i'm in jund energy right now and this is the deck i'm currently using right now. the deck is designed to beat control and combo, which is the meta here in my LGS, but it can hold out fine against aggro and midrange decks.
i'm really having a hard time against UB control, even if i'm on the play. the 1-3 drops just dies to removal and sweeps and when the game gets to turn 5 or so, it's basically game over for us, especially when we only have a creature or 2. chandra, hydra and scrapheaps are nice against them but i feel it's still not enough since post-board they have kalitas, yaheeni and flaying tendrils. any tips and tricks?
To get directly to the point, this deck seeks to get big creatures out or get card advantage using the Improvise mechanic. Now when the Improvise mechanic was first spoiled, to be honest, I did not think that this was a good mechanic at all, but when I was trying to build an Aetherflux Storm fun deck, I realized how many 0 drops standard has. With 12 0 drops and a few cheap artifacts, we can be casting big creatures as early as turn 1 and dealing 6 or 7 damage as early as turn 2.
Bone Saw, Cathar's Shield and Ornithopter - this deck is going to play a full set of these "free cards". It activates Improvise quickly and leaves up mana for other spells
Bastion Inventor - a big beater with evasion that we can cast as early as turn 2 or 3. Since it has hexproof and is a 4/4 creature, it can't be easily removed until midgame.
Sweatworks Brawler - now this is a card that we can easily cast on turn 1. It is a 3/3 with menace which means that we can be dealing 6 damage on turn 3 unless it gets removed.
Enraged Giant - you want a big creature? This is a 4/4 creature so it's really big. You want it to have trample? Yes this card has trample. You want it to be a hasty 4/4 trampler? Oh hell yes!! A creature we can cast on the early turns, and at best it can attack right away because of haste.
Freejam Regent - a 4/4 flyer that we can cast on turns 2 or 3. Since it has flying, we can avoid those pesky early drops our opponent have.
Herald of Anguish - now this is where the fun starts. A 5/5 flyer that we can cast on turns 3, 4 or 5. Plus it makes our opponent discard a card on the early turns. If that ability doesn't say value, I don't know what is.
Reverse Engineer - for those who want to play blue we have another cantrip. Downside is that it is a sorcery spell, but then who cares? It's 3 cards for two mana
Reckless Bushwhacker - since Improvise leaves us with many open mana, we can surge cast this creature up so we can deal a lot of damage
Shock - with Copycat/Angry Cat Lady/ Saheeli Rai Combo lurking around, we need this card to shut that combo down
Battle at the Bridge - an Improvise cards is possible to cost us only one mana. It can kill big creatures and nets us some life.
Tezzeret the Schemer - not only does this guy help us with the ramp, with its ultimate ability we can have 5/5 creatures everyday
Ceremonious Rejection - what better way to shut down Aetherworks Marvel, Dynavolt Tower and vehicles than to remove it completely before it hits the ground
Metallic Rebuke - a mana leak that costs one mana 'nuff said
Disallow - a counter that hits all kinds of strategies
Tezzeret's Touch - an ensoul artifact with a reanimate effect, gives our artifacts an added value. even makes Ornithopter a flying beater
Unlicensed Disintegration - with all the artifacts we have lying around, we're sure to get a 2 for 1 with this card
Tears of Valakut - getting rid of those fliers is a nasty business
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - has a great removal, ramp and if we hit her exile ability with one of our big CMC creatures, it would hurt our opponents a lot
i'm torn between two ideas. I like Temur but i want to take a break from it since i started playing temur and after returning from a MTG sabbatical i came back playing temur. so for now i want to go jund or sultai. like lugger said, Winding Constrictor could be a great card for the energy deck. it nets us additional +1/+1 counters, loyalty counters and energy counters. plus by splashing black we are now open to more hard removals.
People probably will start playing Ob Nixilis again and maybe Noxious Gearhulk. Both of these are cards we have to play around.
true the only cards we have to go around hulk and ob nix are blossoming defense, heroic intervention and hydra
on another note. people were bummed out when Reflector Mage, Emrakul, the Promised End and Smuggler's Copter got the ban hammer. these three cards made me switch from the midrange version to the combo version since the combo version has a higher rate of success. even with the combo version, the match ups with these three cards, especially with reflector mage and emrakul were hard as hell. mage would just bounce my creatures, especially Electrostatic Pummeler and a turn 4 emrakul would just waste all of my pump spells in my hand.
i finally settled on a G/U energy aggro/midrange deck that gave me results since it became a good match up with G/B/x Delirium, Marvel Decks and U/W Blink. since this is a G/R/x energy forum, i don't know if this is the proper forum to post my list.
well anyways now that all three cards are gone, i can finally go back to my favorite colors which is G/R.
Joe Lossett played the Standard portion of SCG Players' Champioship with a Pummeler deck and won the whole tournament. Pretty hilarious to see a $72 budget deck there on top of all the expensive top tier decks.
REJOICE G/R players!!! we have finally won a championship. hahaha
only goes to show that you don't need to spend a crazy amount of cash to have a competitive deck. SCG didn't upload the standard finals. i haven't seen the finals match yet but the results speak for itself.
i wonder how he won with no removals. he only had a set of galvanic bombardment as the deck's removal suit.
for G/R/u, i playtested with kiora. she's only a sideboard card at best. she's only good at control decks. i've beaten a grixis control and an esper control with kiora as support. she's has value with arlinn kord since i get to put 2 creatures instead of 1 against a sweep. against the grixis control, arlinn turned into an emblem and i burned my opponent using bristling hydra during my turn and untap hydra using kiora thus leaving me with a blocker or another burn during my opponents turn.
for those who are having doubts with clip wings against U/W spirits, copters and the boat, may i recommend Tears of Valakut. it's a quite good removal for flying. the only thing that can remove it entirely is indestructible and hexproof effects, and spell quellers. i now run 2 clip wings and 2 tears for MUs against flying creatures.
walkers are good against control decks that run alot of sweeps but for those who don't have chandra, nissa or gearhulk because of budget constraints (like me), i recommend flooding the board with two or three drops and hold your bombs especially those with haste. we can add pressure again to control players after they tap out to fumigate when the next threat they're facing is a sudden punch to the face by a hasty creature. this is why my G/R midrange deck runs 2-3 reality smashers. nothing puts a smile on my face when a control opponent has to face an even bigger threat after tapping out to a sweep. if you know your opponent is having a bad draw one after another, just juice up that cub and protect it. i love seeing a sweep being used as a spot removal.
if i am not mistaken, the only playable 4 drops we have are Chandra ToD, Arlinn Kord and Bristling Hydra.
Tireless Tracker is a pseudo 4 drop if one plays it on turn 4 to play a land and get value from it.
well i am seeing some lists with woodland wanderer. how about Kiora, Master of the Depths? leaving a blocker and an untapped land for instants sounds like value. the second ability also sounds great to refill the hand with creatures after a sweep. the SS skill speaks for itself. i'm thinking of trying her out.
if your deck goes wide, go with Arlinn with optional Nissa VoZ. if your deck has a midrange-y feel to it go with Chandra ToD and Nissa VF.
creatures die to removal, that's a fact in MTG. the question now is what creature is great to fish out removals? some players in my LSG get disenchanted easily with playing RG because cub dies easily to removal. they do not put into factor that if they don't answer cub quickly they are going to face and early threat and cub getting removed is fine for me because that means that brawler, hydra, tracker, etc. can swing in safe without worrying about the opponent's removal. just few hours ago, my opponent using a grixis control deck chose to remove my brawlers and hydras, disregarding the 2/2 cub. i pumped it to a 6/6 which means that it is already outside harnessed lightning, galvanic bombardment or dynavolt tower range. i can just pump cub for every burn they have and hold in a blossoming defense for those straight spot removals. cub wasn't put there just to be a bear. the reason why an RG deck has a cub because a cub on a board would force a decision to a player whether or not to trade with cub.
Hydra is the card I want to see the most. It's lack of evasion is certainly a problem but it can be solved by a healthy amount of removal and with cards like Nature's Way. I agree that Woodland wanderer is good against BG but it's worse against the rest of the field. I also fail to see how reflector mage is more of a blowout than spell queller on the Wanderer. Your wanderer gets spell quelled you will end up with a 2/2 vigilance trample, which is bad. The deck plays enough creatures that reflector mage is just a speed bump.
I mean, Gruul's removal has never really been a selling point outside of instances when it doubles as an engine (Domri Rade) or is absurdly pushed like Mizzium Mortars or Bonfire of the Damned.
Nature's Way? Fighting in a format with instant speed removal seems ill advised unless it's relegated to the SB in mirror sorts of MUs.
R. Mage is more of a blowout since they don't have to leave mana up. You can make them pay for leaving mana up by 1. sneaking under it with more power turns 2-3 or just leaving up Harnessed Lightning or Revolutionary Rebuff until you can deploy a powerful 5 drop.
If someone Quellers my WW, I usually don't bother trying to recoup it. I just try and go bigger with Tracker, Gearhulk, and more 6/6s. A 2/3 is not a clock.
i agree with this. UW isn't really much of a problem as long as we play smart. mage and queller aren't really problems because as lugger said a 2/3 is not a clock, even if there are two of them. the only real problem is their angels but since we go big earlier than them, they have to tempo us out early game. even if they did,what is avacyn going to do with a big cub and an early hydra or with the boat. i am running WW and smasher in my list because i don't have gearhulks (i'm still saving up money to buy them) and trample is a PW greatest nightmare. at most UW has three threats for us, and as for RG, almost all of our creatures are threats. i'm running the temur energy with confiscation coup but no virtuoso and nissa, VoZ (though i'm thinking about adding her, since she has good synergy with arlinn kord) because i'm running smashers and a boat MB, and it's doing very well with UW spirits/tempo and GB aggro.
also, now that i counted the lands, it seems you only have 20. with 6 5 drops you might wanna add maybe 1-2 more lands or lower your curve.
20 lands and 4x Attune with Aether and 4x Servant of the Conduit. So far the mana seems stable. Adding more lands would mean getting rid of creatures or Attunes.
i'm testing the list right now with cockatrice
-2 batmobile, +1 hanweir battlements and +1 another land maybe? for an r/g deck with 20 lands amd 6 five drops is slow. if we want to be fast we can't have more than 2 turns of missed land drop. 21-22 lands can mitigate the damage.
i'm in jund energy right now and this is the deck i'm currently using right now. the deck is designed to beat control and combo, which is the meta here in my LGS, but it can hold out fine against aggro and midrange decks.
4 Longtusk Cub
4 Servant of the Conduit
4 Winding Constrictor
4 Voltaic Brawler
4 Rishkar, Peema Renegade
4 Lathnu Hellion
4 Bristling Hydra
Spells
4 Attune with Aether
4 Harnessed Lightning
4 Blossoming Defense
4 Aether Hub
4 Blooming Marsh
2 Cinder Glade
2 Game Trail
5 Forest
2 Mountain
1 Swamp
1 Nissa, Vital Force
2 Natural State
2 Shock
2 Heroic Intervention
2 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
3 Fatal Push
3 Transgress the Mind
Sweatworks Brawler - now this is a card that we can easily cast on turn 1. It is a 3/3 with menace which means that we can be dealing 6 damage on turn 3 unless it gets removed.
Enraged Giant - you want a big creature? This is a 4/4 creature so it's really big. You want it to have trample? Yes this card has trample. You want it to be a hasty 4/4 trampler? Oh hell yes!! A creature we can cast on the early turns, and at best it can attack right away because of haste.
Freejam Regent - a 4/4 flyer that we can cast on turns 2 or 3. Since it has flying, we can avoid those pesky early drops our opponent have.
Herald of Anguish - now this is where the fun starts. A 5/5 flyer that we can cast on turns 3, 4 or 5. Plus it makes our opponent discard a card on the early turns. If that ability doesn't say value, I don't know what is.
Reverse Engineer - for those who want to play blue we have another cantrip. Downside is that it is a sorcery spell, but then who cares? It's 3 cards for two mana
Reckless Bushwhacker - since Improvise leaves us with many open mana, we can surge cast this creature up so we can deal a lot of damage
Shock - with Copycat/Angry Cat Lady/ Saheeli Rai Combo lurking around, we need this card to shut that combo down
Battle at the Bridge - an Improvise cards is possible to cost us only one mana. It can kill big creatures and nets us some life.
Tezzeret the Schemer - not only does this guy help us with the ramp, with its ultimate ability we can have 5/5 creatures everyday
Ceremonious Rejection - what better way to shut down Aetherworks Marvel, Dynavolt Tower and vehicles than to remove it completely before it hits the ground
Metallic Rebuke - a mana leak that costs one mana 'nuff said
Disallow - a counter that hits all kinds of strategies
Tezzeret's Touch - an ensoul artifact with a reanimate effect, gives our artifacts an added value. even makes Ornithopter a flying beater
Unlicensed Disintegration - with all the artifacts we have lying around, we're sure to get a 2 for 1 with this card
Tears of Valakut - getting rid of those fliers is a nasty business
Chandra, Torch of Defiance - has a great removal, ramp and if we hit her exile ability with one of our big CMC creatures, it would hurt our opponents a lot
Liliana, the Last Hope - great for recursion and stopping early drops
So here is a sample of what I came up with
4 Spire of Industry
3 Forboding Ruins
3 Smoldering Marsh
6 Mountain
5 Swamp
Creatures
4 Sweatworks Brawler
3 Reckless Bushwhacker
3 Freejam Regent
3 Herald of Anguish
4 Enraged Giant
4 Ornithopter
4 Bone Saw
4 Cathar's Shield
1 Cogworker's Puzzleknot
2 Servo Schematic
Spells
2 Harnessed Lightning
3 Grasp of Darkness
2 Fatal Push
4 Shock
2 Fatal Push
2 Tears of Valakut
3 Unlicensed Disintegration
2 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
2 Liliana, the Last Hope
this is my jund idea
4 Aether Hub
3 Game Trail
3 Cinder Glade
4 Blossoming Marsh
2 Hissing Quagmire
1 Foreboding Ruins
2 Forest
2 Mountain
1 Swamp
Creatures
4 Voltaic Brawler
3 Servant of the Conduit
4 Longtusk Cub
4 Winding Constrictor
3 Tireless Tracker
4 Bristling Hydra
2 Verduous Gearhulk
2 Nissa, Vital Force
2 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
Spells
4 Attune with Aether
4 Harnessed Lightning
2 Fatal Push
4 Shock
2 Natural State
1 Skysovereign, Consul's Flagship
2 Tears of Valakut
1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
2 Fatal Push
3 Aethersphere Harvester
my second idea, and the deck i'm really leaning against is a sultai
4 Aether Hub
4 Botanical Sanctum
3 Blossoming Marsh
2 Hissing Quagmire
2 Lumbering Falls
2 Forest
2 Island
1 Swamp
Creatures
4 Sylvan Advocate
3 Servant of the Conduit
3 Longtusk Cub
3 Winding Constrictor
2 Greenbelt Rampager
2 Tireless Tracker
3 Rogue Refiner
4 Bristling Hydra
2 Nissa, Vital Force
Spells
4 Attune with Aether
3 Negate
3 Turn Aside
2 Fatal Push
3 Ceremonious Rejection
2 Natural State
1 Skysovereign, Consul's Flagship
2 Confiscation Coup
1 Noxious Gearhulk
2 Fatal Push
3 Aethersphere Harvester
true the only cards we have to go around hulk and ob nix are blossoming defense, heroic intervention and hydra
on another note. people were bummed out when Reflector Mage, Emrakul, the Promised End and Smuggler's Copter got the ban hammer. these three cards made me switch from the midrange version to the combo version since the combo version has a higher rate of success. even with the combo version, the match ups with these three cards, especially with reflector mage and emrakul were hard as hell. mage would just bounce my creatures, especially Electrostatic Pummeler and a turn 4 emrakul would just waste all of my pump spells in my hand.
i finally settled on a G/U energy aggro/midrange deck that gave me results since it became a good match up with G/B/x Delirium, Marvel Decks and U/W Blink. since this is a G/R/x energy forum, i don't know if this is the proper forum to post my list.
well anyways now that all three cards are gone, i can finally go back to my favorite colors which is G/R.
REJOICE G/R players!!! we have finally won a championship. hahaha
only goes to show that you don't need to spend a crazy amount of cash to have a competitive deck. SCG didn't upload the standard finals. i haven't seen the finals match yet but the results speak for itself.
i wonder how he won with no removals. he only had a set of galvanic bombardment as the deck's removal suit.
for those who are having doubts with clip wings against U/W spirits, copters and the boat, may i recommend Tears of Valakut. it's a quite good removal for flying. the only thing that can remove it entirely is indestructible and hexproof effects, and spell quellers. i now run 2 clip wings and 2 tears for MUs against flying creatures.
well i am seeing some lists with woodland wanderer. how about Kiora, Master of the Depths? leaving a blocker and an untapped land for instants sounds like value. the second ability also sounds great to refill the hand with creatures after a sweep. the SS skill speaks for itself. i'm thinking of trying her out.
are you talking about walkers, creatures or both?
creatures die to removal, that's a fact in MTG. the question now is what creature is great to fish out removals? some players in my LSG get disenchanted easily with playing RG because cub dies easily to removal. they do not put into factor that if they don't answer cub quickly they are going to face and early threat and cub getting removed is fine for me because that means that brawler, hydra, tracker, etc. can swing in safe without worrying about the opponent's removal. just few hours ago, my opponent using a grixis control deck chose to remove my brawlers and hydras, disregarding the 2/2 cub. i pumped it to a 6/6 which means that it is already outside harnessed lightning, galvanic bombardment or dynavolt tower range. i can just pump cub for every burn they have and hold in a blossoming defense for those straight spot removals. cub wasn't put there just to be a bear. the reason why an RG deck has a cub because a cub on a board would force a decision to a player whether or not to trade with cub.
i agree with this. UW isn't really much of a problem as long as we play smart. mage and queller aren't really problems because as lugger said a 2/3 is not a clock, even if there are two of them. the only real problem is their angels but since we go big earlier than them, they have to tempo us out early game. even if they did,what is avacyn going to do with a big cub and an early hydra or with the boat. i am running WW and smasher in my list because i don't have gearhulks (i'm still saving up money to buy them) and trample is a PW greatest nightmare. at most UW has three threats for us, and as for RG, almost all of our creatures are threats. i'm running the temur energy with confiscation coup but no virtuoso and nissa, VoZ (though i'm thinking about adding her, since she has good synergy with arlinn kord) because i'm running smashers and a boat MB, and it's doing very well with UW spirits/tempo and GB aggro.
i'm testing the list right now with cockatrice
-2 batmobile, +1 hanweir battlements and +1 another land maybe? for an r/g deck with 20 lands amd 6 five drops is slow. if we want to be fast we can't have more than 2 turns of missed land drop. 21-22 lands can mitigate the damage.