wickeddarkman

Admittedly, sometimes going for infinite can be a trap. When splintertwin was at it's most powerful, it didn't run 4 of each combo part, and in my own experiments with evolution, it rarely runs 4 of each either.

The question for me is when does people abbandon the potential of the infinite?

This site has so many decks where a two-card combo piece is missing one of the parts.
I'm curious to find out if it's part of the spam-behaviour where trolls list decks in the hope that other people starts using suboptimal decks, or if there could be a natural mechanism behind it where the usual process of evolution abandons the infinite on it's own.

I'm currently running a U/G halfdeck couple, where I could fit axebane Guardian into the green half and freed from the real into the blue part. When these two halves come apart from each other, the combo no longer exists, so the cards in each half faces Extinction unless a way to use the cards within the deck is found that makes the cards worth having in the decks.

I've already done some experiments similar to this by studying what would happen with the moggwarts combo skirk prospector, putrid goblin and first day of class. I tried to put in some cards that could abuse infinite mana that could serve a purpose when infinite mana isn't present. Cards like that get close, but in the end evolution favors something else (at least it has so far, I'm not giving it up that easy)

I'm going to study this on a much larger scale. Maybe there's a defect in the human mind or in evolution that prevents things from going infinite.

I once had a bug in a simulation where evolution was creating burn decks. I remember that according to my own calculations it wasn't possible to kill earlier than turn 4, so when a deck broke the barrier and killed at turn 3, I was ecstatic. Life had found a way. Then later it started to produce turn 2 kills and I was like, hows that possible, it then went on to kill at turn 1 and I stopped the program and searched for the damn bug.

It turned out that I had forgotten to clean up the land count between games, putting it to zero. As each game progressed there would be more and more mountains in play, and so the simulation had access to thousands of mountains. As a result designs started to adapt stuff like fireball in large Quantities, as well as cards that could sacrifice mountains for an advantage.

If the world is a simulation, it makes sense if the programmer gave the simulation a fix, so we somehow drift away from abusing the infinite. Even a virtual infinity.

I'm gonna test this infinity avoidance a little :)
Maybe it's a "natural drift" but learning that it's there, might make it possible to work around.
I'm certainly going to give it a try. Maybe I'll become the bug that breaks our world ;)

Why did you remove the infinite mana aspect, when that part could easily make this go mill infinite?

That's actually clever :)
The card is sort of screaming "try to get to 10" but the card has two uses rather than one.
Creative... solid out of the box thinking.

For rule of the mtgvault, blizard472 stole a squirrel deck from meryn mtg, who stole it from someone else, who stole it from...

That's some quality meta humour.

If you don't get it, read the flavortext of squirrel sovereign.

And the cardmaker of squirrel sovereign stole it from goblin king.

On the bright side, it's a very powerful casual card.
I wonder why the price hasn't exploded because of a higher demand...

There could be a grey zone between exile and sideboards. The two things does seem very similar so I'm not sure myself

Legion angel provides some interesting design features.
Playing one angel in mainboard means that even if games get long, the angel can manage to hide from play in as many as 32 games
(Which is my own personal record when tracking singletons during games) but if you are lucky and draws it, it provides you with 3 other Angel's, provided that none of them get countered.

If you played 2 in sideboard and 2 in mainboard, you'd draw them frequent enough to serve as hatecards, and I think they work best as a way to rebuild after a sweep. Having 2 in the sideboard means you get to dump 3 in a row if none of them are countered, and you have 2 chances to do so if one gets countered.

Playing three in mainboard would mean you draw them frequent enough to get at least one bonus angel during the game by having 3 chances at it.

You can change the dynamics of this by playing with a few cards that can exile many.
Relic of progenitus would allow you to loop your legions from exile in a constant stream as well as protect you from graveyard themes.
You can use your own path to exile to do this as well while ramping up your land count.

Well, the deck was posted exactly at 12, in Europe.
Probably a coincidence then :)

Looks solid enough.

Since you use
Marrow shards I'd like to highlight a pretty overlooked "free spell"
[[Crowd's favor]]

You block with a kiln creature, then convoke the spell.

Here:
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/pauper-control-shell-deceiver/

So, I tell you rock fall vale is a gamble, and you add two kazuuls fury :)
Must be a gambling man, or sleight of hand person :)

The mana might be 5c, but the deck isn't.
Then again, there seems to be a trend among the newer users to "break" up with color identity, like tagging a jeskai as boros, izzet and azorius.

It's probably just me who's being old fashioned ;)

Pst.
It's 4c.

Soul-scar mage is actually pretty strong, so congratulations on using that.
Rock fall vale seems like too much of a gamble to me because it will cost you a turn if you draw multiple of them.

I can recommend apostles blessing.

In fact I'm building up an archive in general:
I use size a4 photo-pockets to store books that I've "compressed"
I read them while underlining anything relevant to me, then after reading it I write up a note paper based on what is underlined, then I refine it and have a private miniature book on the topic that I can go look at whenever I need the info. I'm rebuilding that too...

It's been a while since I've had an updated archive, but yes I frequently build up stuff like that.
It's why I always promote the same cards over and over again.

It's not that long ago that I had a small archive on cards taking out keycards in the modern meta.
So whenever an old card like for example reality Smasher starts showing up, I'd recommend shriekmaw to fight it, and
Phantasmal image is something I've fought with jorubai murklurker.

But some years ago I was close to end up on the street, so the archive got thrown away.
I'm building up a new one for the halfdeck project.

Gary made the tags pretty searchable:
Google for bork mtg and this deck pops up as the third hit on the search...

So I gotta thank you for that.
If gary choose not to fix the problem with tags I'm going to win anyways.
The guys who've kept spamming my magic discoveries over the year will now have no impact anymore.
I'm going meta through the tags.

The world will now be able to hear my cry of warnings, and all the spam on this site can't stop me...

I love idiots :)

Gave the deck a like.
My freedom means it deserves it.

I

There's always a card :)
Over the years I've learned that the easiest way to improve decks is to double check a number of classical moves.
Avoiding counterspells is sort of a classic, so just by having a small list you double check when you want to design around the major classics (counterspells, mass removal, discard, burn, infect etc) you get to skip a lot of card searches.

Second once you've found a hate card, always try to look up as many similar cards as possible, because there is always a card that because of small differences in design is the perfect card against the meta.

The bork meme.
So hot right now.
I wonder.
Did gary make the tags web accessible in 2007 ?
Probably, I'll have to ask him :)

Sparky decks.
Lol I've found those to be so annoying when I was trying to research sparky the ai from arena, and all I can find is sparky decks...

And I see you go damage controll :)
You in a rage yet ;)
Gives more info, wicked go nom nom on catz an burgzars. Much mutate, much meow.