Card/Deck The Orzhov Syndicate (WB)

ravnic

ravnic

Orzhov is an interesting guild. You can build WB decks in all styles easily, from heavy aggro to super defensive control. But when it comes to real themes, I feel like white and black have little in common. How does this effect the gold section.

What are you running in your Orzhov sections? What themes/archetypes do you support? Did you have some surprising successes? What do you want the Orzhov Syndicate to do?


________

My current choices are:

???
Tidehollow Sculler is a solid Aggro+ card and it has a gourgeous promo.
I have a weakness for Gravediggers and Gearsmith buys back Mindslaver!
Angel of Despair is a great control card, no thing not to love about her.
Yeah, and them I have a currently empty slot. Looking for something sweet ... Maybe Merciless Eviction?


The lack of good hybrids makes me run this in that slot.



Confess your sins and tell me what W/B cards you're into!
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Orzhov is interesting because there's a bunch of ways the guild can go depending on how you build your cube. You can go the Lingering Souls + Sorin, Lord of Innistrad route and go for heavy token aggro. There's a lifegain trigger theme in there (Cliffhaven Vampire, extort creatures), which probably got a lot better with the WB vampires in Ixalan. There's some cool aristocrats stuff with Teysa, Orzhov Scion and Cartel Aristocrat. There's heavy control/reanimator payoffs like Angel of Despair and Debtors' Knell. You've got some good enchantress effects in there (Doomwake Giant, Daxos the Returned). It's also got a lot of generic goodstuff cards if you're into that kind of thing:

I feel like it's the enemy guild that you have the most freedom to build however you want in a number of different ways and have those ways both be supported and at a satisfying power level.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Lack of good hybrids?



This card is awesome in slower decks, especially if you have wraths in both colors.

Edit: For some reason Debtors' Knell isn’t recognized by the card tags.
Edit2: The problem seems to be the difference between Debtors' and Debtors’. I never had this problem before?



This is also a cool card, if you can stand the fact that it’s only available in foil and has useless trinket text.

Edit3: Ah! It appears iOS11 enabled smart quotes by default. Luckily I can change my iPad's settings! (See what I did there? ;)) https://www.jordanmerrick.com/posts/ios-11-smart-punctuation/
 
ravnic

ravnic

I was always on the edge for Debtor's Knell. Never got my hands on a copy, but next time I order some singles, I will add a copy.

Does anyone cube with this?

 
shamizy

shamizy

Kirblinx said:
While I have a feeling these threads seem to be just seeing what gold cards you can add to your cubes, I wanted to repost this great thread of my personal favourite W/B strategy.
It is still what my wobbly cube tries to accomplish with it's WB decks and feels very fun to play.
Click to expand...

Damn, it's really been nearly a year since I wrote that up. I think I'll flesh it out a bit more, turns out there are a lot of cards that I didn't really dive deep into. I've got a lot more to say on a number of cards.

It's about time I get to a writeup of another archetype soon, it's been a while since I've had my last cube report.
 
ravnic

ravnic

To the guys running Debtor's Knell: In which decks other than blackbased graveyard themed decks does it see play? Is it even played in decks without black?

I have high hoes on this thing!
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Onderzeeboot said:
I'm not sure I get what you mean. Like, cards like



?
Click to expand...


Uh, not so much in this direction. I meant more like, strictly mono-white cards (e.g.) that you would want in your Orzhov deck (or whatever). It's something I remember Rosewater talking about when designing sets (particularly in Ravnica block), but I don't see much of it in cube. Like, if you want a color pair to do a certain thing, you need cards that support it that aren't just the cards in a (usually) tiny gold section.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist

I'm pretty sure this is already a huge thing. We recently had Guttersnipe in the fight club thread, that is a mono red UR card. No other deck really wants it, so I'm pretty sure we can find similar examples in WB. I'm not sure what deck really wants doomed traveller outside of WB?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
My cube has only five color pairs, there's a bunch of cards in the monocolored sections with their role in a given color pair in mind.
 
sigh

sigh

I think there is more of it in cube than we think, but we may not consciously design to color pairs as much as MaRo might during Return to Return to Ravnica. But like, any card we include for the reason of being in deck [x] is effectively selected to max value for that color pair.

Grillo made a good post in the simic section that was almost entirely mono-color cards that shows what you are asking about, but for that pair: http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/the-simic-combine-gu.1825/#post-71315

For this pair? first things that come to mind are:
? I'm sure there's more I could think of with some more effort.
 
inscho

inscho

Jason Waddell said:
I'm curious, is there something to be said for the mono-color cards that support a color pair?
Click to expand...

Like Golgari Grave-Troll essentially being a golgari card? I typically consider cards like that by the archetype they define than specifically for a color pair.....but it's really six of one and half a dozen of the other. That's just how I mentally organize cards like that, and try to give each niche archetype access to the same amount. Those are the cards that wheel for an archetype and can bind a draft strategy together.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Jason Waddell said:
I'm curious, is there something to be said for the mono-color cards that support a color pair?
Click to expand...

Interesting point.

I try to eliminate those kind of cards where I can, because I feel it is like unbalancing the cubes color distribution. But I also think, that from all the cards listed here, only Guttersnipe really fits the bill. Maybe Resurrection too, but the other, I am happy to play in all kinds of decks. How do Thalia or Syphoner REQUIRE you to be Orzhov at all?

To minimize such cases though, I try to play only cards that are playable outside of a certain archetype, or support the archetype in 3+ colors. This also leads to an environment where players can be more free in deckbuilding.

My 2 problem cards are Guttersnipe and Kiln Fiend. Blue has enough instants/sorceries on it's own to support their spells matter cards, but red not really. Well, at least, these two have been played on a Rakdos deck with some success before ...

Speaking of Orzhov, I don't think I have any white or black cards, that are only playable with a specific second color.
 
Aston

Aston

I don't think it's mono colour cards which are only playable in certain colour pairs, but more cards that support the theme of the colour pair. So eg if your BW section's major theme is tokens, as well as Lingering Souls and whatever Sorin takes your fancy, you also have Glorious Anthem and Bitterblossom in your respective white and black sections. They're fine outside of the colour pair archetype they're included for, but really shine when put together.

Of course my favourite thing is finding cards like this that work across multiple colour pairs. Bitterblossom is a good one - as well as supporting BW tokens, it's good in RB sacrifice decks, and mono black or GB attrition decks. It might be more or less useful to certain people than others, so its value fluctuates and it provides a decision during the drafting - how important is this card to my archetype compared to another generically powerful card? Is anyone else in an archetype that might want it, or can I wheel it? Obviously Bitterblossom is a powerful card on its own so the delta between "value in this deck" and "value in any deck" is going to be fairly small, but something like Goblin Bombardment provides a much bigger spread.
 
ravnic

ravnic

To me that sounds like a good reason to not give guild sections a single, focused identity. My Orzhov decks can range from sligh-aggro to super slow control. They can be tokens+sacrifice outlets, abise the graveyard or blink effects. I rather have a good mix of interesting effects in my guild sections and leave decisions to my drafters where I can.
 
inscho

inscho

ravnic said:
To me that sounds like a good reason to not give guild sections a single, focused identity. My Orzhov decks can range from sligh-aggro to super slow control. They can be tokens+sacrifice outlets, abise the graveyard or blink effects. I rather have a good mix of interesting effects in my guild sections and leave decisions to my drafters where I can.
Click to expand...



Well, slanting your entire guild section to one strategy is lame, and I don't think many people actually do that. However, signaling an archetype with a guild card has a lot of value, especially for drafters that aren't familiar with your cube. It signals both a strategy and a color pairing for that strategy. That's also not to say that a card can't both signal an archetype and be a pivot card for several strategies (lingering souls for instance).
 
ravnic

ravnic

I 100% agree with this statement.

My post wasn't against Aston or any one in particular. However I know (from mtgs), that some people build a cube around their 2 color pairs and give each of them a focused archetype. Izzet is spells matter, golgari does selfmill, selesnya gets human tribal and so on, for example. These cubes have flexible cards too obviously, but it leads to have a 2-color deck always look similar.

Imo this is railway cubing, that gets boring as fast as playing retail limited with the same set over and over again.
 
Aston

Aston

I agree with you on that point, the BW tokens was just an example, and in practice people will tend to have multiple different themes running across each colour pair. The "Modern Masters" style of cube design is something I greatly dislike.
 
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