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Well shit, this may well be the way to build this deck! Perhaps with the exception of the manabase , though supporting enough Urborgs and Heaths to make casting Smallpox off of Flagstones is not easy to balance with a fetch-land-based manabase, so here we are.Running white alongside Urza's Saga solves all the problems that plagued the deck since it fell of shortly after the end of the Eldrazi Winter in 2016.Fundamentally, the deck is still an attrition deck using Smallpox and a whole host of other discard and removal tools to grind the game to a stop after which point Life from the Loam serves as the engine that pushes the deck to victory.The addition of Urza's Saga solves 2 issues:1. Problems running win conditions: The deck has historically struggled to find good win conditions as it, by nature, requires that a large proportion of deck slots be allotted to the engine and the disruption tools that make the deck run. Saga allows us to either win like an 8-Rack deck would, via repeated Raven's Crimes and The Rack triggers, or through an army of constructs, 2 of which can be made by each Saga.2. The inability to deal with resolved walkers, opposing GY strategies, and GY hate in games 2 and 3: Fetching for Pithing Needle makes Karns and the like a non-problem. Fetching for spellbomb makes it possible to win against other graveyard-reliant strategies - all of which are faster than Loam Pox. And fetching for Elixir of Immortality in games 2 and 3 makes it such that graveyard hate of the non-Leyline variety can be prepared for and dealt with.Adding white allows us to diversify our win conditions by allowing us to play Lingering Souls and Kaya, Orzhov Usurper. Souls are a fantastic card, they buy time, they conveniently counter opposing tokens - something an edict-reliant deck derives great value from, they kill walkesr, they win games, and they don't mind being discarded to one of our 8 symmetrical discard effects. It also allows the deck to function without its engine as Saga, Souls, and Kaya can all serve as pressure as well as answers to various situations.
The idea is to disrupt whatever the opponent is doing, then win through any number of ways from Rack triggers, through Souls and a spirit, or a Kaya, or Saga tokens. T2 Smallpox off of Flagstones into a T3 walker can often be game. Likewise, there are a lot of slow decks that manage to resolve a single threat before you Raven's Crime their hand away in which case naming that one threat with Needle or removing it with an edict effect also often just leads to a slow win.SIDEBOARD:Leyline for graveyard-reliant decks (obviously).Damn for creature-heavy decks (obviously).Void Mirror against tron (obviously).Inquisition of Kozilek against combo decks and counterspells.Elixir of Immortality against burn and opposing graveyard hate.Pithing Needle against each of the approximately 400 relevant cards it's good against.Ghost Quarter agasint Tron and color-greedy decks (pretending we ourselves are not one).Boseiju, Who Endures for opposing leylines mostly.Darkblast against tokens, Thalias, Ragavans, Bobs, etc.
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NOTE: Set by owner when deck was made.
I've followed your loam experiments for a long time, and know that you are one of the few that have tried using paperstrips, so when you write that you have problems with the manabase I have to wonder why you have problems at solving it.Have you given up on paperstrips because they are too time consuming, or does your attempts not work out well ?I've been using them for so long that it's almost gut instinct by now, but I do wonder if they are too problematic for others to use.What's your take on that ?I know I worked shortly on evolving a flagstone pox that we had some discussions about, I could link it for you to review.
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Oh, I haven't tested this one unfortunately. Covid kinda killed most non-standard play in my city, and the social aspect of the game is important enough to me to where I am not keen on looking at my opponent through a thick pane of glass with a mask on for 2 hours.My issue here is that you want fetches, really, but you can't really include them without sacrificing either the consistency with which you can sac Flagstones of Trokair to a Smallpox or getting rid of the cycle lands.Honestly, with decks like this I would likely just be best off having a friend of mine with a masters in math turn this into an equation and solve for the ideal manabase given the deck's mana symbol distribution xDDWhat other approaches have you used for iterating/testing things like this?
It's an advanced process with many stages, but I can give some hints.Usually I have a testdeck to play against that is capeable of messing with the manabase.I use an odd hybrid of an RW prison moon with elements of death and taxes so that the mana of the deck I build become resistant to those, and some landdestruction is present in it as well.The first thing I do is design the deck itself, trying to discover exactly how many lands the deck need.I start out by playing way too many lands in the deck, usually 26 for a normal deck that would use 21-24 lands.I would do it with proxies and old lands because of paperstrips and the damage they can cause and all that, but only the lands need this process, the rest of the deck can be normal.On each paperstrip I'd write cut or keep and then play a lot of games against the testdeck. The goal will be to try to keep lands in the hand, because any excess lands can become spells later, but everytime a card is played as a land, I count it as every color, and when played I put a point in the keep section of the card.Always play the card with most keep value first so it collects more value. (Detract cuts to find the real total value)When you discard such a card put it aside in a separated graveyard, then if you return any of them to your hand, keep them separate from other cards in your hand and mark them with a keep.When a game ends, any cards that were not marked are marked with a cut.That's how I find the perfect number of lands most of the time.Next, stage will be to find the perfect blend of individual lands, and that's a bit more complex.Do you think your number of lands is perfect? If so I can describe the next stage.
I have no clue whether the land count is what it should be. How long / how many iterations does this usually take before you arrive at something resembling a satisfactory result?
I've been working for years to find the exact limit of where the process gives a clear answer, and moving further down the scale the things simply dissolves, and at the moment I'm experimenting with what happens if you don't mind that things dissolve just a little.But running a manabase usually takes a single day of really intense work.It can take later if I measure things in the wrong order. Because when it comes down to it, you have to discover exactly how you measure the cards.I used to be very rigid about how I test stuff, but after running experiments with the limits of measurements, I learned to trade accuracy with speed and still get progress.The absolute minimum is "first to two"I write several options on a card on what it can become, and during play, the first choice on the card being picked for the second time gets to be what the card becomes. I prefer to use three as the lower limit, but I'm experimenting with two right now which is driving the whole evolutionary engine.Some cards are simple, in the colony halfdeck I gave cards the option of becoming rats removal or lands.Then when I got clearcut answers on the numbers, I started to specify what I had, which rat and which removal, and yesterday I changed the deck a little because it had some cards not fully answered, and I'm cleaning up the loose ends before starting on generation two.In your case I would start by giving your lands three choices of what they can become, green, black and colorless. Each time you play one, it should contain these three options. In cases where you cannot judge probberly, simply look into the future by looking through the top of each library, then figure out the exact consequences of playing a land.When you play a card as a green mana, put a second strip into it with a green circle on it as a mark. After the game you go through all the cards, remove the markers and write down the choice.I'd do it like this because you have loam, you can always make a last ditch change in decisions if you suddenly realise how you should have made a play instead.When a green mana is played, decide on what it is on the spot, but don't put down notes about it. Have some tokens nearby of each land you want to experiment with.So you play out the deck as if any black mana can be a tomb of yawgmoth, or with the green the green version of the tomb. Any colorless land is potentially a fetchland or a field of ruin or a ghostquarter.If you fetch for a forest or swamp you mark it immediately, and for consistency you could also have Mark's for all land types because of loam, but in the end of it, the lands simple have the options between becoming a black mana, a green mana or a colorless mana.As soon as a land card has "decided" what to become, you give it a new strip, on which it gains the choice of lands within the choice it took. If it decided to be a black mana it now must choose between becoming a tomb of yawgmoth, a swamp, a bojuka bog, a barren moor or a dual land. Go nuts and give it a lot of wild choices, experiment a little.I recommend that the choice of the final land it becomes is the first to reach 3 points.When you play your test game it will at first seem a bit random, but then as more and more choices are being made, each card chooses its final identity and for some reason, because all the cards get a choice, the sum of decisions breathes some sort of life into it. At some level it has to be math, but I'm lost on that area at explaining anything.Any questions? / lose ends? Stuff you want me to explain in another way?