Liliana, Heretical Healer vs Tinybones, Trinket Thief

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maeos
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Post by maeos » 3 years ago

im making a discard deck and debating which legendary to use.

while tinybones will give me CA, liliana will give me a more reliable discard .

In your opinion what do you think is a more effective discard commander.

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RxPhantom
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Post by RxPhantom » 3 years ago

Welp, first let's get some tags in here so we can see what we're talking about. Heck, let's do images:

vs.
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EDIT: I'd go with Tinybones. If your deck is focused on discard, than the 99 should provide that reliable discard and the payoff with Tinybones seems much more substantial than Lily. I'm imagining stuff like Necrogen Mists, Cao Cao, Lord of Wei, etc. Maybe some specters.
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Ruiner
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Post by Ruiner » 3 years ago

Tiny bones is great. Fill your deck with discard effects and mana amplifiers/ramp, and he will be a force to be reckoned with.

He's low mana cost so commander tax isn't so rough.

Really the worst thing about him is some people dislike discard decks, so you will probably become the archenemy, so you just have to embrace that mentality.


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Ruiner
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Post by Ruiner » 3 years ago

pokken wrote:
3 years ago
I think Liliana, Heretical Healer // Liliana, Defiant Necromancer makes a bit more interesting design tbh.
That's a good point. When I've seen Tinybones, it just has one very repetitive straightforward gameplan.

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maeos
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Post by maeos » 3 years ago

true. liliana lets you go with a reanimator package as well.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 3 years ago

Liliana encourages saccing dudes and reanimating them so you get a bunch of angles. Reanimating other people's discards also fun.

People are really prone to discarding fatties early in the game

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Post by TheGildedGoose » 3 years ago

It depends.

Tinybones functions as both a card advantage engine and a win condition, albeit an expensive one. To generate the most value and grind opponents out of the game you'll need to buy time, which means you're going to need a lot of disruption. You're already going to be investing in lots of discard to take advantage of his first ability. All you'd need is the standard mono-black control/ramp shell to slow things down and kill everyone. Even if you're unable to cause enough discard to reliably draw a bunch of cards off of him, since he also doubles as a win con, he's usually relevant.

Liliana functions as a disruption engine and a win condition, too, but a less reliable one than Tinybones. Getting her to flip requires work, and that's opportunity cost because of the deckbuilding constraints. Because of the symmetrical nature of the discard, she'll need more card draw support than Tinybones will. However, the flipside to the discard is that she encourages you to run your own powerful creatures to reanimate as well as the spells to reanimate them with. I think you could go with either a heavy reanimator substrategy or even aristocrats to close the game out with.

Something else to consider is the relative value of card advantage versus discard in mono-black. Black has a metric ton of way to draw cards, from the humble Night's Whisper to the spicy Promise of Power to the utterly busted Necropotence. Comparatively speaking, there are only a handful of ways to cause persistent discard on each opponent's turn, like Necrogen Mists, Bottomless Pit, and Oppression, which means that Liliana's +2 is comparatively more valuable, particularly in the command zone.

I think Tinybones is more focused, but Liliana is more versatile.

Personally, I would probably be very tempted to try Tinybones Control, because I have an addiction to drawing cards. However, I think Liliana is the better discard deck in terms of raw number of cards discarded. Tinybones seems fairly linear in comparison to Liliana, which is a pro or con depending on how you feel about deck complexity.

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Post by DirkGently » 3 years ago

In my experience (having built Liliana but not Tinybones) Liliana is more of a board-control commander and less a discard one. Sure, having discard fodder is nice, but you probably won't want to run other discard, because you'll mostly be preoccupied with defending her from attacks or she'll get priced out pretty fast, especially with the added difficulty of flipping her. Her ult is really insane, though, so she pairs very well with big board wipes to defend her, and later to mind-control the board. Cool deck, but not really discard focused.

Tinybones, on the other hand, doesn't require defending and requires discard to work. So if you want to make a deck around discard, imo he's the clear choice.
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