Think people are making the wrong comparisons here. Many green decks right now want to be casting 4-6 mana cards not 3 mana cards. This is why cards like llanowar and birds aren't good atm.
In the past couple years people got to this 4-6 mana region by using a combination of birds, nest invader and lotus cobra. This is where this card fits in. It will usually only produce 1 mana which is ok as it allows a green deck to still hit their turn 4 garruk/thrun etc without a problem.
Against control play this out on turn 2 on the play and then the control deck has to choose if to leave leak open or not. If they do the green player then has 5 mana to play with, aka a 2 drop with leak back up. If they don't then you can tap out for your turn 4 garruk against a control deck. On the draw it gives the control deck the awkward situation of countering it now or gives up on using mana leak for the rest of the game. However, I believe the control decks best answer to it is to kill it, which also a good case scenario as it means a control deck has used of its removal spells on a 2 drop and leaving it open to play a 3 drop (birthing pod?)
In the right deck this will be a sweet card, but not the sort of deck most people are thinking of.
hmm im not 100% about the red deck wins. a friend of mine was play a great red deck and is a very good at what he dose and i sweeped him 2-0 game one has turn 3 win and game 2 has turn 5 win. but i do agree that more testing is need. in this mu but dont underamate this deck.
Don't get me wrong I'm running a rug pod list and am having great success with it. However, I ran deck, with fauna shamen, which ran fairly similar to this last nat's going 5-1 in the constructed section with the only loss coming from the same guy who won the Sydeny ptq just before, it was a hyper red deck which ran howling mind if you don't remember it.
The best sb strategy against red is to take out the little creatures which die to burn easily such as fauna shaman. Hence the Shaman is just another card you don't want against red. As is the red mu is pretty good but the shaman puts that in doubt.
Just to let you guys know, we've been testing this trying desperately to make it work considering we pioneered this deck this time last year. It just isn't good enough to be played at a nationals level, the loss of jace is still to great even with the m12 cards.
to be fair the red mu isn't as good with the fauna shaman versions. All the signs are indicating that at nats there will be a lot of red decks (~15-20%). Kinda want a very good red mu.
I'm glad he cut the masticore. It just wasn't good enough I found.
I really want to manage to fit in an inferno titan into the list. That card is ridiculous against all of the random creature based decks out there atm which is only going to be emphasised with m12. So anyone know where to fit in an Inferno Titan?
why not just run removal in place of splinter twin/ exarch to protect your self-admitted primary way of winning, that seems like it would be the most consistant rather than trying to fit in a random i-win condition where you might tutor an exarch up with splinter twin in hand or win-more off a titan. Admittedly it works well with acidic slime but that's about it imo.
Exach's primary role is to jump from cc of 2 to a cc of 4 in one turn. Its a lot stronger then the trinket mage packages people are running by itself. So realistically the only cards you would cut would be the 3 splinter twins... its not much of a commitment for a I-win combo. As you also noted splinter twin works well in a second combo with slime. You get almost as many scoops from twin on slime as on exarch.
To be honest the loosest cards in smitty's deck (excluding the 4 drops obviously) are the birds.
I've been reading around that people think that Metamorph copies the converted mana cost as well. I'm currently living with 3 old pro tour players and all of them don't believe this to be correct unless there has been a rule change in the past 2 years (they used to play with clone).
Considering how we're thinking of playing with birthing pod this coming nats it would be appreciated if someone wouldn't mind clearing this up as our usual judges we ask are currently out of the country.
Well i think that baloth vs finks is an argument based on what do you expect to see more, Decks with board wipes your vulnerable to or decks with blighting. Baloth is an anti Jund monster and i fully suspect ill be seeing that match up more that U/W control or something similar. A card that is a tutorable, free answer to a bloodbraid - blightning seems to be to be the better option.
I see where your comming from but The jund mu is so far in favour of the deck I posted its rediculus. You combine all of Jund's weaknesses into a deck, speed, agression and recusion and just crush them. I guess the more green based versions wouldn't have as good a mu as the more red versions do but that may just speek volumes for the heavy red version.
The merits of finks vs Baloth is an interesting discussion but it may just be deck dependent. I do have to stress that finks answers Vengevine and many rdw cards reasonably well too.
Btw Demigod is so important in the Revilark, Cruel etc mu's as not only is it a big, evasive, recurring creature but it's also uncountorable.
Don't need baloths, You always almost win every race as is. Finks do the job just as well but is also useful against decks with multiple wrath effects.
spectral procession has an official CMC of 6(cuz of the hybrid cost)
cloudgoat brings no hate and only works well in tandem with procession
Seems like some of your core understandings of deck building are wrong, but rather then me try to explain them have a look at these 2 articles and pretty much any of Flores articles of late on tcg player. Hopefully they can explain it better then what I can.
When day is good generally taeg is bad so that shouldn't be the issue, the issue should be that running wrath in a aggro deck is almost always wrong.
Surprised not to see any Behemoth Sledge in the deck... considering it's one of the best equipments going around and your in its colours why not? I here its a beating vs Jund (also makes Fae's force field effect bad) and a lifelinking/trampling Colossus sounds better then an unblockable one.
If you can get the mana to work Spectral Procession is one of the most powerful white cards going around even though it doesn;t work the greatest with teeg (btw its still good at 4cc). It also lets you play Windbrisk Heights resonably effectively, although it would make Cloudgoat Ranger a better card (atleast mb) then the baneslayers and prolly even the cloud threshers (I know there for fae but with the extra power and ca it may not be needed mb).
That would leave the mb looking something like this:
Jace, the Mindsculptor. Who loves him, who thinks he's not necessary in the deck?
Jace TMS is great... in the sideboard.
It's needed vs decks that target either your hand heavily or the combo heavily. It's also pretty good vs decks which have their own jaces or only want to land a single threat.
As on if the deck is tournament legal... just check the recent star city 5k's. Kinda weary of troll feeding here but meh.
Whenever I play the deck I feel like I'm letting it down and not the deck letting me down. The only other time I had that feeling was when I picked up Antonio Ruel 2001 worlds deck: AK-GO. Such a powerful deck, so hard to get the most out of it. Definitely get the feeling that if I can just play the deck at 95% I will top 8 anything.
Anyway not been having fun with forsee... I get why it's in the deck but it clumps my hand up to much. Any thoughts for a replacement?
I've thought of Ingenuity but its just so expensive too... hard to find such power cheap and instant speed.
Well to actually answer the op's question: I think someone would have to present a very very good argument against pyromancer ascension from not being the most skill intensive deck in standard.
btw I'm assuming that we're only talking about t1 and t2 decks and not random fringe decks.
The cards are there but the lands are not, for a 2 colour deck (with unusual exceptions such as pyro) need 2-3 dual lands to work. (eg. B/W tokens lost nothing with tenth leaving except for a dual land... the deck wasn't played since).
Also Jund was basically a rock deck yet very few cards from zendikar block were good enough to make the deck... suggests that the cards just aren't powerful enough.
Also in a format of hay-makers rocks incremental advantage looks less and less attractive, I know it sounds like I'm just banging on Flores but he's right atm.
In the past couple years people got to this 4-6 mana region by using a combination of birds, nest invader and lotus cobra. This is where this card fits in. It will usually only produce 1 mana which is ok as it allows a green deck to still hit their turn 4 garruk/thrun etc without a problem.
Against control play this out on turn 2 on the play and then the control deck has to choose if to leave leak open or not. If they do the green player then has 5 mana to play with, aka a 2 drop with leak back up. If they don't then you can tap out for your turn 4 garruk against a control deck. On the draw it gives the control deck the awkward situation of countering it now or gives up on using mana leak for the rest of the game. However, I believe the control decks best answer to it is to kill it, which also a good case scenario as it means a control deck has used of its removal spells on a 2 drop and leaving it open to play a 3 drop (birthing pod?)
In the right deck this will be a sweet card, but not the sort of deck most people are thinking of.
Don't get me wrong I'm running a rug pod list and am having great success with it. However, I ran deck, with fauna shamen, which ran fairly similar to this last nat's going 5-1 in the constructed section with the only loss coming from the same guy who won the Sydeny ptq just before, it was a hyper red deck which ran howling mind if you don't remember it.
The best sb strategy against red is to take out the little creatures which die to burn easily such as fauna shaman. Hence the Shaman is just another card you don't want against red. As is the red mu is pretty good but the shaman puts that in doubt.
I really want to manage to fit in an inferno titan into the list. That card is ridiculous against all of the random creature based decks out there atm which is only going to be emphasised with m12. So anyone know where to fit in an Inferno Titan?
Exach's primary role is to jump from cc of 2 to a cc of 4 in one turn. Its a lot stronger then the trinket mage packages people are running by itself. So realistically the only cards you would cut would be the 3 splinter twins... its not much of a commitment for a I-win combo. As you also noted splinter twin works well in a second combo with slime. You get almost as many scoops from twin on slime as on exarch.
To be honest the loosest cards in smitty's deck (excluding the 4 drops obviously) are the birds.
Considering how we're thinking of playing with birthing pod this coming nats it would be appreciated if someone wouldn't mind clearing this up as our usual judges we ask are currently out of the country.
I see where your comming from but The jund mu is so far in favour of the deck I posted its rediculus. You combine all of Jund's weaknesses into a deck, speed, agression and recusion and just crush them. I guess the more green based versions wouldn't have as good a mu as the more red versions do but that may just speek volumes for the heavy red version.
The merits of finks vs Baloth is an interesting discussion but it may just be deck dependent. I do have to stress that finks answers Vengevine and many rdw cards reasonably well too.
Btw Demigod is so important in the Revilark, Cruel etc mu's as not only is it a big, evasive, recurring creature but it's also uncountorable.
You can always just build a better manabase to support the demigods. Here's what I've got atm.
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
4 Copperline Gorge
5 Mountain
4 Arid Mesa
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Raging Ravine
Creatures
4 Fauna Shaman
3 Ember Hauler
4 Vengevine
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Demigod of Revenge
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Flame Javelin
4 Kargan Dragonlord
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Volcanic Fallout
3 Traitorous Instinct
Don't need baloths, You always almost win every race as is. Finks do the job just as well but is also useful against decks with multiple wrath effects.
Seems like some of your core understandings of deck building are wrong, but rather then me try to explain them have a look at these 2 articles and pretty much any of Flores articles of late on tcg player. Hopefully they can explain it better then what I can.
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/breaking-through-i-d-required/
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-state-of-legacy-picking-apart-survival/
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article_search_result.asp?author=Michael%20Flores
When day is good generally taeg is bad so that shouldn't be the issue, the issue should be that running wrath in a aggro deck is almost always wrong.
Surprised not to see any Behemoth Sledge in the deck... considering it's one of the best equipments going around and your in its colours why not? I here its a beating vs Jund (also makes Fae's force field effect bad) and a lifelinking/trampling Colossus sounds better then an unblockable one.
If you can get the mana to work Spectral Procession is one of the most powerful white cards going around even though it doesn;t work the greatest with teeg (btw its still good at 4cc). It also lets you play Windbrisk Heights resonably effectively, although it would make Cloudgoat Ranger a better card (atleast mb) then the baneslayers and prolly even the cloud threshers (I know there for fae but with the extra power and ca it may not be needed mb).
That would leave the mb looking something like this:
6 Forest
2 Sunpetal Grove
4 Razorverge Thicket
4 Wooded Bastion
2 Stirring Wildwood
3 Plains
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Noble Hierarch
3 Great Sable Stag
4 Wilt-Leaf Liege
4 Kitchen Finks
3 Gaddock Teeg
2 Stoneforge Mystic
2 Chameleon Colossus
4 Cloudgoat Ranger
3 Path to Exile
1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Sword of Body and Mind
4 Spectral Procession
Obviously still needs tweaking and play testing but that's where I would start.
Jace TMS is great... in the sideboard.
It's needed vs decks that target either your hand heavily or the combo heavily. It's also pretty good vs decks which have their own jaces or only want to land a single threat.
As on if the deck is tournament legal... just check the recent star city 5k's. Kinda weary of troll feeding here but meh.
Whenever I play the deck I feel like I'm letting it down and not the deck letting me down. The only other time I had that feeling was when I picked up Antonio Ruel 2001 worlds deck: AK-GO. Such a powerful deck, so hard to get the most out of it. Definitely get the feeling that if I can just play the deck at 95% I will top 8 anything.
Anyway not been having fun with forsee... I get why it's in the deck but it clumps my hand up to much. Any thoughts for a replacement?
I've thought of Ingenuity but its just so expensive too... hard to find such power cheap and instant speed.
btw I'm assuming that we're only talking about t1 and t2 decks and not random fringe decks.
Also Jund was basically a rock deck yet very few cards from zendikar block were good enough to make the deck... suggests that the cards just aren't powerful enough.
Also in a format of hay-makers rocks incremental advantage looks less and less attractive, I know it sounds like I'm just banging on Flores but he's right atm.
Sorry for the inconvenient truth.