TheGildedGoose wrote: ↑1 year ago
Have you looked at the
Ichor Wellspring and the other ETB/LTB 2mv artifacts? Three or four of them make artifact tokens and those seem real good here.
I was running Ichor Wellspring and
Prized Statue as well as the related
Mogg War Marshal in the 1.0 version. I had dismissed the schematics and Mycosynth Wellspring on first crack, but I think will be adding them...
Robobro72 wrote: ↑1 year ago
Random idea that was prompted since I saw that the deck only really has 3 enchantments. Idk if this has been discussed widely but like (most widely)
Keranos, God of Storms decks utilizing
Thousand-Year Storm, Backgrounds in a deck with little other enchantments can essentially be less restrictive
Polymorph decks by using cards like
Reality Scramble to grab a splashy enchantment. Could help with ending the game with voltron (
Eldrazi Conscription ) or just burn (
Vicious Shadows ).
Unfortunately this is probably one of the best
Ulvenwald Mysteries decks and that card is sweet but not exactly something worth cheating out. Also playing green over blue removes some of the "polymorphs" like
Reweave. Without more (haven't searched exhaustively but I can't think of any) you have just as many games drawing an 7+ drop as you do a crazy cheat.
Maybe just
Reality Scramble over the two less necessary enchantments as another copy of mysteries? Requires re-playing
Street Urchin...
Might just be an idea for
Gale, Waterdeep Prodigy and 1KYS.
Fun idea, but not one I want to explore - agree this seems like a much better Gale, Waterdeep Prodigy plan
BeneTleilax wrote: ↑1 year ago
I'm a bit leery of deathtouch machine gun decks, having built Judith very similarly. Even if you power the deck so as not to immediately lock out opponents' creatures, the recursion inherent to aristocrat-adjacent decks like this means you'll often be one of the first to bounce back after a wrath. In my playgroups, this meant no opponent wanted to risk playing the first creature, and the game turned into slog of my recursion vs. their removal, until they slowly ran out of relevant noncreatures and died with nothing on board. Then if I ever stumbled on mana or setup early, I was never given a chance to recover myself. It made for very all-or-nothing games, and unlike most decks in that category, the games I won weren't quick or even particularly interesting.
Yeah I'm afraid of that too - this may be more of a thought experiment than a real deck I build
-----------------------------
Mass update time! I tweaked a lot of the list in the OP.
Cut:
Terrarion,
Iron Apprentice,
Myr Moonvessel,
Blood Petal Celebrant,
Yavimaya Elder,
Cathodion,
Scrap Trawler,
Solemn Simulacrum
Add:
Servo Schematic,
Nimblewright Schematic,
Legion Warboss,
Undercellar Myconid,
Killer Service,
Mycosynth Wellspring,
Loyal Apprentice
Decided to rework our fodder a bit. Moonvessel and Cathodion are a refund and not a replacement so they were easy cuts. Terrarion and Iron Apprentice were tougher but felt a little low-impact; not enough early and too weak late. On reexamination I don't think a critical mass of 1 drops matters as much as having enough 1-3 drops to always have good fodder on turn 4 that can be cast and immediately cracked by Urchin. By my count on a hypergeometric calculator, we're now only ~55% to have a turn 1 play to feed to Street Urchin - but we're 96% to have drawn a 1, 2, or 3 that we can feed into it by Turn 4 which is great odds. Yavimaya Elder, Blood Petal, and Sad Robot are all solid and Elder is a pet card of mine, but I thought we could do better. And on count the original list didn't have enough non-token artifacts for Scrap Trawler to be much more than a
Junk Diver; again fine but we can do better.
For "better", we have the schematics, Myconid, and Killer Service as more "3 for 1s" - I think they are weaker than Prized Statue and Mogg War Marshal which is why they weren't in the 1.0, but they're still critical. Killer Service is especially nice to upgrade random dorks to 4/4 brawlers later. Same deal with Mycosynth Wellspring which is worse than Ichor Wellspring but better than Yavimaya Elder for us. Finally, Legion War Boss and Loyal Apprentice represent critical sustainable fodder generation that can also be fodder themselves in an emergency and have immediate impact.
CUT:
Thrill of Possibility,
Hissing Iguanar,
Retreat to Kazandu,
Turntimber Sower,
Avalanche Riders,
Team Pennant,
Sword of Vengeance,
Acidic Slime
Add:
Springleaf Drum,
Heroic Intervention,
Life from the Loam,
Aggravated Assault,
Grafted Exoskeleton, Hellkite Charger
I wasn't that excited to run Thrill here; it's a lot weaker than our other rummage effects. Retreat to Kazandu, Hissing Iguanar, Team Pennant, and Sword of Vengeance aren't explosive enough for what we want our deck to do. Turntimber Sower was misremembered as landfall - it's not landfall and it's a lot harder for this deck to reliably trigger and get fodder out of. I'm down to Strip-lock some folks, but Avalanche Riders and Acidic Slime feels needless; I don't think this deck wants to be a dedicated LD deck. You could for sure do so, breaking the symmetry of cards like
Tremble and
Tectonic Break and ramping into other LD spells, but I prefer to be a bit more surgical. Both those cards are slow compared to our alternatives.
Springleaf Drum seems like a nice little ramp card for us that can also be fed to Street Urchin later. Heroic Intervention is another way to protect our board from bad stuff. Life from the Loam is amazing and was a total misplay to exclude; it single-cardedly fixes our card flow and graveyard filling issues. Aggravated Assault, Grafted Exoskeleton, and Hellkite Charger come in as ways for this deck to utilize its massive mana advantage to actually win games and do so quickly instead of 1 damage at a time. The 1.0 version of the deck was a true Hawk special - a durdling, soft-locking, grindy machine that had very few ways to actually seal the deal. Hopefully this is rectified now.
You may notice that's more cuts than adds; despite its low curve I wanted to go to 39 lands since discarding and milling lands and then Loaming/Glooming them back is a key engine of the deck. In addition to dropping a few basics I decided to drop
Dwarven Mine and
Gingerbread Cabin as they are increasingly tough to trigger until the very late game, instead adding a full suite of artifact lands plus
Dryad Arbor and
Treasure Vault as lands that can also be fodder and adding
Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance and
Roadside Reliquary as excellent targets for Erinis and Loam.
Cards I'm still pondering:
Ayula's Influence - pitch lands to make bears to feed to street urchin to pave the way to recover the lands seems good, but
GGG is a rough cost.
Bloody Betrayal/
Involuntary Employment/
Mass Mutiny/
Molten Primordial/
Zealous Conscripts - any time I have a sac outlet in the command zone of an R/x deck, I'm tempted to do the ol' sac-n-steal game. These are the best of these effects imo since they come with fodder and/or they steal multiple cards at once for a reasonable price.
