Since I had been playing in the PlayEDH "Mid" discord I felt it was best to get the deck checked by the deck check/mod community to make sure It wasn't falling outside the Powerlevel. A deck doesn't HAVE to be checked to play within the discord but doing so helps others understand where your deck may be at and helps you yourself as a deck builder know where the lines are drawn.
Outside of Ad Nauseam being identified too strong for the powerlevel, which is more or less just a Simple Criteria they maintain. The rest of the feedback I received was VERY surprising. The initial responses are below.
Thalia and Gitrog - Please cut Ad Nauseum, which is problematic draw in the context of your deck; Demonic Tutor, as your general density of tutors is very very high; and ~5 lands and a couple of your less impactful dorks/land-search spells, as you mana density is too high and very likely to brick out even with your commander providing filtering.
Please use those slots to add a few more finishers (token makers and overrun effects), a few more removal spells, and a few more sources of card advantage (i.e. Painful Truths, Horn of Greed) for play in MID
You can imagine my surprise when I'm being told that a deck whose foundations were build around consistency is that it is in fact not consistent and very swingy. So much that in fact it needed a not-so small amount of changes in order to create good play and keep up in the "Mid" category. Cutting lands, a tutor and a main draw engine for what I thought would be clunky cards to me felt like a huge shot to our consistent plan and principles.The TLDR on your first question is neither that it is too powerful nor to weak but that it is too swingy. A deck that plays some games as a 2 and other games as a 9 is the same average power level as a deck that plays some games at 4 and other games at 7, but the former is a much worse play experience for opponents than the latter; it produces more non-games in any directions.
The build you submitted was very likely to draw 1/3 of the deck of a tutored ad naus; it was also very likely to sac lands to draw lands and die with a grip full of mana sources. Neither of those, win or lose, are in line with what other players expect from you going into a Mid pod.
Re: lands, typical mid decks run 33-36 lands, so even with my cuts you'd have 43 (counting MDFC) lands, 10 more than other decks in your pod. As for your plan of using them so sac to Thalia... that's not accomplishing much? Your acutal payoffs for landfall are limited to a small handful of cards. If you want to play extra lands and then sac them to draw into your good cards, you can also just play more good cards, since using Thalia that way doesn't ramp your mana or do much of anything aside from cycling.
Re: tutors, you have Vampiric, Imperial, Demonic to find anything; Natural Order, GSZ, Finale to find creatures; Crop Rotation, and Knight of the Reliquary to find lands. That's just generally too many ways to pick your key cards out of your deck for Mid, and needs to be trimmed down. It needs to be trimmed down less than if you were searching for simple A + B combos, decks tutoring for value and answers get a lot more wiggle room, but it's still a few too many ways to assemble the exact pieces you need.
This set off a few rounds of MUCH discussion with the reviewers and mods (I escalated the review feedback to discuss further with mods). In those discussions I linked both threads from here, game reports that I made a note to explain deckbuilding principals etc. I was attempting to clarify just how consistent the deck is (Tutors + Landcounts + Resilient engines/win cons like Loam and FOTD). After all this, they doubled down on almost all of their suggestions. However, they did take the time to further explain why they thought such changes were needed. And after that I believe that I finally understand their perspective at least to the point where I am willing to try some changes.
To help summarize their perspective i'll quote them.
One issue the reviewer pointed out is precisely that the tutor density is too high. The kind of play pattern you're describing - ramping and then being able to tutor for the situationally best piece in your deck in 2/3 of your games - is not what we're looking for when it comes to curating Mid Power. Especially when you consider that most of the time, you're going to be left empty-handed if that one piece is interacted with at all, which is very likely in Mid Power, as most decks are significantly more interactive than yours is. One key component that a deck that's built in the way yours is is lacking is resilience. Being able to re-cast your Commander after it's been removed once is nice, but it's nowhere near enough to produce a resilient deck. That's why, for Mid Power, builds with more interaction and stronger engines, but weaker tutoring and payoffs (this includes both combos and things like Ad Nauseam) are favored. If someone interacts with your one payoff that you're likely to have access to in your midgame, and your fallback for that is continuing to make land drops and drawing into more lands for the most part, then that's not going to cut it for Mid Power.
I can assure you that our Mentors have seen plenty of decks that are quite similar to this one during their time here - as a particular example with a different Commander, people often like to build Lord Windgrace decks in a similar way, only to find out that the deck doesn't end up working particularly well. Decks that are built in this way, this particular deck included, always end up having these issues in the long run. One thing I immediately notice from your game reports is that in none of the games, you're being interacted with in a significant way. That is very much not the standard for Mid Power.
It really wouldn't neuter your entire deck and strategy at all. The way you're portraying what was said by PlayEDH staff shows a fairly clear misunderstanding of what's going on. We're not making you sacrifice consistency at all with these suggestions - it's the exact opposite, actually. Like I mentioned earlier, what you perceive as consistency is that you're consistently leaning on the small handful of crutches your deck is running to keep things together, so to speak.
I'm glad you understand. Furthermore, going down on lands is very easy once you add more (efficient, think 1-3 mana) draw/card selection. For example, when you have Painful Truths, it also contributes to your likelihood to hit your fourth land drop while also providing you with additional cards. Some other suggestions along this line would be Abundant Harvest, Night's Whisper, Sign in Blood. If you replace 5 of your lands with 5 draws spells like these, not just hitting your fourth land drop, but also hitting every land drop after your fourth becomes significantly more likely.
The takeaways from the discussion and what lead to the below changes were this:I'm being serious here, your deck does not need 45 lands. The suggestion to cut 5 lands was actually quite conversative. If I personally were building a deck like this, I would never run more than 38 lands.
- Our deck construction and principals are based around constancy in executing our gameplan early and often while stalling my opponents long enough to execute it. However, this may lead to situations where if interacted with enough (similar to game reports I've had, or games against Purpheros where I just couldn't do anything). That we end up bricking and drawing too many lands and not enough actionable spells.
- Playedh feedback is that we could should sacrifice some of that early game consistency (Ramp + Lands) in an effort to create more density in threats or interaction, this would prevent late game bricks or stalls if things go south.
My first pass on changes is below (This is in comparison to OP list not my own which had 3 of these changes already.)
Minus
- 1 Snow-Covered Forest
- 1 Forest
- 1 Snow-Covered Swamp
- 1 Elves of Deep Shadow
- 1 Rampant Growth
- 1 Murmuring Bosk
- 1 Dryad Arbor
- 1 Wasteland
- 1 Cavern of Souls
- 1 Into the North
- 1 Ad Nauseam
Plus
+1 Deathrite Shaman
+1 Retreat to Hagra
+1 Painful Truths
+1 Plains
+1 Mythos of Nethroi
+1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
+1 Druid Class
+1 Night's Whisper
+1 Despark
+1 Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer
+1 Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines
The above cuts put us at a 60% chance of casting TATGM on turn 3 with ramp. The added lower CMC draw spells still help us hit land drops when we want them. It has increased sustain + interaction and increased threat density for when our Plan A of FOTD goes south. The cut around Naus was just a Powerlevel (the main argument here is that really only blue decks can interact with a sorcery speed tutor into a sorcery speed Naus which is just really good card advantage) That cut could be ignored if you don't plan to play in PlayEDH discord at all, however, it's an easier pill to swallow since our Average CMC is going up with rest of these changes as well so that makes Naus worst in this version.
All in all, I'm not 100% sold on the suggestions, but I think the argument they made was valid enough for me to try it, which i've done so already a few games and results are promising. I'm sharing because the folks on here obviously helped build it and I wanted to get their opinion on the discussion/discourse above. For extra context I do understand the communities that maintain these discords make suggestions that may be biased towards a given community or such but I usually welcome feedback/critique on decks I've had parts in brewing because I think they provide a fresh perspective.
Thoughts?
