I was extremely fortunate this weekend, and two more of my friends, Joe and Nick (Talisen/Banach in WoW) came over to do even more testing with the revised list this Sunday.
Joe was 1.5 hours early, so I laid out the decks plan for him, and what I was thinking about, as well as some of the other options. He convinced me to but a copy of Into the Roil into the main-deck (not too hard), and Surreal Memoir ("why not" I thought) in place of some of the red spells. (2x Searing Blaze, since those are the most likely to be non-castable). I played 24 lands, with 4x Halimar Depths, 4x Treasure Hunt, 4x Arc Trail, 2x Searing Blaze, 0x Tectonic Edge, 1x Surreal, 1x Into the Roil.
I stuck Joe with Valakut, and the PA deck was victorious in all four games. Some notes:
==1 mulligan for me, at least 3 for Valakut.
==Primeval Titan cast count was pretty low. I was able to kill Lotus Cobra, and Overgrown Battlement whenever he was land-light, and not when he was threat light, which may have been a fortunate coincidence for me.
==Often Valakut just ran out of the appropriate "gas". Either they had 1-2 too few lands, or 0-1 threat, that was killed or a turn too late. Joe didn't have the topdeck "skills" to make the games really close by drawing like 3 primeval titans in a row, or, say, a Mountain when he needed it.
==The 1-ofs did not really show their faces. ITR isn't exactly awesome against Valakut, and Surreal is just 2x Burn spells that take a while to cast.
==This Valakut list had 4x Harrow, 4x GSZ, 0x Summoning trap, to match up quite well with my 0x Counterspell. You can't "Whiff" on trap, and you'll never cast it for free, and your Harrow will never be countered. The Cobras are fairly common for Valakut now(?) and occasionally lived a turn. (with a heavy-blue draw)
==Since Valakut does not have many creatures, or creature threats early, most/all of the burn could go to their head. The difference between doing 1 damage to a Lotus Cobra, and killing 4 Hawks and a Mystic is something like 8-10 life damage to a player, so the threshold for "just killing them" is quite low. All these games ended around turn 7-8, for that very reason.
I think this is the key point. I could just do incidental damage to them (Arc Trail, Searing Blaze, Staggershock rebounds), or just actual damage to them (full Staggershocks, Volt Charge, etc), because they don't have targets I must kill with my red spells, which puts them low enough to die in a one-turn window to any PA that is drawn, or sometimes even without it. I had enough red spells to 2-spell-kill (or one spell + charged PA) kill a Titan, so they needed multiple threats (2 without PA, 3 with PA, just because Valakut triggers add up), as well as the non-creature mana to cast them all, which just didn't happen all that often in the 7-8 turns they had to win.
I don't think this matchup is as lopsided as our 7-2 testing would indicate, but it clearly seems at least "okay", where my previous version of this deck (counterEverything.dec, vs burnEverything.dec) was 0-5 in TPR play.
I had joe play one of my Ultra-aggro decks (GW shaman/quest) for a change
==Joe never had a turn 1 quest, but still smashed me with quest when drawn, because of the mechanics of the quest (I have 5 creatures, and one of them gets equipped at hyper-instant speed, on my turn)
==I can often kill quite a few of their creatures, but they can put them out so quickly at the start, that there isn't enough time to cast all my spells.
==I often had to Arc Trail just a Fauna Shaman, which was incredibly annoying. Maybe this is a mistake, since getting a 2:1 and making them use mana is probably worth the occasional search for a (non-castable?) vengevine, and me spending 2 mana better.
==We only played 2 games, but I lost both, so maybe some attention needs to be paid to this, and other hyper-aggro strategies (presuming they aren't decimated by freaking Batterskull.
Nick showed up, and he played a game using my deck against the GW shaman deck, and he also lost, while I took care of the food I promised my fine testers.
Then, since we had two guys, I had them play cooperatively with the Caw Blade deck, against my PA deck, since Caw can be incredibly complex, etc.
==I won 2 of the 7 games.
==One of the two games I won was a game where they mulliganed to 4, and drew all lands.
The key point of this matchup is that I pretty much could not beat the RW sword (or Batterskull), and they just cast the RW sword on turn 3 after tutoring it out with Stoneforge Mystic (which died), and then from there on out, they threatened equipping anything they cast with the Sword, and near-guaranteeing me losing.
If they didn't manage to get the Sword equipped to a 2-casting cost creature on turn 4-6, they sure could equip it to a Batterskull, or Gideon Jura on turn 5-7.
Batterskull was near-unbeatable. It took two burn spells to kill, and on turn 7 or so they'd just equip it to their 3-power pro-red 2-drop, and gain 13 life a turn instead of "just" 6.
They couldn't cast their spells fast enough to not gain ~5-7 life per RW sword swing, and I couldn't cast my spells fast enough to not be dead in 2-4 turns to the extra damage from the RW sword.
This matchup really felt unwinnable. So I got frustrated, and played a different deck, because if I can't beat Caw, there's no point in playing the deck.
==I went 4-6 with that deck, which also nearly auto-lost to the freaking RW sword, or Batterskull.
==I won games where the Caw deck mulliganed low, or never got to 4 lands, or where they underestimated how much damage Inferno Titan, or a fully-leveled Dragonlord can do. I lost every game where they got Batterskull and RW sword on the same creature, because that was like 13 life per turn, that I couldn't even throw a Goblin Guide in front of.
This was pretty dismal, but it turns out to be critical for my Pyromancer deck, because we decided to throw in some main-deck artifact hate in this deck (that I didn't care about as much, so I was willing to do it), and I went 3-2, with similarly good draws, and no mana-screw for them.
It really felt like I was losing games to the artifacts, and nothing else. Gideon was annoying, Jace was annoying, Collonade was semi-annoying, but they were only fatal when combined with the artifacts. So if I can kill their artifacts, the rest of the deck seems like it just falls apart. This was somewhat reflected in the testing, because I was 3-1 in games where I drew and cast artifact destruction. (I did lose a game where I "saw" three artifact removal spells out of the four I eventually had in (jace-bottomed one, one countered, one resolved)
Joe and Nick remarked that the games had gone from near-auto-pilot, feeling the same every game:
Land (Preordain or no)
SFM, get RW sword (SFM dies, or doesn't, almost irrelevant)
Cast or SFM-in + Spell Pierce sword.
Equip sword on SFM + gain 8 life, or cast + equip some other 2-drop.
Gain 7-8 life next turn, and for the rest of the game, good luck!
To:
Maybe we'll lose...
Crushing their RW sword on the attack, and blocking a SFM with a Goblin Guide was a pretty good swing for me.
The games I won with both decks all happened at the start, when they were perhaps not as familiar with the deck, mulliganing, etc.
So, I made them play two more games with Caw vs Pyro + 2x Shatter (in place of Surreal + ITR)
I won both, and they were close, but they got super-legitimate draws for their deck.
Both games were relatively long(10-12 turns), and relatively close (I won at 1, and 7 life), but they had alot going on.
In both games, they:
==Bounced a newly charged PA with kicked Into the Roil
==Cast Gideon and multiple Jaces (w/enough life to survive multiple burn spells)
==Had relevant counters, and used/threatened them at valid times, causing me to over-burn things. Countered Staggershocks, which prevent a ton of damage.
==Mystic into RW Sword.
Clearly this is not enough testing to draw long-term conclusions, but it was encouraging enough where I should make this change, and try a few more games.
I thought I wanted these artifact destruction spells to be Crushes (harder to Pierce/Leak, easier to cast when I also have other spells), but I think I want them to be Shatters, for the additional utility.
Spellskite is a card that eats two burn spells normally, and prevents me from killing a Exarch.
Artifact aggro is likely a deck, and being able to kill a creature there is reasonable.
Inkmoth Nexus is a card.
The artifact removal in general won't be dead against other decks. against GW quest it is probably better than ITR, because you rarely draw off ITR on T3 Argentum Armor, and Shatter solves the problem forever. Tezzeret decks will have plenty of targets. Valakut won't have any targets, but Into the Roil isn't exactly hot there anyway. Ratchet Bomb was a problem ITR "solved", but Shatter is much more efficient at.
Aggro decks (without swords) is where it Shatter will be weakest, but hopefully the quantity of 2:1's I have against aggro, and 4 sideboard slots to improve those matchups in general will be useful. General aggressive decks are pretty likely to be packing artifacts (equipment) anyway, so maybe they won't be dead there. Vampires is the one matchup I can think of where it's 100% dead.
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Conclusions/Follow-up:
Charging PA with Staggershock, Tezzeret's Gambit, and Volt Charge is near-trivial. Re-charging it is near-trivial.
I felt like I was on the edge, as far as running out of "gas" in some of the games. (having no cards, or having 5 land + no spells in hand). Perhaps better Preordaining, or keeping more Tez's Gambits will be required.
RW sword (+ Batterskull) is neigh-unbeatable with the quantity of random creatures in caw. (Without artifact removal)
Valakut is an okay matchup, definately a better plan than 12counters.dec
Need to test some against aggro, see how much sideboard space I need.
Need to test against Caw with 2x Shatter main. Is this enough to tip G1 from 25% to 50+%?
What's the right Mix of Searing Blaze, Arc Trail? (currently 2xSB, 4x AT)
Treasure hunt drew me 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 cards on the day. It was around 1.5 cards on average blind, and 2.5 cards with Halimar Depths assistance. The goldfish games I played with Gitaxian Probe instead seemed pretty weak. Need to keep considering See Beyond, since the population at large likes it quite a bit. The instant-speed proliferate+draw would be nice, but is yet another 3 casting cost spell.
There was only one game where I really wanted Tec Edge, and I ended up winning it anyway, so cutting it seems pretty reasonable.
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