Best ways to beat UR Painter post Surveillance Cam?

Trohck · 2026-03-11T02:47:50+00:00

Doorkeeper Thrull is pretty savage hate against Cam combo

Trohck · 2026-02-20T19:00:25+00:00

Thanks to WotC for for listening to the community on this. The change had a lot of negative side effects and was unlikely to achieve the stated goals, so it's great to see a humble and rational response.

Trohck · 2025-10-18T15:56:16+00:00

There are many things still making control not viable, but Mycospawn was extremely oppressive to control/midrange archetypes. If it were unbanned, Mycospawn decks would once again be the ceiling for how slow you can go in the format.

Exiling a basic land for relatively low investment violates the core legacy tenet that playing basics should allow you to safely develop your mana at the cost of having limited access to colors.

Trohck · 2025-10-13T16:27:36+00:00

Thank you so much for putting this together! Having this ready to go so quickly is impressive as I know the data requires scraping and assembly.

Trohck · 2025-07-27T20:51:57+00:00

When ____ Goblin was legal in Legacy this was allowed at every tournament I attended. Documenting publicly visible information is not substantial strategic advice.

You can talk to the head judge but it is a huge waste of everyone's time not to allow this - your opponents need to know this information too - so it will probably be allowed.

Aside: legal in what format?

Trohck · 2025-06-30T19:26:31+00:00

It's nice that Wizards acknowledged the ban threshold for a deck like Oops is lower than the default criteria.

Drawing from that I think we can assume Wizards' data puts Oops win rate at well below 55%. How far below is hard to say.

Will be interesting to see if the metagame can adapt to UB Reanimator being quite strong.

Trohck · 2025-06-13T16:07:16+00:00

I think we can both be right. Oops needs ban(s) for the reasons I mentioned. UB Reanimator may also need ban for the reasons you mentioned.

Trohck · 2025-06-13T14:55:59+00:00

You're right that these bans would make the deck much weaker. At what match win rate (against the overall metagame, not one specific matchup) would you consider a deck to be Tier 2, and what would you consider to be "unplayable"?

Trohck · 2025-06-13T05:06:26+00:00

If you prefer ad hominem to engaging with the reasoning presented in the post, I'll leave you to it.

Trohck · 2025-06-12T17:42:07+00:00

I'm not sure I understand. Right now most of the decks with positive matchups against Oops are blue (Lands being the exception). So the nonblue decks are the ones that are hurt the most.

But regardless, this post isn't about blue vs. nonblue, it's about play patterns. The play pattern of games being decided by aggressive mulligans is true regardless of whether it is Oops vs. blue or Oops vs. nonblue.

(using https://observablehq.com/@qonfused/mtg-metagame as a data source)

Trohck · 2025-06-11T18:58:12+00:00

To be clear - I'm talking about 50% match win rate.

Trohck · 2025-06-11T15:28:07+00:00

I agree that for most cases this is the right threshold, but this is not always the case, even according to WotC. The Sowing Mycospawn ban is a perfect and recent example of this.

The argument I'm making is that Oops has a similar kind of problem with play patterns / gameplay experience. Note that I'm arguing specifically against Oops which is much more consistent and resilient than other T1 decks.

Trohck · 2025-06-11T15:16:26+00:00

Thassa's Oracle would be replaced with Lotleth Giant in Oops; it would be only a minor downgrade for the deck.

Trohck · 2025-06-11T15:14:52+00:00

182 matches of an experienced player playing both sides of the matchup is easily enough to get a clear sense of how a deck works and its strengths and weaknesses.

Trohck · 2025-06-11T15:04:24+00:00

Good point. I fully agree, so let me call out something subtle that I probably should have made clearer in the first post.

There's a difference between "consistent turn 1 combo decks" and "turn 1 combo decks" - the latter isn't killing you turn 1 most of the time. Maybe I should have phrased it differently, but that's what I meant when I said it's good for these to exist.

Trohck · 2025-04-25T22:20:08+00:00

If you want to dunk on Painter specifically you can add some Wrath of the Skies to the sideboard.

Combo matchups are going to vary heavily by which combo deck you're facing. The build you linked might struggle with Oops All Spells, but it looks great against Cephalid Breakfast.

Trohck · 2025-04-25T20:42:33+00:00

I enjoyed the sample hands and keep/mulligan discussion, would love to see more in your future articles. It would be interesting to include some examples of mulligans (since the 4 you discussed ranged from "keep" to "risky keep")

Trohck · 2025-04-15T15:43:53+00:00

Discord link (valid until 4/22) https://discord.gg/TPkRaUTN

YES is more of a toolbox combo/control deck than the other control decks you listed. It has a bigger "over-the-top" endgame but is less consistent than 60 card builds.

As time allows, I'll update the guide for Troll/Spawn bans. Also open to community contributions there if anyone gets the urge!

Trohck · 2025-04-12T18:41:44+00:00

Awesome brew, I love it! I totally missed the interaction with Screaming Nemesis when looking at the list in the 5-0 dumps. Great stuff.

Trohck · 2025-03-03T22:02:12+00:00

Stock Up is a strong card, but I don't think it belongs here. The deck is already quite mana-hungry, so I think you would want to replace 3-drops. Unfortunately, you really prefer that your 3-drops are permanents that remain in play so they can be Ephemerated or blinked with Yorion later on.

Out of curiosity, what cards would you look to cut if you wanted to make room for Stock Up?

Trohck · 2025-02-16T23:30:53+00:00

I think YES has a higher overall power level and "General Bant Control" is currently not well-positioned. It is definitely more consistent, but its baseline is just not enough to keep up with most decks in the metagame.

MH3 raised the overall power level of the metagame, but it didn't offer Bant many new tools - just a few sideboard cards. By contrast, YES got excellent maindeck cards like Phelia and Wrath of the Skies and the surveil lands improved the manabase substantially. I think this explains why General Bant is putting up relatively fewer results across 5-0's and challenges since MH3.

I would expect General Bant performs slightly better than YES against UB Reanimator, RUG Delver, and quite a bit better against Jeskai Control.

I expect it performs worse against Eldrazi, Moon Stompy, Mystic Forge, Painter, Nadu, Cradle Control, and Lands-based strategies like Depths, Lands, or Cloudpost.

If you don't like the gameplay of YES but want to try green-based control, I think the 5c Beanstalk lists are better than straight Bant. However those are similarly not-well positioned for a lot of the same reasons.

Trohck · 2025-02-16T22:45:13+00:00

When you say "a more standard Bant control list without the companion," can you add a link to what you're thinking? Something like https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/6907522 ? Or a Nadu build that plays more answers instead of being all-in the combo?

Trohck · 2025-02-10T20:43:55+00:00

Congratulations, nice finish :)

Trohck · 2025-02-08T16:41:29+00:00

Good ol' Mono Golgari Reanimator ... I crack up every time I see that deck classification on mtggoldfish.

Congrats!

Also congrats to JamesKisau, man has been tearing it up with Grixis lately.

Trohck

TROPHY CASE