Countering a modified Aether Mono

[Galadium]

I'm new, and so is my girlfriend. We enjoy playing Elements against each other for fun and against the computer.

I modified the Aether mono grinding deck I found on the wiki like so:

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Note: I'm not trying to improve the above deck. I'm trying to counter it.

It turns out, with no upgraded cards, this is a nightmare to try and counter. It's a bit like trying to solve an equation with three equal signs. Again, I'm new, so my knowledge of card synergies and dynamics is probably weak.

For brevity, I'll make a few acronyms (as I don't know what the standard acronyms are):

LOB = Lobotimizer
PSI = Psion
PD = Phase Dragon
IMM = Immortal
DIM = Dimensional Shield

PSI is a large concern, due to spell damage. Fractal is just icing. If the match continues too long, I end up with an army that all do spell damage.
Counter: The only reliable counter is one of the reflective shields from Light or Life, as they completely bypass all other shields. Locking them down with freeze is problematic due to LOB. Packing more Freeze spells into the deck weakens it's chances of dealing with the other problems.

PD is also bad news, because it's immortal and hits hard. I can't use any creature control on it.
Counter: A damage reducing shield, or ice shield, or the best is gravity shield. Unfortunately Gravity shield happily lets IMM and PSI straight to my health bar. Using Procrastination slows it down a bit, but the damage is still getting through.

IMM is in the middle. It hits as hard as PSI, but I can't target it. The only useful shields might be ice or a damage reducer.
Counter: Nothing directly reliable. Procrast helps, but again that damage is coming through.

DIM is a huge problem. 18 turns of "you can't hit me."
Counter: Steal / Deflag / Momentum some creatures. Getting enough qaunta for a firebolt or icebolt takes too long, and means I can't spend it to counter other aspects of the deck.

Lightning bolt is also very bad news, as a lot of the creatures I could use for strategies have 5 or less health.

LOB ties it all together, as it neutralizes so many abilities useful to counter other parts of the deck.

I've played against it in the trainer, building and rebuilding numerous decks to come up with a solution. Nothing works reliably, but here's what I've tried.

1. I call it Frozen Steam

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Strategy:
Get rid of LOB as soon as it appears. Use squid / freeze to lock down PSI. Pump Steam Machines while hoping the PD and IMM will freeze on ice shield. Accumulate enough water quanta to power Ice Bolt, and get a late game win.

Result: It's too slow.
If LOB comes out early and I don't have a deflag, I can't catch up in speed. PSI's hit the field, followed by IMM and finally the PD. The incoming damage is too much to mitigate in time to get the steam engines powered up or get nearly enough water quanta to power a decent ice bolt.

Even if I kill LOB in time, I have to build up enough damage from Steam. If I'm able to keep the PSI's locked down (very difficult due to lightning bolt / LOB) it's hit or miss if the ice shield can mitigate enough incoming from IMM and PD.

If I make a single mistake, or lag behind in quanta, it's always game over.

2. I call it Legend of Chimera

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Strategy:
Simple. Get past DIM with chargers, while Armagio mitigates damage. I accelerate and momentum some Armagio's while others tank. I try to get as many on the board as I can and then throw down Chimera.

Result: LOB owns me.
I can't stop LOB with this setup. It kills momentum and gravity pull dead. It just neutralizes the whole strategy. The only way to win is if LOB comes out late.

3. I call it Shadow Dragon

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Strategy:
Throw up Mantle, cloak the dragons to stop lightning bolts, and hope I get enough steals to keep DIM out of way long enough to take that health down.

Result: Too slow to get a three card combination.
It takes too long to get enough quanta to get the combo going before I die, either because Mantle didn't stop enough damage, or too much PSI damage.


I've tried about 4 other decks, but this post is far too long already. The others weren't nearly as effective, so they're probably not worth mentioning.

Here's the bottom line:

A. Trying to solve all of the problems presented by the deck forces me to use too many colors. This causes slowdown in getting the quanta needed, the damage available, or both. Aether wins.

B. Trying to solve two aspects of it (say DIM + PSI, or Damage + LOB, or DIM + Damage) leaves two other aspects unaccounted for, and Aether wins.

C. Aether wins more than it loses, in very cheap ways, that don't require any strategy or card synergy. Even without LOB and fractal, it's just brutal.

I just want to know: Can it be done? If so, can it be done using one of these as a base? If not, what should I start with?

Please refrain from strategies involving a bunch of upgraded / rare cards, we don't have access to them yet.

[tereret]

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This should be enough, play dissipation, antimatter Psions and play phoenix ASAP

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quake abuse shuts down the shield

[Calindu]

Yes, you can definitely beat mono aether, but it requires a certain strategy. The deck bases you posted are all good, they just need to be improved.

Let's take the first deck for example, the deck can build up incredible amounts of damage, but it takes more time because you are diluting the strategy. Try this version instead:

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It takes out unneeded cards like freeze and blue crawler and instead, it adds more Steam Machines(The main strategy of this deck), more quanta to get a steam machine out faster and more direct damage. All of those cards help you to win the match against a mono aether.

[Espithel]

The problem here isn't monoaether, but dims. Immortals are kinda slow, and you're rarely going to deal with psions/fractal given how few copies of them are in that deck, so any fast deck that can deal with dims should be perfectly fine to deal with that deck.

Whilst we could argue all day about whether dims is overpowered or not, it should be safe to say that dims is a very swingy, one trick pony kinda card; You either have a counter to it and win, or don't and lose. There's not a lot of middle ground.

For future reference, here's four ways to deal with dims.

1) Permanent Control


The most obvious way of dealing with shields is to blow them up. No surprise there.
The difference between dims and other shields is people who play dims normally pack 6 copies of it, as opposed to the 2-4 copies of other shields in other decks. This makes it harder to blow up than other cards, meaning you'll want to deal as much damage as possible whilst it's blown up. Calindu's deck is an excellent example, as well as this monodark to improve yours:

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2) Shield bypass


Also pretty obvious.

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This deck does use far too many pillars than I'd like it to, but it simply poisons the opponent to death. Use Ice Shield to stop the immortals, and ice dragons to force the opponent to use dims; After all, all that quanta not spent on dims can be spent on dealing more damage.

3) Quanta denial

Tereret and the monodark above has already listed good enough examples of this kinda deck. Dims, if not aether in general, is expensive. Stopping them from having as much quanta as they'd like'll stymie their ability to play dims.

4) Don't care about it

This one's a little odd, but if you play a deck that doesn't try to kill the opponent with outright damage, dims is a pretty dead card. This is not something you can really do unupped without rares, so I'll post two examples for prosperity.

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Stop the opponent from killing you, then deck them out.

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Use SoW on the immortals, play reflective, watch them kill themselves.

[UndeadSpider1990]

Catatitans should counter mono-Aether pretty hard.

That's Titans (need at least 5 of them, bare in mind) + Catapult + Flying Weapon (use Air mark).

- Titan's momentum bypasses shields. (Lobotomizer can stop this but they'll have to invest their quanta in defense further slowing their own offense.)
- Catapult damage is completely unstoppable by mono-aether.
- Lightning is almost worthless flying Titans.

[Galadium]

Thanks for the help guys.

Just to see how these worked, I loaded the Aether deck shown in the first post into the trainer AI at Level 3. Here are the results, playing 10 games for each deck.

Calind
Frozen Steam (Revised) 3/10

Notes. With no defense, the pressure was on to get the engines powered up before the damage overwhelmed me. Not easy to do.

Tereret
Entropy Deck 6/4
Notes: Half of the wins were deckouts! It was fun watching my health go up and down, and hilarious when the AI bolted his own psions after antimatter. Boring to play though. Simply a race between my quanta and the incoming damage. If I drew enough mana in time, I had a chance of winning.

Quake Deck 4/6
Notes: Quite simply if I got the quakes early, I had a chance of winning.

Espithel
Mono Dark 5/5
Notes: If I got the devourers early and they survived LOB / Lightning, I had a chance.

Poison 5/5
Notes: If I managed to apply poison early and often, before LOB / Lightning, I won.


From these mixed results, it's hard to tell which deck was the best at handling it. The matches were very close, often down to HP < 10 unless a bad draw swung the balance. My conclusion is that it remains a very resilient deck to conquer, even with specialized tactics and optimized decks. I can imagine the situation only gets worse with upgraded cards.

Really the late game was the worst for me. Fractal Psions ruined me in many of the losses, so it became critical to try my best to wipe out the opponent before fractal hit the table.

One strategy I was looking into was using the Voodoo doll. The wiki points to gravity pull, and poisoning the dolls to inflict dmg, bypassing the shields. LOB would be able to strip the gravity pull, unless some other method of mitigating damage was employed. I'm going to look into it further and maybe try to cook up a deck.

Thanks again guys. If you have any suggests on a voodoo set up, let me know!

[Galadium]

Well, I made some progress. I think I may have found a near-perfect counter for the dim shield menace known as aether mono.

I read up on voodoo doll, and basilisk blood. It locks down the your enemy's weapon for six turns, in addition to the HP boost. With gravity pull, as long as I can keep pulled dolls in play and time the skins back to back, the AI will happily kill himself. Along with reflective shield for the PSI threat, this shuts it down most of the time. I'm pretty happy with the results.

Anyway here's the deck. I'm just going to call it Kill Yourself. Any suggestions welcome!

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[Arum]

Out of curiosity, what's the win rate with voodoo versus the mono aether?

[Aves]

The problem with that deck is that I can simply play no cards, and I will win against you if my deck is bigger. You have absolutely no offense and a limited amount of defense in the form of soft creature control. The mono aether could win that (if it was played by a human instead of an AI) by simply playing no damaging cards.

There exists a popular pvp deck that does use that combo-- here
Grabbow usually fares pretty poorly against mono aether, but if you pull out the combo correctly, you should be able to win.

As for your mixed results-- consider that you may not be using those decks optimally. With the steam machines, blowing up lobotomizer early is important-- but if it gets out late, you're better off letting it lobo your machines so their attack stops decreasing and using up your , and saving it for a well-timed dim. In addition, it would be a mistake to blow up early dimensional shields-- if your damage is low, there's no harm in letting those first few turns of low attack pass by. You're not missing much by letting them stay up. Ice bolt also has a chance of freezing the lobo.

 With the mono darkness, your opponent wasting their lightnings and lobo on devourer is a good thing-- lightning means that it's one less target to your dragon, and lobotomizer has no useful effect at all on devourer! Its quanta denial effect is a passive, so it makes no difference there. Only 'burrow' is the devourer's active ability, and you weren't using that anyways. Similarly to above with the deflagrations, are you stealing the first dim you see, or are you waiting until the AI has two-three dragons out? Stealing a late dimensional shield grants you two turns of relative immunity. Four steals should definitely be enough to deal with 6 dim shields-- you just have to time it right.

I'm also surprised nobody has pointed you to the classic mono fire, devtal, or firestall yet, but I suppose that elements of their strategies (ha, see what I did there?) are already present in the current decks that you are trying.

[Afdarenty]

There are certainly counter decks available (three of which are posted below). The nice part about playing most Mono Aether decks is that they struggle to get damage on the board quickly. The low speed can be abused, either with denial strategies, or with decks that need some time to set up. There are also quite a few decks that can simply shrug off Dims and Lightning, like the Mono Aether posted below, though a lot of these center around rare cards like Titan, Pulverizer, or Shard of Freedom.

The deck you built is quite strong, and falls into the 'needs some time to set up' category. The only problem with it is that a human player might be able to guess what they're playing against and deck you out by simply playing no creatures, though I doubt this would happen very often unless the opposing player was quite familiar with your deck lists.

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I went 8-2 with the above deck. As long as the Aether deck doesn't start with 5+ pillars, and as long as you don't let them bolt all your Devourers before you Fractal one, it's very difficult for them to win. If you start with only 1 Devourer, wait for Fractal. With 2, play one then wait for Fractal. With 3, just play them all. This deck is a lot stronger with upgraded Nightfalls.

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This deck went 9-1. The strategy is to draw with the Hourglasses and stall with the Sundials until you can play the 5 creatures, Skyblitz, and the Chimera in one turn (make sure not to play a sundial on the same turn that you play out this combo). Play out the creatures, use Skyblitz on them, then use Chimera for 100 damage. Don't play a second Hourglass if you're running low on time quanta, and sometimes it's best to not play a Quantum Pillar so you can discard dead Hourglasses from your (full) hand. Make sure you start playing Sundials before you drop down into Lightning range. In the game I lost I drew no Hourglasses in the top 20 cards, and even then would have been able to win the turn after I died. This deck is a lot stronger with upgraded Hourglasses.

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And finally, why not beat Mono Aether with Mono Aether? If they don't draw their Lobo early then they'll be in big trouble. If they do, wait until you can play 3 or 4 Psions in one turn, then keep dropping more. Dims + Lobo won't be enough to hold you back. I didn't test this one, but it should win quite comfortably.

[Galadium]

Out of curiosity, what's the win rate with voodoo versus the mono aether?

Against the level 3 AI, I got 10 out of 10. The damn thing is silly, it will keep dropping psions on the table and just kill itself all day. In fact it will lightning bolt the dolls as well.

The problem with that deck is... (good advice here).

As for your mixed results... (more good stuff follow).

Thanks for the insightful reply. Yes! I'm fairly tactically minded. I started playing MTG back in the early days, and did quite well in tournaments. I do many of the things you describe, however I didn't know that ice bolt has a chance to freeze the opponent's weapon. Does that happen if you target the opponent directly?

In fact I do try to strategically time getting rid of the dims. If I have three hitters on the board with at least 1/3rd of the opponent's bar in the yellow, I'll take down a shield. Then I'll try to get enough attack power for half of the remaining health bar. At that point I should have two deflags in hand. Assuming he doesn't pull surprise damage on his turn, that's usually a win.

Letting the lobo strip the machines to stop the attack from dropping is something I didn't consider. Thanks for that, I'll remember it! As far as Lobo vs Devourer, I was under the impression it would strip the quanta-sucking ability. If not, then no harm done. I agree with the rest of the stuff you pointed out.

I realize that a human opponent will quickly think around the deck strategy. That wasn't the purpose of the deck, it was simply to come up with an optimized way of dealing with it, and a learning experience for me in building Elements decks.

I'll check out these other decks you mention, I'm sure it will be elementary, dear Watson!

There are certainly counter decks available (three of which are posted below)..

Thanks very much, I'm going to try these out to see how they work!

[ProBacon]

Why you do dis? What did mono Aether do to you? ;-; plz.