MTG thread

Whip of Erebos is a trap card. Don't get me wrong, I play with it, but it's not a card you want more than one or two of. What you don't want to be doing when building your deck is playing with substandard cards to do cute things with the whip unless those plays effectively end the game. There just aren't a lot of tools in Standard to reliably assemble the pieces of those kinds of "combos" without folding to a lot of other decks. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong though.

I agree with you. It is why I have been play testing with it but haven't found a great way to abuse its reanimation ability yet. It is also why I moved to a whipless BUG deck to see what I could do with Prophet of Kruphix. I think for this weekend I'll be going with either BG or junk and expect to see a bunch of BG along with esper and devotion decks and sideboard accordingly. Game day is this weekend but so is SCG Seattle so I expect the competitive level at Card Kingdom to not be so high. I would do the SCG Open but it is 30 miles from Seattle and I haven't prepared enough.

Grabbit Allworth_sl said:

Haha! Touche. I hadn't considered it, but that's perfect. Do we know each other? Guilded together at one point?

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I'm ex-Hoss. Although I think you had left for TR before I joined. Haikken was my toon. I also briefly played with you in EQ2. I think Crimsonbanshee found you and invited you to our "guild."

Chickenpants_sl said:

I'm ex-Hoss. Although I think you had left for TR before I joined. Haikken was my toon. I also briefly played with you in EQ2. I think Crimsonbanshee found you and invited you to our "guild."

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I remember you. =)

mkopec_sl said:

Sweet! Ill be checking it out. Anyone know if you have to drop massive $$ to play at a decent level?

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The App versions are stand alone and you get everything for the purchase price of the app.

I'm confused... I had Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014 on my Galaxy Nexus months ago...

Xalara_sl said:

I agree with you. It is why I have been play testing with it but haven't found a great way to abuse its reanimation ability yet. It is also why I moved to a whipless BUG deck to see what I could do with Prophet of Kruphix. I think for this weekend I'll be going with either BG or junk and expect to see a bunch of BG along with esper and devotion decks and sideboard accordingly. Game day is this weekend but so is SCG Seattle so I expect the competitive level at Card Kingdom to not be so high. I would do the SCG Open but it is 30 miles from Seattle and I haven't prepared enough.

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I totally forgot it was GameDay this weekend. I guess I shouldn't dismantle Esper just yet.

I definitely want to try and put together Mihara's deck, but Prophet of Kruphix does sound interesting as well. The real problem is what to do with all the mana you generate, and losing access to planeswalkers. You could try and splash maybe, but that kind of mana base gets really shake in an aggressive deck.

Nah, RG is definitely the way to go.

I also want to put together Mihara's deck but I think it'll be a bit too expensive if I want to do it by this Saturday. In any case I already have most of the cards needed for a BG deck in the vein of what Willy Edel had at PT Theros. I just need to practice with it, and yes, I'm going with it because Grabbit talked about it. That and I was also going GB* so I may as well just stick with straight GB. All that said, can someone help me understand the sideboard in Willy Edel's deck and perhaps make suggestions? Here's the deck list if you don't want to look it up:


I know Willy Edel said Pharika's Cure underperformed so I may want to replace that but I also don't quite understand some of the other SB choices.

I should add that Mihara's deck more or less accomplishes what I was trying to do with Prophet of Kruphix much earlier than Prophet of Kruphix. That is have access to ridiculous amounts of mana to cast things like Garruk, Caller of Beasts on turn two. That said it is ostensibly a combo deck so it does have some very real weaknesses.

Granted I was putting Prophet of Kruphix in more of a BUG control shell than a smash your face in with creatures shell, but the issue was what do you do with the mana? You need some kind of solid card draw engine to utilize all of the mana.

Maybe Prime Speaker, if you can get something beefy like Polukranos on the board first. It seems like a less effective way of drawing cards than Sphinx with white devotion or Bident with blue, though. Honestly, that's why green/gruul are just defaulting to Garruk. It's in-color and requires no on board support. It just gets even faster if you have the devotion.

Fair warning btw, GB gets straight up raped by Esper. Slinging out one Dese Demon at a time just isn't going to cut it. You'll need some kind of strong, proactive plan so that you don't get outdrawn. Underworld Connections helps a bunch, but it isn't enough. Grabbit may well kick my ass up and down the block with it, I dunno, but I've yet to drop a match to Rock decks this rotation. They just don't have anything like Thragtusk to pressure control enough.

Xalara_sl said:

I know Willy Edel said Pharika's Cure underperformed so I may want to replace that but I also don't quite understand some of the other SB choices.

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A lot of it is really going to depends on your local meta and what matchups you face. Pharika's Cure is really amazing against mono red rush (basically kills any of their creatures and gives you 2 life) and it's really strong against Master of Waves. I found myself sideboarding in multiple copies last night. I think the card is great in the current meta, but if he faced a lot of RG Monsters, then yeah I can see how the card doesn't do what he needs and Doom Blade would be way better.

Erebos/Underworld would come in against control to gain more card advantage.

Gaze of Granite/Doom Blade/Pharika's Cure/Ratchet Bomb/Vraska/Devour Flesh would come in where you need more removal. Vraska could also be an alternate win condition against control I guess.

Golgari Charm to fight Hammer/Bident/Whip

Pithing Needles is probably to deal with Planeswalkers

The Specters are the only interesting thing to me. There would be matchups where you want more threats or more flying. Against Mono Blue Devotion these would be great. I don't know if he was expecting to see a lot of that deck or what else he would be planning for.edit: Derp, it just hit me that these come in against control to replace the irrelevant removal spells. It just ironically was also really good against Mono Blue Specters and Raptors.

I don't really like so many 1 ofs in the SB, especially something like Doom Blade/Devour Flesh that do very similar things, but of course are also very specific. Devour Flesh beats hexproof (Caryatid, Witchstalker, etc.) and Doom Blade beats everything else (that's not black obv.). I would rather see a 4th Hero's Downfall than either of these. The extra mana cost can be a consideration, but the flexibility is much stronger.

I'm obviously not a pro and really just getting back into the game. I've been watching a lot of SCG and WotC streams of their major events, so I'm still trying to understand the meta myself. The States tournament on Sunday saw a lot of GW aggro and mono red still so all my removal was good. Last night at the smaller local tournament the PT had an effect and saw more mono blue, mono black and mono red devotion. If you know what you'll be seeing it should help you to shape your SB a little more to handle it. Also keep in mind FNM is not the same as the PT, not just in level of play, but also in size. 5 rounds of swiss is very different than 10. You'll face a less diverse group of decks; you'll need less silver bullets like this.

To me it seems like a solid deck, but I don't know that the green adds enough (Reaper, Scooze, Abrupt Decay, G Charm, Gaze) to make up for the inconsistency you could have from playing Mono Black. I'm interested to hear how it does though and more importantly if it's more fun...it's always the best choice!

The 1 mana makes a huge difference on Hero's Downfall. I love the card, but it is generally a mid-game spell. I won't keep a hand with Esper that just has say, Downfall and Verdict as removal. I'll keep an Azorius Charm and Verdict first, or even Doom Blade and Downfall, almost entirely because it gives me a turn 2 play.

Against Selesnya, Downfall comes out entirely in exchange for Glare of Heresy, and usually a couple D Spheres come out for Last Breath. They're just better removal options, and the increased likelihood of having an answer one turn earlier (that exiles vs Voice and is mono-color vs Soldier) is greatly preferred.

I'm pretty happy about the Master of the Waves deck since I crushed a mono blue version online and a blue/red version at last FNM, my sideboard is absolutly brutal for them with 8 protection from blue uncounterables.

I'm running a G/W Hexproof/Bestow deck which needs a bit of refining (almost all 4 of's) but went 3-1 at FNM and has tested well online:

What do you guys think? Only thing I have major trouble with seems to be black decks which is ironic since I made it to eat Doom Blade decks

Heylel_sl said:

I'm going to try and build Mihara's deck for this week's FNM. While I'm pretty competitive, once I do reasonably well with a deck I usually switch gears and go to something else for a while to try and build other skills. Particularly for FNM, I'm a big believer in winning one week, then learning another deck so that other people don't feel discouraged and the store meta stays fresh.

I'll need to scrape together 2 more Nykthos and 2 Garruks, otherwise I should be good for Mihara's deck. It can generate some truly terrifying amounts of mana with Nykthos and Voyaging Satyr.

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I have no where near the cards to pull this deck off but I have decided I am going to start building towards it.

AngryGerbil_sl said:

I have no where near the cards to pull this deck off but I have decided I am going to start building towards it.

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We built a copy for our playtest group and I have to say, I really disliked it. I expected it to be pretty powerful, and it has some incredibly explosive hands if the pieces come together, but it's a helluva lot more fragile than Mono Blue. Like most ramp decks, it's very susceptible to the "bolt the elf" strategy, and if you keep them off their green devotion then Nykthos shuts down. I really did thing I was going to love the deck, but I didn't.

That being said, Nykthos is INCREDIBLY STRONG. Arguably the closest to a broken card I've seen printed in a very long while.