MTG Salvation

Damping Sphere seems nice. That will be in my Sideboard for sure.

Hey just popping in to say great job guys! I really like the feel of the current decklist.

Btw, I do believe that Quiet Disrepair would still lose you the game vs Demonic Pact without the bounce. They both trigger at the same time, so it wouldn't matter which you stacked on each other. Both triggers would resolve.

Quote from valleysdai »

As a major supporter for the bug version, which red cards are you keeping in the 75? I'm only keeping 1 red card and that is aether grid

Slaughter Games. Might bring back Hide/Seek. I cut AetherGrid months ago as I wasn't having issues with creatures after turn 3-4(and if I was, it was a single creature so Dispatch was a better choice imo), though I still have it in my binder as a maybe. Wincon wise, my current version only wins through mill, helped out by Surgical Extraction and Nephalia Drownyard. Timing out might become a factor again for me, but meh we'll see.

I still like it as an Alternate win-con and it has promise, but the more I tooled with it to work the more it felt like two separate decks. That coupled with the massive amount of Main board hate that destroys Thopter Foundry before you can get the ball rolling made me shelf it for now. Online is full of non-burn decks, and that is really the only match up I was finding myself wanting more Thopter. It's mighty powerful, but playing it vs Scavenging Ooze is just not worth it. A midrange Tezzeret deck would do better with it.

I took it out, and replaced it with some Serum Visions and a 2nd Surgical Extraction. I'm liking the Bug version of this deck, and have since cut nearly every red card in the 75.

Personally, I don't blind mill myself unless I have a way to get whatever I'm looking for. Usually, this is with Academy Ruins either in my hand or on the field.

I like Faithless Looting based solely on the flashback ability. I don't see it having a place in this deck anymore, but in the past I did love the ability to ditch high costed cards or lands while also digging for the cards I needed.

Now though? Now I'm going to run Serum Visions or Gitaxian Probe over anything else if I want more digging power. This is after maximizing Ancient Stirrings.

Having played 100's of games with Grindclock I can safely say I like it as the 9th or 10th mill rock after you have maxed out Bell and Codex. It wins games faster that you have already won. It is not completely a win more card because it can act as a regular mill rock by coming into play tapped, but even still it does have a tendency to slow the deck down. I ultimately cut it as I didn't have enough room. If you search the thread you can see one of my decklists that did praise the card, though you can also look at that decklist and see some pitfalls that the deck was still running into (namely efficiency). It's on my list of maybe cards that I keep around, but I doubt it will be coming off anytime soon.

My Ranking of Millrocks

1. Codex Shredder
2. Ghoulcaller's Bell
3. Pyxis of Pandemonium
4. Grindclock

I play Dispatch for Platinum Angel, manlands, and bigger than 4 butt creatures. Game 2 I have more answers. I find Dispatch more useful than Aether Grid, specifically because of that situation and Ulamog. I would not play more than 1 though.Personal preference obviously

Quote from Lantern »

Old extended ran 3 swords, 4 thopters. It ran 3-4 muddle the mixture to find them both, and 3-4 Tezzeret the Seeker and Thirst for Knowledge as combo finds. It dropped tez and 1 sword and 1 thopter when it became a hybrid deck. Just some random knowlage I know that might help ya'll out.

Thanks Lantern, it was a pleasure testing against your Zoo deck yesterday. My only loss too, and that Blood Moon + Stony Silence was oppressive.

So if we use that thought process, then because we are a hybrid deck a 3 Thopter Foundry and 2 Sword of the Meek split might be the best.
I was taught for deck building that a quick idea on how many of each card you should run:

1. If you want to see the card once every other game
2. If you want to see the card generally
3. If you want to see the card once every game
4. If you always want to see the card

Obviously the nature of Top Control plays with the 1 ofs and 2 ofs, but the core of that idea might be useful for others.

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I don't think worrying about a ban before we have become overly oppressive is that important, and which is why I feel like it'd be more constructive to just work on deck testings and reports. Bare minimum, a deck made of Draft Chafe was banned, and people will look at the Banlist years later and say "Really?" I personally find that thought hilarious.

So I just finished playing a couple games with my deck above. A few things:

• Overall, I'm changing my position. Thopter/Sword should be in this deck. It's defense + Wincon.
• I still want Spellskites main deck. This fights against infect/boggles/targeted removal/Exalted.
• Stony Silence still hurts, though now more than ever. White decks will have it. I'm gonna be running Ray of Revelation again in my SB
• I'd still run a main deck Surgical. It's still quite useful.

Now what amount of Thopters and Swords should be in the deck? That I'm not sure about. Drawing Sword of the Meek feels bad. Drawing Thopter Foundry isn't too bad. Having both is awesome. Having neither is no real issue, cause then its game plan A.

What is nice is it gives us the Alternate Win con, and it allows us not to rely on only Ensnaring Bridge.

Quote from Kerotan1989 »

I love the thopter/sword combo. It's so easy to either get sword in your hand or the graveyard with all our mill rocks (I've added Taigam's scheming to help with this too). I started out with just 3 foundry's, but found the combo so great that I'm now trying 4. I think Lantern has got a massive boost from this. The combo gives us life, flying blockers, and a pretty fast wincon in fact, even with bridge on the board.

As much love as I have for the combo, I'm still pretty skeptical. Of course, I gave that mono red burn Top Control deck a whirl too, because you have to test a hypothesis. It's what led to the deck in the first place.

It does look promising if you are seeing an ease in testing though. Looking at your list as compared to the standard core, it looks like the major changes you have are taking out Spellskite, Surgical Extraction, and Pyrite Spellbomb.

I really like Spellskite as a protection for both our lock and the ThopterSword Combo. Also makes me happy I can defend Thopter Foundry, then sac Spellskite.

Surgical Extraction is a flex spot to me. It is really useful at times, and it isn't. It has won me the game more times than Pyrite Spellbomb has to be honest, but there are a lot of times when it is useless.

Pyrite Spellbomb is small creature defense/planeswalker defense/wincon. The ThopterSword combo, when online, is better at all 3 with more mana as an investment. It makes sense that we might be able to drop this card.

I'll try it out myself as well once I get a chance, though I haven't had that time just yet.

Here's my tentative decklist that I'll be trying online later tonight.

Quote from Jjbinks_jarlath »

TBF you only need to mill the sword to get the combo going with Foundry

I do see that, but how many slots does Sword/Thopter have to take up? 1 of each? How often will you be drawing both of them? Maybe a 1/4 or a 2/4 of Sword and Thopter respectively. It would take an overhaul of the deck to fit in 3-6 flex spots. The worst case scenario, you'd draw a whole bunch of Thopters in your opening hand... well now you have a bunch of multicolored spells that you have to ditch.

I really want it to work out, but I feel like the only decks that will want this are Tezz decks, Affinity decks, and the really rare Neo-Affinity decks.

So over a year ago this deck was testing out Thopter Foundry as an answer to burn. It worked, ish, but overall it hurt us too much to really keep it as we had to sac our artifacts that we wanted.

With Sword, Thopter Foundry becomes much more viable as a card, but overall I'd say not enough. It doesn't help Game Plan A. It requires a Sword that does nothing in our deck, which means it dilutes our game plan. It isn't a good fit.

At the same time though, Mox Opal just got even better. Those puppies are going to skyrocket if another competitive deck comes out of this unbanning.

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Ancestral Vision as an unban has a good chance of hurting our deck. Remember when letting them draw multiple cards was bad? The draw back of Visions was that as a late game top deck it was useless, except vs our deck when those suspend turns will pass by fairly quickly.

Against Ad Nauseum game 2 there are a bunch of cards that might slow them down, but your best friends are any cards that can remove their combo from their deck.

Discard + Exile effects

Quote from shadowgripper »

Typically I would say you will be at 18 life or more against Ad Nauseum. This requires 8 lands to be discard to be lethal. That leaves them with 8 more in their hand (being generous). This forces you to activate Spellskite 8 times for those lands they hold back plus one time for the initial load of lightning dmg. That's 9 activations, or 18 life. This is pretty close for both sides assuming they are playing it perfectly well while holding back resources and we are failing to acquire a blue source to pay for redirect, and failing to mill every chance we get to strip lands from their deck. Note, it's unlikely they go off asap because we have discard + surgical options to buy time while we mill away lands.

Spellskite is a safety net. It works most of the time.

Game 1, if they don't have a way to remove it and if they only have Lightning Storm as their wincon. Even if it saves us game 1, it will not save us game 2 or 3, as by then they have Enchantment Removal with Artifact Removal boarded in. That makes it a dead card for sure in game 2 and 3. It is possibly useful game 1.

Quote from shadowgripper »

On the topic of Llanowar Wastes vs Overgrown Tomb, I find this problem fairly simple to solve. Consider how often you need to play one of your first three lands untapped to get use out of it in the first few turns of the game? You pretty much need the mana asap always during turns 1, 2, or 3. Therefore you are very likely to pay 2 life for a tomb. Now consider how often you require black mana for a card from the land slot occupied by wastes/tomb. There are what, 8ish cards in the deck that require black? This means at most wastes will ever only deal 8 damage to us (thats how many black symbols are in our deck). Given how distribution works, its unlikely we have 3 or more of these 8 black cards in our first few turns. We also get the opportunity to skip paying black mana from wastes to pay for these as we have Glimmervoids and Mox opals. We have the option to avoid dmg given certain draws, but with overgrown tomb we do not have the option to skip out of the 2 life in the first few turns; we MUST get mana from tomb asap to cast our spells.

I do see where you are coming from, but it has been my experience that the Waste usually deals 2-3 damage as the game progresses. While there are green producing lands, I count 13-15 cards that need those colors. We might run a lot of Colorless spells, but enough times I have played games without a G/B producing permanent other than a singular Tomb.
- If I have an active Spellskite, I'd rather my rainbow producing permanents producing the possible blue.
- If know 2 turns from now I will want to cast Abrupt Decay, I do not want to be playing 2 life to do so after playing some of those other 1 mana discard/cantrip spells.
- If I know I am playing against a burn deck, I'd rather the knowing that I shocked myself 2 than the pigeon hole that might happen later on in the game from paying for my third black spell.

Quote from artfranc007 »

Tomb would not be good in this deck because you would consistently have to play it untapped. Life loss from wastes is negligable because we usually have 3 colored spells in our hand tops and more ways to generate colored mana pain free. Wastes is usually used for colorless mana unless you have no other option. For instance you have wastes/tomb and glimmervoid in hand with no lantern, but you do have iok. The correct play is to slam iok turn one and see what your opp is up to. With wastes you only lose 1 life and can rely on glimmervoid for colored mama later. With tomb you are forced to take 2 damage and still won't need it for colored mana later.

Let's use this example. Tomb will make me lose 2 life. Waste will only lose me one. I cast IoK.

Onto turn 2! Chances are, I'm going to draw one of the 12-14 green black cards in the deck. If I haven't drawn an artifact before then, I will have to cast the card with Tomb. Playing with a waste at this point, the two lands are identical in tradeoffs as both have dealt me 2 damage, except that from now on the Waste will get worse.

Note: I do also only run 2 Tombs with 2 more basics than other people, so this also may be why I just don't see the pain that the Tombs are causing other players instead of Wastes.