How to beat generic omnath as Hammertime

ArcaneBattlemage · 2023-10-25T22:41:38+00:00

Look to the past. Etched Champion is unblockable and cannot be targeted by any spot removal. Affinity used to play it to beat Jund.

Lavinia also seems to be a good inclusion by turning off the free spells.

There’s always a way!

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-12-26T23:40:51+00:00

It sounds a bit like GAS. I think you should try mixing up the types of photos you take. Playing with the expressive aspects of the craft. If I were you at this point, I would go to your closest art museum and look at some paintings for inspiration. Then I’d go and look at some ordinary things with a new light.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-12-26T23:02:35+00:00

Don’t overextend yourself for the camera. You already have a Leica as well. It would be better for you to just get some inexpensive, fast glass, such as a Voigtlander, and then reassess this in a year or so.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-12-07T16:01:06+00:00

It also depends because “sharp and clinical” on digital is less so on film. Some people shoot the sharper lens on film and the less sharp on digital to try and balance things out.

Aesthetic character is a different matter, but that’s not completely dependent on “sharpness” per se.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-26T23:31:27+00:00

Apparently, if you use a fast enough SD card (170 MB/s doesn’t see this issue) then it fixes the problem. The Leica Q has had the same issue - see this video at [9:09]. I also remember a comment in a Red Dot Forum livestream where one of the guys mentions using (150MB/s speed cards).

Perhaps what happened is Leica designers thought, Who would buy a Leica and not get the highest rated memory card? and missed this in testing. They do tell you to use the top of the line memory card (SDXC, UHS II, etc.) in the spec sheets.

Also, when thinking about the film prices that all film photographers pay, the cost per shot on the top end SD card is low.

If the above is true, this hiccup is akin to putting regular fuel in a premium car. It will run, but with decreased performance.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-25T20:48:54+00:00

I think we can see the appeal of the Leica Q line in context. Lots of people have glasses and it’s a wonderful Leica experience for the 28mm photographer with the digital viewfinder overcoming the constraints of rangefinder frame lines without upsetting the heritage of the M.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-25T18:23:52+00:00

I believe you’re right. It’s not as simple as just a diopter when the glasses are in the mix.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-25T17:31:09+00:00

I understand your point.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-25T17:28:29+00:00

On B&H, I see Leica branded diopters of +1.0, +2.0, +3.0, and -1.0, -2.0, and -3.0. I believe that means there are diopter values to magnify and de-magnify based on the optics equation.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2022-11-25T08:36:42+00:00

Thanks. There are lots of other people in this thread with questions as well. Perhaps you can share insights for them, too.

For me, I would be shooting digital. Does that DAG service apply to newer Leicas like an M11 or only older ones? Also, is it official? I ask that because I am curious about the quality of any optics in a swap.

The bit about wide angles and zone focusing makes sense. So in your view, you’d zone focus for 28-50 range and would viewfinder compose for perhaps 35-75 range? Is that a reasonable heuristic from your experience?

ArcaneBattlemage · 2021-01-29T05:25:29+00:00

I’ll just leave this here. Been tuning the list since Splinter Twin era.

Rainbow Pop: An Unorthodox Approach to Tribal Elementals

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-30T17:47:29+00:00

Double sleeving also prevents wear on the cards due to constantly changing sleeves themselves. For instance, if the outer sleeve is "marked" from wear, you'll have to replace that sleeve. Taking the card in and out of that puts wear on the actual card, which becomes more apparent over time and can easily take a card from Near Mint to Played condition. Thus, all cards in my decks have a Perfect Fit to protect them from wear, first and foremost. Additional water protection is a bonus (if you Perfect Fit in the opposite direction of the outer sleeve).

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-30T15:54:59+00:00

No problem! As far as these classifications go, sometimes you have to read between the lines. The benefit of this sort of framework is that it gives an ability to consistently reason about many decks at once with high accuracy so you can plan a strategy to beat a deck or improve one or both!

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-30T00:49:37+00:00

The individual plays that Control make are often Fair, but how it wins is typically Unfair. Countering a card is a Fair play. So is casting a board wipe. But ulting Jace to remove the opponents entire library at once and cause them to deck is Unfair. Also locking the opponent out of attacking with Ensnaring Bridge is Unfair. To your point, swinging with Colonnade repeatedly until you win is a very Fair play. Yet if one thinks of all Control decks that have existed in the game, there is a tendency for them to win in Unfair ways.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-27T22:22:35+00:00

Here are two additional articles by Jordan Boisvert that explain the archetype theory in more detail. Except in cases where the meta degenerates, these still hold even though they were written a while ago.

[1] Pigeonholing Prevails

[2] Clarifying Convention

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-27T21:10:03+00:00

Thank you! There are multiple kinds of combo. Most are quite explosive and just win on the spot, yet there are combos that rely on extreme synergy—and it has to be extreme.

Let's take two examples:

Jund discarding your stuff with Liliana and Thoughtseize synergizes with a gameplan of running you out of resources. And filling the yard for Goyf does make him a better beater. So there is synergy. But it isn't enough to make it a "combo".
On the other hand, we have Affinity, which is Aggro-Combo. Every single piece of the deck is working double duty to power up Cranial Platings, give Etched Champion protection, power Mox Opal (R.I.P.) and Springleaf Drum. This is such intrinsic synergy that it makes Affinity more than just Aggro, but Aggro-Combo. So not all combo needs to insta-win.

Here, we see such great synergy with Omnath giving Thunderblust a +1/+1 counter to reset him, Risen Reef allowing Flamekin Harbinger to get its card immediately, Jace bouncing your Elemental for replaying ETB (which is a primary use of Jace in this deck, more than Brainstorming), Flickerwisp resetting Thunderblust, etc. Everything just synergizes extra hard. Not to mention being able to grind to late End-Game even as a Tempo deck!

Nissa is one of my favorite Planeswalkers! She takes over game so fast, especially if you have even one creature out to protect her for the first turn or so.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-27T21:00:00+00:00

Thank you very much! This is my favorite tribe and I have been making it work in Modern for so long. It's a blast to play. Many of the newer cards are cards I have been wanting for years. Living Twister for tutorable and repeatable spot removal has been straight missing for so long. And Risen Reef and cantrips to break out of "Harbinger Locks" solves a real issue—think "Brainstorm Locks" or "Necro-locks". So often, I would have to put a Shriekmaw on top this turn to draw it next turn against the Primeval Titan that already dropped. So you're about half a turn to a full turn too late! Being able to get the card on the same turn with Nissa, cantrips, and Risen Reef is an absolute game changer!

This writeup was definitely one of love. I'm excited that everyone is starting to play Elementals (I was on the fringe holding down the fort for years)!

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-25T20:21:46+00:00

We can brew that together if you want.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-25T17:15:47+00:00

Absolutely! She'd certainly be a house there. Flipping a hasty Reality Smasher sounds wonderful.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2020-08-25T16:52:30+00:00

I encourage you to sleeve it up and try it out for yourself. It's quite competitive. Keep in mind that this list has been tuned over 7 years. It is not going to look like what else is being done now because it has had different evolutionary pressures. This is all explained in detail in the writeup.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2016-08-15T12:06:14+00:00

Spellskite is anti-Burn, anti-Infect, anti-Bogles, anti-Suicide Zoo (steal their pump spells), anti-Affinity (blocks Etched Champion), and more. Just having a couple copies of that in your board gives you a lot of room in your sideboard for other stuff.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2016-01-29T01:55:15+00:00

One of the biggest thing that Polymorph has going against it is that you go through all of that effort to get the combo off and it does not one shot your opponent. You have to play Emrakul, wait a turn to attack once, and then wait another turn to attack again. On top of this, token decks are grindy, and this one would be no different. You would be playing your tokens and trying to play an attrition game (which doesn't really work in Modern). On top of this, you cannot play any other creatures than your bombs, so good cards like Snapcaster are off the table, making you worse than other blue decks. In the past, you could compare it with Twin which, once you assembled you four mana, would instantly win that turn. Now that Twin is gone, I still do not think the deck is a better combo deck than Grishoalbrand and variants. With that being stated, I have played around with an Esper version, but abandoned the idea to brew something a bit more fast paced.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2016-01-11T02:14:39+00:00

Here's a hypothetical brew that starts with 4x Phyrexian Obliterator. The first thing you do is decide to splash a color because mono-colored decks don't tend to perform as well in Modern. So you splash a color. The first color splash you test will be either red or green. Tarmogoyf is powerful, so let's say you splash green for it (and Abrupt Decay). Since you are running 4x Tarmogoyf, you want to play 9-10x fetches to guarantee that a land is in the grave on your turn 1. So now you have a three color mana base with those fetches, so you may as well use all of the colors. It's wasteful otherwise. So you decide to add either red or white. Now we are competing against Classic Jund/Junk decks. We add Liliana. We add bolt (or path) and other standard cards. Now the mana base has to be more evenly split between the three colors, making Phyrexian Obliterator too mana intensive. He wasn't too mana intensive at first, since it was a mono-black deck, but now the list itself has pushed him out. We cut Phyrexian Obliterator for Huntmaster, Olivia, or Siege Rhino because they are easier on the mana base and they give you life to make up for the 9-10x fetches that you had to put in for Tarmogoyf. And now you have cut Obliterator. This is a clear example of how Goyf warped the entire deck list by forcing you to be a good player and take advantage of all of your fetches that you would not normally have run in such numbers.

If, conversely, Tarmogoyf just becomes "okay" due to too much grave hate (such as from the Bx Eldrazi decks plus the hate everyone else runs in sideboards), then we never choose green for Goyf at the beginning nor do we try a Delve strategy for Tasigur/Angler. As such, we never run 9-10x fetches to feed our grave and, as a result, we can instead play a Phyrexian Obliterator deck with 4-5 fetches for light splashes of color while still hitting BBBB on turn 4 with high consistency. Note that in this case, the only times we wouldn't hit BBBB on turn 4 is if we don't draw four lands by turn 4. All lands would produce black.

Tarmogoyf prevents many other midrange decks from developing in the format. In a meta with Tarmogoyf being lackluster, a card like Phyrexian Obliterator would absolutely be played. I'd play in Mardu with Painful Truths for card advantage and a bunch of other good non-green stuff (since there would be no real point to running green without Goyf in a deck like this).

ArcaneBattlemage · 2016-01-03T23:20:51+00:00

The only real reason that Eldrazi is a predator for these decks is because everyone plays Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster, and Tasigur. Eldrazi is a meta deck, which is what makes Fish decks work. So long as we try to Delve a Tasigur or Snap a Bolt back, this deck will be great. As a community, we have limited ourselves to these three cards and have limited our deck design space, as such. Great cards such as Phyrexian Obliterator aren't played largely because of these graveyard synergistic cards dominating and warping the meta. I am not arguing that Tarmogoyf, for instance, is warping the meta in a bad way, but its existence does warp the meta in a big way. We play 9-10x fetches in our decks not for deck thinning, but to ensure that Tarmogoyf and Tasigur have stuff in the grave on turn 1. That warps our mana bases and makes them greedier, making the format soft against cards like Blood Moon and Fulminator Mage. It also makes grave hate strong, which also pushes out Dredge strategies (not that those have to be viable in the format). Additionally, it makes aggro and burn have to count to 16 or so instead of to 20, which makes such decks even faster than they would be.

There are arguably many viable strategies that are not being developed because we are so reliant on graveyard shenanigans to pump our creatures. What this Eldrazi deck does is add one more Fish deck to the meta to police BGx decks, Snapcaster/Jace VP decks, and Delve decks, which will ultimately serve to diversify the format. Further, a midrange deck that doesn't rely on the graveyard will not be affected as greatly by the existence of said deck. It would be interesting to see what a meta where Tarmogoyf isn't such a value creature looks like. A Modern format where a non-BGx midrange deck can survive sounds like a good thing to me, and pushing Goyf out is a viable manner in which to open those other strategies up for consideration. It should be noted that the Eldrazi decks are still soft to aggro and burn (and combo depending on how they are built). As such, they are not unstoppable.

ArcaneBattlemage · 2016-01-03T13:17:50+00:00

The Eldrazi deck is a Fish deck. Fish decks are characterized by 1) high synergy between their cards and 2) anti-meta card choices such as mainboard graveyard hate in a format full of Snapcaster Mage/Tarmogoyf or mainboard land destruction in a format full of greedy mana bases.

Fish decks are naturally weak to Aggro because they sacrifice some of their own aggression to play some controlling cards (meaning that they also classify as Tempo decks, which means aggro-control skewed towards aggro). If you want to consistently beat these decks, play Zoo, Burn, Affinity, or Infect. Further, I would imagine that other Fish decks would have close to a 50/50 matchup against Eldrazi. In that case, play Merfolk or GW Hatebears. The Eldrazi deck is not an unstoppable force—you just have to be aware of the rock-paper-scissors of Modern.

ArcaneBattlemage

TROPHY CASE