So...
steal artifact goes into the cube...no one drafts it, starting to doubt the veracity of my drafters >.>
I P1P1
temur sabertooth...and not sure. Here is the deck, which I really liked, and which felt like a tron deck.
4 color not-tron
What I mean by it feeling like a tron deck, was that its play pattern was to generate an obscene amount of mana, and to leverage that mana in crushing bursts. You aren't really ramping into things, as much as you are fueling big plays to strong-arm an opponent. Instead of assembling tron lands to do this, it assemble bouncelands and land untappers. It had more of a fair controlling feel to it, than the more assertive R/G tron builds you find in modern, or some of the more focused pauper RUG tron builds.
I also don't think this was an optimal build. I kind of got knocked around the draft a little bit, but I think this would have been much better had I gotten more of a RUG build; controlling the game with red cards, filtering with blue, and generating mana with green. Also, of course,
cloud of faeries or an actual ramp target would have been nice.
Lumberknot was also terrible, and it would have been really nice to have an extra land here. Color screw was a constant worry when playing, and a big role of the land untap effects was just to color fix for me. I think a number of my opponents just did not grasp fully what the land untappers were going to do to them, and were not aggressive enough in killing them. Thats not
entirely unreasonable (though still unreasonable) because of how many bouncelands i'm running (logic is that if i'm a ramp deck this dosen't shut down my plays) but seeing as my strategy is to consistantly generate 16-17 mana in a turn and go nuts with mana sinks, its pretty bad.
But there were a lot of really sweet interactions.
Muddle the mixture was awesome as a tutor, grabing
starstorm,
rolling thunder,
fertile ground,
voyaging satyr,
deprive, and
nameless inversion. All of the land untappers were great, with
magus of the candelabra and
krosan restorer being mana generating monsters. One of the sweetest interactions with them is using them to untap a bounceland the turn it comes into play, creating an almost
amulet of vigor feel. I also was able to setup some great ambushes by cloaking the amout of mana available, one time overtapping for a
starstorm to bait out a mana leak, which I prompty could untap and pay for. I also had one crazy sequence where I had to use
frantic search in response to a conditional counter on my removal, in order to untap enough lands to
rewind the counter. Being able to play with adult counterspells again felt great.
Hopefully, after tonight
starstorm will get the respect that I think the card deserves. Instant speed wraths have been a staple of pauper for a long time, and having access to one as strong and versatile as starstorm was a real blast,
especially in a deck running
rewind. I could use
rewindto either cloak my mana to try to tempt blowouts, fix my (admittedly poor) mana to make starstorm a possibility, or use it as a tool to ramp up the damage I needed to wipe the board. The biggest challenge was figuring out when preserving my own untap creatures and cycling was a better play than sweeping.
Rolling thunder was, of course, just terrifying in this deck once it got going. I was able to kill a guy outright with it from 16 life, lol. Mearly 11-12 point
rolling thunders were more the norm though. It worked really nice with the rampers because its a one-sided wrath here, though I wish it was instant speed.
And this brings us to
temur sabertooth, which I am still not sure about. Its a
very durdly card, and hemorrhages so much tempo to do its thing that even in this deck it was difficult to play. This was partly because of the poor mana, which made casting and using it a challenge, and I was always trying to hold back waiting until I could both cast it and use it in the same turn (which may have been a mistake). I was always under enough pressure too, where I was hesistent to devote the time to get it setup--though this again might have been a play mistake given how impactful it is once it gets going. Late game, with enough mana, however, it
did feel like a soft lock, as you could recur
bone shredder to take over most boards, or
mnemonic wall to rebuy rolling thunder. I think its ideal home would be a two color green deck with a lot of ramp (R/G or U/G). My instinct is that it probably is a little bit too strong, but I kind of want to see if my players can keep it under control.
Play of the night, after all, was a game where I lost. He
nightmare voided my sabertooth, when I later went to
reclaimit (did it main phase, trying to be efficent with mana), he
compulsive researched me so that he could
nightmare void it again...off of a
treasure cruise triggered dredge. Ouch, but really good play from him.
