A New Deck
I went to FNM this past week. and did fairly well. I went 3-1 in the swiss, dying round 1 to the eventual winner, Dave with his GW tokens deck that I might have been able to stabilize against had I drawn any Days, but I didn't two games in a row, so I lost. I won the rest of my rounds except for the quarter finals putting my overall record at 3-2. Not the run I was hoping for, but not bad.
A few things I learned.
First: Bonehoard is bad in my esper control list. I run a lot of creature removal, but it never made a 4 drop x/x good. I figured it would be a threat that would "survive" a day of judgement by jumping on a sea gate oracle and making it huge post Day. It ended up being a bad draw pretty much every time I drew it, and always wanted to play any other card in my deck first. Maybe an anti aggro board card, but I've got a lot of those cards anyway, and I think Baneslayer might be better.
Second, Venser is a real threat, but, and this really should be obvious, he needs a board presence to be good when he hits. Bouncing a land with no creatures, artifacts or enchantments on the board is pretty underwhelming, especially when he bites it next turn, or you just die next turn as your opponent ignores the irrelevant Venser. This is the case for most planeswalkers, but they are best played when at or slightly ahead on board and go a long way towards KEEPING you ahead on board.
With the changes I made, and the cards I was testing, I was slightly more spell heavy and less permanent dense than in previous builds, so there were games when Venser was not a good card. As has been noted before, Venser is a card you have to build your deck around. There were games I went turn 4 Venser off a Sphere of the Suns, and turn 5 Grave Titan, and games I went turn 6 Venser, with no board, turn 7 die.
So I played, traded, traded, played. Trading is a fairly new past time for me. I never used to trade anything for fear of, I don't know, not knowing card prices, getting bilked out of a really expensive card, or something similar. But once I started trading I suddenly had more consistent access to the cards I needed for the decks I want to build. This has been really liberating. I'm now able to put together full lists of good decks, instead of using suboptimal replacements for half of every deck I want to play. As has been noted in this blog before, I am also able to build multiple fully fleshed out and strong standard decks at once, which is great as I never really like playing one deck for weeks on end and I also help out people who want to play standard but don't actually have a list to play.
And then I realized about 4pm Saturday that I've finally put together a playset of Grand Architect. And my mind starts spinning.
I started with a base of:
4 Grand Architect
3 Trinket Mage
2 Treasure Mage
giving me an artifact toolbox of:
4 Everflowing Chalice
2 Chimeric Mass
1 Brittle Effigy
1 Contagion Engine
1 Myr Battlesphere
2 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Blightsteel Colossus
1 Steel Hellkite
That's 22 cards leaving me with slots for around another 10-16 cards depending on my mana base.
I fill out the deck with
3 Renegade Doppleganger (not exciting with architect, although multiple crusade effects isn't bad, but REALLY spicy with wurmcoil, or blightsteel, or myr battlesphere)
3 Thrummingbird I have a bunch of proliferate targets but more importantly I really need to have a turn 2 blue creature that allows just silly turn three with grand architect. Thrummingbird also allows me to go turn 2 bird, turn 3 everflowing chalice on one, attack, proliferate the chalice to two then cast treasure or trinket mage and search for whatever is best in the matchup.
Basically the blue two drops facilitate some silly explosive openings.
I fill in the rest of the deck with some counters
2 Stoic Rebuttal
2 Spell Pierce
1 Thopter Assembly (really good at creating chump blockers while making the dopplegangers 5/5 flying monsters.
2 Argent Sphinx resilient flyer that turns your dopplegangers into resilient flyers.
2 Precursor Golem
Lands are:
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Halimar Depths
4 Tectonic Edge
11 Islands
Now this list isn't perfect, and has a few cards I'm trying out but in the test matches I played against Nick and his U/B control list it's pretty resilient, and has the ability to turn games around rather fast.
Let me give an example:
I had been attacking with a thrummingbird for a bunch of turns while I had an everflowing chalice on the board. He hadn't found a way to kill me through my counters and tectonic edges, so I was slowing whiltting away his life total and proliferating my chalice up to above 20 when I found a treasure mage. The treasure mage found a Blightsteel Colossus and I cast it with 8 mana floating. He bounced it for a turn or 3 with Jace TMS, and I play Steel Hellkite + Blightsteel Clolssus every turn until he can't deal with them anymore and dies.
Another game I have 2 dopplegangers, a trinket mage and a grand architect with 6 islands and an everflowing chalice on three. I play treasure mage for blightsteel colossus, tap the treasure and trinket mages and the architect for 6 mana, tap my lands and play the colossus, make both dopplegangers into blightsteel colossus and swing for 22 infect.
These may seem like magical christmasland scenarios, but they weren't as rare as you'd think.
I'm interested to see how this works. Maybe All is Dust in the sideboard. It's fun to play, for sure.
A few things I learned.
First: Bonehoard is bad in my esper control list. I run a lot of creature removal, but it never made a 4 drop x/x good. I figured it would be a threat that would "survive" a day of judgement by jumping on a sea gate oracle and making it huge post Day. It ended up being a bad draw pretty much every time I drew it, and always wanted to play any other card in my deck first. Maybe an anti aggro board card, but I've got a lot of those cards anyway, and I think Baneslayer might be better.
Second, Venser is a real threat, but, and this really should be obvious, he needs a board presence to be good when he hits. Bouncing a land with no creatures, artifacts or enchantments on the board is pretty underwhelming, especially when he bites it next turn, or you just die next turn as your opponent ignores the irrelevant Venser. This is the case for most planeswalkers, but they are best played when at or slightly ahead on board and go a long way towards KEEPING you ahead on board.
With the changes I made, and the cards I was testing, I was slightly more spell heavy and less permanent dense than in previous builds, so there were games when Venser was not a good card. As has been noted before, Venser is a card you have to build your deck around. There were games I went turn 4 Venser off a Sphere of the Suns, and turn 5 Grave Titan, and games I went turn 6 Venser, with no board, turn 7 die.
So I played, traded, traded, played. Trading is a fairly new past time for me. I never used to trade anything for fear of, I don't know, not knowing card prices, getting bilked out of a really expensive card, or something similar. But once I started trading I suddenly had more consistent access to the cards I needed for the decks I want to build. This has been really liberating. I'm now able to put together full lists of good decks, instead of using suboptimal replacements for half of every deck I want to play. As has been noted in this blog before, I am also able to build multiple fully fleshed out and strong standard decks at once, which is great as I never really like playing one deck for weeks on end and I also help out people who want to play standard but don't actually have a list to play.
And then I realized about 4pm Saturday that I've finally put together a playset of Grand Architect. And my mind starts spinning.
I started with a base of:
4 Grand Architect
3 Trinket Mage
2 Treasure Mage
giving me an artifact toolbox of:
4 Everflowing Chalice
2 Chimeric Mass
1 Brittle Effigy
1 Contagion Engine
1 Myr Battlesphere
2 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Blightsteel Colossus
1 Steel Hellkite
That's 22 cards leaving me with slots for around another 10-16 cards depending on my mana base.
I fill out the deck with
3 Renegade Doppleganger (not exciting with architect, although multiple crusade effects isn't bad, but REALLY spicy with wurmcoil, or blightsteel, or myr battlesphere)
3 Thrummingbird I have a bunch of proliferate targets but more importantly I really need to have a turn 2 blue creature that allows just silly turn three with grand architect. Thrummingbird also allows me to go turn 2 bird, turn 3 everflowing chalice on one, attack, proliferate the chalice to two then cast treasure or trinket mage and search for whatever is best in the matchup.
Basically the blue two drops facilitate some silly explosive openings.
I fill in the rest of the deck with some counters
2 Stoic Rebuttal
2 Spell Pierce
1 Thopter Assembly (really good at creating chump blockers while making the dopplegangers 5/5 flying monsters.
2 Argent Sphinx resilient flyer that turns your dopplegangers into resilient flyers.
2 Precursor Golem
Lands are:
4 Inkmoth Nexus
4 Halimar Depths
4 Tectonic Edge
11 Islands
Now this list isn't perfect, and has a few cards I'm trying out but in the test matches I played against Nick and his U/B control list it's pretty resilient, and has the ability to turn games around rather fast.
Let me give an example:
I had been attacking with a thrummingbird for a bunch of turns while I had an everflowing chalice on the board. He hadn't found a way to kill me through my counters and tectonic edges, so I was slowing whiltting away his life total and proliferating my chalice up to above 20 when I found a treasure mage. The treasure mage found a Blightsteel Colossus and I cast it with 8 mana floating. He bounced it for a turn or 3 with Jace TMS, and I play Steel Hellkite + Blightsteel Clolssus every turn until he can't deal with them anymore and dies.
Another game I have 2 dopplegangers, a trinket mage and a grand architect with 6 islands and an everflowing chalice on three. I play treasure mage for blightsteel colossus, tap the treasure and trinket mages and the architect for 6 mana, tap my lands and play the colossus, make both dopplegangers into blightsteel colossus and swing for 22 infect.
These may seem like magical christmasland scenarios, but they weren't as rare as you'd think.
I'm interested to see how this works. Maybe All is Dust in the sideboard. It's fun to play, for sure.
Very nice list. The doppelganger strategy is brutal, and combined with Thrummingbird, the deck seems very versatile and scary. It will be interesting to see how our lists match up against each other.
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