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Welcome to Year Five of the Brewhaus! Last year went pretty well. We got close to nailing some competitive decks right at rotation, and people have at least had some fun with stuff. I really don't have anything to harp on this time around. Surprising, I'm usually a lot more vocal. Oh, Deck Thinning still isn't a thing I’ve decided that I’m not going to link to the other Magic threads this year, as I tend to be the first person to refresh threads and my links are usually all invalid within a week of posting. Some important things to note before you post your deck:
Enough with the notes, on to some of the deck building basics. Before you build:
Now that I've mentioned them... Deck Archetypes
Next up, Building! While you build:
I can't stress enough how much you have to consider your mana base. Your forseeable manabase for Kahns/Battle For Zendikar Standard –or- MY GOD, THE UTILITY LANDS THIS TIME AROUND: Basic Lands: Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountian, Forest. Battle/BOFA/Tango lands: I don’t think the community ever decided what specifically to call these, but they’re dual basic typed lands that ETB tapped unless you have two basics on the field already. We’re only getting ally paired variants of these in BFZ, but there’s an expectation of enemy pairs in Oath of the Gatewatch. Expectation is that these will fill the roles of the Temples nicely and help mana bases greatly Enemy Manlands: Lands that ETB Tapped but can have mana pumped into them to be turned into a creature until end of turn. They’re ok fixing and generally fairly good cards. We’re only getting U/G and W/B in BFZ. Fetchlands: A known quantity in older formats, these lands border with the Alpha duals in terms of best lands ever. One of these in hand is one land of the two types in hand, as needed. For this standard iteration, they’re Delve fuel, Landfall enablers and have typed duals to go looking for. They’re better fixing in KTK/BFZ then they were last season, but not incredible. There is a deck thinning component with these, but it's statistically insignificant. If you post that you're running these for deck thinning only, I'm going to mock you relentlessly. Functional Refuge reprints: The full cycle of 10 enemy and ally duals in Kahns and Fate Reforged. They enter the battlefiled tapped and gain you a life. THESE ARE YOUR BUDGET GO-TO DUALS. They're common and in plentiful supply. Clan Tri-Lands: The wedge versions of the Shards of Alara tri lands. They enter the battlefield tapped and produce one mana of any of three colors. Being uncommon, they shouldn't be hard to get a hold of. Enemy Painlands: Rare lands that enter the battlefield untapped and can be tapped for colorless, or one of two colors of mana from an enemy pair at the cost of 1 Damage. These and the M10 checklands tend to be the standard baseline for dual lands, though R&D tends to prefer the checks because of new players. After two consecutive printings they’re not hard to get a hold of, and even foils are relatively cheap. Evolving Wilds: Significantly inferior to the fetches, as whatever basic they search out comes in tapped despite being able to grab any basic. Still fills the graveyard, and is an ok budget option. Tomb of the Spirit Dragon: Primarily a limited card, Auto-include in the all morph/colorless/Devoid deck, but still not likely to be useful in standard. Haven/Crucible of the Spirit Dragon: Does your deck run dragons in it or care about them? You probably want to run Haven as a 2 of to recur your rawr. Crucible isn’t quite as good unless you’re looking to ramp. Foundry of the Counsuls/Spawning Bed: Colorless lands that allow you to pay mana and sacrifice them for token creatures. Foundry if you want fliers, Spawning if you want sacrificial 1/1’s for mana generation or whatever the gently caress. Mage-Ring Network: A colorless storage land. Similar to Crucible of the Spirit Dragon but no rawr Requirement. Rouge’s Passage: Wasn’t horrible last time it was in standard, but not great. Lets you spend mana to make a creature unblockable. Generally best as a 1-of. Ally Encampment: If you’re running Allies, you want a couple of these in your deck. A bit narrow, but useful in the right deck. Sanctum of Ugin: Colorless fetching for when you cast a big colorless creature. Remains to be seen if there’s an Eldrazi deck to support this. Shrine of the Forsaken Gods: This is mainly to get you from infinity mana to beyond. It’s a monster once you’ve got seven lands. Blighted Lands: A cycle of colorless producers that can be sacrificed for a minor effect for 4 or 5 cmc. Usefulness depends on what kind of deck you’re building. Blue, Black, and Red are much better than White and Green in a vacuum, but who knows what ones will be the best when the cards hit standard. Fertile Thicket, Looming Spires, Sandstone Bridge, Skyline Cascade, Mortuary Mire: Zendikar and World wake each had a cycle of spell lands that ETB tapped but generated a small effect. These are another iteration of this cycle, and they all seem to be relatively effective (though the white one isn’t as good as the red one). A special note: If you’re opening BFZ for any reason, you may run into an Expedition land (full art foil). This can be any of the Ravnica Shocks, Fetches, or the new BFZ duals. If you open one of these in a draft or sealed event, you can use them. Only the allied Fetches and BFZ duals are Standard legal. After it's built:
One other thing to note when you're building your deck is that there's a good chance you're going to have a "pet card" you want to try to shoehorn into every deck you build. I recently tried to jam Tymaret, the Murder King into whatever I could. Be aware of this card and make absolutely SURE it fits into your deck. Alternatively, the OP of this MTG Salvation thread does an excelent job of going over all of this. Some questions you may ask: Can I post the full list of my Commander/EDH deck? Use a link to deckstats/tappedout for your Commander/EDH Decks DON’T POST FULL LISTS OF COMMANDER/EDH DECKS Or just post it in the Commander thread and know that you’re a horrible person. How many of each card do I want in my deck? Here's a good way of looking at it (this excludes basic lands): Four of a specific card: I want this card in my opening hand and/or want to see as many copies of it as possible. Three of a specific card: Having this in my opening hand isn't bad, but I generally only want to see one or two copies of it during the course of a game (Legendary Creatures, Planeswalkers). Two of a specific card: I'd like to see this card on occasion, but never really want it in my opening hand. One of a specific card: I NEVER want to see more than one of this card or something I'll be searching for with a tutor effect or drawing through massive amounts of draw. (Singletons are often a deck win condition in vintage or legacy, and frequently a win condition in a combo deck.) Why does my deck keep getting slaughtered by this other type of deck? Your deck may have an inherent weakness to that deck. As an example, a creature ramp deck can be stalled out horribly by a mono-red burn deck. A deck with no flyers can be completely out of luck if your opponent drops a large flyer like a Baneslayer Angel. That mono-red burn deck has a huge weakness to life gain and shroud/hexproof creatures. You have three options to deal with this. First, you can make main deck changes. Second, you can dedicate slots in your sideboard to shore up this match. Third, you can just accept that your deck is bad against that type of deck. What's a sideboard? That's 15 extra cards you can use to modify your deck between games in a tournament. You can use this to solidify your deck against a bad match up, or transform your deck into something else. It's a good idea to consider your sideboard options in parallel to your main 60. How do I tune my deck for my local metagame, what about my sideboard? Well, thats a bit of a doozy and specialized. You'd need to tell us what your expected metagame is, then we can help you. I'm running a Mono-color deck and would like to include Fetch Lands for deck thinning. Is this a good idea? The short answer is No. The long answer is, "for purely deck thinning purposes, it's not a good idea since the life cost for the deck thinning effect is too high." That said, there are OTHER reasons to use Fetch lands in any kind of deck. A. You need lands in the graveyard for something 2. You need a shuffle effect (for ponder, brainstorm, other things that require certain cards on top) D. Landfall triggers (from ZEN and BFZ blocks) eff. Mana Fixing in multi-color decks. I want to build a mill de-- Having this bit in this OP got worse for everyone because of the U/R Sphinx’s Tutelage deck winning a GP recently. I have news for you: Mill decks are still bad. I’m not saying they’re not fun and can’t catch an event with its pants down like it did over the summer, but they’re a slow burn or combo deck at best. U/R Tutelage can be annihilated by enchantment removal. They lack consistency and are open to just being run down by even midrange decks. TurboMill from LOR/ALA is probably the closest, most recent example of a consistent mill deck. It took the rise of 5-color-control for it to be a player though. And none of that mattered once Seismic Swans came around. Still, if you want to build one I won’t fault you. There’s something fun about milling someone out. Just don’t expect to win a lot. Why did you rip my awesome deck to shreds? It was the best thing in the world! You have no idea what you're talking about! While there's a decent chance that someone commenting on your deck may not have the best deck building sense (including me), the same holds true for you. Also, I warned you this would happen, and even gave you this link earlier. Put your ego aside, we're trying to help. Hay guyz! I just got given a bunch of new cards from someone and I want to post my deck list. Should I do it?" JerryLee put it pretty succinctly in the first thread, but I'll sum it up here: Probably not. If your card pool is really tiny what you can put together isn't going to be of much interest to us, and you're likely to be ignored. If you want to list out a fully fleshed out deck (include cards you want to acquire for it) BASED ON what you currently have, or get some suggestions on what to look for, that's fine. If you want to save some money, you can buy from other goons! My deck didn't get commented on.  This is likely to happen for any number of reasons. More often than not this tends to happen for Legacy and Vintage decks posted, but don’t worry if you want to talk older formats, Go here and post the list. Another reason your deck may have been ignored is because you didn't specify what format it's for and/or your budget. You could have also posted in the middle of a fury of decks being posted and it was just missed. Don't take it personally, this just a single thread in a sub-forum of a sub-forum that's doesn't exactly have a huge amount of traffic. That said, If you want to get competitive, don't hesitate to go to Star City Games top deck lists from their open series and use that as a place to start on the type of deck you want to use. I'd like to remind everyone to INCLUDE WHAT FORMAT YOU'RE BUILDING YOUR DECK FOR! The format a deck is built for is key to getting help. If you'd like to get a hold of me in regards to something with the thread, talk Wizard Poker Deck building, or berate me for being a jackass, feel free to PM. I might actually get back to you on that. Happy Brewing.
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Oct 1, 2015 23:03
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DO 
and win in one fell swoop. Examples inclue thopter/depths (which could generate a 20/20 flying indestructible on turn two), hive mind, and the first major combo Channel/Fireball.
at your opponent, your mana curve should terminate at a converted mana cost of NO HIGHER than four and the majority of your spells hovering around the CMC 2 range. There's no hard and fast rule for what a mana curve should look like. 
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 10:16 |
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black potus posted:i before e, except after siege This. Exactly this. I'm so tired of it I don't even want to spell it right. I have no clue what I'm going to run for standard here out. I may just have to slap together a Mardu thing if I play tonight.
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Oct 2, 2015 18:34
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InterrupterJones posted:Mardu is actually not a bad idea at all. If you've got Hangarback Walkers, Tom Ross posted a pretty interesting looking Mardu deck based around a few token generators and Impact Tremors. Also there's Mardu Dragons, which has the benefit of having Draconic Roar as a pretty sufficient Lightning Strike replacement. I actually went 3-1 (0-2, 2-0, 2-0, 2-0) for fourth place with a B/R dragons variant. Creatures were: Bloodsoaked champion Hangarback Thunderbreak 2 Kholagan, TSF 3 red sarkhan Wild slash Roar 3 firecraft 3 foul tongue 3 Kholagan's command 3 Outpost siege 23 lands (3 bfz b/r duals, one English, one Russian, one expedition) My game losses in round 1 were entirely due to never getting beyond three colored sources. The rest of the matches were me steam rolling people.
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Oct 3, 2015 20:40
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Man, does this standard season suck for brewing so far or what?
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Nov 30, 2015 22:18
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Welp, morale hasn't improved  I decided to try to translate U/R Eldrazi to standard. And it's not great, but simple to play: Deck: Pseudo-Temur eldrazi??    //Lands 3 Forest 4 Island 4 Lumbering Falls 2 Mountain 4 Shivan Reef 4 Spawning Bed 3 Yavimaya Coast //Spells 3 Dig Through Time 4 Titan's Presence //Creatures 4 Eldrazi Mimic 4 Eldrazi Skyspawner 3 Herald of Kozilek 3 Rattleclaw Mystic 4 Reality Smasher 4 Ruination Guide 4 Thought-Knot Seer 3 Vile Aggregate  Display deck statisticsI was basically spitballing things with this. I'm sure it can be improved vastly, but don't say "add jace". I'm not spending that kind of money.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:23
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Irony Be My Shield posted:Ghostfire Blade is a great card in any deck full of colorless creatures. Hangarback is also a nice on-theme card. My habgarbacks are slotted into my Jund "dragons" deck (which I need to post the list for, it's been quite good for me) Here's my thoughts on this Eldrazi list though: Spawning Beds become Sea Gate Wreckages Dig Through Time become Ghostfire Blade Not totally sold on Titan's Presence but I wanted to try it out. I'm not saying this deck is going to be good, but if it ends up tier 2 I've done something right.
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Feb 9, 2016 17:51
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Threadnote: New thread later in the week. Goodbye easy four color manabases. Hello potentially interesting standard.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:05
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Yawgmoth posted:Easy 4 color mana bases were fun and interesting. Look at this horrible opinion. I get the fun in having perfect mana bases, but most people I've talked to at FNM levels are kinda sick of being driven into play Jace or play Eldrazi. I'm in the Eldrazi camp. I ran blue Eldrazi to 3-1 last week (lost hard to G/W)
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Apr 5, 2016 16:11
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I'm gonna miss multicolor fun times and probably stop playing when we eventually swing the pendulum back to "two colors at most" decks.
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 10:16 |
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NEW THREAD: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3771499
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Apr 8, 2016 19:18
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