To clarify the issue.
When you aren't running fetch//shocks, and decks have to have strong guild identities, B/W can be a challenging guild to design for, if you're running cheap aggressive creatures in both black and white. Eventually, some player will first pick a
champion of the parish, and combo that with a cheap aggro creature in black. The problem is that while B/R or W/R has access to great tools to build a reach puzzle around, white black is not great at that, as white usually has no direct damage effects, and black just has (practically) blood artist triggers for cheap reach.
With fetch // shock, you never have to address this, because you just go into a mardu deck and are done. Since I am not running fetch//shock, even if I support a B/W control deck, I still have this problem that the small creatures that provide the foundation for the W/R and B/R decks, will inevitably combine into a B/W aggro deck, which thus must be represented in the format. Even worse, the fact that so many higher power "sticky" black aggro threats can't block, it means that once you start going down that road, you can't really pivot into a midrange deck (this is why the penny cube doesn't have this problem).
I like the focus on disruptive effects, as its rather akin to how mono black aggro (or stax aggro for that matter) traditionally worked. Sort of like a B/W death and taxes deck, to use a more modern analogy. The idea behind the rally/wake approach, was to provide the deck with a reanimation based reach strategy. I'm also still not sure about
smallpox, because it kills one of this deck's own creatures, which seems terrible if you draw the white creature portion of your deck.
In other news, I think I solved my UR issue. That was interesting, because running double
wildfire without mana rocks, really narrows wildfire down into a R/G card. The UR decks are big mana control decks, and its an incoherent gameplan to run a sweeper (which you need) that delays your overwhelming late game, by delaying your mana development.
My solution was to add a small section of mana rocks:
The boarder posts are brilliant, and should be kept on my radar as a way to incorporate an on-point system of mana rocks and a corresponding artifact theme. I opted not to do that here (though that might change after this new set) as I have no UR post, and the only way I can create artifact density in the main colors is to run splicers, which goes against me toning down the ETB power level.
Though this is a really cool idea.
So there should be just enough tools for UR wildfire to be a thing, and than I gave blue and red a couple beefy 4-5CC (non ETB) flyers that they can protect for a sort of midrangy tempo game. Red offers two phoenix cards (
shard phoenix!) and
Detritivore, so we're looking at a bigger mana deck, capable of asserting pressure down the line, while breaking symmetry on resource pressure.
Also added
