wickeddarkman

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.

Dredge is likely to bring raven's crime into the graveyard, from which it will be playable, so I think less raven's crime is needed because of that.

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.

If it's a testdeck there's probably a primer where the cards are discussed.

Raven's crime is usually a 2 of I think, so that might be it.

Heh, I'm more into making decks on recipes than anything.
I'm currently running an extremely large project, and part of it will help me create some very advanced recipes :)
In a way, building a half deck is already a recipe, but at some point I want to be able to work with some different numbers, like having a "splash deckset" of maybe 20 cards.

I want to crack the numbers of removal, creatures, enchantments, everything.

I'm just working at an extremely slow and carefull pace so I don't miss something vital.

It also has 10 blue sources, usually 12 is the norm for a merfolk deck, so being a 5c deck it's pretty good.
I do believe abundant growth compensate well enough for the two missing islands. The deck does have a real low number of green to support abundant growth though, but the odds of it all might just be present enough for him to have UU when needed.

I think it's a part of a project he has to map the current meta.

He could use the decktag new modern to "link" them.
He's built 3 so far.

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.

It would be good with dakmoor salvage

I love shadowspear, it's good against infect and bogles and the old gods.
It fits well into the pox & manlands theme as the board will often be clear.

Why aren't you playing relic of progenitus ?
It stores a card so you can pox & liliana and then start drawing.
It deals with delirium which is pretty widely used in modern these days.
And in response to someone trying to clear YOUR graveyard, you crack it, and instead of drawing save your most vital card, life from the loam.

Coretapper and chimeric mass can be emergency storages of them.
I've also seen this type of deck before (even built a few) and there's an artifact that transfers charges between artifacts and creatures, I assumed it was in this build because most of this decktype has it.

Muktol, don't you remember ?
This was the user that tried to imitate halfdecks in his early decks, they are still there ;)

Paromor, Still using your recipe I guess?

[[fate transfer]]

And since this is mostly artifacts and you have both counterspells and damnation, why not equal the mana ?

When I put my own halfdecks together I always double check if the mana can be smoothed if the decks share common elements.

Crowd's favor is exceptionally fun to play against other aggro.

I like it as well :)