pokken wrote: ↑3 years ago
So the thing to remember about jamming a small selection of things that enable draws on combat damage (e.g. bident) is that it makes your attack surface different. It's a very different play texture to have 20 guys who individually always do something if they connect to 20 guys that do nothing without a support piece.
Long time "saboteur tribal" player, since before Tymna dropped so I've had this style of deck in some form or another for like 6-7 years.
I believe the minmax "cheap fliers and
Coastal Piracy effect" route is much stronger than the "each dude pulls their own weight" path. This is because of how the costs scale. It's not a case of "20 self sufficient dudes or 20 flying nerds", but rather you might have one or two 3+cmc guys with their own built in triggers and if you are lucky, built in evasion (many don't), or you might quickly have 6+
flying men drawing off of a bident of thassa, replenishing themselves, growing the board state and drawing enough interaction to keep them
on the board. One of these strategies is fast, snowballs into a dangerous board state, and sustains itself with lots of draw. The other is slower, deals less damage and gives you far less payoff- this is coming from a guy who has deliberately run that style for a long time and still loves it!
You also might have 6 one mana dudes not triggering anything, so it's not pure upside, but I find the risk is more than outweighed by the huge consistency of the deck one it gets one of the 5+ piracy enablers on the table. If your enabler is in the command zone, the risk is very minimal. What I do like about the clunky style is that often, you can have several unique or different effects every turn instead of simply "draw a card". You lose a ton of power and consistently, but get more varied gameplay. If you don't want to go the efficient way, would still hugely recommend piracy enablers for your deck. If you are trying to get combat damage for triggers, stacking various on-hit effects for maximum impact is the way to go.
If you want to play with the
Raging Bulls rather than the
Flying Men , have found Tymna + X to be a winning combination. In my case I have played Tymna + Kraum for a long time, with the red in the deck being mainly for sunforger. These decks like equipment, and Sunforger is one of the best equipment there is! I also have a less fleshed out Tymna +
Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa, which runs hatebears and uses Kondo+Tymna's abilities to let them draw cards.
However, I've also been experimenting with two alternatives -
Inniaz, the Gale Force or
Ukkima, Stalking Shadow +
Cazur, Ruthless Stalker. Both are going the flying men route, but the Cazur deck could be adapted to be either style. Cazur in particular is a sleeper for this style IMO, as getting +1 counters (or especially more than one through various synergies) can turn your card draw engines into win conditions quickly and without using the same hoofmaster ascension route as every other green deck
The idea here is to always be drawing fire and to be able to win without needing to commit as hard to the board (just play two guys and start drawing cards vs. play two guys and an enabler).
Tymna + Kraum or Tymna + Ludevic gets a massive thumbs up from me. You really need the blue for saboteurs to have enough value, and the red gets you sunforger which is fantastic for defending a boardstate as well as simultaneously improving your threats.
One small idea I've also considered is using less explosive but harder to interrupt overrun effects; more sorin and Gideon ally of zendikar less beastmaster ascension, maybe even instant speed tricks.
This deck will be slow without needing to add slower win conditions. You will lack the board state (or untapped board state) to protect planeswalkers and get more than one emblem off them (or whatever other value) and likely lack the card draw to take advantage of instant-speed pumps. Pumps would need more raw draw than this style enables and more bodies to scale up for EDH - plus pumps that are actually good enough are not common sadly.
I'm thinking about not using equipment either so as to not open up that attack surface. Forcing them to interact with the individually strong saboteurs and then defending them.
The 'individually strong saboteurs' will all likely die to the same removal as the creatures in the flying men route, though we have a few kinda interesting ones lately. I'd look to open up the field to "fatties that draw" rather than "fatties that draw through combat" to get a few creatures like
Niv-Mizzet, Parun or
Nezahal, Primal Tide. Investing in protection for these is worth it and they will likely draw more than combat trigger creatures, at the very least replacing themselves in these cases when the likely non-creature removal is cast on them.
Personally I think equipment is one of the few advantages the 'few strong' approach has over the 'many weak,' as it allows you to really build up those threats again as they go down to removal. Better to equip a sunforger to Nezahal than it is to put it on a Flying Man.
pokken wrote: ↑3 years ago
I think what I'm gonna try is jamming a package of pumping planeswalkers.
Or something like that. Probably some good ones I'm missing there and some of those likely aren't good enough.
This will struggle enormously without the body count to make their pump effects worthwhile. I think you'd be better with either planeswalker + flying men, or "individually strong saboteurs" + equipment, auras or some such that provide individually better power boosts. Going for "small creature count, low impact wide spectrum pumps" seems like the worst of both worlds!