LEH wrote: ↑3 years ago
The deck ran really well tonight. I got eliminated first but I held off two other players winning turns then managed to grab the lead before I got Merciless Evictioned (which I managed to sac my board to Carrion Feeder),
Clever play, I approve.
LEH wrote: ↑3 years ago
I then got Mindslicered taking both Living Death and Patriarch's Bidding I got Aether Gale cast against me (targeting me with everything!?/sadface) after I managed to rebuild the following turn and hit for lethal by Akiri, Line-Slinger that I had been picked with for a few turns but that was now equip with Cranial Plating and died to Commander damage. They died the next turn to Ghave, Guru of Spores infinite combo shenanigans.
Rough meta, man. Ghave is not easy to combat, or to stop from comboing. FYI, this
Mindslicer play is precisely why I want either a zombie
Snapcaster Mage or a zombie
Archaeomancer. There's not no options in that respect, but what's out there is not ideal (
Dralnu, Lich Lord and
Possessed Skaab, neither really fit well here). There's
Mystic Sanctuary too, but that won't work with my land base; it might with yours.
LEH wrote: ↑3 years ago
I guess an issue with Varina is that the deck is very "out in the open" - unlike some decks (Ghave, etc. lol) which look fairly harmless until they drop 1 card and just pop into the lead, Varina seemingly looks relatively threatening even when it's just holding on to a truce. I enjoyed the deck though. Looking forward to testing it again tomorrow.
It is pretty overt, yeah. I guess on the other side of that is that not much of the stuff I run is kill on sight, barring maybe
Alhammarret's Archive and
Teferi's Ageless Insight - the beauty of the deck is that it doesn't overly care if your stuff gets nuked. Other than that, I find the most successful games I have are the ones where I'm able to read the board and shift between answering board states and actively pushing for the win myself well. It probably gets easier with a regular meta, which I don't have, but it'll also come with time piloting the deck for you as you learn how far your resources can stretch and how far you are from a win.
As far as Ghave goes, though, I don't trust
anything that thing does. It combos with the tissue you just used to blow your nose and you should be wary of it even twitching. I can personally attest to how difficult it is to make a Ghave deck that
doesn't combo.
LEH wrote: ↑3 years ago
I'm unsure of starting hands and what to mulligan into but that will come with more experience with the deck. The deck was slow to take off that game but that didn't hurt as it allowed me to capitalise on securing myself for a take over and it came online right when I needed it to - I still lost but given what happened I didn't stand a chance at that point lol.
In general, you want a fairly low to the ground starting hand with at least one turn 2-3 drop zombie, or optimally turn 1. Any answers, reanimation, other deck architecture you can start to dig for as long as you can swing. So as a quick idea, I'll do a few 'draw 7's from the decklist function on the first page:
Well, damn. This one's an easy keep to me. Your first turn play is Ancestry so you can untap turn 2 with 2 lands and drop a rock or Augur. From there you want to just....play out the rest of your hand, really. Optimally, you'd probably want to sacrifice a little efficiency in combat for a more expansive boardstate and drop Signet or Talisman turn 2, play Colossus turn 3 and the rest of your zombies to follow so you're getting some tokens in play, but that really depends on the board state. If it's cracking on really quick you just turn this about for bodies on the table quicker. Either way you should be on track to hit your commander turn 4, and at that point you could be digging pretty deep.
This is a pretty obvious mulligan.
It looks worse than it is. The only thing holding this back from being a golden start is lack of
w. Even then you get 2 lords in hand, you can get one down turn 2 followed by the other the following, and there's a relatively good chance (especially with your fetch suite) you'll get to something that gives you the
w you need to cast Varina. It's probably a risky keep but less risky than it looks.
Hope that helps; the key to a good start with the deck is early presence, even if it looks pathetic to the rest of the table. So long as you can turn sideways and get yourself some structure to your hand and/or graveyard, you can make some moves.