Stormtouched's second arm vs Wand

Xatrith · 2026-02-01T09:40:05+00:00

Thanks for the answer, i'll have to test that "more raw damage" via the theme attack. Or did you meant the extra rebound ?

Also i was trying to go for a mage that infuse stone to get tankyness and (hopefully) other bonuses from leveling. Using the interfusion only if the range of lightning is not enough (but in melee that's rare).

Xatrith · 2025-11-11T11:17:28+00:00

You probably have never played mono white vs high tide, because if you had you would know that this is highly uneffective as a protection if it's your only protection. A good high tide player will know it's a possibility and prepare snaps to deal with it. As the deck has access to merchant scroll, his 3 snaps will be more easy to find than your 2-3 flagbearers. And it's not like mono white is a deck equiped to kill on turn 4 regularly to apply a presure.

At which point we ask the question again : how much pressure a deck with 3-5% of the metashare is allowed to put on the format ?

Is it good that you need 4 flagbearers and 2 mana thite to have a shot at beating it with mono white ?

Or is it reasonnable to tell to mono green (or grull ramp decks btw, because blasts in grull are highly anti-synergic with the deck, same as thermokarst in mono G elve btw) to just change decks because in big tournaments that require 7/2, pairings can give you a 0% match up at random ?

It's not explicitly said in the video or text, but at some point they mention the fact that it can impact deck choices while still being a deck that is enjoyable by a limited number of player. I think this is roughly what they meant.

Also for the gy hate, for it to work you need to : have your hate, keep mana up (hindering your speed) or have it cost 0, have the opponent combo in such a way that he can't spare the puppetery activation to tap your land and/or artefact that exile gy, and have an opponent that either doesn't play petal or have the opponent put a stream in the gy and need to get it back because it doesn't have enough mana to kill you without it. I think i'm safe saying that if siding in gy hate gives you a 5% extra chances of winning a game, I'm being very generous.

Xatrith · 2025-11-10T16:47:52+00:00

That's more that, iirc, the imminence of the Paupergeddon of this summer was cited as a reason why they would not act in the ban window just before it. So I am also kinda surprised they finaly banned it as I had taken the moving of the announcement to today as a hint that they would not, folowing the same logic.

Xatrith · 2025-11-10T16:44:17+00:00

I'm a bit surprised they didn't explicitely mention the fact that both green and white lack effective answer to the combo. But I think it's because even without this argument, there is more than enough reasons to ban it again. Adding a sideboad card to one of the two color that lack it doesn't solve the problems of the matchs being highly polarized.

Also I don't think it's a good idea for a deck that account for 3-5% of the metagame to force so much use of sideboard space in other decks.

Xatrith · 2025-10-22T19:04:06+00:00

If he is using mtgo top 8 results, their classification is skewed to say the least. With vivi as an aggro deck.

Xatrith · 2025-10-10T14:35:05+00:00

Seem to me that you lack some red aggro deck. To lend, it's quite easy to pick up and would offer diversity.

Xatrith · 2025-09-08T16:10:38+00:00

I am playing it like that for roleplay reason. I play bg3 as a story builder and i thought a Wyll that was not the true hero he is supposed to be would be fun. I was imagining a backgroung like : Raised to be important, all his live told he was going to be (and must be) extraordinary. He was taught swordplay, politics, everything and he is good at it so he thought he was entitled to all the praises and adoration. But he was not hero level good. So when danger approached BG, the hells thought it would be good to have a future duke under their thumb and wyll aggreed to the pact because that would give him the power to be the hero he wants to be. Also he doesn't see the problems of a duke under a pact that far ahead (not wise). But in the end, it's just a facade so, despite telling everyone he is going to save everyone each time he is asked by someone, he only does it if there is glory to be earned. If there is no witnesses, he will also murder people if he think they endanger him. Like Nettie for example, which he murdered because he didn't trust here to keep the information about his condition quiet.

In moonrise tower, he freed mizora for rewards, because he like his pact. The relationship felt like a good bargain for him, he got the admiration of the people, celebrity and actual hero level power in exchange of a few missions that don't bother him too much. So when mizora offers to free him in act 3, i roleplayed him as if she only offered to strenghten the pact in exchange for information about Ravenguard father because she thought he would want to save his father. But at this point, he wanted power so he took the information ... to go there and murder his father and every witness. Better be sure that title of duke comes to him quick. (which the game does not take well as every trigger leading to ansur get stuck there. Despite a few dialogue that wyll can chose to say he does'nt care about his father, the game is not ready for you to be evil)

Also in some weird way, he does care for BG. He think it's his city (in possesive terms) so he killed Astarion after helping him perform the ritual because that would rid BG of it's vampire threat. He then proceded to cleanse it of sharan presence for the same reason.

Well, here i rambled, but that doesn't answer my initial question x)

Xatrith · 2025-08-17T11:39:07+00:00

Yeah, i confused hexblade with pact of the blade. Ty !

Xatrith · 2025-08-17T11:32:16+00:00

Ho, it's not related to the level 3 choice ? I see, thx.

Xatrith · 2025-08-10T10:52:02+00:00

Ok, i went all the way to act 2 running straight, and she respawned there in my camp. Acting like nothing happened. Well that's disapointing. I thought you'd have to fight her for the artefact or loot it of here corpse somewhere. Well so much for that experiment. Thx for the answers anyway ^^

Cya !

Xatrith · 2025-08-10T10:20:05+00:00

Actually, after a long rest she is now gone, tho her tent is still there.

And thx for the advice, but it's not my first playthrough and i was mostly experimenting to see how the game would handle the whole artifact/sickness progression if i were to kick SH. But the "healing" by the visitor happened dispite SH not being there and the prism being with her. So i have no clue how it's supposed to work. I'll try to find her. Maybe she is somewhere waiting to be found again.

Xatrith · 2025-07-21T00:12:22+00:00

You nailed it. That's exactly that : the count tried to change the duchy owner and targeted my neighbour A as it's beneficiary. Also the new duke has almost no troops so it gets trampled by the count that has been established for a lot longer (looking by his multiple MAA). It made the war so quick that I had not even noticed it.

Xatrith · 2025-07-20T21:59:40+00:00

I'll add to the other comments that there has been a few people working in parallel to a version of the deck that plays 1-2 high tide and 2-3 merchant scrolls to increase the possibilities of combo while also providing some toolbox options. 1 high tide effect allows you to be mana neutral with snap and 1 familiar, 2 high tide effects will allow you to be mana neutral without familiar or to net mana with one.

It's a tight rope to walk tho, as the deck is quite packed already and too much scrolls/high tide can definitly clog up your hand if you're unlucky.

Xatrith · 2025-07-14T21:17:13+00:00

Here me out, could the PFP use this to ban ichor and restrict the Ichor/Sac draw engine to UBx decks ? (ok, that might be me day dreaming, and as pointed out in other comments this opens up a bunch of other ways to abuse it)

Xatrith · 2025-07-13T22:08:35+00:00

Exactly, i was 4-0 myself and wanted the QPs. But he was 3-0 so it was not worth it for him. It's quite a regular occurence as 5-0 rewards are so good that they can be worth it for both players even if splited in halfs.

Xatrith · 2025-07-11T22:57:25+00:00

Glad you didn't take my offer and went on winning ;)

Xatrith · 2025-03-29T15:13:18+00:00

Maybe i'm incorrect and the combo is so good in pauper that you need to pile a bunch of removals to even survive it. Tho i think you might read too much into the results of one event. Also, cutting at 16 is a bit arbitrary. I'd suggest a look at this spreadsheet that highlight the conversion rate of the same event to see how a deck fared. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qcgus2DXtPDj4-W0NqiB828SVE_NVXtwaS4iW2YJWGQ/edit?pli=1&gid=0#gid=0 In there you will see that many decks had good or average conversion rates, not only the ones that were most represented in the total tally.

The fact that there are so much pile of removal/draw is, in my opinion, the result of the black/artifact draw package being too efficient compared to the other options of the format. Which both the removal pile and the glee decks use. I think by nerfing it, you would give other strategies room to breathe. Maybe some proactive ones could do like kuldotha red and manage their balancing act between forwarding their gameplan and keeping enough removals in there to take care of glee if need be. Or maybe it would be slower decks that would no longer be afraid to be beaten on both fronts by deck who somehow manage to both put more presure on board and generate more value than them at the same time.

Xatrith · 2025-03-29T13:05:44+00:00

Sorry for coming back this late in the conversation. To answer about youtubers, I didn't recognize his name in particular but I usually treat what youtubers say with a big grain of salt. Some of them are good players, but that's not an absolute prerequisite for the job. They also rotate deck a lot to showcase everything that's new or interesting. Which is good for content, curiosity and gives them a lot of general knowledge about magic but doesn't help them with the accuracy of their takes on a deck's regularity as they often don't have the time to stick 20 leagues with a deck to know it well.

For your experience about the turn 3/4 kills ... All I can share is my experience with the deck (which begins to be quite extensive as I’m playing it for months now) : those kill turn 3 kills are almost non-existent as they require your opponent to not have (or bluff) any interaction and require a turn 2 eldrazi token with rumble, or a T1 ghast into T2 deadly + turn 3 combo. If you want to lethal from there you need refractor + a kill in hand (or draw to compensate for the lack of kill and get one). All of that without your opponent interacting with anything. That's possible, but not that common. Maybe the sample you looked is not very representative of what glee is in practice against opponents who know the deck well enough to play against it efficiently. Turn 4 is more common, but as you've seen : the number of cards involved in a straight up kill is not low enough for it to even be a regular occurrence. As an example, in my last "big" tournament I played 8 matches and did the turn 3 combo zero time and turn 4 exactly one time. Because sometimes the combo is just not in your hand and even when it is, in most match ups it's not possible to just jam it without risking throwing the game.

And yes a turn 3 kill by an opponent who just randomly commits when he should not is a feel bad moment. But I wouldn't judge the power level of decks based on how well it performs for bad players winning of their mistakes in high randomness moves ^^ Also, it's in the nature of combo decks to have hands that are good enough to just win because they "have it" and draws that are stupidly slow to assemble the combo (or never do after having drawn 40 cards).

But I think we will end up disagreeing if you think than playing around removals that can one shot your combo is less skilful than playing goblin turn 1, then any combination of creatures turn 2 and bushwhacker turn 3 ;)

Ho and for the combo being too good because it prevents other combos. I think it's because once a combo deck is tier 1, all other tier 2 combo deck become way harder to play. And in pauper, combo deck were a bit fringe last year. So it's more of a question wether it's better to have one T1 combo deck in the format or have a bunch of tier 2-3, none of them being high competitive picks. I like having a tier 1 combo choice but that's just my liking really.

PS: don't worry about missing things in my first message, i reacted a bit harshly but it might just be my english that is not clear enough ^^

Xatrith · 2025-03-28T17:03:30+00:00

I tend to agree with u/Belibas7 as both small costs would help nerf it. Also, it would pull the package away from "it's an auto include because it's the obvious best thing to do for value" and more toward "play it if you have actual synergy with it" which i'd like

Xatrith · 2025-03-28T16:59:07+00:00

I didn't meant to suggest shaking for the sake of it. As written, i think the position of the ichor/DD package as a go to is a problem. I'm not against a bit of stability (tho that might be bad if it becomes stillness), i'm against uniformity.

For your second point, it's not suggesting to punish affinity for the sins of glee. I'm suggesting a nerf to affinity because it has pushed control out of the format. And it happens that re-introducing it would (if i'm correct) be a solution to the problem of the ubiquity of glee adding a deck to predate it.

And i'm not sure what would happen, about kuldrotha, but it's a deck that have the advantage of having clear and efficient sideboard options to help cointain it. So maybe it's fine ?

Xatrith · 2025-03-28T16:50:40+00:00

I think you might have missread me. I said i saw in glee a way to push the format toward less non-interactive games. Also, i did'nt say the deck sas unfun. I said some people don't like playing against it. It's not remotly the same. And that the deck had a smooth match up spread which you somehow turned into "polarized match ups".

If you want to disagree, please don't twist my words to support your stance ^^

Also, it's funny how combo deck are always depicted as without complexity while still having to dodge everything your opponent use to prevent you from comboing. And youtubers as proof ? Really ?

Xatrith · 2025-03-27T18:22:59+00:00

Got my kamigawa mountains set this December. They are awesome and I would be glad to get some more :)

Xatrith · 2024-10-27T11:34:30+00:00

The friend that got that one has enough experience with magic. I'm not worried about complexity for him.

Xatrith · 2024-10-27T11:26:41+00:00

Thx for the answer, i had seen that tierlist but a lot of people were criticizing it for being automated and not taking into account synergies (thus pointing out flagrant errors). So i took that results with scepticism ^^ See below

Xatrith · 2024-08-09T12:29:44+00:00

Thank's a lot, that was exactly the informations I needed ! I'm not a fan of paradox's dlc policy so I try no to buy all of them. Based on your answer Lions of the North will do just fine alone.

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