has anyone tried torpor orb? shuts down a lot of the key cards in hoomans and spirits. possibly good vs jeskai too because they play 4 snaps, 1-2 cliques, no RIP as opposed to UW which only plays 3 of those total with ~3 rips.
hoomans and spirits are on the rise and are some of the toughest MUs for us obviously.
Curious how my combo brethren have found boseiju in a metagame where both UW and Jeskai are sporting field of ruin. I play grishoalbrand and have cut boseiju for a third pact of negation a long time ago. Perhaps I'm missing something here.
Hey Jonathan, nice to see you around. I think with that many FoR, you'd have to run 2 Boseiju to see it being very useful. There's three way to look at it :
1) Run 2 Boseiju and no Pact.
2) Run 2 Pact.
3) Run 1 Boseiju and a counterspell (normally Pact, I run Dispel for some other reasons).
I'm not feeling very comfortable having no extra counterspells in the sideboard if I'd go with 2 Boseiju, and having no is also a downer. I guess the split is still fine, but I think also that the consensus around here should be to run 2 Boseiju maybe.
Cheers!
Thanks (y) that makes sense to me. Having 1 in an era where even jeskai is running fields seems flimsy. Curious to hear about your rationale on dispel. Because you can pay for pact or negate it with Grace, I'd think it's just better to have free counterspells. Are you playing that in addition to 4 pacts of negations, or as the fourth pact of negation?
Yes, sometimes I run 4 Pact because I have lots of control in my meta (UW, Esper, UTron). Normally I run 3 main, 1 Dispel or 1 Pact in the side. Sometimes, I run Dispel if I expect the game to get longer against instant speed decks or control decks. In the early game, you don't always have all the combo pieces, so having Dispel to disrupt the opponent without having to waste Angel's Grace is good. Is it the best configuration ? I'm not sure, I doubt. But it works most of the time for me and it prevents Surgical Extraction effects from control decks and gives early interaction without sacrificing a combo piece when you don't have either the mana or an extra Angel's Grace.
So it really is mostly for utility purposes, I'd say sticking with a 4th Pact is more classic and regular, but Dispel is not bad either.
Cheers!
makes sense to me. When I played grixis I did waffle between pacts and some number of dispels. The point about early interaction like Surgical is a valid one.
Curious how my combo brethren have found boseiju in a metagame where both UW and Jeskai are sporting field of ruin. I play grishoalbrand and have cut boseiju for a third pact of negation a long time ago. Perhaps I'm missing something here.
Hey Jonathan, nice to see you around. I think with that many FoR, you'd have to run 2 Boseiju to see it being very useful. There's three way to look at it :
1) Run 2 Boseiju and no Pact.
2) Run 2 Pact.
3) Run 1 Boseiju and a counterspell (normally Pact, I run Dispel for some other reasons).
I'm not feeling very comfortable having no extra counterspells in the sideboard if I'd go with 2 Boseiju, and having no is also a downer. I guess the split is still fine, but I think also that the consensus around here should be to run 2 Boseiju maybe.
Cheers!
Thanks (y) that makes sense to me. Having 1 in an era where even jeskai is running fields seems flimsy. Curious to hear about your rationale on dispel. Because you can pay for pact or negate it with Grace, I'd think it's just better to have free counterspells. Are you playing that in addition to 4 pacts of negations, or as the fourth pact of negation?
Calculating such a probability can be very tedious. I'm a statistician, and while I see how to compute it exactly, I never would for this sort of problem. It's much easier to approximate it via Monte Carlo simulation, assuming you can program in something like Python or R. Create a list of the cards left in the deck (ignoring the card you know is on the bottom). Select 14 (or however many you are interested in) of them randomly, then check to see if you hit the desired cards, then repeat with the original list. In, say, 10,000 repetitions, the proportion of times you hit will be close to the probability that you hit. The first decimal place should at least be right, anyway. If you want more precision, do more repetitions.
However, what you really need is to be able to compute these probabilities on the fly. You don't have time to program up a simulation in game. Without knowing the actual probabilities there, I would have went for it.
yea fair enough. I do stress learning the heuristics over learning a lot of math for playing this deck (although in my opinion some are crucual to playing the deck, such as what's the probability of hitting 1 of 4 shoals in 7 with x remaining or the odds of drawing shoal+wurm to keep going)
in practice i generally would lean towards a line that may have less singular outs than a line with more outs that requires multiple cards. I'd also lean towards lines that can kill immediately than a line that looks safer but is uncertain like this situation - as long as they are close.
i was curious how close this particular case was after the fact and see how close my heuristic method was
Curious how my combo brethren have found boseiju in a metagame where both UW and Jeskai are sporting field of ruin. I play grishoalbrand and have cut boseiju for a third pact of negation a long time ago. Perhaps I'm missing something here.
for the scenario above, I know with 99% certainty that the last card is Spell queller, if anyone's curious and wants to take a shot at this problem. Also there's a Worldspine Wurm at the very bottom.
does anyone know how to solve this problem mathematically? My probability skills is very shoddy beyond using stattrek. How does one calculate the Pr(at least 2 of 4 +SSG/1 of 4 +SSG and 1+ of 8 unapped land+1+ of 3 Goryo's Vengeance drawn in the next cards of a 32 card deck), for example?
I would highly recommend shatterstorm rather than shattering spree if Hardened Scale is a real force. also would suggest you map out the SB plan for all of the tiered decks and see how the leyline/leyline/moon/chalice work for you. my gut is you dont want both of them. In fact I would do Leyline of the Void out of all of these if anything but I've been experimenting with a hateless SB
Manamorphose is mostly for the tight combo turns where you are constrained on mana and need to convert Simian Spirit Guides into black mana for Goryo's Vengeance.
As spooly said, there are other corner cases where the library is 7>large and you need to hit a card using Manamorphose/looting. It also pitches to Nourishing Shoal in a pinch, help you cast Borborygmos Enraged, or Pact of Negation. Most of the times it's a free draw and a filter for Goryo's Vengeance
That deck is a dedicated Griselbrand combo deck (though, currently it is in development), while this one is a Goryo's/TTB combo deck. Though, if you want to stick to the Shoal version (I like it more atm, even though I want to develop a good dredge version tbh) you could do the following things:
- Add 1-2 Gemstone Caverns to be faster on the draw
- Add 1-2 Footsteps of Goryo, to be able to have more Griselbrand "cheat" spells. Though, I would play 1-2 Noxious Revival MD than (to be able to shift game plans from the Graveyard plan to the TTB plan).
For this I would cut 1-2 lands, 1 TTB and 1-2 Desperate Rituals (depending on how many Revivals you want to play). Also, I would play two Hugs instead of the split, if you want to go this route (cause you have more graveyard enabler).
@FeedMVP, please give me a reminder in the next couple of days, need to look through my decklists first and otherwise I will forget it
Greetings,
Kathal
this looks completely ridiculous and unreasonable. I'll have to try this one time..
the deck is faster than KCI and KCI in its current iteration has literally zero cards against grishoalbrand (no nihil spellbomb like previous versions). just race them. shattering spree is pretty useless vs kci. Lightning axe is about the only real interaction you'll have vs. them and it won't make a big difference a lot of the times.
if we want similar effects, I think we just play slaughter games.
I had 3-4 Leyline of Sanctities or Chalices in, but thinking of leaving them out now. I liked Leyline against Storm and BGx decks (both on the decline now), Chalice was nice against a lot of decks but pretty much only on the play.
Thinking of adding some graveyard hate, mainly against Hollow One and KCI. I think the best options are Leyline of the Void, Ravenous Trap, Rakdos Charm, Surgical Extraction and/or Nihil Spellbomb.
I'm leaning towards Surgical Extraction or Rakdos Charm (especially if Jonathan thinks it's any good). Surgical because I like that it's cheap and it protects against opposing Surgicals. The downside being that it only slows Hollow One a bit (this could be balanced by playing more Angers). Rakdos Charm is nice because it also hits things on the battlefield against these decks.
Here's what I sketched out for my GP Vegas list. I'll work on a tournament report soon. Went 11-4 but 2 of my losses were literal punts out of the stadium and the other two were very close, so this conceivably could've been very different. In the meantime hopefully people will find this helpful. Have some other random thoughts too for some MUs
I'll be taking Grishoalbrand to GP Barcelona this weekend and would greatly appreciate some feedback on small tweaks and the last few spots in the sideboard. I've borrowed heavily from finalnub and damnjoni's post above. Unfortunately, I only get some FNM testing and a few leagues on MTGO, so I'm leaning heavily on videos I've watched and this forum.
My thought for a mainboard change is to swap Cathartic Reunion out for Tormenting Voice. My thought here is that I usually have only 1 card in my hand I can spare whenever I draw it, so I always feel the cost in lost combo pieces is too high. I also think this may reduce the blowout that happens G1 against a counter deck that counters it. Ultimately, this may just be that I'm bad at evaluating the combo pieces in hand, but this does seem to make me less hesitant to use.
Sideboard, I'm expecting slightly more KCI but also plenty of Humans. I really like the Sideboard guide that Jonathan put together, and acknowledged the removal of the 3rd Pact. In its place I'm thinking of one of three cards:
Thoughtseize "(discard outlet, general answer to problematic cards)" - FinalNub
Cranial Extraction "(Storm, KCI, other GY stuff, although this may be a reach)" - FinalNub, I also like the idea damnjoni of it protecting against opposing Surgicals (great against lantern)
Lost Legacy This could be good sideboard tech against KCI, or other obvious linear strategies
2ndRakdos Charm An obviously versatile option that can be used in a number of situations but importantly can be used against "Go Wide" decks like Humans or those trying to prey on them.
I've made an only slightly modified version of Jonathan's guide here: Google Doc
Any and all feedback is very welcome. I've got a ton of backup sideboard cards so I'm still not committed to anything yet.
p.s. finalnub you have a number of notes in your doc that just says "could use more" or highlight a specific sideboard spot that is blank. Could you provide just a bit more feedback on those items?
The "could use more"row is just me voicing my thoughts on the spot on whether it "feels" like the matchup has enough cards going in/out. nothing scientific. people can certainly disagree with my assessment and you should chart it out and see if you agree with my assessment and if not, what cards would make you feel good about the most matchups.
you are faster than KCI and they have literally zero cards against us post board. I wouldn't bother worrying about them specifically (which was sort of my mistake). A card like thoughtseize which has widespread utility is a card I would support and play.
Slaughter Game can end games vs things like storm (not a 1HKO, but very helpful. It's unclear how many empties they leave in post board. Caleb Scherer's guide has 0 empties post board), KCI (hitting pyrite spellbomb should end it, or KCI. not sure which is better), Ad Nauseam, Amulet Titan, etc. Also fairly good vs UWx hitting the most dangerous counterspells (probably dispel which is a 2 of post SB, or even snapcaster) and getting full information. I've always dismissed it because the closest i've come to flirting with Slaughter games was as a tool vs. storm and I thought 4 mana was too slow. Could be worth trying though.
hello every one , i would like to ask if its possible to play kolaghan's command in the sideboard , is it worth or that card doesnt represent our arctype ?
I don't see what this card does. You don't care about making your opponent discard their weakest card, and it's very expensive to be a discard outlet. 3 mana shatter is a horrible rate, and so is a 2 damage ping. You certainly do not want to be bringing back a creature from your GY.
I think the card does not fit what the deck is doing.
hoomans and spirits are on the rise and are some of the toughest MUs for us obviously.
in practice i generally would lean towards a line that may have less singular outs than a line with more outs that requires multiple cards. I'd also lean towards lines that can kill immediately than a line that looks safer but is uncertain like this situation - as long as they are close.
i was curious how close this particular case was after the fact and see how close my heuristic method was
does anyone know how to solve this problem mathematically? My probability skills is very shoddy beyond using stattrek. How does one calculate the Pr(at least 2 of 4 +SSG/1 of 4 +SSG and 1+ of 8 unapped land+1+ of 3 Goryo's Vengeance drawn in the next cards of a 32 card deck), for example?
As spooly said, there are other corner cases where the library is 7>large and you need to hit a card using Manamorphose/looting. It also pitches to Nourishing Shoal in a pinch, help you cast Borborygmos Enraged, or Pact of Negation. Most of the times it's a free draw and a filter for Goryo's Vengeance
if we want similar effects, I think we just play slaughter games.
The "could use more"row is just me voicing my thoughts on the spot on whether it "feels" like the matchup has enough cards going in/out. nothing scientific. people can certainly disagree with my assessment and you should chart it out and see if you agree with my assessment and if not, what cards would make you feel good about the most matchups.
you are faster than KCI and they have literally zero cards against us post board. I wouldn't bother worrying about them specifically (which was sort of my mistake). A card like thoughtseize which has widespread utility is a card I would support and play.
Slaughter Game can end games vs things like storm (not a 1HKO, but very helpful. It's unclear how many empties they leave in post board. Caleb Scherer's guide has 0 empties post board), KCI (hitting pyrite spellbomb should end it, or KCI. not sure which is better), Ad Nauseam, Amulet Titan, etc. Also fairly good vs UWx hitting the most dangerous counterspells (probably dispel which is a 2 of post SB, or even snapcaster) and getting full information. I've always dismissed it because the closest i've come to flirting with Slaughter games was as a tool vs. storm and I thought 4 mana was too slow. Could be worth trying though.
I think the card does not fit what the deck is doing.