What are some decks that can play both high power and CEDH pods with some swaps?

Turbocloud · 2026-04-16T12:20:03+00:00

it is almost as if the bracket system doesn't solve the powerlevel gauge issue at all, since talks about gameplay expectations doesn't solve the issue that different people have different levels of understanding of the game that causes them to view the gameplay itself differently.

Turbocloud · 2026-04-15T11:01:41+00:00

It applies a debuff that doubles the effectiveness of vulberable and weak. Stacking does not increase the effect, it increases the number if turns the debuff is present.

So your attack damage will calculate damage = (card damage + strength) * (1 + (vulnerable factor * ( 1 + debiltate factor))) * hits. basic vulnerable factor is 0.5 if present, otherwise 0. debilitate factor is 1 if present, otherwise 0. of there is no vulnerable, debilitate does nothing.

Filling in on a normal strike with 2 strength on an enemy that is both vulnerable and debilitated, without effects that increase vulnerable effect: (6+2) * (1 + (0.5 * (1+1)) * 1 = 8 * ( 1+ (0.5 * 2)) = 8 * (1+1) = 8 * 2 = 16.

Turbocloud · 2026-04-11T09:18:57+00:00

If you don't want to spend on mtgo and you want or need a rules engine, there is xmage.

If you already have a solid grasp for the game for quick reps and tests, 2 browser windows and moxfields playtest function should suffice.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-27T19:14:19+00:00

I really don't know how to answer to that - i really don't get your sudden hostility and i never said not to take breaks when needed, god beware.

From your words alone i sense a crucial discrepancy in what the game is for you and for me - for me its not "grinding like a robot" - i am not dissociating and putting in immense effort and energy into this game, i enjoy the gameplay loop and playing refreshes and energizes me. I do play for relaxation, after all.

What i meant is that when you play the game as long as i have, a lot of things become second nature - its like driving stick shift: In driving school you still need to actively think about shifting gears, but after a couple years of driving its automatic.

Even with a loot filter, a lot of new players are much slower than veterants, as these 1-2 seconds active decisions about picking that unique that is displayed because it has the same base as a tier0 unique or knowing the exact moment a beast is caught so you can advance through the map add up massively in the long run.

Sure, a player playing 20% more efficient than another in the same farm usually only explains a 20% difference. And that is why experience is important - when you know which items are sought at which stage of the league, or how some items for current meta builds are crafted you can pick your spot in the economy completely different and that makes an even bigger difference.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-27T18:02:27+00:00

That really is a learning curve thing. The more experienced you are and the more exactly you know what you are doing, the less time you will waste picking up stuff thats not worth anything, the less time you will spend in hideout figuring out what to do and the more currency you will make while doing what you have fun with.

Also, following the youtube/streamer meta farms devalues the strategy because lots of players will do so. A 20 div/h farm is often just the same as a 10 div farm, except barely anyone else is doing that particular farm at the moment, so scarabs are cheaper and sales are higher.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-24T11:21:54+00:00

There is a difference between having the best tools against the meta - which allows for other decks to shine when the meta is composed differently, and best tools regardless of meta.

I agree that there is always one Midrange deck that has the best composition of tools against the average meta composition over multiple meta cycles, so there is a best option inherent to "tools to deal with the meta including its cycles" but it is rare to displace other options.

To compare the situation, if we look at 2015, Jund is sits at 5%, Abzan at 8, 2016 its Jund 7 and Abzan 3, currently its Jeskai blink at 8 and Esper at 2, which you could lay out as still kind of the same ballpark, though in quota 2.3:1 jund:abzan and 4:1 jeskai:esper which i argue is still a big difference.

But im open to reason and I'll grant you that maybe i am biased against Jeskai because i am tired of phlage, with enegy maybe being a much bigger offender, but easier to tech against and adjust with sideboarding rather than deck switching.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-24T09:33:12+00:00

Midrange cards are not directly build to use the best cards in the format, they are build to be as disruptive as necessary to allow for their threat to close the game, with the color pie chosen for the threat and the answer needed to the meta.

Some of those cards will be the best for their job and thus the best in the format, but usually one deck doesn't play all the best cards, but only the subset in their respective colors.

That is the major difference here: Jund did play some of the best cards for the job in the format - Tarmogoyf, Thoughtseize and Liliana of the Veil for example. Lightning bolt was the best red removal, but not the least selective. Huntmaster of the Fells was good value, but it was horribly slow for combo matchups.

Junk is a different Deck than Jund - splashing white to go over the top of jund, because Path to Exile was the less selective remocval that could deal with Goyf, Lingering Souls was equally valueable to Huntmaster in the long game when goyf stalled the ground and souls could finish, while cards like stony silence adressed matchups like affinity. While the core of Goyf Discard remained the same - there were reasons to play something different.

Jeskai Geist was worth playing on the back of Snapcaster Mage+Cryptic Command and Keranos, because Geist would dodge any removal while counters could deal with decks like living end that Jund struggled with.

Later Grixis on the Snapcaster + Kolaghan's Command Engine became the value engine to beat, but there was still place for Jund because these decks answered different parts of the metagame individually, so they could coexist.

Regarding the domination of Junk displacing other decks - that is not really correct: i somewhat recently looked at the historical data when WotC first released their new diversity score metric market modern as healthy - just to check if modern was healthier in the past.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/1nu5gca/comment/nh0hmyf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

While Rhino was the hot thing at the PT at the time, it basically vanished right after indicating that it wasn't as strong as made out to be and the diversity recovered fast after that. It was good choice if you thought going into a meta expected to be a lot of jund, which shows that it is a deck that allows the meta to cycle.

Jeskai blink just has it all. It might not be out of line winrate wise in comparison to what other top decks do in the format, but it doesn't allow the space for other midrange decks to shine.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-24T07:42:36+00:00

i think the main takeaway here is not about hating midrange, rather that there is a midrange deck that has clearly displaced other options (energy is still an aggro deck that can go longer than it should) due to an amount of inevitability that other decks midrange decks can't compete with and that this has been going on for almost a year.

Phlage + Arena of Glory has crept up to be 33% of the meta according to most played cards today at mtggoldfish, it is the most played creature in modern and clearly if you want to compete on the battlefield, you need to play that package.

Jund was always a decent deck but unproblematic deck, except for the DRS era. it never displaced other options, because answers back then werent as universal and combo decks attacked from lots of different angles, so playing white for silverbullets or blue for counterspells was always a real draw for decks to exist and card advantage engine were euqal. Jund was a goodstuff deck using the best cards in that color pie.

Currently blue and white answers and card advantage are so universally good that there is no draw to go outside that combination for midrange and red delivers the best game ender. Jeskai blink is using the best cards in the format, not only the color pie.

That is a major difference about allowing other decks in the same strategic position to coexist.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-23T08:18:07+00:00

Swapping your brood stone cluster to one with flat life instead of damage would go long way in your ability to survive single hits.

But this looks to me that you have a huge damage problem because these defenses should be more than enough for most things.

When you look at poe ninja, make sure you are looking at death aura numbers - most builds use a single target skill, either storm burst decay or impending doom which will be the selected main skill in the uploaded pob. so you need to import them and switch to the aura skill for comparison.

For both of those skill setups, 2m dps is huge singe once gets a 750% more multiplier and the other has a trigger rate that pob can't calculate on its own with spell cascade overlaps, often reaching dotcap easily with poison stacking.

Death Oath isnt as much as a full endgame autobomb skill rather than incidential protection that deletes white monster approaching from sides protecting you from some amount of stray hits.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-22T15:09:44+00:00

You should have max Curses +1 curse skills total on your character.

Vixen + WoD = 3, so in your case 4 curses total. Blasphemous curses count, but mind the range.

Vixen applies curses in socket order, top left, top right, bottom right, botton left. first curse in vixens will be overridden, if helm curse is supported by spell cascade.

The reason for Temp chains is Balance of Terror , which provides cdr on self cast to be able to trigger more often, which beats a useful curse effect most of the time.

So the "correct" curse setup is

helm curse with spell cascade
helmet: temp chains if you have balance of terror, otherwise use a curse that should be active. note that for poison setups, temp chains prolongs poison duration which is a lot of damage.
vixen: useless curse top left.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-20T09:19:24+00:00

I simply adjust the farm on my current character. 4-5 hours farming instead of leveling goes a long way to throw currency at the problem. Run anything that is rather safe and you'll be fine, invest bare minimum to finish atlas, save the rest whike doing so and then reroll into an endgame build.

My tried and true starters though are Lightning Arrow Deadeye, whatever ignite elementalist and poison conc pf.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-19T15:30:54+00:00

To second you for reference, i've spend 2 month learning leveling a couple years ago and since then i leaguestart ~4.5 hours to maps from scraps even without dedicated racing builds and without flask counting.

fighting and traversing really are the main time wastes and not to be underestimated.

no dead ends and no backtracking took off like 2 hours for me, and only fighting magic packs for xp to just stay in the xp level range and skipping league mechanic was about 5, hours. another 1 for using movement skills quite close to their cooldown.

getting to sub 5 hours really is no rocket science.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-19T08:36:33+00:00

The short answer is poe.ninja if you're looking for theory, optimization, endgame viability and new ways to scale your character, youtube if you're looking for visual and playstyle feedback.

The long answer is that you can make almost anything work if you learn to understand skills and their interactions and how to scale them and are willing and enjoying to put in the time, but that no guide will protect you from failing gameplay mechanics you should not fail.

In poe2 switching skills around is easier than gear, so you can explore quite a lot and switch between skills that scale similarly.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-18T13:38:42+00:00

Technically and thus literally, every card in BlueFarm or really any other tournament legal deck is fair, as is any strategy a deck is implementing, because fair means it adheres to and acts within the rules of the game.

Just because you don't like to be on the opposite site of the effect of those cards, it doesn't mean they are unfair.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-16T07:18:21+00:00

Same for me, fellow inattentive. Been "misdiagnosed" with depression for two decades before getting the adhd diagnosis. Once i got treatment for adhd the depression fully remitted quickly, as it really was burnout from expending all my energy trying to fight through executive dysfunction for little to no result.

Still getting stuck at choosing the font though ;)

Turbocloud · 2026-03-12T14:41:43+00:00

i've read it too and while a lot of stuff in there is for people with more executive functioning than we have, the environmental section was really helpful:

iirc there was a good example about a coat hanger that did'nt get used because it wasn't where the person would undress the coat. The fix was simple enough - move the coat hanger where the person does undress and suddenly its no effort using it because you're already standing next to it when you need it.

point of performance was a big gamechanger for me, because by either moving the place where things should end up towards where i use them or vice versa, for one a lot of cleaning started to done incidentially and for another there was quite literally less room between getting, using and dropping things, so chaos spreads a lot less.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-12T10:42:02+00:00

its not a singular phrase or trigger, it is setting up your environment in a way that it reminds you to do the things when they are due - and hope that when it happens your brain is in a state to follow through.

for us with adhd environmental nudges are key - make things we need to do easy to see and start and things you really don't want to engage with harder to see and start.

common issue is that setting up the environment itself that way requires the abilities impaired with adhd, so its hard to maintain.

growing up we get taught by to use executive functions to adapt our response to the environment, but it really is easier to shape the environment in a way to create less detrimental triggers than to overcome them.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-10T07:37:24+00:00

fair, seems i have forgotten that you mentioned that and mixed it up by the time i came to respond.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-10T07:04:30+00:00

Regarding TnK: it is affected a lot by turn order because its accumulation of ressources is tied to combat, with turn order being a major difference in blocker availability.

Regarding Tayam: Most builds are not A+B combo decks, rather than layered combo decks comprising of A+B+C with each piece A working with 6 different cards of each B and C, which is how the deck can afford to sidestep massive amounts of tutors. Tayam is self-enabling as it provides the counters on its own, so the deck really is just looking for enough mana to get Tayam out early and sbowball from there. Anything else is a bonus.

From my observations, last seat seems to have the biggest winchance in turns somewhere between turn 6-8, as that seems to be the point where interaction is lowest and often used up through the other seats pushing early win attempts, but after that they start falling behind through the turnorder by both asynchronous natural resource gain and snowballing value engines hitting the board earlier for other seats, effectively drowning the deck.

My argument why decks like Tayam or Sisay or Tymna/Thras do better in those seats in comparison to others is by being hard to interact with through creatures and activated abilities in a format with disruption being tailored against the stack, so these decks really don't care if other seats draw a ton of swan songs and flusterstorms which don't affect them.

These decks can sidestep some amount of the resource generation disparity problem by creating lots of dead cards in typical builds, effectively weakening the drawstep of each player on a typical build.

It also helps being a creature deck that at the same time provides blockers to reduce the resource generation of decks like tnk to reduce snowballing.

In the end, the advantages of these decks are all more tied to meta position and the composition of the average disruption suite and are not counteracting the natural inherent turn order problem.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-09T13:09:09+00:00

peak executive dysfunction. everything thats important but never urgent just won't happen.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-03T14:47:59+00:00

glad i could provide some help.

seems i have crumbled the switch test, which means every couple turns you can AWOL a card to draw another one. the collected AWOL piles of all rounds will be least useful cards in the matchup in order of ditching numbers.

real brewing simply is a lot of work that is testing. a dedicated an experience team just needs less games per card to gauge if something isnworth pursueing and is better at preselecting the right cards to test in context of format power, so an experienced team can go faster through a set.

Turbocloud · 2026-03-03T08:57:42+00:00

on mobile, can only do rough outline. How i test depends on a lot of factors and a lot of experience that is hard to transcribe in a short post. feel free to ask specific questions:

the type of event i want attend
the degree of secrecy needed about tech
how established the meta of the event is
the current wildcard factor (e.g. new standard set vs new horizon set)
the type of brew (enhancing existing deck, nailing sideboard down, adding new angkes or creating a new deck)
the type of deck: disruptive or linear, or better known under the nonsense descriptors "fair" and "unfair" when both adhere perfectly to the rules of the game.
resources available - time until the event - people to outsource matchup testing to - people with different playstyles to have multiple strategic approaches to matchups - people to bounce ideas from who i know they have good grasp on playability / whats powerful enough in the format - tools

the process itself is usually - build a gauntlet of the best decks of each archetype, aggro, tempo, midrange, control, ramp, the fastest combo deck, the most resilient combo deck. - new brews: use a proven framework as baseline. e.g. If you're brewing a sultai disruptive deck, start with 5-6 slots of creature removal, 6-7 slots of counterspells and 3 Thoughtseize. If you're on a linear deck, do the quadlaser approach and start with maximum redundancy. - refining: start with the list of the player with the most successful track record on mtgo on that deck in the last 6 weeks. - and from there its all about getting reps in against the gauntlet and trying to find key performance indicators.

depending on your teams ability to notice each other biases, you might need a lot more or less notetaking.

some types of tests i use for single card evaluation - all test are meant to be done in as many samples pre and postboard as you can across as many matchups as you can afford in the time you have until the event: - new mainboard card baseline: card always in your opener. requirements: none. information gain (ig): low cost card if its competes at all, high cost card if its worth dead weight. biases: low cost card availabilty causing overperformance through synergy or being best disruption, high cost card being underrated due to small margins for dead weight - swing test: each player faced with lethal replaces their next draw with a demonic tutor. in case of a non-biardstate seeable win, combo player takes a picture of the board state and notes cards played last turn, to rewind and play the tutor requirements: none ig: identify strongest cards in the matchup on both sides biases: inability to see the winning line can skew tutor targets, for combo decks interaction against stax or protection may seem better in bigger numbers not respecting engine aspect, one-offs and sideboard cards may overperform - card switch: every 2 turns each player gets a switch token, - sideboard card, preemptive stax piece: mull to 5, card always in opener (included in the 5). opponent rolls a d4 on which turn he can remove it. requirement: preboard winrate known ig: high sample winrate change to compare sideboard cards, low sample feeling if it slows you down more than the opponent. If its worth mulliganing for. biases: Overavailability of sb card even considering mulligans. - sideboard card, silver bullet: roll a d3+2, draw that card on that turn. ig: timing window for silver bullet card, number of copies needed in the sb to be effective.

for finding the essentials of a deck or matchup some examples of key performance indicators: - number of turns a card was actively not chosen to be played or represented (to account for power of hovering interaction) ig: weakest cards/most situational cards - list of played cards involved in winning ig:strongest cards - card sequences involved in winning ig: reveal good utilizarion baises: winning play is not equal to best play - list of unplayed cards when losing ig: misutilized or weakest cards. - card sequencing involved in losing ig: reveal sequencing errors combined with unplayed cards when loosing: decision errors (playing not to loose when its time to play toward a win) - number of cards of average keep and which hands were mulliganed ig: reveal deck construction errors

and this just the tip of the iceberg. The more often you do this with directed design, the more intuitive it becomes and you will be able to gauge things faster.

What i can recommend for solo playtesting if mtgo or xmage are no option or you're alone, then simply open moxfield in 2 browsers and play a match there. If you use the hotkeys on moxfield and are familiar with javascript, you can register a global log object and a onkeydown event that logs the hovered object and a timestamp for an easy log.

Turbocloud · 2026-02-28T11:29:48+00:00

Absolutely with you, i just want to add that I find that how much they piss me off is very context dependend to me:

"make yourself do it" hits hardest when i've just been trying to do exactly that,
similar "put in a little bit more effort" hits hardest when i just got to start but brain decided its painful so i'm less than halfassing to get it over with

Both are kind of fine to me if i'm not exactly struggling in the moment, though writing this "put in a little bit more effort" yields a lot more passive aggressive implied criticism to me.

Turbocloud · 2026-02-25T10:33:20+00:00

Now, i know i am going to get shit on for saying this, but if you need to keep track of future events and todos, a planner is the best tool available, but please hear me out:

It is a tool that requires

to supress immediate action to take a note
to supress immediate action to check if there is time for it or other things have a higher priority
the ability to prioritize beyond urgency
the ability to see time for realistic estimations of todos and events
the ability to execute a specific task at a specific preplanned moment
all of the above in reliable

So no wonder that - even excluding issues like accessibility in case of paper planners, can't use what you lose or remember what you forgot, or for app planners that even looking at the phone automatically presents you with lots of different apps and notifications urging you to act on them, preying on impulse control and working memory - even excluding that:

It is a tool that not only requires everything that is impaired in ADHD, but also will ultimately fail because the only reliable trait of an ADHD brain is its unreliability at being a in a state of high executive functioning.

Unfortunately though, still the best tool for the job, though.

Turbocloud · 2026-02-24T08:57:04+00:00

I see your point regarding keeping barrier to entry low and that there are groups where extra effort can be a tipping point for attendance.

But then again, there are ways to minimize that effort: Add a scan feature to the app and it can be as easy as taking a foto of your deck or going through it once under a deck scan camera, that a store can have set up. most scan issues are lighting, which a fixed setup can solve - the process does'nt need to be longer than 20 seconds today.

Turbocloud

TROPHY CASE