TenInchRichard wrote: ↑4 years ago
The direction I wanted to go with
Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy is a bit flip-flopped; my intentions are to go for
Basalt Monolith as the default plan.
Freed from the Real /
Pemmin's Aura are not so much plan B as nearly impossible to tutor, if either of those cards are in the opening hand I will keep them(barring a mulligan for other reasons); however, I am not about to go too far out of the way to assemble a combo that depends on flimsy dorks and their lazy(summoning sickness) ways. That again might be my weird semi-casual control oriented play group; they like to wipe the board frequently.
With flash/hulk, I don't see Kinnan breaking the competitive plane; however, now that flash is gone I think there is an upside to Kinnan over
Thrasios, Triton Hero/
Tymna the Weaver . Not to say Kinnan is 'better', just not all downside anymore. Being able to get the monolith by turn three for inf generic mana is nothing to sneeze at. Even without one of 16 ways to win with inf generic, I normally have four colored mana available when the
basalt monolith hits, which usually nets roughly 13% to get either of the non-human mana dumps.
My theory is that there are 11 deterministic routes to the monolith and 16 deterministic routes to win immediately after + a random 13%ish chance that you win flip the wincon without any of the 16 in-hand. Also, I feel that tutoring for dorks is suicide, again with the summoning sickness and
Worldly Tutor/
Sylvan Tutor don't even put them in your hand, Your looking at T3 before they are usable. You better have a perfect hand or poor opposition if you expect that to win doing that.
To me, monolith method is much easier/reliable than drawing one of nine cards to get you the mana making creatures ability and one of five to get the auras to make them go inf.
Hi, welcome to the forums
So my first build didn't have the
Freed from the Real/
Pemmin's Aura plan, I was 100% focused on winning with the
Basalt Monolith.
This was backed up with
Transmute Artifact,
Fabricate,
Whir of Invention.
But then of course you need a generic mana sink. So the two problems I was finding was requiring that mana sink AND casting costs of routes to victory.
Now that second part cannot be understated. The Blue mana requirements for casting cards invariable means having to wait an entire turn before you can win. Like this will happen 90% of the time.
For example you have your Basalt. You have
Drift of Phantasms in hand. This costs two Blue to transmute. You want to hold up another Blue for say a
Dispel so that you don't get blown out. Between casting your Basalt that you probably had to tap at least one Blue mana for, and the transmute and wanting to hold up a counter, you just end up running out of Blue mana. So you end up just using the transmute to setup for the following turn. Trust me a turn in cEDH is an eternity.
Its the same for most of your stuff like this.
Merchant Scroll for
Pull from Tomorrow is three Blue mana.
And same goes for tutoring for the
Basalt Monolith.
Spellseeker into
Transmute Artifact is three Blue mana, and you are just 90% of the time going to have to wait a turn to actually win. Its completely transparent for your opponents at this stage.
So I'll just say that since I've been playing into the
Freed from the Real/
Pemmin's Aura plan more, it is more consistent, due to fixing colors in the same turn you want to combo.
Not having to wait another turn, is normally the difference between winning and losing.
Those mana dorks might be flimsy, but they just so happen to provide
uu with Kinnan in play, and this amount of additional Blue feels like you have an entire ocean worth of mana to work with when you are attempting to combo.
Btw
Prophet of Distortion is a nice include, forget this card existed. Its going to go into my Zirda // Kenrith deck that you can check out in the forums as well. That deck is all about the
Grim Monolith/
Basalt Monolith infinite mana.
I am curious about
Trinisphere and
Sphere of Resistance . I discounted them initially because the cmc of my list is so low; land count is also insanely low. My only hangup on those two is that this list depends on a ton of 1c/0c counterspells. Have you run into issues with this or does the opponents added costs mitigate the loss in efficiency.
21 lands (I'm counting your
Land Grant) is just not a reasonable number. The number of times you'll have to mulligan to ever have a keep-able hand will just mean this is pure card
disadvantage, rather than card advantage which is the angle you are hoping to achieve through this.
You are not even playing the one mana Elves to help with these attempted God hands.
28 lands is the consensus lowest land count a deck should have. Trust me you can do plenty of solitaire games to figure this out as you'll mull to 4 cards a lot of games just so that you can at least cast a card.
If you want to get clever then you could try 27 lands,
Land Grant and
Once Upon a Time, but any lower land count and you'll on average be at least one or two cards down every game.
And
Land Grant is not a freebie in cEDH, revealing your hand is a big deal.
Also your lands need more color fixing, even though you have the
Back to Basics, you need to be able to cast all the cards in your hand in a timely manner, and hoping for the right mix via basics is not correct.
Command Tower,
Yavimaya Coast,
City of Brass,
Command Tower,
Mana Confluence,
Tarnished Citadel,
Forbidden Orchard,
Gemstone Caverns.
This might seem like a lot, but you can easily play around
Blood Moon type effects, and even your own
Back to Basics.
The
Trinisphere and
Sphere of Resistance have been really amazing. They are worse if you are starting behind more players, rather than going first or second. But on the play, resolving these early often is the difference between your opponents being able to win or not.
Think of them as pure gas. Sure they slow you down a bit, but you can operate so much more effectively than opponents. They are all-stars if they hit the table. It just requires more patience. Opponents can't afford to not play out cards to keep up with you AND hold up a 3 mana disruption spell (lets say they have
Force of Will in hand with
Trinisphere in play). So because you can keep playing out another card each turn, its going to force your opponents into a spot where they will not be able to counter your combo (on average).
I ended up cutting
Back to Basics and I'm thinking about cutting
Winter Orb as well, as these are just much easier to work around by opponents than the Sphere effects. I just find them a little slow to interact with opponents in some games.
Easy cuts for including the correct amount of lands are
Land Grant and
Everflowing Chalice.
But after that you are going to have to make some hard decisions. Can you really afford to cast a triple blue spell like
Future Sight?
With more lands in the deck it gets a lot worse.
Is
Scroll Rack mana investment worth the payoff?
Does
Metalworker do much at all, as it doesn't go infinite with
Freed from the Real/
Pemmin's Aura? Chances are if you are revealing artifacts from your hand, that means that you have access to the mana that they can produce anyway. Actually
Metalworker is an easy cut.
I do think
Springleaf Drum is an upgrade to
Paradise Mantle, as you have potential summoning skickness with Mantle, where as you can cast Kinnan and tap him straight away for mana with the Drum.
Paradise Druid is basically a hexproof creature, as you can cast
Freed from the Real/
Pemmin's Aura on it, and as long as you have an additional Blue, you can always untap it in response to removal.
That should help you with the "flimsy dork" mentality