Magic: The Gathering C/D

i feel like control would be even worse a matchup since delver decks are so threat-light by necessity of having 20+ spells.

tbh i only played epser three times w/my last list and although i won all of them they dont feel like representative games. in my head i feel like the cards BUG tempo plays are working against esper really well, stuff like dispel, deathrite shaman and unsummon are all decent plays against the standard esper lines. lack of threats is one of the biggest problems w/ the deck though. the first list i saw had 4 mayors but he was really awkward against all the aggro decks so i cut him for three duskmantle seers and more land. but even duskmantle often feels a little too expensive for the deck. i think you probably just have to play a tempo deck w/o delver and either go into white for geist or go deeper into green for synergies/power. tbh i do want to try to four-color w/geist and deathrite shaman/decay but i don't think the mana really works.

i'm just not sure the more aggressive tempo decks work right now when you can't essence scatter reliably. i've put a lot of thought into it because as i said i want to play duskmantle seer if its playable, and that's the obvious place to play it

Reckoner + Blasphemous Act was used a ton this weekend at the PT, sometimes in midrange, sometimes in control. The guy who got second place also had an infinite life combo in his deck (Reckoner + Boros Charm + Azorius Charm). Crazy that Reckoner fits into every type of deck. Aggro, midrange, control, and combo decks can all play this guy profitably. Guess it's no surprise it's worth so much.

yeah, i had p high hopes for spell rupture but it has been a little too hard to turn on

i want to play seer as well, and i really love the idea of a good tempo deck in this format but every list i've played w/ as felt underpowered compared the most competitive decks. i'm trying esper rn w/ a slightly higher curve and stuff like obzedat. i'm playing in a gp this weekend so i'd like to figure something out, otherwise i'll probably play something similar to your naya deck since i have all the cards for it.

if you're talking about the fast naya deck you definitely want lots of bonds of faith/volcanic strength somewhere in your 75 since otherwise reckoner is a problem

i haven't played the deck much and i don't know how the metagame will shake out now that the pro tour's happened, but if you're expecting lots of control it seems like a better choice than the midrange builds.

the rest of the pro tour decklists are up btw
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/ptgtc13/Top_Standard_Decks

not very many brand new decks that aren't just some configuration of red- or green-based aggro, the most interesting to me are
Hiyoshi Ishida
Wenze Krautmann
Tsu Teung Lam (not really a new deck but i'd been struggling to build it correctly and this build seems pretty good as a starting point)

krautmann one kind of looks like a pile though

cider, i like the deck idea, but i'm not sure if elves is the way to take it. i've tried a similar build on cockatrice and gyre sage is actually quite underwhelming with no 3 drop to evolve it. the fact that archdruid does not evolve it sucks so much. if archdruid did, would be a different game entirely.

i've had more success with an undying biomancer build. zameck guildmage, slitherhead, strangleroot, and young wolf. one thing i'd consider is how awesome rancor is in that deck. either you have giant creatures to slap rancor on, or you put it on biomancer for double the pump. it's more resilient against aggro too. and thennn, you get to run a couple ooze flux, which might be my favorite gatecrash card.

lol it took me a while to figure out Reckoner + Boros Charm + Azorious Charm but yeah that's a pretty neat combo if you can pull it off. it's the best kind of combo since all these card are pretty good on their own. I always thought Blasphemous Act was very playable as well.

frogbs did you look at the decklist that won the pro tour yesterday?

just seeing it now, I like it but I'd love to see Mark of Mutiny in the sideboard, there's a ton of sac effects there and the +1/+1 counter is just a bonus. it's really cool to see all these decks - I think at any given time only like 7-9% of the cards in Standard are playable but this is the only time I can remember this much synergy between everything.

It's kind of funny given how much bellyaching there's been about gatecrash on sites like mtgsalvation, and now you're seeing top tier decks getting built around stuff like cartel aristocrat.

So I'm developing this new act that features a vampire, an extortionist, and a Minotaur wizard who shoots fireballs at the audience...

that reckoner combo is genius

mtgsalvation is notoriously bad at evaluating new cards, its fun to look in their archives and see them completely underestimate dark confidant, or hype up elspeth tirel so much that it hit $50 at release then saw only fringe play

and yeah the reckoner thing is a 3 card combo which normally is bad except that the 3 cards are cards you'd have in your deck anyway so it's a complete freeroll

Vraska also got hyped up a ton until everyone realized "oh wait, this is just a Lux Cannon". I think the market is just used to "planeswalker = broken" and maybe acts out of fear that the next one is going to hit $100 like Jace, as though Jace TMS wasn't obviously the most busted card they had printed in quite some time

I think I actually prefer planeswalkers as cool utility guys that do some interesting things as opposed to game over bombs.

BUG midrange is actually sounding better and better to me, if everyone's leaning on boros reckoner then having abrupt decay + snapcaster is a reasonable place to be. i can't imagine beating control reliably without mayors though, as awkward as they are vs. aggro and with snapcasters

for the sake of my MTGO account I really hope Reckoner alone spikes the price of Abrupt Decay.

BUG midrange is actually sounding better and better to me, if everyone's leaning on boros reckoner then having abrupt decay + snapcaster is a reasonable place to be. i can't imagine beating control reliably without mayors though, as awkward as they are vs. aggro and with snapcasters

yeah mayor is really good but so is deathrite shaman - he's one of the best cards in the esper matchup imo. nighthawk also isn't terrible

i can post my list when i get home if you're interested - i don't think its that great but maybe you'll have a better take on it

I think the market is just used to "planeswalker = broken" and maybe acts out of fear that the next one is going to hit i00 like Jace

Ding ding ding. I think it's pretty logical too, when one of them takes off, they are a bitch to get.

yeah sure i'll take a look. i'm not interested in playing delvers really though, i think they limit the rest of your deck in ways that you can't afford right now

nighthawk seems like a must to avoid dying to aggro anyway. wish there was one more card like nighthawk since 4 is probably not enough

have seen some lists with quirion dryad but that has the same problem as mayor plus gets blown out by azorius charm so it seems awful

no i've given up on delver even when i could get him to flip reliably the deck still wasn't all that good and getting to a point where you can flip him reliably really warped the rest of the deck so i have a 22 land version that i like better. it's still focused on tempo as opposed to midrange tho

dryad is terible imo, it's worse than lotleth troll in these decks, any deck/draw that can't deal with the dryad was probably losing to any of your other cards and it rarely did much for me

things i want to try include wolfir avenger and mystic genesis

this is where i ended up:

4 Deathrite Shaman
2 Duskmantle Seer
4 Mayor of Avabruck
3 Snapcaster Mage
4 Vampire Nighthawk

4 Abrupt Decay
3 Devour Flesh
4 Dimir Charm
2 Dispel
2 Spell Rupture
4 Thought Scour
2 Unsummon

4 Breeding Pool
3 Watery Grave
4 Overgrown Tomb
3 Drowned Catacomb
2 Hinterland Harbor
4 Woodland Cemetry
1 Island
1 Swamp

not sure easy to cast wolfir avenger would be but its a card im interested in. the gensis less so but i do want to get more counters into the deck. i tried spell rupture but it proved... unreliable. the spell ruptures have been essence scatters, dissipates, negates &c &c. like i said, i've gone 2-2 in every daily i've played although i've had better luck while testing w/friends for the gp.

lamp, why is mayor a key card in that deck? i don't know anything about the deck, that said. it just seems like mayor doesn't pump anything. is the only reason it's there to durdle out wolf tokens?

alright I'm goin for the "extort 20 times to victory" strategy and it makes me wanna vomit

fennel hes just the creature that best fits a BUG tempo deck @ 2. the shaman is more of a utility creature and delver is too hard to flip reliably. the mayor is easier to flip and does have some small incidental value on his human side. other stuff i tried like dryad, lotleth troll and knight of infamy were either not powerful enough or too easy to neutralize. strangelroot geist was both too hard to cast and too minor a threat. i've considered using garruk relentless instead but he's actually kinda just worse against resto angel.

lamp, have you considered gloom surgeon? he saw play in PT gatecrash and holds up aggro decks quite nicely. he obviously doesn't hit as hard but is nice on utility. maybe as a 2-of?

if you had more creatures, evolve dudes like shambleshark or gyre sage might be nice. gyre sage probably won't really work in your build but was used nicely in PT gatecrash aggro builds.

i wonder how wight of precinct six would do, too. might be effective with 4 thought scour and lots of ways to kill creatures. could be a worthy SB option against zoo decks.

gotta say i am confused at the 4 thought scour. what utility do they serve? do they just feed your snapcaster? i wonder if you should have a runechanter's pike in there to take advantage of em.

i don't know why my posts have been so rambly lately

i ended up winging it and making up my own list last night since you hadn't posted that yet when the standard daily started. seems like we reached some similar conclusions though. mine was

3 deathrite shaman
4 snapcaster mage
4 mayor of avabruck
3 wolfir avenger
2 vampire nighthawk
2 duskmantle seer

4 thought scour
3 syncopate
3 abrupt decay
2 simic charm
2 unsummon
1 dimir charm
1 tribute to hunger
1 runechanter's pike
1 mystic genesis

4 breeding pool
4 watery grave
2 overgrown tomb
3 woodland cemetery
3 hinterland harbor
3 drowned catacomb
1 forest
1 swamp
1 island
2 ghost quarter

sideboard had more counters and jace memory adept for control, and more removal, the other 2 nighthawks, and a couple gloom surgeons for aggro. also the 4th deathrite.

i went 2-2 beating mono-red and esper control, and losing to jund and a hyper-aggro naya humans build

wolfir avenger was a bit hard to cast and didn't do a ton, though it seemed like it would have been good vs the naya humans deck if i had it there. the other creatures were all good. pike stole me a win vs control when i ripped it with only 5 cards left in my deck, i think you want it in any tempo deck like this that doesn't have a ton of powerful threats.

syncopate was actually pretty good, i even managed to keep it live vs the control deck though it's obviously not great there. i don't know if i want 3 though.

the jund matchup felt unwinnable if i didn't have multiple counters in hand, you can't really deal with any of huntmaster, thragtusk, olivia, or garruk on board. no idea how to fix this matchup, i think you just have to tightrope walk and hope that they don't draw well and you can get them with a pike or duskmantle seer.

gotta say i am confused at the 4 thought scour. what utility do they serve? do they just feed your snapcaster? i wonder if you should have a runechanter's pike in there to take advantage of em.

it helps get my deathrite and snapcasters going but it also just cantrips. i really wish this deck had more cantrips in it. man if dimir charm was a cantrip it would be the best card in standard imo. ok, it wouldn't be but man would that be sweet. i've been trying pikes in the board since i need the maindeck space against aggro i think.

i had dismissed gloom surgeon because he exiled the cards and that seemed like too much anti-synergy. i'll give him a try in the daily tonight though.

@cider - sorry, i would have posted sooner/with a sideboard. sideboard i had two negates, three dimir charms, two grafdigger's cage, a pike, jace, three ultimate price and a tragic slip.

midrange jund matchup isn't great - dimir charm is p good here since it kills huntmaster and that's why i have all the devour flesh. aggro matchup is bad though

exiling cards isn't really anti-synergy, it's just like how milling your opponent doesn't 'take cards away' from them until they actually deck. the only super-important 1-of in the deck is pike and that's only vs control where you don't have the surgeons

i never actually drew mystic genesis in that daily but based on how the games played out i'm pretty sure it's only good vs midrange so maybe should be a sideboard card or not in at all. the card that i most wish existed in standard for this deck is Infest, you really need something more than spot removal to catch up vs burning tree emissary starts.

sorry - dimir charm sideboard are golgari charms

sure, that makes sense re: gloom surgeon. i'm going to be sad when/if he exiles seer but it seems like a good roadblock for aggro zoo/human starts.

i had to look up infest but yeah, that would be very nice. i do wonder if this build is actually better as a control deck, going a little higher and playing planeswalkers, curse of death's hold &c. it would mean you couldn't play seer though and he's a big part of the reason i want to play the deck

so I went simic in a 6 man draft yesterday and despite having it all to myself from p1p1 my deck was still v mediocre. 1 raptor, no shamblesharks, no elusive krasis - there just weren't any. part of this was just bad luck, but simic really is dependent on a few commons more than any other guild. there are a lot of substitutes for boros/orz/gruul roleplayers but simic either has an evolve curve or doesn't.

crushed an 8-4 last night with dimir. took p1p1 undercity informer and would do it again, that card is very good. the strong dimir cards still go very late, i got a pack 5th or 6th pick that still had bane alley broker AND dinrova horror in it. this can't possibly last (i think ars arcanum guy has an article going up today exposing dimir's power in draft though i'm not sure how many people read him since he's on some backwater site), but right now it's a pretty profitable plan.

but I think the problem is the same as simic, just worse - undercity, dinrova and bane alley are great, but they're all uncommons and you can't rely on them even appearing.

i didn't actually draw/cast any of those cards in the draft matches btw, i won with commons and wight of precinct 6. there are tons of good commons in black, less so in blue, so you want your dimir decks to be heavy black.

you actively want these commons:
grisly spectacle
death's approach
basilica screecher
balustrade spy
deathcult rogue
hands of binding
shadow slice
devour flesh
sage's row denizen
corpse blockade
keymaster rogue

you can make use of these:
shadow alley denizen
cloudfin raptor
metropolis sprite
psychic strike
midnight recovery
totally lost

gutter skulk, frilled oculus, horror of the dim, syndicate enforcer, leyline phantom are all creature-count and curve filler. enforcer and phantom might be a bit better than that, not sure. mortus strider is very specifically for the decks that can loop them with a bunch of extort or sage's row denizens, otherwise don't play it. spell rupture is fine if you didn't get enough of the black removal. anemones is probably fine in decks that are all-in on mill, otherwise it's 1 mana shy of efficiency. i honestly haven't played with last thoughts yet but i think you need a pretty defensive deck for it to be worth the tempo loss. skygames and way of the thief are for getting green guys through in simic, you don't need them. scatter arc is a sideboard card vs orzhov. contaminated ground is unplayable.

forgot paranoid delusions, that one's mostly unplayable too

see the prob is the actively want commons are *all* gonna be split save sage's row denizen

nobody's taking simic's shambleshark, kinpin's pet, the 3/1 batallion off-guild off guild, but dimir doesn't really 'get anything to itself' great at the common level.

death's approach is that card imo

i guess orzhov people can take it but it won't be nearly as good for them unless they max out on balustrade spies

ah I overlooked that. but it's not even an A+ card - it's conditional and terrible in your hand early game, which mostly negates the advantage of it being so cheap.

upthread I had 100% the same problem w/ golgari. needed an A+ common that it didn't have to split.

like make dinrova horror a common and I don't think you have suddenly made dimir broken

i don't think dimir is necessarily the strongest guild (orzhov is imo) but it's within a few % of the other guilds in power level while being drafted as if it's half as good, which makes it really strong.

I think dimir being bad is part of why orzhov is as good as it is - dimir's often undrafted so the black is open (and the blue available for splash) - and you have almost 0 overlap w/ boros in terms of white cards you want. it's also naturally good at dealing w/ aggro. I think a boros or simic deck that can regularly curve out are still better than a strong orz deck but as a drafting strategy orz is pretty smart because there's so much to go around and it fits the meta well.

in general this format reminds me a bit of innistrad in that it's an aggressive format with a lot of cards and mechanics that reward really tight play and deck construction while severely punishing the opposite. the difference is that playing from behind in this format feels a lot more doable, whereas innistrad had a few key tempo tricks with flashback at common that just put you too many turns behind to catch back up.

yeah I feel like my decks don't necessarily put themselves together the same way they did w/ rtr. the archetypes were pretty clear cut w/ rtr and you just built towards one w/ easy decisions, whereas anyone building a non-boros deck in this format is going to have to make much more difficult choices about what to include.

ah I overlooked that. but it's not even an A+ card - it's conditional and terrible in your hand early game, which mostly negates the advantage of it being so cheap.

in Dimir you can really make it an A+ card. it goes with Devour Flesh and even stuff like Psychic Strike - you Strike their 3-drop and mill another creature, suddenly this card is like Dead Weight or better. works really well with the Spy too. and Orzhov doesn't really want it (I'd take Executioner's Strike over it, for example) so you can get something like 2-3 of them every draft.

the Screecher is also really really great in this deck. but I'm sure everyone knows that already. As it turns out, there are really a lot of key uncommons - not just the Horror (quickly becoming my favorite 1st pick uncommon), but also Dimir Charm, Killing Wind (remember every removal spell powers up Death's Approach), the 2/5 Drake, Informer, Wight of Precinct Six (another awesome card in this deck that nobody else should draft), Aetherize, Rapid Hybridilization, and Call of the Nightwing (not to toot my own horn here but I think I was actually right about this one, it's really great)

as for Last Thoughts, I try to pick one up every time (easy because it's a 12-14th pick type card), maybe even two, because a lot of times I'm just 1-for-1ing their dudes and sometimes you end up in a situation where both players are just trying to topdeck, and this is where you really need to abuse Cipher. The cool thing about Cipher is that you can put it on a small flyer and it'll have the side effect of drawing out any removal your opponent has instead of them hitting the creature they really wanted to kill. you already get the effect at least once so it's not like you're exactly getting 2-for-1'ed. in fact for me it's kinda rare to not get those spells at least twice. If you can trigger a Cipher spell twice and draw out an Angelic Edict or Massive Raid, that's a major win. Haven't tried Shadow Slice yet though it looks like it's at least a better Lava Axe, and maybe useful since Dimir can't deal a lot of damage at once.

A+ cards don't need other cards to be good!