Tymna and Ludevic Affinity (formerly Silas)

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

And here's where the deck evolved to --

Decklist

Sorceries (3)

Approximate Total Cost:


I really like the red stuff. Goblin welder, goblin engineer, ludevic, dockside, pyroblast, chaos warp, crackling doom. Doom especially has been a house, really great at clearing the board without getting my stuff.

And the planeswalkers daretti and Nahiri have been very solid.



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So I've been working on this list concept for a while, moved around from mardu to esper to 4c non-green etc etc. I am pretty sure I want to go with Tymna/Silas and Esper has all the stuff I want.

All of my decks like to durdle around and grind out resources for the most part, and they tend to tutor enough that it's a bit annoying. Even the super simple fair MW deck I just made winds up cracking fetchlands for half the game.

So I'm going to build an aggro deck, whether it's good or not, and try to minimize tutoring - there're a few in there.

The goal is basically to replicate modern Affinity as much as possible. Almost mono brown, very low color commitments, play creatures almost every turn of the game and keep refueling off Tymna and Silas.

And here's the complete version based off lots of tinkering and feedback:
Decklist

Enchantments (1)

Approximate Total Cost:



Here's the draft:
Decklist

Sorcery

Approximate Total Cost:

My questions for the hivemind are:

* Are there any awesome aggro affinity type cards I'm missing?
* Are there any cards that you think really do not fit at all?
* Ranger of Eos and Serra Ascendant feel like they would go super well in the deck and keep with my idea of minimal but specialized tutors. Serra is...not super synergistic with anything but cashing in on some Tymna cards and gaining some life to pay for it, but I think it probably belongs.
* Any other thoughts :)
Last edited by pokken 4 years ago, edited 12 times in total.

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Kemev
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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

I put something similar together when the partner commanders came out. It was kinda fun, but it never really worked as intended and didn't win very often. And I've played a lot of Affinity in Modern (and Legacy, before Modern). A few observations...

- For being an aggro deck, it was very grindy. When I won, it was an attrition battle powered by Thopter/Sword and Scrap Trawler
- I got a lot of mileage out of the bauble-type cards, like Nihil Spellbomb, Aether Spellbomb, Tormod's Crypt, Dispeller's Capsule, and Executioner's Capsule
- Silas Renn, Seeker Adept is weak. He's a small artifact creature who's dead to everything. I really wanted to like him, but he was frustrating to play with
- It's rough playing against board wipe heavy decks. There's enough card advantage that you're never out of the game, but sometimes it feels like you're never making progress, only building/rebuilding
- Having a solid suite of counterspells made playing against board wipes way easier. Negate was this deck's best friend
- A lot of times I felt like I was playing a bad Breya deck, and I wished I had red
- Seriously, it's hard to play aggro in EDH without red. Haste makes everything better (including avoiding board wipes)
- The deck's cold to Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite. If you've got reanimator guy in your playgroup, it's gonna be rough
- This deck doesn't use Tymna as well as some of the G/W/B/(x) lists that have plenty of mana dorks (they make ok early attackers when no one has blockers, and they're still useful late game). Affinity doesn't really have a way to replicate that

All that aside, now that there's Bolas's Citadel and Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge, the deck might be a lot better.

Still, if you want minimal draw/tutoring, are you sure blue's the right color for you? I'd be tempted to try Reyhan/Tymna using the Modern Hardened Scales deck for inspiration. Or maybe Akiri/Tymna.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Kemev wrote:
4 years ago
I put something similar together when the partner commanders came out. It was kinda fun, but it never really worked as intended and didn't win very often. And I've played a lot of Affinity in Modern (and Legacy, before Modern). A few observations...

- For being an aggro deck, it was very grindy. When I won, it was an attrition battle powered by Thopter/Sword and Scrap Trawler
- I got a lot of mileage out of the bauble-type cards, like Nihil Spellbomb, Aether Spellbomb, Tormod's Crypt, Dispeller's Capsule, and Executioner's Capsule
- Silas Renn, Seeker Adept is weak. He's a small artifact creature who's dead to everything. I really wanted to like him, but he was frustrating to play with
- It's rough playing against board wipe heavy decks. There's enough card advantage that you're never out of the game, but sometimes it feels like you're never making progress, only building/rebuilding
- Having a solid suite of counterspells made playing against board wipes way easier. Negate was this deck's best friend
- A lot of times I felt like I was playing a bad Breya deck, and I wished I had red
- Seriously, it's hard to play aggro in EDH without red. Haste makes everything better (including avoiding board wipes)
- The deck's cold to Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite. If you've got reanimator guy in your playgroup, it's gonna be rough
- This deck doesn't use Tymna as well as some of the G/W/B/(x) lists that have plenty of mana dorks (they make ok early attackers when no one has blockers, and they're still useful late game). Affinity doesn't really have a way to replicate that

All that aside, now that there's Bolas's Citadel and Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge, the deck might be a lot better.

Still, if you want minimal draw/tutoring, are you sure blue's the right color for you? I'd be tempted to try Reyhan/Tymna using the Modern Hardened Scales deck for inspiration. Or maybe Akiri/Tymna.
So I really think this deck wants some countermagic. And thopter sword is the main draw for me.

I actually just did a counters thing so I want to stay away. Flipping dice gets so tiring. Atraxa made me almost want to hang up the dice entirely but arcbound ravager is too cool.

I very much appreciate your insights. It does seem like silas is pretty poor. He sure does seem like he ought to synergize with tymna but he has always seemed a mite clunky.

Do you think akromas memorial would be worth trying as a haste enabler? I could whir or even treasure mage for it without going nuts on tutors.

I suppose thirst would be on theme, and agent of bolas would be a solid wincon.

I'm thinking what I probably will do is rebalance the deck with a good selection of targeted removal. There's probably too much air in there. And i can bring cage and maybe crypt to hate on most of the ways norn will come out.

Kemev
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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
thopter sword is the main draw for me.
Ok, that seems fair. With that in mind, though, it is gonna be tricky to play mostly-mono-brown. A lot of your best cards are going to be cards that support or create artifacts, without necessarily being artifacts themselves. For example, these are the cards that always over-performed for me:

Trinket Mage and its fodder: Nihil Spellbomb, Aether Spellbomb, Tormod's Crypt, Dispeller's Capsule, Executioner's Capsule, Grafdigger's Cage, Meekstone, Darksteel Citadel, Wayfarer's Bauble, Expedition Map, Pithing Needle
Master Trinketeer
Sram's Expertise
Thopter Spy Network
Living Death

I'm pretty sure Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle would be good in this deck (especially with cards like Scrap Trawler or Trinket Mage). There are a few other cards that I never played with, but I'm pretty sure would be good:

Mox Amber
Spawning Pit
Umezawa's Jitte (cheap repeatable removal for Birds of Paradise, etc)
Dovin, Grand Arbiter
Echo Storm (counts both of your partner commanders)
Mirrodin Besieged
Dusk // Dawn

I'm kinda medium on Akroma's Memorial. It's obviously a powerful card, but it's also expensive and clunky. Same thing for most of the Swords of Whosis or Whatsis; the only one I really like is Feast and Famine, since it lets you keep mana up for counters/protection spells.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Ohh yeah I forgot about Teshar. I just added it today.

Dusk//dawn looks great too. Exactly what I'm after.

That's a great list of cards man, thank you :)

I'm going to make a big buy from CK once my latest buylist goes through and I'll see what I can throw together. It's really tough to get the amount of ramp and lands right to the place I want, might need to add some Thougthcast/Ponder/Tithe type stuff to help fix the mana. It's really iffy right now.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

in related news I just remembered tempered steel is a card :)

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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

I played the hell outta Tempered Steel when it was in Standard, but it's never impressed me in EDH.

I like Leonin Sun Standard instead. This is another reason I like red... Jor Kadeen's an awesome anthem effect. Spear of Heliod is ok too.

Esper has pretty good mana options, so I imagine it'll come together fine.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

I updated the OP with where I ended up on this deck. I got to play it once so far and I really like it. I made the mana a bit sketchy on purpose but it seems to work given the very low mana color requirements and copious fixing.

What I wound up doing was trying to really avoid a lot of staples I normally play (top), and jammed a lot of manlands and instead of most of the donothing artifact ramp I would normally play I played all the mana creatures I could reasonably fit.

Living Death was a total house in my first game. I swung out with all my creatures, they died, I cast living death and put myself into a position that won the game easily.

Scrap Trawler was also quite a beast. And thopter sword did exactly what I expected. It was crazy how little support that combo takes to win the game...I had 18 thopters at one point, dropped a chief of the foundry and killed somebody.

Tymna fit in the deck like a glove, regularly drawing 2 or 3 cards off of chip shots and restocking my hand.

I never cast Silas :P I almost always had better stuff to do with my mana. He brings blue to the deck at least, and I am sure in some games he'd be better. But dunno.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

This deck has evolved quite a bit, and changed into Ludevic+Tymna. I never did like Silas or Ishai. With the newest take on the deck I usually run out Ludevic to deflect in the early game, and it seems to almost always get people swinging at each other for cards. Then I can drop Tymna when it's time to draw from everyone :P

I played it the other night against Mairsil combo, Sai thopter value, and Edgar Markov. It was a ridiculously long game with all of us except poor Edgar taking long turns. It only went to turn 10 or so but it felt like forever.

The pivotal turn of the game, the Sai player dropped a billion thopters, drained us all and milled us all like 30 while psychosis crawlering me down to 20 or so. Then he dropped a Font of mythos.

I just want to talk about Font of Mythos. I have been noticing a trend lately where my decks just run away with things when someone starts group hugging. I do not know why people do it so indiscriminately. I won two games last night absolutely handily where GHUG decks did things that set me up (another one with Aminatou where they let me miracle a devastation tide by tapping temple bell which set everyone back enough to allow me to resolve an intuition and win).

So he passed to me, I drew 3, played mind sieve and hangarback walker for 1, bringing back my sword of the meek. I had a scrap trawler out, so I was able to chain turns until I drew Dockside Extortionist (which made like 30 treasures) allowing me to close the game out with Inkmoth nexus and cranial plating after clearing the thopters with walking ballista. With the combination of my Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas and Font of Mythos I was seeing essentially 10 cards a turn so it was pretty inevitable (with tymna and ludevic).

End group hug rant I guess ;)

Here's the new decklist;
Decklist

Sorceries (3)

Approximate Total Cost:

I'm doing a few things differently in this deck that I don't normally do --

* I'm not ramping very hard
* I'm playing a fairly crappy manabase. It's focused on getting basically 1 of each color fairly quickly so I can cast all my spells -- almost none take more than one pip of each color. I just put cards in there I had and didn't get any new stuff for the manabase.
* Playing a lower land count with a lower curve. Normally I am super conservative but this deck really can run on 4 or 5 mana most of the time.
* I'm aggro!
* And finally I'm playing a lot of walkers. What I've found in this deck is that it's pressuring people so much they're not interested in attacking my walkers, they want to be blocking.

There're a number of random combos but none of them are bad cards, even mind sieve just randomly takes 3 or 4 turns even when it doesn't win. There're plenty of fairly weak synergistic elements in the deck but they're not for the purpose of comboing.

I find I can usually finish tables with a combination of plating+nexus'ing one person, combat damaging another,and sometimes mixing in tezzeret drains.

Overall really fun and very different deck for me.

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