Tasigur/Delve strategy

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Sinis
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Post by Sinis » 3 years ago

Hey all. I've recently made a Tasigur, the Golden Fang deck that has elements of self-mill, delve, and escape. The idea is that you mill a bunch, prune away cards you don't want with Delve/Escape/effects like Bow of Nylea, and then when you activate Tasigur, you get what you want.

The only trouble is that most of the cards I prune away with kind of suck. No one really wants to play Murderous Cut, only for someone to give it back to you. Murderous Cut isn't even that bad as these things go; in the first game I played, I had Dead Drop and it got given back to me twice.

I've moved towards permanent cards so that they can't be given back (Uro, Polukranos 2.0, Soulflayer), but it doesn't help when I want the one non-land left in my graveyard, I mill a Nature's Lore and they give me that instead. How do we avoid getting back low-impact cards while still having an early game.

I guess, I would like Tasigur's activated to be stronger, but I'm not sure how to go about it without going infinite, milling my whole deck, picking up my whole graveyard and winning the game.

cc: @Mookie, since you have a Tasigur list along these lines.

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Mookie
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Post by Mookie » 3 years ago

Speak my name, and I shall appear!

From my experience playing Tasigur, I'll say that getting the exact card you want back with Tasigur is pretty difficult. Unless you run a lot of ways to prune your graveyard, it's going to naturally fill up with random stuff over time. And, of course, unless your land count is really high, Tasigur's ability will usually dump more nonlands into your graveyard too. It's possible to play more politically and get opponents to give you what you want, but that strategy tends to break down if you end up being archenemy.

For my own deck, I've gone with three approaches to address this issue, and to raise the quality of cards returned by Tasigur. The overarching theme is Morton's Fork - no matter what cards my opponents choose, they're going to have a bad time.

The first approach is to just maximize the number of good cards in the deck - I'm trying to play as few niche / situational cards as possible. In order for a card to make it into the deck, it has to pass the criteria of being a card I would never complain about getting back with Tasigur. This means that even if I don't get the exact card I want back, I usually won't complain.

The second approach is to maximize the number of cards that my opponents won't want to give me back. I'm running a lot of recursion, which I can use to just get back the card I want directly - opponents are pretty much never going to return Eternal Witness to me. In addition to that, I'm also running some pretty scary cards (ex: Genesis Wave, Exsanguinate, Casualties of War). The net result is that while I'll usually mill over at least one nonland with Tasigur each activation, the odds of milling nonland cards my opponents either can't give back or don't want to give back are a bit higher. And, as a corollary, recursion spells are really good draws in the lategame.

The third approach is brute force - in other words, I'm running a ramp deck, and my primary endgame strategy is to generate enough mana to activate Tasigur 5+ times per turn cycle. Quantity has a quality all its own. Seedborn Muse and Wilderness Reclamation are strong recommends here. I do lean slightly towards permanent-based ramp (as you already mentioned, getting back Nature's Lore hurts), but I also just lean slightly towards heavier ramp - getting back Skyshroud Claim or Far Wanderings isn't that bad. Plus, as a ramp deck, I'm never going to complain about having more mana, especially since it just means more Tasigur activations later.

(as a sidenote, I'm in the process of polishing my Tasigur thread into a primer, so I'll recommend you give it a look)

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