wickeddarkman

In the past I spent a lot of time with [[wall of blood]] and [[ragged veins]]

It's a similar concept, but the "lesson" I can give is to plan for what to do when the opponent has no creatures.

Yeah, soul warden is legal, fun thing that I haven't seen it played in arena yet, so that's a nice card pick.
Can't wait to see that oldie hit the meta.

Format confusion is a thing.
There are too many cards and too many formats and it changes all the time. I'd hate to play in alchemy.

He wants to know why you mark this as arena. Simple.

It could use some modal lands.

Oh, I just have to get me a set of phase dolphin, to put in any deck, and when someone asks about it, I'll say
"Oh, that, I put it in during my dolphin phase"

That will switch their eyes :)

I didn't know muktol was a minotaur name :)
What do you call a minotaur kid ???
Answer: a minor-taur :)

Balancing two decks to be equal is hard, so I don't think that I will try to balance my halfdeck

Here's a thrown together prototype
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/the-end-pauper/

There's a 1/13 zombie for 4B :)

Mutt-tol (he he hee), plays pestilence a lot, and I've been experimenting with it myself against a 2018 merfolk which is so fucking fast. I believe pestilence does have the upper hand in the matchup.

I also believe that pestilence brews are totally uncreative in designs and I'm going to work on improving that aspect.
Cards like shambling stalker and a number of black creatures with super toughness could really beef up the concept.
There's a lot of 0/4 creatures for 1 mana, and for just a little more mana the toughness increases to sick proportions, enough that I'm planning to try out some switch power&toughness effects in the future, probably in grixis colors.

One of the more interesting cards I've added to my mill halfdeck is zulaport duelist.
In games against merfolk I have been lucky to take out an early cursecatcher whenever merfolk got manascrewed or wanted to play spreading seas or silvergil adept as the second card. In few cases I've had two zulaport to take out an attacking lord. Overall, merfolk just walks through my islands, but by bouncing the lords that provide islandwalk, I have played zulaport to reduce the smaller attacker and block the bigger attacker.

Among modern cards I've only found 1 permanent that can bounce zulaport, but if you can find one in pauper you will be able to have a small mill engine that produces miniature fog effects.

But I think that in pauper, zulaport duelist will shine at taking out the first 1/1 to cross the board.

I've been following the decks in pauper with monarch, because I expected to see a sort of cyclical monarch event where people would try to out-monarch the others until other designs without monarch crushed them and a reversal in the number would happen for a while before monarch creep would start up again.

So far I've seen decks with two monarch in the brews that have them.

Do you have any ideas why there's no monarch creep ?

People playing guardians often has a pestilence, and no bearer can help there as the damage of those is simply untargeted.

The guardians are there to keep pestilence alive, so having them tapped isn't a great bother either, you just keep sweeping with pestilence because most pestilence decks also have lifegain.

Painter's servant ?

It was manaless, and I think grief was the deciding factor.

What interests me is WHY it's run in vintage.
There are plenty of dredge cards, so why shambling shell in particular?
Is it purely for the dredge, or does shambling shells ability to grow other creatures influence the choice.

I think you will be trapped between two aspects.

On one side you want to play slivers fast and kick ass.
On the other side you want to have slivers that after turn 5 have a high enough cost that you get to cascade into as many slivers as possible.

When cascade was new, people was trying to use all of the cascade spells, but after the initial tests people just used cascade 3 in decks, so designing a curve for this you might want to find some really old cascade decks to get a hint of the ratios they tried out back then.

One thing that might be helpful, if you play with cards like index and sage of Epityr you can both assemble your mana faster, but you can also set up a successfull cascade.

I just saw some vintage dredge list today at mtggoldfish, it contained shambling shell, which I think we've talked about in the past, but I'm not sure. I've always considered it as being a card fitting a step curve.

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?

Relic vs elixir is one of the reasons why I love magic, just like in real life there is no absolute answers, I'd pick relic to harm other graveyard based decks at all times, but I'd do it at the cost of being more vulnerable to graveyard hatred myself, while you prefer being less vulnerable to hatred but then less able to harm others who try to exploit the graveyard.

Both choices have their own pros and cons.
It's kinda cool.

That could be done.
From a certain point of view, the landdestruction, removal and liliana is enough to lock them down, so what's left is to find a way to kill within the 45 minutes a match lasts. And not knowing pox by heart you are the better judge on the amount of kill.