That's what makes them ravenous.
General Fight Club
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
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That's what makes them ravenous.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I don't like oust because the kind of deck that wants griptide usually wants to attack with it
I don't condemn because it's just free wheel cards for a control deck, which I really feel they don't need (Might be bias)
I don't condemn because it's just free wheel cards for a control deck, which I really feel they don't need (Might be bias)
Its kind of hard for me to imagine control even being playable in your cube. I need to play it some time.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Condemn is a very fine card if you feel control needs a boost in your cube. Oust sucks.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I've got aggression in my blood, so I'm sure it sounds that way if all you hear is from me and complainer lucas
I tried Sidisi, ended up cutting her. She just wasn't pulling her weight and 1YXZ is such a cost. Doomsday is one of those cards I *REALLY* want to cube with but I don't understand how the card works in cube. I want to resolve it so badly but I have no idea how
I want to resolve it so badly but I have no idea how
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I would go doomsday all the way, though I don't know how much B/x combo you support.
Doomsday is the ultimate combo tutor, letting you select a small pool of cards with which to win the game, at great risk to yourself.
Doomsday is one of those cards I *REALLY* want to cube with but I don't understand how the card works in cube.
Doomsday is the ultimate combo tutor, letting you select a small pool of cards with which to win the game, at great risk to yourself.
I tried Sidisi, ended up cutting her. She just wasn't pulling her weight and 1YXZ is such a cost. Doomsday is one of those cards I *REALLY* want to cube with but I don't understand how the card works in cube.
the cool thing about doomsday is that it's a very efficient tutor for multiple cards, so you can set up your clunky combo onetwothreefourfive justlikethat
(and how do you like your blue-eyed boy mister death)
===DOOMSDAY CONTEXT AND HISTORY (also how to pilot doomsday it's not that hard in theory?) - SKIP THIS===
Doomsday in Constructed is originally a Vintage combo deck that uses Black Lotus to pull off some really quick combo kills. There's a Legacy port of it, which is where most of my knowledge comes from, but it's a different beast without Lotus and Yawgwill. The OG OG OG kill is Lotus, Recall, Mana Vault, Mind's Desire, Beacon of Destruction - so elegant! - but Doomsday decks have killed in a number of ways. Vintage Doomsday is brutal and uncompromising while legacy doomsday is a lot more work than every other combo deck for no discernible edge, so of course I have a soft spot for the card and not the anger it deserves.
Some early piles used Ill-Gotten Gains, a Storm engine card from a beautiful deck from a bygone age. It was called IGGY Pop, and it abused Ill-Gotten Gains to generate mana and storm and featured Intuition both as part of the combo and a tutor for its initiator (intuition for IGGx3, loop 2 IGGs, LED and cabal ritual for
and storm, eventually IGG for Intuition for three Tendrils of Agony for lethal). Sometimes you could just use fast mana to slam IGG as a Mind Twist that sets up your combo a turn or two later, also.Obviously IGG says "each player", so it could only really work in a meta without Force of Will decks (which indeed is when it lived up until like original rav block?) and so it died out. Traditionally you'd get recursion, protection and a kill, cast your Duress first to strip their Force, and then go off. As if Force of Will weren't cruel enough, New Phyrexia dealt the death blow. Now IGG had a real enemy - Misstep on Duress, Force exiling the other blue card. Countertop control's rise to prominence was also less than kind. Good luck setting up your clunky kill! Doomsday used Top itself (it filters for the combo before you go off and then taps to draw you into it) but didn't really gain an edge until it started to kill with the uncounterable combo of Shelldock Isle casting Emrakul.
Contemporary Doomsday builds usually kill with Lab Maniac in Vintage and Tendrils in Legacy, (siding in to Shelldock/Emrakul against counterspell decks) but they're flexible enough that they can play (and play around) all sorts of things, which is what Doomsday in particular enables. It's not that hard to go through the motions, the challenge is in working out which kill gets around what sideboard hate and how many turns you should do it in.
Here's how you build piles: card draw and mana on top, combo and protection in the middle, recursion on the bottom. That's Doomsday, now you know how to pilot Doomsday. You're welcome!
===DOOMSDAY IN CUBE===
Now this is where this post stops being pointless b/c even though Doomsday is allegedly REALLY COMPLEX or whatever it's honestly not that hard to play if you have an idea of what's up and don't care about mastering the deck. Obviously some people have exhaustive tables of potential weirdo combinations (kill around two swords to plowshares and Leyline of Sanctity is one i remember being impressed by) but you're essentially going to look at the resources you have, the kills you have available, and build a pile from the ground up getting you from A to B. With fast mana, Brainstorm and recursion, the Eternal formats get a really sweet package out of it.
So in the Lab Man case, you need lab man, mana to cast him, a way to draw five cards, and protection for Villain's meddling. Thought Scour is cool because it's not just 3 cards off your pile for 1 mana, it's valid protection against removal (thought scour in response, can't draw the card, win), so where you put it in the stack can depend on what you need it to do. Flexible cards like these are probably key to making Doomsday/Lab Man work in Cube.
The key to porting it to Cube is you probably need to give up on the idea of winning the turn you cast Doomsday. That's fine, I think! It lets us really focus on its strengths and show them off. First off, it's a combo-agnostic tutor; it doesn't care what you wanna do, as long as you don't need more than 5 (12) cards to do it. This excites me because conceivably I (one of my drafters? idk) could use it to support whatever janky corner-case interaction I think is interesting that draft. It's "for" DDLM combo though, that's just a bonus.
I'll go through a couple of Cubable DDLM piles at the end of the post, so don't worry if this doesn't make sense yet. Doomsday's interesting as a combo enabler in that you're not doing anything to your hand when you cast it. Any spells already in your hand are part of your combo resources, but remember that Doomsday also looks through your graveyard so if your fair spells are part of the combo you get to cast them as fair spells first!!!
==SAMPLE==
You do some stuff, maybe draw some cards, make some mana sources, and then you cast Doomsday. We're doing Soft Doomsday here so let's assume we pass the turn and kill next turn or the turn after that. This lets us draw 1 or 2 cards off our pile naturally, which is huge, because then we can build looser piles. Instead of 'draw six cards and you win', we just need to draw 4. It also means we're probably putting protection at the top of our pile so we draw it first. If we don't have any protection, that's okay, we can recur Doomsday somehow, draw into it, and make a new pile (remember, we can tutor from the graveyard).
We drafted Brainstorm, Snapcaster and Unearth, so we'll untap, cast a cantrip from our hand (activate a planeswalker?) to go to 3 cards in deck, and then we'll cast Lab Man. Maybe we fight over it on the stack - maybe we drew into Thoughtseize and that isn't a problem - or maybe Hero (at this point I concede I am in fact the villain here) tries to bolt it immediately. We could either cycle Unearth and then brainstorm in response (winning the game) or wait for Lab Man to die, Unearth it, and hold brainstorm in case there's a second piece of removal. Or just make a pile of Lab Man, recursion, brainstorm, and two flex slots for draw or protection.
Remember for these examples that we're passing the turn and drawing into the first card naturally unless otherwise noted. If you've got a Ponder still in your hand when you cast Doomsday, that resilience should count for something, no? You get to go off a turn faster, and the tightest builds get to go off really early (esp. with Dark Ritual).
Left card is the top of the deck.
'just the brainstorms, thanks' pile: (negate on the bottom brainstorms out a turn faster but doesn't protect your first brainstorm)
'he's already in the lab' pile
'high school boyfriend' pile (eternal witness gets back doomsday but he forgot to bring protection)
'johnny five aces' pile (he gets all the goods)
Conveniently there's actually all sorts of marginal stuff (at a few power levels!) we might already be running to support DDLM combo and probably wouldn't suck that much to include (although I think Brainstorm and Unearth will be key to making it work):
Unearth is awesome because like Thought Scour from earlier it pulls double duty: recurring Lab Man or drawing the last card you need (since if lab man dies in response to that, you'd lose and be unable to unearth regardless). Brainstorm's resolution involves drawing three cards before you put back two; if there's two cards in your library it'll win the game as well. These are the heavy hitters in Cube, but obviously the looseness of the tutor leaves our panicked drafter open to alternatives.
I really wanna talk about the Tendrils of Agony kill but this is already too long and it's such a bad idea. whoever's working on a 360 powered cube loop me in and i'll try to fit in Cool Doomsday for you (for me also)
===
===She mills you and makes zombies. Sometimes she mills you too much, or makes not enough zombies. 3/3 is nice.
ALLEZ CUISINE
...So I guess I'm finally ordering that Doomsday and throwing Laboratory Maniac back into my list.
Jason: would you publish an "Enabling Doomsday combo in Cube" article if it were 50% actual content 50% piles with comedic names by volume?
e: if not what kind of ratio are we talking
Independent of Doomsday, Sidisi was reportedly "sweet" in the last draft, and I personally saw it do a lot of work in the one game I birded, and how can you not want to just build the sweetest BUG Zombies deck with Gravecrawlers and Skaab Ruinators and Bloodghasts getting milled and pulled onto the battlefield.
Spellskite would be great, it slipped my mind at the time. It's not an exhaustive list, that's the really cool thing about Doomsday in mostly-singleton formats, the specific cards you need are often interchangeable.
I have a few ideas about what to look at but want to try some stuff before I write anything. It doesn't look like there's any writing on Doomsday as a combo enabler in Cube so I want something people won't feel shortchanged by (also, I gotta test some DDLM cube decks and see if it's even good or interesting).
I don't know! My guess is I'll swap them in and out based on which one is ruining my environment more that week but maybe the correct answer is to run both so that Lab Man isn't just a niche include? like if this is 1 slot for doomsday combo but i cube lab man explicitly for doomsday that's 2 slots. Competing demand is good, I think I'll try cutting Esper Charm? idk
e: test drafting on CT and just realized FETCHLANDS DRAW INTO YOUR STACK IF YOU GIVE THEM A TARGET
i hope doomsday becomes the next 'pitches to force' is what i'm saying more or less
Yeah, I'm not saying you have to run one or the other, just thought I'd give my opinion on Sidisi, which is a card I'm currently testing. Safra, I mean, I would just run them both until you have the data you want? I'm all about temporary cuts for testing purposes.
Note that fetchlands shuffle the stack, so, proceed with caution.
You'll have a tough time selling a build-around, but there is something there? It's a very fresh and exciting idea. Lab Maniac feels like a Utility Everything Draft card.
Random probably bad thought: Demonic Pact?
What I would also be interested in is if you can use it to set up non-Lab Maniac kills.
General thoughts:
Cons: we are dedicating two slots to a very narrow function, and I don't know if your average drafter will know what to do with it.
Pros: a whole lot of sweetness points. Dom's comments on Delve Pod chains makes me think that maybe I should amp the sweetness potential in my format a bit for drafters who want to "go deep". Somebody should probably just make a thread dedicated to "going deep". It's not usually my personal draft style, but I don't think I should be leaving those people in the dark either.
Note that fetchlands shuffle the stack, so, proceed with caution.
You'll have a tough time selling a
build-around, but there is something there? It's a very fresh and exciting idea. Lab Maniac feels like a Utility Everything Draft card. Random probably bad thought: Demonic Pact?
What I would also be interested in is if you can use it to set up non-Lab Maniac kills.
General thoughts:
Cons: we are dedicating two slots to a very narrow function, and I don't know if your average drafter will know what to do with it.
Pros: a whole lot of sweetness points. Dom's comments on Delve Pod chains makes me think that maybe I should amp the sweetness potential in my format a bit for drafters who want to "go deep". Somebody should probably just make a thread dedicated to "going deep". It's not usually my personal draft style, but I don't think I should be leaving those people in the dark either.
Yeah, I'm not saying you have to run one or the other, just thought I'd give my opinion on Sidisi, which is a card I'm currently testing. Safra, I mean, I would just run them both until you have the data you want? I'm all about temporary cuts for testing purposes.
Note that fetchlands shuffle the stack, so, proceed with caution.
You'll have a tough time selling a
Random probably bad thought: Demonic Pact?
What I would also be interested in is if you can use it to set up non-Lab Maniac kills.
General thoughts:
Cons: we are dedicating two slots to a very narrow function, and I don't know if your average drafter will know what to do with it.
Pros: a whole lot of sweetness points. Dom's comments on Delve Pod chains makes me think that maybe I should amp the sweetness potential in my format a bit for drafters who want to "go deep". Somebody should probably just make a thread dedicated to "going deep". It's not usually my personal draft style, but I don't think I should be leaving those people in the dark either.
yes hi it's me, that's my favourite way to draft if I feel like I have a handle on the archetype. maybe i'll make the threadq
Fetches shuffle the stack but it's yet another way to draw that one extra card, so you could, say, have 3 cards in library and a brainstorm in hand, so your uncracked fetch makes your combo a turn faster. Just another niche interaction! I'm so excited by it because of the implications re:going out of one's way to support Doomsday combo decks. DDLM is cool b/c even though both namesake cards are wayyyy single-serving all the actual cogs are 'whatever' so you're not constrained by trying to pick up the right enablers (assuming they're even getting drafted tonight).
I think the most likely beneficiary for my environment would be some kind of new combo-control archetype (love it) but it's possible that other decks might want the engine. Twin combo benefits but I don't think very many of us are supporting it. Persist combo too, and it's often in
to begin with. There's also nothing wrong with the Grixis Doomsday Villain looking at both life totals, casting Doomsday and brainstorming into lethal burn, it's just way less exciting to talk about in the abstract. My other hope is that Doomsday the engine will sometimes be the star of its own deck but sometimes Doomsday the efficient tutor will enable, like, a Pyromancer's Goggles deck or something? idk i need to go to bed, more on this 48hrs from now
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Sidisi is a very high pick in my cube despite the difficult colors and oftentimes she is quite scary. But my environment is lower power than most cubes here and since my cube is tribal she is often supported by one or some combination of these guys as well.
But doomsday really got me thinking about how cool lab maniac is. I didn't really get the hype before. And with lab maniac in mind what do you think about these two?
vs
But doomsday really got me thinking about how cool lab maniac is. I didn't really get the hype before. And with lab maniac in mind what do you think about these two?
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I think Necrologia is probably better but Ad Nauseam sounds way more fun
Now with lab maniac specifically, ad nausaum can't win you the game since it doesn't actually draw cards, but then again when I have enough life to pay to draw the rest of my deck with necrologia, I think I've got enough going for me that I might win in fair ways anyways
Now with lab maniac specifically, ad nausaum can't win you the game since it doesn't actually draw cards, but then again when I have enough life to pay to draw the rest of my deck with necrologia, I think I've got enough going for me that I might win in fair ways anyways
The combo for ad nauseam is with angel's grace or phyrexian unlife. EOT, draw entire deck, my turn win. These two cards specifically prevent you from losing to life loss. I personally love ad naus even without combo potential.
This with the lab maniac mentioned.
This with the lab maniac mentioned.
I run ad nauseam as it is right now, because it's really fun to gamble. But my drafters are afraid of it ever since one of them gambled one too many times against grull. So I was thinking about trading it in for necrologia mainly because it looks "safer". The not really instant speed and less-fun life payment might be what is needed to get it played in my cube. But on the other hand lab maniac might help them get over their fear of ad nauseam.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Yeah the gamble angle is a huge upside for me
I want to enable Laboratory Maniac combo and have one loose slot for it. In this context, please choose: