Magic: The Gathering C/D

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!

clearly you've never heard of Druid's Familiar then :(

shambleshark and wojek halberdiers aren't really A+ cards either though so it's all moot

I think wojek, skyjek, shamble and raptor are all As

wight @ common might have also worked

mist raven is the most recent A+ common based on what i think of as an "A+ common"

well it was less the "A+" and more "A, also nobody off-guild is taking this, so you get passed it later than you should"

like making wojek 1R instead of WR would make it an even better card - it'd also make boros a slightly worse guild

this is inspirational https://twitter.com/tommartell/status/304089310859243520/photo/1

speaking of, what's your opinion on thrull parasite? the more extort dudes the better, or deceiving because you can't extort early and you're left w/ a 1/1 by the time you can extort?

it's alright

ars arcanum is up http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-gatecrash-draft-overview

guild winrate chart looks about how i expected

wight @ common might have also worked

definitely agreed though it's kind of an odd card for Dimir since big ground creatures really arent its thing. I'm okay with R&D underpowering guilds like Izzet and Dimir with the knowledge that less people will probably draft them and also because I think a strategy like what those guilds are trying to do being too powerful would likely hurt the format.

speaking of, what's your opinion on thrull parasite? the more extort dudes the better, or deceiving because you can't extort early and you're left w/ a 1/1 by the time you can extort?

I'm leaning towards the former, I take Kingpin/Screecher/Syndic over it obviously but I like it better than say, Knight of Obligation because not only do cheap Extort dudes allow you to Extort more earlier but Orzhov also wants cheap spells for other Exorters in general.

I think his analysis is flawed because people are more likely to play 'bad' boros decks and less likely to play 'bad' dimir decks. I'd be more interested in seeing what % of 3-0 decks are what guild and I highly suspect dimir would be #5 on that.

(even if you adjusted it for playrates)

i think gruul would be #5 on that, dimir 3 or 4

yeah maybe

but still I think that's the metric that matters. pure winrate is very deceiving.

dimir is the weakest guild, even if its a lot more playable than people initially gave it credit for. i've gone 6-0 with dimir but that's because the only times i've gone dimir it was a) ridiculously open and b) i opened/been passed multiple bombs. i have yet to play dimir in sealed and have only lost to to dimir in sealed a handful of times.

theres an interesting macro effect w/ dimir - and simic weirdly - where the more people avoid drafting it the better it is to draft but i agree w/ cider that it cant last. even cards that should be amazing in orzhov like grisly spectacle go way later than they should. but people will start having success w/dimir and more importantly start losing to dimir and then they'll be willing to move in on a fourth pick horror and dimir will go back to being really terrible because theres rarely two strong dimir decks at the table.

like clearly you *can* win with dimir but best deck, even considering the meta, is just straight up not the case. it's not great because nobody plays it, it looks great because people only play it when it's great. xp

how do you feel about Smog Elemental? Is this guy even playable at 6 cmc?

that's actually p stupid - obviously any guild is going to be better to draft the more open it is my point was more that i don't trust the ars arcanum guys data to be that useful as people adjust their drafting strats. also that dimir disproportionately benefits from being open in a way that boros wouldnt.

nah smog sucks, might be cool if azorius were still around but it's pretty much a 3/3 for 6

oh he mentions 'win rate by popularity' later in the article which i assume is what you're talking about here and apparently orzhov wins that

well I'd rather see 3-0 rate adjusted by popularity than pure winrate

this is exactly what happened with Black in AVR - I used to do really well with it because you'd get like 9th pick Bone Splinters and 11th pick Butcher Ghouls

AVR black was a lot harder to draft/build/play well than GTC dimir though imo

oh he mentions 'win rate by popularity' later in the article which i assume is what you're talking about here and apparently orzhov wins that

thats interesting but it's not what i really mean - it's more that given dimir is routinely underdrafted do dimir decks disproportionately benefit from having fewer drafters because the pool of playable commons is lower. also that dimir is getting a knock-on effect from the underdrafting of simic, so that it's current win rate or even win rate by popularity over represents its 'natural' win rate

something that gerry t said in mondays gamestate episode was that he was going to 'just take the best card from the first three packs' and then look to see what was open. i've really liked this strategy so far in gtc because i think drafting strategies are really, really terrible rn. i think - and i may have just been bad at rtr - but because rtr rewarded patience/forcing a lot more people have been over committing to guilds in gtc way too early and there is routinely one guild - almost always simic or dimir - thats really open. so all you have to do is wait for that fifth pick zameck guidmage or fourth pick grisly spectacle and move in.

in the big picture other guild %s suffer from all the people running terrible decks in guilds that weren't at all open, and *nobody* is running dimir when it's not open.

yeah when simic is open it's embarrassingly open

i agree that those winrates are obviously super-skewed by public perception still, but i feel like if everyone had perfect information then the results would be reasonably balanced. i don't think dimir is more than a couple percentage points worse than any other guild on card power level.

also the gold cards in this format tend to make for really strong signals, and it's super important to be in the right guild for your seat, so i wouldn't ever force a guild.