I get the shockland thing, and I'm glad I have enough to build decks with, but I'm not sure that a stack of them is the best mana base. Fetches, basics, a few shocks, and some number of filter/futuresight/man lands seems like a much better manabase. We didn't have fetches in Ravnica, so of course you needed a dozen duals in every deck. This isn't Legacy-- no one gets to play wasteland or sinkhole.
The threat of Wasteland (and to a lesser extent, Blood Moon, Back to Basics, and Price of Progress) is the main reason Legacy manabases aren't just stacks of duals. Only one of the cards I named is legal in this format.
Yeah, and when you cast him on turn 2, he isn't 5/6 either without Legacy level shenanigans. Normally 0/1, 2/3 at best.
Tarmogoyf has always been cool but never terrifying as a turn 2 drop. The problem comes when he's a turn 6 drop, is a 5/6, and you can't stop it because your opponent has 3-4 blue open. It is honestly the best blue creature ever printed.
If a card hits triple digits then Wizards can just make an Event deck with one or two copies of it and sell it for $30. That's the whole point of a nonrotating format with no reprint policy, isn't it? The expensive staples can be managed and Wizards can actually make some money off of the secondary market. Increasing the supply of, say, Shock Lands would do a lot towards distinguishing the format (price wise) from Legacy. A few other staples come to mind - Confidant, Tarmogoyf, and possibly Sculptor, though all of those would have to be handled with more delicacy.
So your solution to the inconsistency of RDW is to add in a combo that wrecks the mana base, necessitates running 12 cards that do nothing to advance the RDW portion of your win condition, and to then run insufficient lands and dig spells to support the combo?
Sounds like a terrible idea. Shoving the Twin combo into some existing archetypes can work, but RDW isn't one of those archetypes.
I saw a guy playing Bant-Pod at a Win-A-Box side event at the SCG Cincinatti open. It was a cool list, did hilarious shenanigans.
"Birthing pod, sac Archon of Justice, exile your batterskull. Get a sun titan, bringing back Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back a 3rd Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back Sea Gate Oracle.
Blue has some great ETB creatures, and a clone at CMC 2 is probably too good for a list chock-full of amazing creatures to pass up on.
I luck-sacked a victory against him with insane topdecks as RDW, but it was a fantastic fight.
Oh my God it's a list from I-N-S that doesn't run 4 Ingenuities.
All joking aside, it looks interesting...though considering that Death's Shadow is your sole win condition (you can't really rely on Tar Pit with a land count that low), aren't there real problems with your opponent simply having a removal spell or two? Sure, you have counters to protect them, but you also need counters to stall your opponent's game plan. It just seems like there are going to be a lot of times where the need to protect the Shadow is going to put you in a lose/lose situation - after all, you can't play the long game as well as a lot of other decks, so I'm not sure you'll have time to simply find another Shadow.
Also, for a deck that's so built around the phyrexian mana mechanic and that has such a crippling fear of RDW, the lack of Spellskite in the 75 seems unusual. I'm not quite sure where I would squeeze it in the 75 - probably in place of Surgical Extraction, though that's up for debate.
Final question: why Duress over any of the other 1CMC discard options in sideboard?
Albus:
I don't think building the deck very strongly around Edric is wrong, it's one approach (though by no means absolutely the best), it just means you have to protect it. Finally, I really hate playing vanilla creatures, even if they fly. I will however try cloud pirates out once or twice if I have time.
Bol:
I agree protecting Edric the turn he comes out is important, but I'm not actually that sad when I play him turn three (though I do have 7 0-1CC excellerator cards) as long as he's somewhat protected. My late game plam is fauna shaman and survival, as they can be used to fetch counterspells (mystic snake / venser + bounce dudes to bring them back), as I'm super aggro, I think that's all I need. I only have a few cards at 4CC and none above it (save prowl alternate costs) and it allows me to have fewer dead draws in a game, I never have found myself at 10 mana (6 for buybacked capsize + 4 for snake), so I don't think that merit's inclusion. I will test with the 1/1 flyers.
I just sleeved up a version of the deck that is heavily reliant on Edric, and I have to say I find myself agreeing with you. Flying Men is awesome when it's also a Shadowmage Infiltrator, but if it isn't, it's just bad.
Still, I think the focus has to be on Edric. Whenever I've been able to start drawing cards on turn 2, I haven't lost. The idea of waiting until turn 4 or 5 to start swinging with evasive beaters and drawing cards (looking at you, Serendib Efreet) is highly unappealing. I honestly think that if you want to play a higher curved U/G deck then Vig is almost strictly superior; Edric lends itself to aggro.
Yeah, I have to run jank like Foil, Commandeer, and Misdirection. But I'm willing to suffer the card disadvantage for that early game tempo, because if Edric starts winning it simply doesn't stop.
All of these tools (excepting Spellskite and the rarely-played Despise) existed before Cawblade became the dominant deck. And the only one that was a serious problem was RDW, which Valakut could still race with a good enough hand, depending on what its ramp package was. (Overgrown Battlement: expect it.)
And none of them stopped Valakut from being an unholy terror. Valakut has more than a good matchup against "certain forms of aggro and midrange," it had a good matchup against control. You seem to forget that U/b usually lost to Valakut, as even without a resolved Titan it still had an acceptable clock in the form of dropping lands. You can't counter everything, and without the power of Stoneforge + Hawks, control is a bit slower than a slow-rolled Valakut deck.
You're right about one thing: Valakut is easier to beat than CawBlade. But CawBlade has been ushered into the elite hall of "utter nonsense" along with other Standard-banned decks, such as Affinity and Academy. Valakut will still be a powerful force to be reckoned with...but more along the lines of post-WWK Jund than anything else, methinks. It's an inexpensive, competitive deck with an even or positive matchup against vast portions of the field. Even if it's not the most winningest deck, it will still pull down a good chunk of victories just by being a disproportionate percentage of the playfield.
I say restrict Jace and Stone-Forge. Problem solved.
I take it you mean ban? We've had this conversation.
Historically, the policy of the DCI is to ban broken "engine" cards, as opposed to powerful cards that merely run off of the engine. I'll give some examples: recently (actually some time ago), Survival of the Fittest was banned in Legacy, because it was the engine which powered out a broken aggro deck whose worst matchup against major decks was 52% against Tendrils. Now, the recent card that had pushed Survival over the top was Vengevine - but rather than ban the enabler (Vengevine) they banned the engine (Survival).
A similar thing happened with the old Necropotence decks. The DCI fiddled around with banning all of the cards Necropotence enabled before eventually giving up and just banning Necropotence, which allowed for a huge spate of unbannings.
Mystical Tutor was also banned a few months before Survival of the Fittest, because it freed up so much deck space and allowed an incredibly powerful and diverse suite of answers to be run in multiple decks, mostly Reanimator and Tendrils. Both were amazingly dominant decks that were heavily neutered by the loss of Mystical Tutor and its package of Silver Bullet answers. (Old tendrils lists would run 1-of outs to every major deck in the format simply to fetch them and then combo off. One of the common 1-ofs was their main combo piece, Ad Nauseum.) Without the protection and consistency Mystical Tutor represented, both decks could still operate - but with a significantly worse matchup against large portions of the playing field.
So we have to ask: what is the engine that makes Caw-Blade so powerful? Most will point to either Jace or Stoneforge or both. (If you think it's Gideon Jura you have no place in this discussion :P).
Once we've identified the engine, we have to consider what would be the best way to institute a ban that would do the following two things:
1) Remove the imbalanced nature of the format
a) I'm assuming, for the sake of argument, that the format is broken and needs bans.
2) Allow for the greatest possible variety in deckbuilding
So let's look at our two candidates. Jace the Mind-Sculptor is the face of the format and the posterchild for people who hate Mythic rarity. (I think that posterchild should be Batterskull but we can discuss that at another time and place.) Jace has been a very powerful card since the days of UW Tapout and Planeswalker Control during the winter/summer periods of ALARA-M10-ZENDIKAR standard. He hits the table and creates card advantage and (usually) puts your opponent in a very difficult and awkward situation that has no good way out. He is powerful enough to be played in every format.
Jace is also no longer the "only" good Blue card. When originally printed, Blue existed only in Mythic Bant and the rare Cruel Control deck; there simply wasn't any playable card pool for heavy blue. This is no longer the case. Blue decks can definitely be played without Jace the Mind Sculptor, though he is undoubtedly an asset to most. He's like a Phyrexian Arena that also gives you tempo and occasionally straight up wins the game. (Though if you're winning with his ultimate, you won the game long ago.)
Stoneforge Mystic is a bit like Tarmogoyf. It came out as a dollar rare, shot to $5 when people remembered Basilisk Collar, and as time went on and the Sword cycle came out it soared as high as $20-$25. (Though there is now confirmation that Stoneforge will exist as a 2-of in a $25 precon deck that comes out on the 10th of June, and its current price ($15) reflects that.) Stoneforge is an engine card very akin to Mystical Tutor in that it frees up a massive chunk of deckspace, allows for consistently finding silver bullet hate cards (Mortarpod, Sylvok Lifestaff), and is the true "engine" behind the power of Caw-Blade.
Honestly? My vote goes to Stoneforge Mystic. But I don't see them printing it in a precon deck and then banning it 10 days later. Mind Sculptor will probably take the hit, if anything does get banned.
Missing Ponder also hurts, but the Probe is a reasonable sit-in replacement for Manamorphose from the extended version. I built it recently myself, but then I realised that without Time Warp, I'm just basically playing a bad UR burn deck that needs to dig for a specific card to even win the game.
Missing Ponder hurts more than Time Warp, imo. Most of the time Time Warp was either win-more or an awkward sort of cantrip; Ponder actually got you the necessary ascensions.
Thrun is an irrelevant 4/4 for 4 with irrelevant abilities. He does nothing when he comes into play. His only abilities are being really hard to kill, because of the troll shroud, regeneration, and a lack of interest in killing a 4/4 that doesn't actually do anything.
So yeah, Thrun isn't bad, per se, but he's certainly not good. Mediocre at best.
Edit: And I say this as somebody who has won at least two games solely because of a 1-of Thrun wielding a sword against Ux control's fistful of Condemns.
Of the cards you named, only GFtT, Doom Blade, and Into the Roil are currently played/playable. Beast Within will probably see play, but we dunno yet. And Oust isn't even an instant.
I always saw Act of Treason a Squadron Hawk with a sword, the sword "falls off" and sets them back a turn. I just assumed the Aura would "fall off", but being an aura go to the graveyard.
If you gain control of a creature that is enchanted/equipped with something, you don't gain control of that enchantment/equipment. That means if you, say, Mind Control a creature that has an equipment on it, that equipment's controller still controls the equipment. This means that only that equipment's controller can activate the equipment's abilities - such as its equip cost.
Splinter Twin is an aura that grants an activated ability to the enchanted creature. As such, when you gain control of the creature, you gain the ability to activate the ability.
But I'm pretty sure they can make infinite blockers, since they have their guy back.
I didn't think you could end-step the spell, and actually keep the dude for your own turn, because it doesn't say "until the beginning of the next end phase" or however they word it. Same with the copy effect. It doesn't work like Mimic Vat, I don't think.
Splinter Twin is, for whatever reason, worded with "until the beginning of the next end step." So if you still have the creature during the beginning of the end step, you should be able to make a ton of tokens. Not sure when exactly you lose the critter though - cleanup, I think? You should be able to.
But as you pointed out, infinite blockers.
The new threaten is, regardless, a bad answer to the combo and a bad card in general.
The threat of Wasteland (and to a lesser extent, Blood Moon, Back to Basics, and Price of Progress) is the main reason Legacy manabases aren't just stacks of duals. Only one of the cards I named is legal in this format.
Tarmogoyf has always been cool but never terrifying as a turn 2 drop. The problem comes when he's a turn 6 drop, is a 5/6, and you can't stop it because your opponent has 3-4 blue open. It is honestly the best blue creature ever printed.
Sounds like a terrible idea. Shoving the Twin combo into some existing archetypes can work, but RDW isn't one of those archetypes.
"Birthing pod, sac Archon of Justice, exile your batterskull. Get a sun titan, bringing back Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back a 3rd Phantasmal Image as a copy of Sun Titan, bringing back Sea Gate Oracle.
Blue has some great ETB creatures, and a clone at CMC 2 is probably too good for a list chock-full of amazing creatures to pass up on.
I luck-sacked a victory against him with insane topdecks as RDW, but it was a fantastic fight.
All joking aside, it looks interesting...though considering that Death's Shadow is your sole win condition (you can't really rely on Tar Pit with a land count that low), aren't there real problems with your opponent simply having a removal spell or two? Sure, you have counters to protect them, but you also need counters to stall your opponent's game plan. It just seems like there are going to be a lot of times where the need to protect the Shadow is going to put you in a lose/lose situation - after all, you can't play the long game as well as a lot of other decks, so I'm not sure you'll have time to simply find another Shadow.
Also, for a deck that's so built around the phyrexian mana mechanic and that has such a crippling fear of RDW, the lack of Spellskite in the 75 seems unusual. I'm not quite sure where I would squeeze it in the 75 - probably in place of Surgical Extraction, though that's up for debate.
Final question: why Duress over any of the other 1CMC discard options in sideboard?
I just sleeved up a version of the deck that is heavily reliant on Edric, and I have to say I find myself agreeing with you. Flying Men is awesome when it's also a Shadowmage Infiltrator, but if it isn't, it's just bad.
Still, I think the focus has to be on Edric. Whenever I've been able to start drawing cards on turn 2, I haven't lost. The idea of waiting until turn 4 or 5 to start swinging with evasive beaters and drawing cards (looking at you, Serendib Efreet) is highly unappealing. I honestly think that if you want to play a higher curved U/G deck then Vig is almost strictly superior; Edric lends itself to aggro.
Yeah, I have to run jank like Foil, Commandeer, and Misdirection. But I'm willing to suffer the card disadvantage for that early game tempo, because if Edric starts winning it simply doesn't stop.
Will post a list later.
And none of them stopped Valakut from being an unholy terror. Valakut has more than a good matchup against "certain forms of aggro and midrange," it had a good matchup against control. You seem to forget that U/b usually lost to Valakut, as even without a resolved Titan it still had an acceptable clock in the form of dropping lands. You can't counter everything, and without the power of Stoneforge + Hawks, control is a bit slower than a slow-rolled Valakut deck.
You're right about one thing: Valakut is easier to beat than CawBlade. But CawBlade has been ushered into the elite hall of "utter nonsense" along with other Standard-banned decks, such as Affinity and Academy. Valakut will still be a powerful force to be reckoned with...but more along the lines of post-WWK Jund than anything else, methinks. It's an inexpensive, competitive deck with an even or positive matchup against vast portions of the field. Even if it's not the most winningest deck, it will still pull down a good chunk of victories just by being a disproportionate percentage of the playfield.
I take it you mean ban? We've had this conversation.
Historically, the policy of the DCI is to ban broken "engine" cards, as opposed to powerful cards that merely run off of the engine. I'll give some examples: recently (actually some time ago), Survival of the Fittest was banned in Legacy, because it was the engine which powered out a broken aggro deck whose worst matchup against major decks was 52% against Tendrils. Now, the recent card that had pushed Survival over the top was Vengevine - but rather than ban the enabler (Vengevine) they banned the engine (Survival).
A similar thing happened with the old Necropotence decks. The DCI fiddled around with banning all of the cards Necropotence enabled before eventually giving up and just banning Necropotence, which allowed for a huge spate of unbannings.
Mystical Tutor was also banned a few months before Survival of the Fittest, because it freed up so much deck space and allowed an incredibly powerful and diverse suite of answers to be run in multiple decks, mostly Reanimator and Tendrils. Both were amazingly dominant decks that were heavily neutered by the loss of Mystical Tutor and its package of Silver Bullet answers. (Old tendrils lists would run 1-of outs to every major deck in the format simply to fetch them and then combo off. One of the common 1-ofs was their main combo piece, Ad Nauseum.) Without the protection and consistency Mystical Tutor represented, both decks could still operate - but with a significantly worse matchup against large portions of the playing field.
So we have to ask: what is the engine that makes Caw-Blade so powerful? Most will point to either Jace or Stoneforge or both. (If you think it's Gideon Jura you have no place in this discussion :P).
Once we've identified the engine, we have to consider what would be the best way to institute a ban that would do the following two things:
1) Remove the imbalanced nature of the format
a) I'm assuming, for the sake of argument, that the format is broken and needs bans.
2) Allow for the greatest possible variety in deckbuilding
So let's look at our two candidates. Jace the Mind-Sculptor is the face of the format and the posterchild for people who hate Mythic rarity. (I think that posterchild should be Batterskull but we can discuss that at another time and place.) Jace has been a very powerful card since the days of UW Tapout and Planeswalker Control during the winter/summer periods of ALARA-M10-ZENDIKAR standard. He hits the table and creates card advantage and (usually) puts your opponent in a very difficult and awkward situation that has no good way out. He is powerful enough to be played in every format.
Jace is also no longer the "only" good Blue card. When originally printed, Blue existed only in Mythic Bant and the rare Cruel Control deck; there simply wasn't any playable card pool for heavy blue. This is no longer the case. Blue decks can definitely be played without Jace the Mind Sculptor, though he is undoubtedly an asset to most. He's like a Phyrexian Arena that also gives you tempo and occasionally straight up wins the game. (Though if you're winning with his ultimate, you won the game long ago.)
Stoneforge Mystic is a bit like Tarmogoyf. It came out as a dollar rare, shot to $5 when people remembered Basilisk Collar, and as time went on and the Sword cycle came out it soared as high as $20-$25. (Though there is now confirmation that Stoneforge will exist as a 2-of in a $25 precon deck that comes out on the 10th of June, and its current price ($15) reflects that.) Stoneforge is an engine card very akin to Mystical Tutor in that it frees up a massive chunk of deckspace, allows for consistently finding silver bullet hate cards (Mortarpod, Sylvok Lifestaff), and is the true "engine" behind the power of Caw-Blade.
Honestly? My vote goes to Stoneforge Mystic. But I don't see them printing it in a precon deck and then banning it 10 days later. Mind Sculptor will probably take the hit, if anything does get banned.
Missing Ponder hurts more than Time Warp, imo. Most of the time Time Warp was either win-more or an awkward sort of cantrip; Ponder actually got you the necessary ascensions.
So yeah, Thrun isn't bad, per se, but he's certainly not good. Mediocre at best.
Edit: And I say this as somebody who has won at least two games solely because of a 1-of Thrun wielding a sword against Ux control's fistful of Condemns.
If Boros is holding 3 mana open starting on my turn 3 for the rest of the game? I'm okay with this.
Only when you're on the play. And only when they don't have a Spell Pierce, Mana Leak, or Into the Roil at the ready.
Really, Torpor Orb is bad.
Of the cards you named, only GFtT, Doom Blade, and Into the Roil are currently played/playable. Beast Within will probably see play, but we dunno yet. And Oust isn't even an instant.
If you gain control of a creature that is enchanted/equipped with something, you don't gain control of that enchantment/equipment. That means if you, say, Mind Control a creature that has an equipment on it, that equipment's controller still controls the equipment. This means that only that equipment's controller can activate the equipment's abilities - such as its equip cost.
Splinter Twin is an aura that grants an activated ability to the enchanted creature. As such, when you gain control of the creature, you gain the ability to activate the ability.
Splinter Twin is, for whatever reason, worded with "until the beginning of the next end step." So if you still have the creature during the beginning of the end step, you should be able to make a ton of tokens. Not sure when exactly you lose the critter though - cleanup, I think? You should be able to.
But as you pointed out, infinite blockers.
The new threaten is, regardless, a bad answer to the combo and a bad card in general.