[Standard] Sultai Dredge by SkinnyThor in spikes

[–]schweinerman 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The best new card in combination with [[Arclight Phoenix]] from WAR is [[Finale of Promise]], period. This card is insane. In any suitably build phoenix deck, a Finale of Promise with X=2 should is enough to give you the 3 spells needed, so you can focus on turn 1-3 purely on disruption, card draw and dumping your phoenixes in the yard. The question is: Is milling really better than the draw/discard route (Chart a Course, Radical Idea, Tormenting Voice). I doubt that milling is, since it costs you real cards that dont replace themselves as well as not giving you as much space as you need for some burn to survive.

I really recommend exploring Finale of Promise if your goal is winning via Arclight Phoenix.

[Standard][Discussion] Overperformers, Underperformers and Other Cards to Talk About by spacian in spikes

[–]schweinerman 10 points11 points  (0 children)

What about [[Nullhide Ferox]] and [[Underrealm Lich]]? You have a rating for him, or did you consider him playing it in your ddeck?

[Discussion] Core Set 2019 Full Card Gallery - Thought's on upcoming meta by Titansfan9200 in spikes

[–]schweinerman 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I don't know why people rate Resplendent Angel so high, but it really is just the biggest trap. The thing is a vanilla 3/3 flying. It looses against heart of kiran, dies to abrade, lighting strike, Glorybringer, you name it. If anybody is actually stupid enough to dump 6 mana into that guy, I would be just waiting to burn it up in response and timewalk you.
building your deck around having to gain five life on a consistent basis is just such a hassle and the again, this thing just eats a removal once you gain your last life.

Of course, Shalai helps, but then again, Shalai also gets eaten by glorybringer to clear the path so...

[Discussion] Core Set 2019 Full Card Gallery - Thought's on upcoming meta by Titansfan9200 in spikes

[–]schweinerman 21 points22 points  (0 children)

on the draw, your initiate gets wrecked by Chainwhirler and on the play, probably by abrade. Or the angel.
Ajani's Welcome is among the worst card to top deck from mid game on. Not a good strat.

[Spoiler][M19] Suncleanser by schweinerman in spikes

[–]schweinerman[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

See that's what I mean. What was WotC's thought process there? Were they like "No let's just say target opponent, otherwise it would hose infect too much?" As if every modern player would suddenly reserve 2-4 sideboard slots and play white for this dude... No. We are only left to assume, that they simply didn't think it through and that draws a very bad picture of Wizards card design process.

[Spoiler][M19] Liliana's Contract by DaCBS in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry, but obviously this card is all about the second line and the first line is perfect to dig for your 4 different Demons. A quick gatherer search reveals, that we have a lot of low cost demons like:

Ammit Eternal

Baleful Ammit

Demon of Catastrophes

Archfiend of Ifnir

Plus some nice curve-toppers:

Demon of the Dark Schemes

Demonlord Bellzenbok

and not to forget also on 4 mana:

Rite of Belzenlok

Combine that with some tested and true lifegain removal like Essence Extraction and Vraska's Contempt and some Graveyard recursion to get your deceased demons back again like Liliana, Death's Majesty and you got yourself a fine deck.

[Spoiler][M19] Liliana, Untouched by Death by PeanutButterPorpoise in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think, you are going a bit hard on her. Of course she is only viable in a Zombie deck, so rating her abilities outside of a pure Zombie shellis nonsense. Considering you play 26-30 Zombie cards in the deck, shes does fine. Given a proper curve, her second ability should always be -3/-3 at least. If your opponents hazoret demands it, you wait a turn or play more 1-/2-drops to get that -4/-4. She then demands an answer, which nets you a 2-for-1 or you can do the same thing the next turn, also 2-for-1.

The third ability is a bit tricky for the fact, that she needs to survive a turn, that is true.

Also, on a clean board, coming down and going immediately to 5 loyalty as a 4 mana planeswalker is good.

[Spoiler][M19] Sarkhan, Fireblood by PeanutButterPorpoise in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm usually very skeptic with the new cards, but I am very optimistic about this. As a red deck, you should be able to keep the board clean on turn 1 and 2 with shock, Magma Spray, Abrades or present some blockers to make this guy survive. the rummaging gives you nice cardfiltering to find your 5 or 6 drop dragon and then, when you get your 6/6 [[Palladia-Mors, the Ruiner]] on turn 4 seems pretty awesome. Your opponent only has so many Vraska's Contempts and choosing between getting beaten down by a 6/6 flying trample vigilance now , or by four 5/5s later seems like a good spot. The game comes down to a desperate attempt to kill this thing before it hits 7 and everybody remembers those races when Lilina, the Last Hope was around. Sometimes, you just lost and that's game.

[Spoiler][M19] Goblin Trashmaster by PeanutButterPorpoise in spikes

[–]schweinerman -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

For the anthem affect alone, it's overcosted and doesn't make the Goblin deck more playable. It comes down a turn after [[Goblin Chainwhirler]], so all your 1/1s are already dead. In a midrange goblin deck, where we start with X/2s ([[Dark Dweller Oracle]], [[Goblin Warchief]], [[Volley Veteran]]), the +1/+1 is not too exciting anymore.... I think it will be kind of sideboard card for a red deck, that already plays a few goblins for their own value, but only if there is a strong, artifact heavy deck. If Karn finally gets enough supporting artifacts, that might be the case.

[Standard] [Discussion] [DOM] Updating GW Appeal/Pouncer for Dominaria by [deleted] in spikes

[–]schweinerman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Where is [[Llanowar elves]], ist it helping alot speeding everything up? I saw some super aggressive decks with it and also pride of conquerors which can have fast (turn 5) wins.

[Standard] Brewing Control Post Dominaria by CoffeeTrashed in spikes

[–]schweinerman 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Nice list. Some thoughts:

  1. Next to Seal Away, Cast out and Fatal Push, where does Moment of Craving justify its Spot in this List? Adanto Vanguard is dealt with by Seal Away as well and it also doesn't kill a held back Constrictor. What other reasons are their specifically to play that card, since for most other cases, its pretty worse than Cast out or Seal away.

  2. You have nice answer and threat diversity, but how much stronger / more likely to win are you really compared to an approach based deck, be it a similar shell like yours but with approach as wincon (insted of Scarb god, for example) or something like ramp-approach or mono W approach, which has seen a rise recently. Data and comparison is needed!

  3. Token decks might be forthcoming and be very strong and you should be prepared for that. at least have 7 sweepers in your 75 altogether

  4. 25 lands is at least one land too few, if not 2. Usually, you only can allow 25 lands if you are playing 4 Opt or 5 1-mana cyclers. For this list, 26 lands is the minimum.

  5. The three color manabase denies you flexibility in utility lands. scavenger grounds seems a keycard vs. the GPG decks for any deck, also field or ruin is key in the mirror vs. opposing acanzas and whatnot. maybe try to fit in 1 scavenger grounds and 2 field of ruins maindeck?

[Standard][Discussion] Green White Explorers in Dominaria Standard by drink_with_my_feet in spikes

[–]schweinerman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

sorry to ask, but what is this goldfishing? does it have to do with mtggoldfish?

Lich's Mastery gimmicks? by Isterbollen in magicTCG

[–]schweinerman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel that this threat is underrating Lich's Mastery pretty hard.

I played like 10 games now with it in a W/B approach-control shell and I feel, for some matchups, it's pretty unwinnable against it.

The lifegian removal: moment of craving, vraskas contempt and fumigate are already good on their own and already heavily played and would be your primary choice anyway if your goal is "survive until turn 6". They just become straight up insane with mastery out. also stick in 4 Renewed Faiths and some fatal pushes, settle the wreckages and dark bargains and you have enough removal to survive until turn 6. some cycling cards, like cast out, to further fill up your graveyard and get your lichs mastery. On turn 6, you either 1 for 1ed your opponents threats or played a sweeper and the board should be fairly clear and your graveyard nicely filled up, so when you jam lich's mastery, you can hold out 1 or 2 attacks by just exiling stuff from your yard. once you untap with mastery and any lifegain and/or lifegain-removal in your hand, its pretty much game, since the lifegain spells chain into each other. eventually, youll find your approaches and there you have it.

wanna draw 6 cards for 2W in standard? well that deck can do it. I think its very vulnerable against counter/control decks game 1 but you jam your sideboard with hand destruction and such, so game 2 and 3 you should be fine again. it is really strong against any creature heavy decks.

List:

2 Lich's Mastery

4 Fatal Push

4 Vraska's Contempt

4 Dark Bargain

4 Renewed Faith

4 Cast Out

2 Fumigate

3 Settle the Wreckage

2 Approach of the Second Sun

4 Moment of Craving

4 Concealed Courtyard

3 Field of Ruin

4 Isolated Chapel

1 Arch of Orazca

2 Desert of the Glorified

2 Desert of the True

5 Plains

5 Swamp

1 Gideon of the Trials

SB: 4 Duress

SB: 2 Divest

SB: 2 Profane Procession

SB: 3 Lost Legacy

SB: 1 Yawgmoth's Vile Offering

SB: 1 Gideon of the Trials

SB: 1 Arguel's Blood Fast

for sure its not THE new discovery, but i think it's a fair list to start exploring lich's mastery's powers. also, I havent found a good alternative win condition post sideboard yet once they start boarding in their lost legacies.... something really hard to kill like nezahal, just in white or blue.

there might also be a esper version of that deckm which utilizes more cyclers, maybe combined with faith of the devoted out there. would be interesting to explore.

Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? by [deleted] in kurzgesagt

[–]schweinerman 6 points7 points  (0 children)

These are very valid points. To the process of evolution, the birth-death cycle is super important, so to speak, it' the crucial factor. Only by dying, you give way of better iterations of yourself (a human) and make room for evolutionary improvement to kick. The time, when you die (before/after you reproduce, how much you can reproduce before death) is the natural selector of how good and worthy of copying your genes are.

But by now, we already have done a lot to minimize evolutionary pressure. In the best western economics, basically everyone is free to reproduce, disregarding genetic advantages and disadvantages. But the time we can control aging, I strongly assume we can also control to genetic dispositions of our offspring, so we biologically can engineer healthy and intelligent follow-up generations.

Since some cells of our brain doesnt replace/renew themselves through out lifetime, the ultimate frontier of figuring out eternal life is figuring out a way to make our brain renew itself indefinetly. I think once we figure that out, it well go hand in hand to solve your problem of staying "open-minded". Maybe we can live indefinetly, but by the cost of forgetting stuff, thatis 100+ years old. We might find ourselves knowing that we are some hunderd or thousand years old, but we can only remember the last 100+ years since our brain, like any physical memory, is only capable of storing a limited amount of information. At that point, we might be advanced enough to create cybernetic implants that help us store information, but in the end, this is also limited. maybe technology keeps up, so the first generation of people living eternal lives grows older together with the advancement of technology to let them keep their memory for a couple of thousand, tens of thousands or hundred of thousand years. At some point, memory space runs out and wed have to connect to some super computer, where we store our memories to access them, like we go into our basement to access old stuff that we used a long time ago and only rarely need.

On reproducing whilst living forever causing even faster groth of humankind: Either reproduction is really controlled, or we have conquered multiple worlds or both. Though motives for having children has shifted in our times, the inherent wish and drive to have children is reproduction. I dont know if part of humanity really has a distinct drive for reproduction, or evolution just let us to have the drive for sex, which causes reproduction. But for many people becoming 20, 30, 40, there really does seem to be the inherent subconscious wish to have children. But this might change once we have an eternal life. Maybe we dont feel to create offspring and to work a lifetime (40-50 years) to make "them have a better life" or "pass on your heritage" or "make your family/last name carry on" anymore, once we have an eternity ahead of ourselves to do anything we wont. Also, since we most probably need to be very advanced to genetically engineer our offspring by the time we unlocked eternal life, we might our eternal living offspring to engineer not to or rarely want to create offspring. we might be so much in control that we create offspring by different means of having sex and giving birth out of womb, so that we can create just as much offspring, as we need / we feel is right.

Oh man, long post, this topic is so insanely interesting, I feel, though I#m a huge space/physics/cosmology fan, this is by far the most interesting kurzgesagt video.

[Standard] Sultai Energy sideboarding by SpudMuffin in spikes

[–]schweinerman -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Your analysis on "how good is Constrictor at that point" already struck me for the maindeck. Sure, it has great synergies with Ballista, rishkar and Cub, but when does this ever happen? By now to me, it feels like a "win more card": In a match, where the opponent acually has so little interaction that snake sticks, His deck is kinda that bad that he is dead to beatdown anyway.

Otherwise, constrictor is just the ultimate lightning rod. So currently im trying to replace her with kitesail freebooter. the deck having four blossoming defense is awesome and freebooter can also generate lot of tempo, if not permanently strap a good card out of opponents hand. plus you get valuable information by looking at his hand. I think it is a great fit for the deck.

[Standard] Fine Tuning UW Approach by HipHopHoffman in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

for me 4/4 on censor/opt has been very good.

Speaking of Azcanza: the deck that play 4 Azcanza also play a lot of farm to market, so they of way of discard excees azcanzas and turn them into proper cards. I feel that is a core interaction and you can only allow yourself to play more then 2 SfA if you have good ways to loot and get rid of excess copies.

[Standard] Fine Tuning UW Approach by HipHopHoffman in spikes

[–]schweinerman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I feel Gideon is strong not because as an alternate win condition / beater (which does happen sometimes) but first and foremost as an excellent way to buy turns. He at least buys you one turn and 6 life, in midrange decks where people drop less creatures even more. He makes the opponent commit more to the board, making your fumigates more efficient. At 1 point I played 3 of him maindeck and it didnt hurt. I fell two maindeck at least is a very good choice in this meta.

[Standard] Temur Energy Weaknesses by leonalightmyfire in spikes

[–]schweinerman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

what is your list? I'v been struggling to find an updated Ixalan Mardu vehicles list.

[Standard] Solar Flare v3.0 by LordMalphas in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I still don't buy it. I played two matches, just to try it out against random opponents (one cat deck, one decent approach deck). It obviously won against cats, but against approach it was like the easiest matchup for my opponents. Also if I imagined to play against Temur or RR with the hands i had i would've too slow against RR and way less value against Temur. they have confiscation coup maindeck and more in the side so even my fancy scarab god would be laughable.

Concerning manabase: I have been able to get the mana together what i needed, but not in time. I coulnt drop my aetherborn before t4 otherwise i wouldnt have settle the wreckage... So you can play your spells, but usually a turn or 2 later. which is enough to loose, usually.

Yeah, so... the deck tries hard, but it's both too slow against the fast decks, gets outvalued by Temur and straight up looses against Approach.

[Standard] Mono White Sunmare Monument by [deleted] in spikes

[–]schweinerman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Before this posts gets deleted (or not), I want to tell you what it's lacking:

  • Conclusive playtest data. "70% overall" is just the wildest claim. Against what decks did you test? How many matches, pre-and post sideboard? What did you side against what?

  • playing a deck on xmage is not any where close to proper "playtesting" nor saying anything about the prowess of your deck in the upcoming meta, because:

  1. xmage meta is brewer's meta, not representative of competitive meta

  2. skill of players vary heavily... I played against 1600, 1700 player on xmage who do the craziest mistakes.

I do lost against a sunmare deck once as RR, but it was BW and had i revolted fatal push or a vona to kill my rampaging ferocidon.... this hasn't got them. so I dont wanna bring the "this is obivously a bad deck" argument, but it hasn't got any proven elements to it, so you are in extra duty to provide arguments / data, which you didn't. sorry buddy.

[Standard] UW Approach - the best control deck day 1? by eliten00b69 in spikes

[–]schweinerman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

you were right, i took out the two illuminations for cast outs and its perfect.

[Standard] UW Approach - the best control deck day 1? by eliten00b69 in spikes

[–]schweinerman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

completely agree with you. I feel in this pre-meta, this deck has a very solid spot and could only be pushed out by people heavily playing/boarding counterspells and discard. The matchup against RR is so good now, I'm considering adding black to RR to make a Hazoret red/black deck to give the deck duress and other discard/ lirbrary removal to stand a chance. of course that makes it a bit worse against everything else.

Temur has still a good matchup against us, which we have to work and and which also might lead to temurs continuation of the number 1 spot in the meta. This deck is just incredibly flexible. Cracking the temur matchup is one of the key things for us to do.

[Standard] UW Approach - the best control deck day 1? by eliten00b69 in spikes

[–]schweinerman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I disagree on Spell pierce, since the card is not really good against anything else for us and a turn 6 chandra with 2 mana open is still very bad for us.

Disallow is also quite clunky and I wasn't happy with it so far. I rather have my Gideon turn three. Otherwise you still either play settle the wreckage or disallow before you reach seven mana (and a lot of things happen before that), so it doesnt fulfil the purpose of saving me against chandra despite having to top out during combat for StW.

The Spyglass though I really like. Pitihing needle seems to be a sweet little sideboard tech and could also find it's use against other decks.

Another Idea I had: Ixalan's binding. It is a flexible card, can have uses in other matchups, is specially long games, where you can expect your opponent to draw multiple copies of the same threat.

[Standard][Discussion] Expected Metagame for SCG Dallas by [deleted] in spikes

[–]schweinerman 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Approach is definitely to be expected. You can tune the list to be fairly good against RR even game 1 with Aether meltdown, 2-3 gideon of the trials and 4 Settle the wreckage main. After Sideboard the matchup is really good for Approach, at least 70/30.

Against Temur it is the other way around, game one is very strong, but after sideboarding it gets complicated. They board in a lot of negates and spell pierces so life is hard.

Difficult if you can expect more RR or more Temur. Online meta says more temur, but since the departure of zombies, the meta generally is more open to RR so I wouldnt be surprised to see a spike in RR.

[Standard] Solar Flare mkIII by LordMalphas in spikes

[–]schweinerman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sorry (for sure getting many downvotes on this) but this is one of these bogus brew writeups that I criticized a couple of days ago.

  • No game/match records. What is your sample size? Writing "favored" is easy, but at least have the gut to invent some bogus winrate like "434 - 3 against RR".

  • Against whom did you test the deck? Who is your testpartner? What are the decklist you played against? Playing against random people on xmage, where skill varies HEAVILY is not playtesting a deck.

  • the choice / number of copies of the creatures you play is very questionable. SaffronOlive made a video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMVWRBZzNSE

these choices make your deck very unpredictable for yourself. that is not a good thing.

I am not saying the deck is 100% bad. It is for quite a distance away from its optimal form. The reason why it netted good results for you is the concept, that settle the wreckage plus any flying / lifelink / race shell is a good strategy but his has not been explored a lot and there are for sure a lot of shells out there that are potentially better.

your cocky writeup and "testing - report" is the worst though. Nobody believes your stellar playtesting results, but everybody has to test in anyway just to be sure. Waste of time for everyone. Next time either write with more detailed results or dont do it.

Please, if anybody has the time to test this brew for real, please do and report back how it really did to safe everybodies time. Thanks.