Ive been playing Esper draw go for close to 4 years now, with just a short break because modern frustrates me.
Ive been pretty "purist" in the draw go aspect as you can see from my list below. Im having some difficulties in the tron matchups as wll as humans.
Im also considering some experimental cards to give another shot. Lingering souls, Collective brutality and *cough* sprout swarm...
Inspired by pauper I think a single sprout swarm could serve as a wincon as well as a STW type effect to jam the boards early game. With people starting to get interested in Lingering souls too they seem like they could be decent together. Im just throwing this out there but what do you think of my theoretical list and ideas here?
This list has been really solid for my local diverse meta. Almost every top deck shows up weekly with only shadow variants and control varients being duplicates.
The version of the deck I am wanting to test is something like this:
Changes are marked in bold. This version actually looks pretty decent and allows us to commit to the board and put pressure turns 5-6 if our opponent is doing nothing, while still acting on their end step or holding counterspells with souls. Im trying 2 Breeding pools just because of all the land destruction around, I dont want 1 ghost quarter cutting us off.
This is what Ill be playing this week and ill let yall know how it goes.
Sprout Swarm seems a little strange to splash green for just 1 card. If you're looking for the grind engine, why not just do the Thopter/Sword of the Meek Combo? Stays in your color and grinds better. You're having problems with Tron, what is your sideboard? With Tron you need to be aggressive and put early pressure. Ideally casting Snap as an Ambush Viper on 2 and following up with either a turn 3 Geist or an opponent's draw phase Vendilion Clique. I've been running Esper Transcendent lately and it's been doing really well.
To answer your question about wanting more than 4 Snapcasters, have you ever played Jace Vyrn's Prodigy and Snapcaster in the same deck? It's generally not very good to have too many flashback effects in your deck because you end up eating your entire graveyard and it makes you super soft to Rest in Peace. Normally I wouldn't bring in RIP against a deck like this, but if I see Snaps and this dude? RIP is 100% coming in. If you really want more than 4 Snapcasters, just throw in a JVP or 2.
If Popeye Stompy could give Legacy a shakeup, maybe Grixis Delvaargh is the next new thing in Modern? In all seriousness though, I love the idea of playing 8-Snap (with Dire Fleet Daredevil) and have begun working on a list. It's a very rough first draft, but I'll throw it out there none the less.
You realize that Pirate Stompy is a fake deck? It was completely made up by Bob Huang from Channel Fireball and everyone bought it hook-line-and-sinker.
Merchant Ship even spiked to like a $20 card. This is the problem with our society, no one thoroughly reads anything. They read the headline and then hit repost. Here's the original link. READ THE WHOLE THING. It's hilarious and a lot of opportunists made some serious money on it. https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/popeye-stompy/
Hasn't Merchant Ship spiked due to the reserved list and buyouts of useless but not printable cards? I don't recall it being used on pirate stompy. I guess people really don't read anything, the pirate stompy was the dumbest thing I've seen in quite a while.
About the daredevil... sounds good in a meta with a specific kind of deck. But quite worse than snapcaster, not having flash is HUGE. I think it was a joke, but even though daredevil is strictly worse than snapcaster, snap is so good that "additional copies" could be good.
But it sounds too lose.
But could be good.
I mean, not reeeeally good, but good...ish?
Maybe it's just not that bad.
But not quite good-ish.
I guess that joke kinda got me thinking.
I'd say it's good against 50% of the meta, kinda good against 25% of the meta and a bad black knight against 25% of the meta. But in any case I think it's too mana expensive as a sorcery-speed spell for grixis delver.
Yeah the price went up on Merchant Ship because of buyouts, but the reason people bought it out was because of speculation of this stupid Stompy Deck that wasn't real. The same thing is happening right now with Lotus Vale's and Blood Sun. People are speculating and they bought out Lotus Vales and now the prices spiked.
I know that Popeye Stompy wasn't a serious deck, and it actually wasn't Bob Huang who was the mastermind behind it - he wrote the article but Julian Knab was the creator. My deck wasn't to be taken too serious either, but often the best way to test new cards is to play more copies than what you'd do in a deck to see if the card has any legs. After some testing I can say that Daredevil isn't bad, but that most decks (especially with access to blue) shouldn't be playing more than 1-2 copies.
Did you read the article bro? It was literally never a deck. There wasn't a mastermind behind it. It was completely fabricated. And all the mouthbreathers who want to use MTG as an investment fund went crazy and drove prices up on a bunch of cards for a fake deck.
If Popeye Stompy could give Legacy a shakeup, maybe Grixis Delvaargh is the next new thing in Modern? In all seriousness though, I love the idea of playing 8-Snap (with Dire Fleet Daredevil) and have begun working on a list. It's a very rough first draft, but I'll throw it out there none the less.
You realize that Pirate Stompy is a fake deck? It was completely made up by Bob Huang from Channel Fireball and everyone bought it hook-line-and-sinker.
Merchant Ship even spiked to like a $20 card. This is the problem with our society, no one thoroughly reads anything. They read the headline and then hit repost. Here's the original link. READ THE WHOLE THING. It's hilarious and a lot of opportunists made some serious money on it. https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/popeye-stompy/
Not only does it do nothing when it comes down, every activation is a horribly inefficient use of mana. You gotta realize that in Modern you're going to be pinging 1 and 2-drops. It would be nice against midrange decks with low creature counts, like Jund, Grixis, et al, but that's about it. The flip side is possibly worse, putting small little bears in play to block when you should be activating Colonnade or trying to draw your whole deck. I think it flipping is probably a downside.
Aside from Jund/Grixis matchups, you'd really have to be stomping your opponent or sitting on nothing to ever want to activate this card. I do need a foil for my Oloro EDH deck, though.
Just my opinion, of course.
There was a card printed already that did a very similar card called Pharika's Cure and it only saw a little play in Theros Block in UB. I don't think the BB and B1 really makes that much of a difference. It might see standard play.
Humans can be problematic.
Sometimes you open game 1 on 3 lands, snare, knot, think twice, cryptic, and lose the game right there when they go cavern > vial > pass.
Otherwise, I don't think its usually terrible, but counterspells kind of suck against them, and you might not have enough cards in the board to make the matchup good.
I tried settle and didn't like it much. I could see playing it as my sideboard wrath if I felt like humans/dredge/etc was really popular, but only hitting attacking creatures came up a lot for me.
You do seem to have a lot of sideboard stuff for humans, which definitely makes the matchup a lot better.
The problem with Settle the Wreckage is once it's known it's easy to play around. You might get them one time with it, and maybe that's all you need. But once they know you have it, they will know to play around it.
I really don't think Esper has any terrible matchups except for Burn, even Dredge and Storm can be managed with cards like Runed Halo and Rule of Law. The problem in my mind is the "good" matchups only being 55/45. The number of games where you don't hit a pile of draw spells and have to topdeck with your opponent was too high for me, which is why I experimented with more draw engines (ones that draw more than 2 cards).
Interesting that you guys all think Humans is so poor of a matchup; am I the only one who's tried Settle the Wreckage? I also have a Night of Souls' Betrayal in the sideboard + 2 Detention Sphere and 1 Engineered Explosives. I only just added the 2 Fatal Push back to the Maindeck, as well. Could be that I just haven't played the matchup enough times.
Humans match up is rough for a few reasons. If they get an early caverns it shuts off your early counter magic. Thalia makes things incredibly difficult and they are able to reestablish their field with Collected Company. Any GW decks Control has a hard time dealing with because of recursion and being very resilient.
I would disagree with that, counters company has been underrepresented at almost every paper event I’ve attended in the last 3 months (exception being a PPTQ with ~20% of the meta being Coco)
Esper is good against most of the control and Midrange decks, it’s not a fold to aggro, so that leaves tempo, big mana, and combo — which are all pretty bad for Esper.
It’s a matchup game, but whereas Affinity can steal a quick t3 win against their bad MUs or storm can get a lucky top deck to put the game away, Esper has to fight and dig the entire game — there is rarely a game where you just flush out the opponent and ride the game to a quick finish.
For sure man. Aggro is not a quick fold, but it can be very difficult against Burn and Eldrazi (both Death and Taxes Eldrazi, Bant, and Tron). Game 1 is almost always a loss against burn, unless your hands line up perfectly and their hands are not fantastic. Sideboard does get better, but you gotta see those cards.
Obviously both sites have their problems, and this data set is kind of incomplete, but lets just use it for now.
Generally organizing this into 3 tiers: favorable, unfavorable, and even. I'm going to assume "other" is perfectly 50-50, which is maybe flawed, but I don't think its too unreasonable.
This doesn't actually look as bad as I expected it to when I started it, given thats its pretty even. Its obviously heavy on the "even" because I don't really have a lot of control over the "others" categories.
Obviously some people may disagree where I'm placing decks, but I'm trying to be objective, and not base this only on my own experience.
So its possible the current meta isn't terrible for esper, but its also possible this data isn't very accurate.
I think its worth noting that some of the "flavor of the month" decks that have gotten popular recently (humans, storm) are not good matchups for us. Burn has also seen an uptick recently (bad), as has tron over eldrazi tron (strictly speaking, even, but decks tron is good against we tend to be good against as well, and decks good against tend to be good against us as well). Its possible that for many of us, people tend to play a lot of the current popular decks, which makes the meta look a lot worse than these numbers do.
For the other part of your post, it seems obvious that esper is somewhat difficult to play. I have no doubt we all lost a lot when we first picked this deck up (I guess some have played hard draw-go for decades, but you still probably lost a lot when you started playing the archetype).
Few people will pick this deck up leading up to a major tournament, have immediate success with it, and then decide its the best choice, and take it.
It seems pretty obvious to me why this is true (why the deck is hard): its not very similar to most other decks in the format, its bad (plays a lot of underpowered cards), and its very unforgiving.
Obviously both sites have their problems, and this data set is kind of incomplete, but lets just use it for now.
Generally organizing this into 3 tiers: favorable, unfavorable, and even. I'm going to assume "other" is perfectly 50-50, which is maybe flawed, but I don't think its too unreasonable.
This doesn't actually look as bad as I expected it to when I started it, given thats its pretty even. Its obviously heavy on the "even" because I don't really have a lot of control over the "others" categories.
Obviously some people may disagree where I'm placing decks, but I'm trying to be objective, and not base this only on my own experience.
So its possible the current meta isn't terrible for esper, but its also possible this data isn't very accurate.
I think its worth noting that some of the "flavor of the month" decks that have gotten popular recently (humans, storm) are not good matchups for us. Burn has also seen an uptick recently (bad), as has tron over eldrazi tron (strictly speaking, even, but decks tron is good against we tend to be good against as well, and decks good against tend to be good against us as well). Its possible that for many of us, people tend to play a lot of the current popular decks, which makes the meta look a lot worse than these numbers do.
For the other part of your post, it seems obvious that esper is somewhat difficult to play. I have no doubt we all lost a lot when we first picked this deck up (I guess some have played hard draw-go for decades, but you still probably lost a lot when you started playing the archetype).
Few people will pick this deck up leading up to a major tournament, have immediate success with it, and then decide its the best choice, and take it.
It seems pretty obvious to me why this is true (why the deck is hard): its not very similar to most other decks in the format, its bad (plays a lot of underpowered cards), and its very unforgiving.
The only issue with using the stats from Mtggoldfish and mtgtop8 is combo is very poorly represented as to what it is in the actual paper magic. If you're predominantly playing online, then this data is fine I think. But I know for a fact Counters Company makes up more of the paper meta than these stats.
I think the best way to go in Modern right now if you want to play control is play a control deck with some sort of combo finish or a very fast clock, like Jeskai Geist. Personally, I think the best placed control decks are any of the Blood Moon decks. You are well placed against most of the field and there isn't any one matchup that is really bad.
Okay, so I wanna know everyone's opinions: It's been acknowledged that Esper isn't a great choice for the current meta, but why? What is it about the decks out there or about Esper that makes it so hard to play?
I think the biggest is the land based decks. Against Valakut, you can have all the answers in hand, but if you don't have a way to kill Valakut (find your 1 of 2 Ghost Quarters) they can just play lands and get there. Big mana is also hard for Esper to deal with as they can also go the long game and their top end is much better than yours. Esper also has a hard time with the incredibly fast decks like Burn and Elves due to the shaky mana base and the pain you have to deal yourself to be able to have W/B/U on 1, Double U on 2, and WUB on 3. Esper is in a bad spot because you are pretty bad against Tron and your aggro matchups are bad unless you see sideboard cards.
Jund isnt a control deck.
Its a midrange deck.
Breach is closer to false tempo than control, but I'm willing to accept the argument.
Shadow is a midrange deck.
That all being said, search seems to be good in a couple of decks (some jeskai, some UW, some grixis, some UR) but not nearly all.
Would you classify 4C Leovold as control? What about Delver in Legacy? I think there is a false premise that in order to be a control deck, you have to run nothing but counters, kill spells, and board wipes and only have a max of 5 win cons. A lot of people don't think the Esper Lingering Spirits list is a "control" deck, but why not? It runs Cryptics, Logic Knots, and Collective Brutality. Just because it's running Tasigurs, Anglers, and Lingering Spirits it's not control? "Grixis Control" In Legacy has very little counter magic or kill spells. Most lists only run 4 Cabal Therapy, maybe 1 or 2 Thoughtseize, 2 or 3 Fatal Push, and the rest of the list is cantrips, Young Pyros, and Anglers. Limiting control to being only draw-go style of play only hinders your own thought process.
Breach and Death's Shadow are 100% control decks. They are just a different type of control. That's like saying Jund isn't control because it doesn't run Blue. Breach is a control deck that has a combo finisher, much like Nahiri Control, Saheeli Control, and Splinter Twin of old. Death's Shadow is control as well. It runs hand disruption and counter magic. It just has a faster clock and a tempo style or tap out control.
Yeah the price went up on Merchant Ship because of buyouts, but the reason people bought it out was because of speculation of this stupid Stompy Deck that wasn't real. The same thing is happening right now with Lotus Vale's and Blood Sun. People are speculating and they bought out Lotus Vales and now the prices spiked.
You realize that Pirate Stompy is a fake deck? It was completely made up by Bob Huang from Channel Fireball and everyone bought it hook-line-and-sinker.
Merchant Ship even spiked to like a $20 card. This is the problem with our society, no one thoroughly reads anything. They read the headline and then hit repost. Here's the original link. READ THE WHOLE THING. It's hilarious and a lot of opportunists made some serious money on it. https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/popeye-stompy/
There was a card printed already that did a very similar card called Pharika's Cure and it only saw a little play in Theros Block in UB. I don't think the BB and B1 really makes that much of a difference. It might see standard play.
The only issue with using the stats from Mtggoldfish and mtgtop8 is combo is very poorly represented as to what it is in the actual paper magic. If you're predominantly playing online, then this data is fine I think. But I know for a fact Counters Company makes up more of the paper meta than these stats.