +2 Jace. Then, if I want a third one, I'll take out one Wheel of Fortune. One of the strengths of this deck G1 is that most people think you're UW Control and play with more caution.]
Going a bunch of turns, having a full grip, a lot of extra lands and a fully loaded As Foretold is enough to make people forfeit as well.
then that 4 mana card stuck in hand for the correct moment to play could be something else that makes you win
This is a great point to run less than 4 Jaces, actually. Since I've been based on As Foretold, I'll probably start with 2, altough I feel that 3 is the sweet spot.
Like hemur said, however, the turn 4 fog into miracle might be a really strong interaction, and is the sole argument to run 4 Jaces, I think.
Tron is not very good against permission-type decks nor ultra-fast decks, basically every Jace deck and every deck that wants to kill Jace decks. Tron are their best against midrange, so they are probably going to be a decent choice in a meta full of BBE.
Jace is good against TKS, but bad against Reality Smasher, so I think Eldrazi Tron is still decent in the meta. Probably colored tron decks are going to reduce their numbers in favor of Eldrazi Tron decks.
Also, I would like make something clear: don't be hellbent in the whole turn4 Jace thing. No one would ever do that in a game if it means you instantly lose the game. If I would draw a parallel, it would be going for a T4 Splinter Twin win when the opponent has open mana. If you make your argument for not playing Jace as taking the worst possible approach to play Jace, he will look like a bad card.
Please don't make a bad play and put the blame on the card.
I love that one-of Living End as a zero/three mana wrath with As Foretold. I've thought of using Restore Balance for that kind of effect, but saccing lands and discarding cards would end up being too much for us.
Truckis123 list is in the direction I would be playing, def. I'm just not too sure about the miser's Azcanta and the lack of Gigadrowses.
To be fair, I don't think running 6 fetchlands is all-in. You're running 4 already, 2 more shouldn't be much of a stretch, specially since there's not a lot of Choke around. All in would be something like 8 or 10, imo.
If you play a turn 4 Jace and Brainstorm Temporal to the top, I'm fairly certain that very few players would waste a whole turn Field of Ruining your plan. It gives you pretty much a virtual timewalk in the sense that they are taking their turn to hinder your plans, and taking time is pretty much the theme of this deck.
While I agree that Temporal Mastery is the worst card to start the game, it's pretty much the card you want to see the most past turn 2. It warrants a 4-of in my list because of that.
I would like also to argue that I'm not very experienced with the splashes outside of red of this deck, so maybe 3 would be fine in the UB list that you championed not a while ago.
I favor the mono-blue builds with this new BR, though. I like Truckis123's direction and will definitely explore that over the course of the next months.
Time will tell. I have been playing the UR version for a while and personally I think he is a welcome upgrade to Chandra, Torch of Defiance. That is not to say she is bad - I just think he is that good.
IMO, I don't like playing with Mine effects, so whenever there's a card that can rival the mine engines, I will take a look at it. I wasn't expecting the unban on Jace, as I overvalue him thanks to playing Cube Drafting and Legacy a lot. But well, I'm happy (my wallet is not, however. I have 4 paper JTMS but I have been mostly playing on MTGO ).
Speaking about MTGO... I hope they fix the Exhaustion bug. It is simply annoying not being able to play with one of the best cards for the deck.
PS: I don't think he needs to be build around that much. He is simply a really good card and he has a lot of sinergies with our strategies. I mean, we need:
1 - Multiple card draws. Check.
2 - Win Condition. Check. Fatesealing an opponent to death is very strong (and frustating on the receiving end).
3 - Resource efficiency. He can do it. If you happen to draw a Temporal Mastery he may well as read: 0: Add 5 mana.
I'm pretty sure not only he doesn't need to be built around, we have an excellent shell to put him into already. Anything extra from that would be overkill.
i'd rather go Ug and ramp mana for early jaces tbh. seems better that way i guess
One of the breakout decks when Jace, the Mind Sculptor hit standard was a deck called TurboLands. It used some number of ramp spells like Explore and Oracle of Mul Daya to quickly deploy Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Time Warp. The synergy of putting drawn lands into the top of the library with Jace alongside Oracle of Mul Daya made you essentially draw 3 every turn, helping you dig for those Time Warps. You would generally win the game with a huge Avenger of Zendikar or simply because you drawn so many more cards than the opponent thanks to Jace.
That should be a good starting point reference for UG turns with Jace, I think.
Still, I think you are underestimating Jace a lot. I reckon you probably don't have a lot of experience playing with him and that's why you're quick to dismiss him. Play with the card with an open mind and take conclusions by yourself. He's broken and can win games by himself if unanswered.
But well, I might be wrong as well and he turns out to be terrible. I think this is very unlikely, though.
This is a very rough sketch of what I would make to be the maindeck. I simply dislike the Mine effects (I think they are subpar) and I like playing with As Foretold.
One of the upsides of running a lot of Jaces is the fact that you can get away with a lot of one ofs in the maindeck, so this list should probably be tweaked A LOT. But this is where my starting point is. Running Scalding Tarn is better than Polluted Delta, but I lack the former.
There's also the fact that maybe you want to play with more interaction. Then I would play UB with Fatal Push in the 75 as well and maybe a Damnation or two.
He should be played here the same way Chandra, Torch of Defiance is employed. When you have resources to make sure he is alive. Playing a turn 4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor against a field full of creatures is nothing more than a overcosted Fog. That is not how you play with Jace.
But you must be kidding to think that one Brainstorm every turn is not game changing. Jace is simply the best planeswalker card ever printed (aside from, maybe, this guy) and he wasn't banned for nothing. The fact that he can put Temporal Mastery back on top is huge for the deck, allowing us to develop and go for the kill.
Hell, I would even say that turn a 4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor putting Temporal Mastery on the top and having Island + Dictate of Kruphix is enough to simply go off. Assuming they don't have lethal, Jace takes the punch and you have the engine setup to go. If they ignore Jace I'm pretty sure the game will end quickly.
The unban of Jace will certainly make this deck jump in strength. We simply play cards that are subpar compared to him and he makes an excelent substitute.
Not playing JTMS in Taking Turns will be a huge mistake. He's a straight upgrade from Chandra, Torch of Defiance in UR builds and is simply bonkers with Temporal Mastery. By using JTMS we can even afford not to play any Mine effects.
I was not aware that a card such as Invasive Surgery existed. It is really good, specially with Search for Azcanta builds.
That being said, I'm not very worried about mostly blue decks. I think we are favored against them, at least g1 because they have a lot of dead cards. They are the beatdown and they're not very good beatdown decks.
G2-3 is a different beast. There's the gamble of bringing Thing in the Ice, as they're pretty much siding out Wraths.
I think Ancestral Vision builds of Turns will be more successful if the metagame is full of discard spells and these miracles decks, because of the inevitability of winning the card draw battle. You have the better lategame than them. It's actually worse if they just try to aggro you out instead of grinding. That being said, BBE into Kolaghan's Command is still a backbreaker.
On the topic of Leylines: I hate them. Whenever I side them in and have a decent hand I feel the pressure to mulligan to look out for one. And if I keep, I always have the impression of topdecking one in the worst possible time. I just don't like the extra stress and variance they add to your games and I will always advise against it.
Oh, what a fool I am. I forgot completely that it only works in the draw. Yes, (4+-1) sounds about right. I guess Mr. Wong was just about average lucky, so no need to feel bad about being a lucksack.
Since I was a little bit bored, I did a hypergeometric distribution calculation on the chance to see Gemstone Caverns, when you have 2 on your deck. The calculation does not consider mulligans.
So, the chance to see exactly one Caverns in your starting hand is a little bit shy of 21%. The chance to see one or two is a little bit over 22%.
So if we plug this data in a binomial distribution and use a Student's t distribution to calculate the confidence interval, in average after 32 games you would have seen (7 +- 1) Gemstone Caverns for 95% accuracy. Looks like our friend is either VERY unlucky to only have seen that many Gemstone Caverns or he is not shuffling his deck enough times to reach a sufficiently random state.
OTOH: 2 Gemstone Caverns really seems the sweet spot. Running just 1 makes the probability of seeing one on your starting hand go down to 11.6% and going to three, soars it up to 28%, with the caveat of having a risk of seeing doubles on the starting hand to 31% and multiples across the game to be very likely to happens (something we do not want).
This post has been sponsored by my procrastination to finish a presentation. I hope you liked it.
Edit3: The calculation assumes a normal distribution approximation. To correctly calculate the confidence interval of a binomial distribution, it is a more complicated process. I also was pretty lax on the confidence intervals, as I just did a z=2 for 95%. That is a rough approximation.
Edit4: The chance to only see 4 Gemstone Caverns in 32 games is funnily, one in 33. This means that what happened on the GP for Mr. Wong happens only about 3% of the time. Talk about unlucky!
4 Field of Ruin
2 Polluted Delta
2 Tolaria West
1 Hallowed Fountain
8 Island
1 Snow-Covered Island
1 Plains
2 Snapcaster Mage
4 As Foretold
4 Time Warp
4 Temporal Mastery
4 Serum Visions
3 Gigadrowse
3 Path to Exile
4 Ancestral Vision
3 Wheel of Fate
1 Living End
1 Approach of the Second Sun
2 Nimble Obstructionist
3 Thing in the Ice
2 Aven Mindcensor
1 Grafdigger's Cage
2 Dispel
1 Negate
2 Tormod's Crypt
When Jace hits, I'll probably go -1 Approach, -1 Cryptic +2 Jace. Then, if I want a third one, I'll take out one Wheel of Fortune. One of the strengths of this deck G1 is that most people think you're UW Control and play with more caution.]
Going a bunch of turns, having a full grip, a lot of extra lands and a fully loaded As Foretold is enough to make people forfeit as well.
This is a great point to run less than 4 Jaces, actually. Since I've been based on As Foretold, I'll probably start with 2, altough I feel that 3 is the sweet spot.
Like hemur said, however, the turn 4 fog into miracle might be a really strong interaction, and is the sole argument to run 4 Jaces, I think.
Jace is good against TKS, but bad against Reality Smasher, so I think Eldrazi Tron is still decent in the meta. Probably colored tron decks are going to reduce their numbers in favor of Eldrazi Tron decks.
Also, I would like make something clear: don't be hellbent in the whole turn4 Jace thing. No one would ever do that in a game if it means you instantly lose the game. If I would draw a parallel, it would be going for a T4 Splinter Twin win when the opponent has open mana. If you make your argument for not playing Jace as taking the worst possible approach to play Jace, he will look like a bad card.
Please don't make a bad play and put the blame on the card.
Truckis123 list is in the direction I would be playing, def. I'm just not too sure about the miser's Azcanta and the lack of Gigadrowses.
To be fair, I don't think running 6 fetchlands is all-in. You're running 4 already, 2 more shouldn't be much of a stretch, specially since there's not a lot of Choke around. All in would be something like 8 or 10, imo.
If you play a turn 4 Jace and Brainstorm Temporal to the top, I'm fairly certain that very few players would waste a whole turn Field of Ruining your plan. It gives you pretty much a virtual timewalk in the sense that they are taking their turn to hinder your plans, and taking time is pretty much the theme of this deck.
While I agree that Temporal Mastery is the worst card to start the game, it's pretty much the card you want to see the most past turn 2. It warrants a 4-of in my list because of that.
I would like also to argue that I'm not very experienced with the splashes outside of red of this deck, so maybe 3 would be fine in the UB list that you championed not a while ago.
I favor the mono-blue builds with this new BR, though. I like Truckis123's direction and will definitely explore that over the course of the next months.
IMO, I don't like playing with Mine effects, so whenever there's a card that can rival the mine engines, I will take a look at it. I wasn't expecting the unban on Jace, as I overvalue him thanks to playing Cube Drafting and Legacy a lot. But well, I'm happy (my wallet is not, however. I have 4 paper JTMS but I have been mostly playing on MTGO
Speaking about MTGO... I hope they fix the Exhaustion bug. It is simply annoying not being able to play with one of the best cards for the deck.
PS: I don't think he needs to be build around that much. He is simply a really good card and he has a lot of sinergies with our strategies. I mean, we need:
1 - Multiple card draws. Check.
2 - Win Condition. Check. Fatesealing an opponent to death is very strong (and frustating on the receiving end).
3 - Resource efficiency. He can do it. If you happen to draw a Temporal Mastery he may well as read: 0: Add 5 mana.
I'm pretty sure not only he doesn't need to be built around, we have an excellent shell to put him into already. Anything extra from that would be overkill.
One of the breakout decks when Jace, the Mind Sculptor hit standard was a deck called TurboLands. It used some number of ramp spells like Explore and Oracle of Mul Daya to quickly deploy Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Time Warp. The synergy of putting drawn lands into the top of the library with Jace alongside Oracle of Mul Daya made you essentially draw 3 every turn, helping you dig for those Time Warps. You would generally win the game with a huge Avenger of Zendikar or simply because you drawn so many more cards than the opponent thanks to Jace.
That should be a good starting point reference for UG turns with Jace, I think.
Still, I think you are underestimating Jace a lot. I reckon you probably don't have a lot of experience playing with him and that's why you're quick to dismiss him. Play with the card with an open mind and take conclusions by yourself. He's broken and can win games by himself if unanswered.
But well, I might be wrong as well and he turns out to be terrible. I think this is very unlikely, though.
4 Flooded Strand
4 Field of Ruin
4 Polluted Delta
1 Steam Vents
1 Snow-Covered Island
4 Temporal Mastery
4 Time Warp
4 Exhaustion
4 Cryptic Command
4 Serum Visions
3 Gigadrowse
3 As Foretold
2 Wheel of Fate
2 Snapcaster Mage
This is a very rough sketch of what I would make to be the maindeck. I simply dislike the Mine effects (I think they are subpar) and I like playing with As Foretold.
One of the upsides of running a lot of Jaces is the fact that you can get away with a lot of one ofs in the maindeck, so this list should probably be tweaked A LOT. But this is where my starting point is. Running Scalding Tarn is better than Polluted Delta, but I lack the former.
There's also the fact that maybe you want to play with more interaction. Then I would play UB with Fatal Push in the 75 as well and maybe a Damnation or two.
But you must be kidding to think that one Brainstorm every turn is not game changing. Jace is simply the best planeswalker card ever printed (aside from, maybe, this guy) and he wasn't banned for nothing. The fact that he can put Temporal Mastery back on top is huge for the deck, allowing us to develop and go for the kill.
Hell, I would even say that turn a 4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor putting Temporal Mastery on the top and having Island + Dictate of Kruphix is enough to simply go off. Assuming they don't have lethal, Jace takes the punch and you have the engine setup to go. If they ignore Jace I'm pretty sure the game will end quickly.
The unban of Jace will certainly make this deck jump in strength. We simply play cards that are subpar compared to him and he makes an excelent substitute.