Magic the Gathering

I'm really hoping the new set comes out with something so control can at least can-trip, cause IMO, I don't think that Divination will cut it enough. Sure we have Scry to smooth out our draws, but after RtR and M14 rotates, we don't have a decent can-trip card besides Divination, so in turn, control is going to be very weak come next Standard, unless the print out other ways to draw.

Control is going to lose a lot of good cards too after rotation. Sphinx's Rev, Supreme Verdict, Syncopate, Counterflux, The Charms, AEtherling, Detention Sphere, Pithing Needle, among the other cards are going away. I'm pretty sure they are going to re-print Day of Judgement do to the fact that I think the RNG at Wizards still want Regenerate to be a thing, but the others, control players a losing out on a lot of good stuff.

I think that MtG since Inndistrad has gone from a very spell-heavy meta, to a lot of creature-heavy meta. There is a lot more creature value over spell value nowadays for Standard. I am particularly annoyed by this due to me be a control player at heart, so I hope that the next set balances it out.

Sphinx's Rev has got to be the biggest reason these control decks are viable, I'd think. Even if you manage to slow your opponent to a halt, you'd need a way to recover that card advantage from, say, using all those removal spells to take out an aggro decks early drops. The life gain is such an added bonus, too. It just creates that inevitablity. So much, that people just concede to the second or third Sphinx's sometimes.
I've noticed that with the non-white control decks I make. I can't really grind the game out as well as the control decks just cus I don't have access to that card.

I do hope the metagame shifts again to a spell-based one, too, at least a little bit. It's not as fun playing these decks that just plan to go ham until they win. It doesn't feel like that's really skill intensive. Getting back to slinging spells back and forth, or holding back until someone makes a mistake seems like a more fun way to play Magic for me.

Jund just never dies, does it?

[youtube]http://youtu.be/lSKskFiNv-g.*?[/youtube]

One would think an aggro intensive format would lead to very thought intensive combat phases, where you have to figure out how to navigate your army of creatures through theirs, but unfortunately it usually just ends up being a question of who gets their better stuff first. Control is supposed to be there to make it not that simple for aggro players.

To me the ISD-RTR standard had a really good balance between creature and spell value, whether it may be using Resto Angel to flicker Augur of Bolas, Snapcaster, Thragtusk, or a creature that you didn't want to die in combat, knowing when to hold onto your counterspells for the counterspell war between control players, or having value for all cards, just like what Jund did, and will always do in any format, back in Standard.

Now, in Standard, spell value has dropped down, while creature value was buffed up. Sure, spells are still a thing in Standard, but from my perspective, the decks that are still winning the most are the decks that still use creature cards as their basis for their decks over spells. Mono Black and Mono Blue are still some of the most dominating decks out there because of this.

I miss the hell out of the ISD-RTR standard... The mana was so damn good! Until Burning Earth happened, there was no reason not to play three or more colors. Despite that, there were a variety of options, so you could play whatever you want, even within monocolor, like the mostly monored-splash-green beatdown deck, or mono-black. There also were simply two-color decks which were good, especially after Burning Earth, that weren't punished so hard by it. Or of course, one could continue to just play that tricolor deck they loved so much. For some, Burning Earth was not a good enough reason to cut a color.
I miss my Grixis deck at that time, it felt like perfection: I tuned it perfectly for my store's metagame, until Burning Earth picked up, and even then, it was fun times.

This really wanted me to make a Zedruu commander deck :

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AtOjt5ScybE.*?[/youtube]

Personally I hate all of the commander set legendaries, and I wish they would stop printing them.

All the talk about heroic throughout the Pro Tour has inspired me (slight pun intended) to build a deck around (or, at least, with) Hidden Strings. As they talked about one guy's deck (I forget whose), suddenly Hidden Strings came to mind, and now I can't stop thinking about it. I'm trying to think of what funny shenanigans I can do with it in Standard with either Heroic or Inspired (in which I could possibly do both).

The only thought that comes to mind so far is to have Nivmagus Elemental in it as one of the one drops of choice. It and Cipher cards sound like a good combo, because I merely want to target other Heroes. I'll just exile the copy on the stack to add counters to the Elemental after choosing my targets and triggering Heroic with, say, a encoded Hidden Strings or Hands of Binding. It seems like it'd be a nice plan considering it doesn't really overextend by loading a dude up with enchantments.

Any suggestions to further this idea along? I haven't even fully decided what color to pair with it. Between Hidden Strings and Nivmagus, I'm in blue, and white seems like the most reasonable color for Heroic, but not 100% sure that I want to move in that direction yet.

For you BlinkXPoke :

Interesting. So, Choke seems obvious, since, in that match, I was mostly monoU, but Creeping Corrosion seemed like an interesting choice. No thought to board in Stony Silence instead? It seems like a cheaper answer to my Shackles and Batterskull.

I chose going one of Creeping Corrosion on a whim. Nothing too deep. Just realized though, if I did cast it, I would kill my Vials as well. Derp.

Also, I realized that Stony Silence deactivates your Vials, as well. Derp. I actually thought it was a one-sided effect.

On another note, I'm a little surprised that the deck runs so many nonbasics. I'm surprised that Blood Moon could shut down this two-color deck's mana base... Except for the fact that it can still run off of Noble Hierarchs and Aether Vials.
Only other two-color deck I've seen with an absurd number of nonbasics is Faeries.

The Pro Tour was pretty good~!

[youtube]http://youtu.be/OJp6h9ZiNmE.*?[/youtube]

It may be going kinda deep, but I've been enjoying playing this wacky Eidolon of Blossoms + Maze's End deck. The idea came to me last weekend randomly; I just wondered, "How would a sort of Eidolon of Blossoms engine help fuel a Sphere of Safety lock and buy time for a Maze's End kill?" So I tried it out.

I learned that the Eidolon is insane, and Sphere of Safety basically makes you unattackable, but the Maze's End part of it was pretty awkward. My reasoning for using that as my kill of choice is because I didn't think there was good enough ways to actually end the game with the Eidolon of Blossoms engine. I thought all it did was stall, since I didn't realize Strength of the Fallen was a real card. Regardless, this is a fun deck, just trying to work out a few consistency issues. Probably first on the list is the mana base, I kinda just threw basics in it after throwing in all the gates.

Here is is:




Sideboard:

Well, I definitely want 2-3 Crackling Perimeter, but otherwise, I don't know yet. I wanna get the maindeck working just right for now. I have some ideas for the board once I feel satisfied with the main, though.

___________

The Urban Evolutions felt kinda awkward, somehow.
The Kiora's have seemed good for the very little actual testing I did, even though I'm still not sure how necessary it is. Perhaps two is the right number for her, but drawing her often is sweet, and having multiple copies doesn't seem painful so far. I'm pretty sure I like them, especially at three.
The Heliod I'm not sure really belongs, now that I realized again that Maze's End costs a lot of mana to activate. There's never any mana leftover to use the ability.
The Gatecreeper Vine I've never liked, but chumping with it seemed to have won me some games, so I'll continue trying to like it. It buys me that little extra time to set a lock, but otherwise, it feels redundant.
All the other enchantments, I've been thrilled with, thus far. They're all pretty good on their own, and when they have "Draw a card" or "Draw two-four" cards stapled to them as well, they're insane. Courser is good with the Gate strategy, the O-ring effects help me deal with everything, and obviously Sphere of Safety means the opponent can never attack anymore. Makes me wanna try Crackling Perimeter maindeck, something I already considered before.

EDIT:
One of my first thoughts was making the Maze's End win a secondary wincon, and making this some sort of midrange attrition deck, that can kill in a normal way, but has the backup plan of tutoring a gate every turn for the win. Thus, I'd simply play one of each gate, perhaps fewer Maze's Ends, and then make the core of the deck a sort of typical GW midrange/constellation deck that splashes every other color. Maybe lean more towards Junk if I go the constellation route, and Bant if I go for a more versatile midrangey deck.

For now, I seem to be favoring Bant, since Kiora is so good. In this direction, my list so far only contains 37 cards, all of which come from the list I posted above:

Yup, Standard is broken now. Shattered to bits, I dare say.

That Hidden Strings Heroic deck I thought would be pretty sweet was actually already thought up. I saw Greg Hatch's version on his stream and it is sick. It is grossly powerful and fun... I LOVE IT. I had about 70% of the deck thought up, but couldn't fill in certain holes, and he had it already figured out, nearly completely.

My version has one slight change to it: I abandoned Boros Charm because it makes the mana super awkward sometimes. I feel like it's probably a big mistake because Boros Charm is so good, but he had some consistency issues with color, so I figured I'd try out the deck without it, to good enough success. Times I needed a card like Boros Charm, it didn't need to be Boros Charm specifically.

Here's the list:



Hatch had 3 Bioshift and 3 Aqueous Form to make room for 2 Boros Charm, and in place of 3 Basic Island, he played 3 Steam Vents so that they were more castable. However, he seemed disappointed with the mana still.

The sideboard, I'm simply gonna copy from Hatch for now. My store's metagame is pretty erratic at times, so I'll figure out what to adjust later.
Here it is:



The reason why there's only 12 cards is because Hatch had his fourth Aqueous form in the sideboard, and he had the last 2 additional Boros Charms in addition to the 2 in his version of the maindeck. I may just up the count of Triton Tactics and Mizzium Skin for my version. Also, perhaps that Temple Garden should be a Watery Grave, to help cast the Gift of Orzhovas.

I was directed to a bunch of local players and I took the plunge to get back into Magic... went right for Modern with UWr Geist. I was graciously gifted a bunch of cards from a friend to form the core, so after dunking a couple hundred on lands, now all I'm missing are the sideboard cards, like Engineered Explosives, Sowing Salt... there's quite a variety of decks around so I need to be prepared for everything. ;(

An interesting choice for the deck. Probably my favorite version of the RWU deck. Not durdly as hell like the super slow version of it, and not fragile like the aggressive Delver version. The Kiki version of the RWU control deck is interesting as hell, too, though.

Any particular reason you chose that deck?

You familiar with the Modern format? Or are you trying to just have a wide variety of stuff in the sideboard just to be safe? I may be able to help you round out your sideboard by looking up popular decks, so you can have more stuff against those.


I still wanna find a deck in Modern I can just stick to. I haven't been consistently satisfied lately with a bunch of the decks I've tried out. They get boring too quickly. I probably want some kind of mono/mostly mono color deck, since the two decks I enjoy playing most so far is Blue Moon (monoU-splash-red) and Skred Red (monoR snow). I'm still not tired of those yet. Both have very easy mana bases, and both irritate the opponent until it can potentially just completely lock them out.

There's also a mono-black deck I thought of that sounds like it could be interesting. Not sure if it's any good, but I think it could be funny. It's just basically a Mono-Black Midrange deck with lots of devotion: Geralf's Messenger and Phyrexian Obliterator into Gray Merchant. Seems like it could be a real thing if it curves out. Probably have some hand destruction, removal and card draw to round out the earlier part of the curve, too. It's still just an idea right now. I haven't actually built a list and tried it out yet.

In all honesty, when I was debating to go back to MTG, I knew I wasn't getting into Standard, so I researched what the local player base was like, and Modern was right after Standard, followed by Legacy. So I researched decks that were passive-aggressive using the UWR colors, and ended up with UWr Geist. It's just like you said: I can switch from being aggressive to passive whenever I want, and it's right in my style of play. In all my time playing blue, I never liked draw-go style decks, and even when Caw-Go was Standard legal I steered away from it as much as I could.

I really want to be safe with my sideboard. I played some games tonight and lost every match due to NOT HAVING ANYTHING. I had RiP to protect myself from Melira Pod and then I got beat down by Exalted Thrun because I didn't draw any Wraths. I lost against Scapeshift because I didn't know anything about how the tech worked, and I lost the counter battle on game 2. Then I had nothing at all against Affinity. I couldn't draw any Paths for Splinter Twin.

I'm just going to assume I'm gonna get rekt until my fetches come in the mail.

I guess for Geist UWR, the good all-round side would be this :

2x Anger of the Gods
2x Molten Rain/Sowing Salt (depending on your preference)
1-2x Supreme Verdict/Wrath of God (depending on store meta as well as how many you play in main. WoG is less color intensive than SV as well as stops affinity if they play the jar card that regens target artifact)
1x Rest in Peice
2x Swan Song (comes in handy against Twin and Thoughtseize)
1x Counterflux
2x Aven Minesensor (especially if you don't play Shadow of a Doubt main)
4x - ? Not sure what else to put. Have to think about it and look at the current modern meta to find out. Some generic ideas though for this slot are Spellskite, Coumbust, Ajani Vengant, Elspeth, Knight Erreant, and whatever you feel like you need more of that you don't have enough in main.