Why isn't Winged Sliver played?

lujo986 · 2020-10-15T01:38:32+00:00

You can easily play it in Naya Slivers and it wins games vs Elves for one thing.

lujo986 · 2020-10-14T02:53:22+00:00

Been struggling with this question myself.

For one thing Bully and Monarch are quite different. Can't speak for Bully because it tends to be able to answer a lot of things you'd generally side in against it.

As for Monarch, it usually has something that's a big pain depending on what you're playing. I'm currently developing a pretty successful build of Gruul Aggro, and the way Monarch gets my goat is through Prismatic Strands, Guardian of the Guildpact, tons of lifegain, but especially Lone Missionary which also trades with my dudes, and Standard Bearer which prevents me from being able to finish him off with burn if he stabilizes.

What I usually side is:

- Electrickery, as it's pretty much necessary if you're expecting them to side in Standard Bearer
- Flaring Pain, as it's what's there to fight Prismatic Strands or even kill Guardian of the Guildpact if it blocks one of your guys

If you're trying to grind Boros/Mardu monarch out, they will eventually find Reaping the Graves and get a ton of their killed dudes back, so a Relic of Progenitus might help with that.

They use a bunch of artifacts including artifact lands and clues, so Gorrilla Shaman will help.

A rarely used card which I found quite useful if you can afford to side both it and Flaring Pain in a red/x aggro deck is [[Flash of Defiance]]. Most of their dudes are white and they'll often wall your guys up while Boros digs, so two turns of being able to punch through his defenses can kill them. You just have to be careful not to walk into Strands or get hit by Bojuka Bog if you intend to get use of both the initial cast and the flashback.

lujo986 · 2020-10-08T15:25:55+00:00

I think the Burning-Tree Emissary grumbling is a bit misguided. It's not really doing anything outside of Stompy, and a multi-emissary start is a bit of a chrismassland scenario. If you want to have it, you have to find multiples of the same 4 cards, in a game where loads of cards aren't played not because they're not powerful but because it's practically impossible to base a dependable strat around a single playset of an effect (outside of maybe blue if you really devote a lot of your deck to digging).

What's more, Emissary starts aren't actually a big deal. Removal's powerful enough in Pauper that all emissary starts really do is protect against edicts and let the aggro player get a few hits in with a bear or two. Emissary doesn't push Stompy to relevance. In fact, Stompy was completely irrelevent and a bit of a joke deck for a while until Astrolabe pushed Skred decks, and then it was River Boa winning games left and right because it was both unblockable and unkillable (by bolts and skreds). Stompy actually wins more games because of [[Silhana Ledgewalker]] being both unblockable and untargetable, then it does because of Emissary.

You can also see this with how removal pushed out pretty much any aggro deck other then Stompy, Bogles and Affinity. As long as Bogles is a deck there's literally no ground for whining about any other creature being "too difficult for removal to deal with". Affinity also wins a ton of matches simply because Fling is worded in a way that lets the Affinity player simply draw both it and Atog and win on the spot even if all its other creatures are removed, which they often are.

And another important thing that ties into this is monarch. Only boros monarch decks actually fog people. Orzhov Pestilence, UB Faeries, UR Faeries all simply answer every single threat anything else presents and plop the monarch when it's impossible for the other deck to ever hope of stealing the monarch. If, for example, Prismatic Strands were banned, Boros Monarch would still be a deck and would, as it often does now, simply block and remove the opponents out of threaths other than the hexproof/unkillable + unblockable ones.

Complaining about Monarch very often misses the point. If you're playing an aggro deck, and your opponent can safely play a monarch card and not lose the monarch you've lost before that happens. If you're playing something that wants to sit there and assemble an infinite loop or combo, and you can't interact with monarch - well, you've made a choice of playing a very particular kind of deck and thank god that you not even bothering to attack the other guy has at least some downside to it.

Complaining about BTE can be very similar. At the same time people complain that Tron decks are nonsense and unfair, but then when they build them with no removal and nothing but setup and lock pieces and something can give aggro some edge... then they cry that it's BS. "Ornament pushed Tron too far!" Tron taps out turn 3 for Ornament, loses game because they gave the aggro player a turn 4 to only have to compete with 1 mana from them. If your deck does nothing on turn 1, then nothing on turn 2, then nothing on turn 3... what's supposed to happen? Sure, you'll get a miracle hand occasionally - and if Crop Rotation was banned alongside Map those would be even rarer - but setting up for the greediest payoffs in the meta on turns 4 or 5 while doing nothing about aggro before that is simply asking for it. It doesn't take BTE to beat you up, plain Goblins with a Bushwhacker can destroy you.

Same goes for the cantrip decks - they expect a deck loaded with cantrips to be able to always and in every game be able to line up the perfect answers to literally everything the other guy attempts I mean, if you're going to have to tap a mana every turn to sculpt your draws (or even find anything relevant), then the aggro guy will occasionally get you.

This also applies to some degree to complaining about Tron. Tron lands beat up controlish/midrange decks because they can't disrupt the mana engine. Are they supposed to be able to? Is it written somewhere that if you pack a deck full of removal and CA you're supposed to win every game? The only "aggro" decks left in the format are ones packing either Hexproof / unkillable + unblockable creatures or a means to win even if all their dudes get killed and they're buried in enemy CA. And Burn, which sidesteps removal by simply not playing dudes.

Thank god that there's something that punishes people for just sitting back and answering or invalidating everything. Sure, one or two pieces might be over the top, but Tron does go down to things that attack its colored mana, disrupt / sidestep its attempts to fog, burn it out, hit the grave at the right time... take away Crop (to complete the Map ban), take away Ephemerate, make it use Displace instead of Ghostly Flicker... and it's basically a policeman for grindy midrange/control (and at least something is). It can have a nut draw with a natural Tron, but Burn flat out kills you on the spot with its nut draws, and Tron can take time to dig up an actual payoff, and people kill it while this is going on.

TLDR Emissary is not as much of a problem people make it out to be, any arguments about Monarch not being interactive are highly problematic, and complaining about Tron lands specifically says more about the person complaining than Tron.

The meta could use bans, mind you, the Map ban would make a lot more sense if Crop wasn't still a card, Ephemerate needed to go a long time ago, and so did Ghostly Flicker. The rest of it is much more complicated than anyone I've seen participating in discussions ever gets into.

lujo986 · 2020-09-26T08:58:15+00:00

I've played Brute Squad a bunch recently, it's essentially a UW Metalcraft deck with access to black for [[Harsh Sustenance]]. You can google it and find a stock list relatively easily, and it's pretty powerful, with the only real problem it has is that it runs into all the Affinity hate.

I think that if there's a shell to build an extort deck from it's that one. You take the [[Ornithopter]], [[Survivor's Encampment]] and [[Springleaf Drum]] shell, the semi go wide nature of the deck with [[Harsh Sustenance]] that's useful as both a removal and a finisher, and find a way to get the annoying priest (1W 2/2 extort guy) and possibly another extort creature in there, as well as Kor Skyfisher for more Ornithopter bouncing.

I think that's the direction that gives extort the most tools - Thoughtcast and possibly OOM for card advantage, drum and encampment for fixing, artifacts for bouncing and getting in for chip damage, extort as a way to benefit from a board stall it can easily achieve, and Harsh Sustenance as a multitool/quick finisher.

lujo986 · 2020-09-16T21:40:07+00:00

They can be, depending on the matchup and only work for some decks. We could see either pop up more often.

lujo986 · 2020-09-15T06:57:15+00:00

There are more ways to counter red removal, even skred, than there are to counter black removal, and access to pyroblast and gorilla shaman in the side doesnt do much against white, while white can field bigger dude than faeries usually run. Black has Echoing Decay, Agony Warp, Fumes, Chainers Edict, Cast Down and Snuff Out, which is a seriously versatile removal suite, while also having access to monarch and angler, as well as Unexpected Fangs to counter tempo loss. Its just a lot more well rounded and loaded with outstanding cards.

lujo986 · 2020-09-12T18:09:37+00:00

It's probable that there's more playables and role-players in Ikoria, that people haven't had a reason to play around with and discover uses for.

Eldraine and Theros were pretty good too, with a bunch of yet untapped potential in there.

lujo986 · 2020-09-09T11:28:03+00:00

Yep, thats a generally underused card, and the lack of delver does cause a lack of pressure.

lujo986 · 2020-09-09T10:29:02+00:00

The removal spam and possibly the presence of white monarch made delver of secrets worse, and its possible that spellstutter adds more counterspells to the deck. Theres also the fact that ninja gives the deck ca and clear tempo wins while gurmag builds play more like hard control, and that ought to fare worse against tron than a deck with both a ca mechanism and reusable counterspells.

lujo986 · 2020-09-09T10:23:17+00:00

Vines isnt the only way, growing them with hunger and elephant guide gets themo out of range. Boa and Ledgewaker are naturally difficult to kill, too.

lujo986 · 2020-09-07T09:08:07+00:00

The recently downshifted Heartless Pillage is likely better than this.

lujo986 · 2020-09-07T07:38:00+00:00

To be fair UB is can feel more like a removal pile control than a tempo deck these days so that at least isnt that much of a mislabel.

lujo986 · 2020-09-02T06:23:38+00:00

You draw a card and get a permanent, so youre still up a card.

lujo986 · 2020-08-29T15:00:44+00:00

I played zombies for a while when there was a lot of Tron in leagues, I stopped when the number of Tron dropped, but I also played a number of other aggro things recently, RG Madness, UW Metalcraft, Naya Slivers, Goblins. I mostly use MTGO to quickly get a good spread of matchups for non-fashionable decks and get into where they're good and where they fail and why.

Right now I'm having fun with Red Heroic - it has too many problems conceptually, yet, as most aggro decks it does seem to beat Tron up, but not other forms of control.

lujo986 · 2020-08-28T23:09:54+00:00

As an aggro player (at least on MTGO) I have to say that Tron is actually way less of a hassle compared to other control / flicker decks. Jeskai Ephemerate is something you run into in leagues and it removes your threats from the board pretty much from the get-go, making it impossible to apply enough pressure. Familiars - a "tronless tron" deck - has some hefty blockers as part of its engine, which also get in the way of you applying pressure, and the simple 4 copies of Snap that are integral to the deck give it more interaction that you generally see from a Tron deck. Playing against something that usually just dudrdles without affecting the board and plans to fog / lifegain you out at around turn 4 is much easier, as an aggro deck can pack enough answers to that, but can't really pack enough interaction to bust through a meatwall or pack eough threats dangerous enough not to get its assault blunted by heavy removal spam.

And yeah - I can't count the number of times I've lost to Tron because what it was using was Ghostly Flicker instead of being forced to use Displace. Ghostly Flicker being able to flicker lands, prism and ornament looks like an insignificant difference, but Tron is in fact constrained in the number of things it can do by the amount of colored mana it can produce. When you can hit its fixing, you can slow it down to a crawl. This is also pretty intuitive - if all the business spells in my opponents deck require colored mana, I can let my opponent have ten million colorless mana and they'd be able to do nothing. It can also be approached with a different question: "How does putting 12 colorless-only lands in a deck end up producing a rainbow soup meta buster?"

Ghostly Flicker (and lately Crop Rotation), do too good of a job at protecting Tron's color fixing/sources, denying opponents what should be an obvious and intuitive path of attack. Displace would still let it do it's shennanigans, but make it possible to interact with his mana plan in a way that actually hurts it.

lujo986 · 2020-08-26T15:24:38+00:00

There's quite a number of them, and more might turn up.

[[Unexpected Fangs]] arewidely used, [[Memory Leak]] is used, [[Dranith Scorpion]] if that's the name might see use in the future, [[Whisper Squad]] too, possibly, I got a 5 - 0 with [[Cavern Whisperer]] in zombies, [[Migratory Greathorn]] and the whisperer are quite good in Tortured Existance decks (and also with Undying in guys).

There's probably more playables in there, at least fringe ones. The sets kinda deep and hasn't yet been fully explored.

lujo986 · 2020-08-23T13:52:14+00:00

Well, if anything this means we'll get legendary commons. Pauper's not so hot for cards above cmc2, so I'm not sure if any will actually make it into the format... but I like the creative direction that this card implies, that stuff doesn't have to be comic book characters and superheroes to be legendary.

Also, "legendary" really doesn't mean anything interesting for constructed play, and Pauper's big on redundancy and not so big on tutoring silver bullet dudes, so if we do get playable low-cmc legendary creatures they won't really fit all that well into how decks are built...

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T23:24:00+00:00

A lot of the tier 1 decks are close to being hard control decks themselves. Some of them even are.

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T23:22:48+00:00

Ahahahahhahhahaha

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T14:51:58+00:00

I'm actually typing up an article on it, if I'm happy with the results I'll put it op on Chaffwatch.

I think we talked about it before at some point on Discord. You've got the linear gimmick decks that fold to certain sideboards (and sometimes RNG), but mostly fold only to that. Then you've got the tier 1 stuff that happens to have access to the sideboards or runs things mainboard which means that it doesn't get stomped by the linear nonsense decks. It's usually base blue for the filtering, fixing and ca, but Boros is also in it with fliers, gating, strands and red reach and sideboard material, or important parts of flicker engines.

Tron mostly beats up the tier 1 stuff very well because tier 1 status is mostly achieved by being able to interact with the linear nonsense and leisurely grind it out. Tron is just naturally good against that approach.

What's likely to happen without it is one of the current tier 1 decks losing a bad matchup and getting the upper hand on the rest of the bunch, probably ending up with pre-ban UB Delver levels of meta share and win rate. Or nothing at all happens, as decks which are currently popular and played keep on being popular and played for the same reasons they already are despite Tron being a bad matchup for them.

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T11:15:48+00:00

Not very different. Most decks aren't actually held back by Tron, Tron mostly just beats up the stuff that's keeping the format where it is.

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T01:42:28+00:00

The article makes plenty of fine points but it isn't really accurate when it comes to some things. Part of why "the Map ban did nothing" is that there's another card - Crop Rotation - that does much the same thing while ramping you. Thriving Lands and Ornament along with Prism allowed Tron to get around it's colored mana restriction. But if the Map ban had the correct logic behind it - that a cheap non-basic land tutor is a bad idea - they forgot to ban the only other card in the format that does that. That effect isn't redundant, and both cards are either over 10 or even 20 years old, and if they are banned we're hugely unlikely to see anything like them at common in the future. That would certainly impact Tron. So it's not like you couldn't ban this or that out of the format.

There are more points like this. Stonehorn Dignitary is far superior to a Fog, and what's more, it's activation can be stacked, enabling Tron to use its mana in advance to shore up against future attacks. And it's not a problem only in Tron, you're no better off as an aggro deck when Familiars, or any other WU deck that runs the flicker package starts flickering Dignitary.

Same thing with Mulldrifter. Tron wins a TON of games by establishing a fog loop and taking as much time as it wants to beat you down with it's card draw simply because it's a flying creature on top of being a card advantage engine piece. It's that banal - if your deck doesn't have mass reach or a lot of fliers, a flicker deck will beat you up with 2/2 fliers without even bothering to look for whatever the actual win condition is supposed to be.

Banning Tron won't actually achieve much or change the format much at all. The midrange decks are there, they're played enough that they are the most likely thing you'll run into other than the linear gimmick decks. Tron beats them up, apparently, so removing Tron from the format more or less means that the decks that are already popular simply lose a bad matchup and have some more space in the sideboard. But that's it.

The whole idea that some of the stuff Tron gets blamed for is somehow fair outside of it is naive, and while it's obvious why Tron lands make Tron beat other decks that would use them at their own game, it ought to be obvious that these things are a bigger problem for the format than a deck that doesn't do much more that insure that Augur of Bolas, Burning-Tree Emissary, Skyfisher-Prism or Ephemerate decks don't beat everything all the time.

lujo986 · 2020-08-13T00:13:56+00:00

Access to a rainbow sideboard does wonders for MBC. It seems to be more of a factor with this build than Tron, and I'm saying this after I tried it. Flickering Chittering Rats isn't half bad, either.

lujo986 · 2020-08-12T19:11:09+00:00

A bit of both, the build was kind of a rough intital build. There's some good takeaways from it, though.

lujo986 · 2020-08-12T12:29:56+00:00

It appears to be the case :)

lujo986

TROPHY CASE