Round 5-Strategy

[catalyzeme]

ascabi and I just tested this deck:

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It went 1-1 against fire duo, now we both have to leave. If anyone else wants to test it, great, but I'll be around in a few hours to work it more. It might need more creatures (I didn't draw any for a while in round 2, and he had a pretty quick draw and got off an immo, which lessened the impact of earthquakes).

Haven't tested it against other grav decks

[kev]

Looks underpillared, cat.  -1 dragon, +1 pillar is better, although as you noted you're dangerously low on critters as is.  I'm not sure why you'd use bolts instead of ragepots, especially if you're intentionally underpillared.

Overall I'd think the original Dragons deck is better and I doubt you'll be able to tweak this to make it better than Dragon Powa.  If I didn't come off as overwhelmingly supportive of Dragon Powa and it's causing you to hesitate, that's my bad.  Dragon Powa is a good deck and this is a great opportunity to bust it out.  An aether mark will look like dimshields to PF as well, so you'll have a big advantage during the first match.

[Acsabi44]

Looks underpillared, cat.  -1 dragon, +1 pillar is better, although as you noted you're dangerously low on critters as is.  I'm not sure why you'd use bolts instead of ragepots, especially if you're intentionally underpillared.

Overall I'd think the original Dragons deck is better and I doubt you'll be able to tweak this to make it better than Dragon Powa.  If I didn't come off as overwhelmingly supportive of Dragon Powa and it's causing you to hesitate, that's my bad.  Dragon Powa is a good deck and this is a great opportunity to bust it out.  An aether mark will look like dimshields to PF as well, so you'll have a big advantage during the first match.

If I have to choose from those two, then I'd lean towards the EQ deck.. It needs some fine-tuning, sure, but if on and working, it stops the deck we played against greatly.
When we played with the powa deck, I was a bit unimpressed.

The question is, how much likely will they bring the fire/gravity duo. Against other decks, Dragon powa might be better, I don't know.

[catalyzeme]

I do think Dragon Powa should be ok, but I think with gravity probably struggling to even field enough legal decks, taking out pendulums could really hurt. They can't afford to pack extra quanta in their decks. If EQs aren't being used elsewhere, it seems a waste to not use them here, with gravity hurting for cards. I doubt they can put together 5 decks with decent quanta situations. That was part of the reason for the 5 pends. It produces more earth quanta than necessary, but a first turn pendulum means 3rd turn earthquake, after which they would have trouble playing much of anything outside of immolating. I thought packing more creatures and being underpillared was a better idea, since it means the deck can take more CC. Being a little slower shouldn't, in theory, be a big issue against a gravity deck that has hopefully already been shut down, quanta-wise. The deck above I put together very quickly and I didn't really have time to tweak. Rage Pots could definitely be better. My idea behind bolts was that because it has only 7 creatures, bolts might be necessary for late game damage (especially if EQs stop creatures from coming out anyway). In the win I had in practice, I had 24 fire quanta and 2 bolts to finish him off a turn early (although I would have won anyway).

Ragepots can kill both chargers and gravitons, though. So you are right, I should probably switch to those (especially if one of the novagrabbys is removing some and freeing them up).

I might try to work on a more fine-tuned EQ deck when I get home. Anyone else is also welcome to, if they wanna help me out. We still have more important decks to test though, I imagine, so I understand if I'm mostly on my own to see if I can get one working.

Also, I just looked at the deck kevkev is using. Why does it need 6 novas and 6 immos? That's a lot of rainbow quanta you are going to be producing, but just 2 lycans and an arsenic to absorb quanta. I get that they will help grow the destroyers, but you don't think something like, -nova +lightning would work better? A maxwell's would give you serious trouble right now. Lightning could also take out a drag, or kill something antimattered if immo isn't an option. I'm sure it works, I am just surprised by how much quanta will go unused. Is that a Discord failsafe? To have a lot of quanta to shuffle around?

EDIT:

This is a version I would like to test. Switched to Rage Pots, and one Dragon to a Phoenix to slightly decrease fire quanta usage. I think the number of pillars is ok since the opponent should be slowed down by EQ.

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[jmdt]

Also, I just looked at the deck kevkev is using. Why does it need 6 novas and 6 immos? That's a lot of rainbow quanta you are going to be producing, but just 2 lycans and an arsenic to absorb quanta. I get that they will help grow the destroyers, but you don't think something like, -nova +lightning would work better? A maxwell's would give you serious trouble right now. Lightning could also take out a drag, or kill something antimattered if immo isn't an option. I'm sure it works, I am just surprised by how much quanta will go unused. Is that a Discord failsafe? To have a lot of quanta to shuffle around?

All the spare quanta makes the deck essentually immune to discord.  Versus , discord is the number 1 card you must stop.

[kev]

Also, I just looked at the deck kevkev is using. Why does it need 6 novas and 6 immos? That's a lot of rainbow quanta you are going to be producing, but just 2 lycans and an arsenic to absorb quanta. I get that they will help grow the destroyers, but you don't think something like, -nova +lightning would work better? A maxwell's would give you serious trouble right now. Lightning could also take out a drag, or kill something antimattered if immo isn't an option. I'm sure it works, I am just surprised by how much quanta will go unused. Is that a Discord failsafe? To have a lot of quanta to shuffle around?

I've messed with No Land Stompy quite a bit.  I'd tweak a couple cards and then test 50 games.  Repeat.  I was never able to improve upon No Land Stompy's results.  It's already a great incarnation of what it is and I was hesitant to tweak it too hard.

That said, it totally makes sense to me to take out 1-2 novas and add a lightning and maybe one of the following: fog, freeze, precog.  I'm personally considering a precog.  This'd mean I'd have to get 4-10 novas/immos to use both lycans.  I'd really love to hear other thoughts on this, especially from jmdt who I know has used this deck quite a bit.

[Acsabi44]

yep, if  quanta is not used elsewhere, then a precog equals a free card. Auto-thinnig.

[catalyzeme]

Just wanna clear something up: kevkev, you are taking the Lava Golems, right? So Stinnger will have to switch away from the Earth deck and the EQs are open? If so, I would like to switch to the Earth deck I made above. However, if we still want to run EQ against Light, I can take Dragon Powa and someone can modify the deck I have above for Light. Rage Pots won't be that useful, but deflagging a fireshield if they bring one could be. At the same time, though, both Dragon Powa and the EQ deck would likely fail if they bring one of their speed decks.

Also, has brett been around in a while? He wanted to use quinted spirits unless/until someone suggested something else, but there is a lot of support for the Nova/Grabby that jmdt posted that is also now listed in majofas strategy thread.

Quinted Spirits would be *highly* susceptible to a Fireshield, but it might also have the potential to survive long enough and have high enough damage to take down a light stall and potentially stop a rush. I don't know that it's the best bet, if we've got something better (like a second entropy duo, maybe), but Stinnger needs a different deck against if kevkev takes the golems.

I apologize if I missed a post clearing any of this up.

[jmdt]

Just wanna clear something up: kevkev, you are taking the Lava Golems, right? So Stinnger will have to switch away from the Earth deck and the EQs are open? If so, I would like to switch to the Earth deck I made above. However, if we still want to run EQ against Light, I can take Dragon Powa and someone can modify the deck I have above for Light. Rage Pots won't be that useful, but deflagging a fireshield if they bring one could be. At the same time, though, both Dragon Powa and the EQ deck would likely fail if they bring one of their speed decks.

Also, has brett been around in a while? He wanted to use quinted spirits unless/until someone suggested something else, but there is a lot of support for the Nova/Grabby that jmdt posted that is also now listed in majofas strategy thread.

Quinted Spirits would be *highly* susceptible to a Fireshield, but it might also have the potential to survive long enough and have high enough damage to take down a light stall and potentially stop a rush. I don't know that it's the best bet, if we've got something better (like a second entropy duo, maybe), but Stinnger needs a different deck against if kevkev takes the golems.

I apologize if I missed a post clearing any of this up.

kev will definately be taking the golems out for a spin in no land stompy.  The only question is what to upgrade for top speed.  That deck has done quite well in testing versus .  I also like immophoenix for acsabi's matchup versus  .  has virtually 0 answers for our immo decks.

Against  , I like rushing them out of the building so immophoenix for hyroen and nova grabby with 3 ups for me like this.

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Versus , I stick with my recommendation for the fire shield laden novagrabby.  They have no answer for it.

will again have a tough time dealing with poisonbolt from majofa.  Especially since we've game them 3 rushed and a wings stall to think about.

now to and

We did some experimenting with immocord lava posted and found a build that is immensely successful versus 's cataloge.  We took lavas modified build and swapped out a few CS for deflag.  With the added deflag, it can take down the fire shield the fire stall had and effectively beat that deck with ease using the discord to prevent miracle and fire buildup and immos to send phoenix's out uber quick.  The deck is a sure win versus every deck except the nova grabby (which is a 50/50 or 40/60 matchup); however I do not expect them to try to rush us.

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After a great deal of testing versus , and an EQ deck is a terrible idea.  All their decks have 3 pillar stacks or 2 stacks and novas or immos.  Stinnger would be wise not to use one.  I'll still have to find a top shelf build for stinnger to use.  A pillar based discord deck is my number 1 choice, however they pack 0 PC so a dim shield deck could be an option to stop damage from glory etc.  If we knew they wouldn't pack flyers, we could run a set of wings and stall them out, however against their fire stall, they could just bolt us for the win.  Since our quinted spirits deck has been dismantled for pieces elsewhere essentially, we could run quinted crimson dragons versus light.  The problem we run into is they have access to immo and nova based decks which are fast, the EQ deck which would wreck a pillar based deck, and the fire stall that kills anything not a phoenix quickly.

We could tweak dragonpowa to use against light potentially.  it has the ability to drop 96 damage in 1 turn and 120 total maybe we could 1 or 2 shot the fire stall deck.  Probably not a good idea though.

I have a feeling discord, eq or dragonpowa will be among the 3 decks we pick for and .

[catalyzeme]

I've been staring at 's decks for like 15 minutes and I gotta say... I've got nothing. It seems like round 1, where we might just have to put up a deck that can beat SOMETHING and hope we get the right rock-paper-scissors. I don't see any way to consistently beat both the fire stall and the rushes. Either individually are a challenge, but preparing for both is way above me. I think I am going to officially switch to the earthquake deck, though, if testing it vs light has yielded poor results.


EDIT: jmdt tested the EQ deck similar to the one I made about against light and had success against the fire stall. It should stand a chance against nova/grabby too, as it can stop pegasus from coming out and kill grabbies with rage pots. Stinnger should use that against light. I'll use Dragon Powa against gravity.

EDIT2: I guess its a version without ragepots? Does anyone think I should bring a couple against gravity? They kill pretty much anything gravity can bring out (chargers, otyughs, gravitons)

[majofa]

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[kev]

Can't talk atm.  On my phone.  I proposed two discord duos against light a page ago.  I'm surprised it isn't being given more consideration.