Monday, October 15, 2012

End of old standard - looking forward! Farseek!

The GW flicker deck tested pretty poorly.  It beat some random decks, but none of them too convincingly, and it lost to zombies and delver. (or broke even).  My plan for defeating the format is not to break even vs the tier one decks, and beating bad decks, so I bailed on the GW flicker deck before taking to the scary real world level of MtGO.

I experimented with a R(g) ultra-haste list, which actually gave Delver a run for it's money, but wasn't overwhelming, and my bad cards (Mogg Flunkies) were absolutely terrible in the matchup.  The plan of "race them" worked very bad against mana leak, and Geist of Saint Traft.  You just can't race a Geist, ever.

Moving into RtR standard, I am quite excited about the idea of a green-based midrange deck.  I really like the idea of Farseek into a Shockland (Blood Crypt, etc) as a way to fix two colors (or provide double green), and I'm also very excited about the combination of core set (Rootbound Crag and co.) and Innistrad (Woodland Cemetary, etc) duals, with Shocklands, and basics to power up ultra-mana fixing.

I think a three-color manabase is pretty free around a core of:
4x Farseek
12x Innistrad + Core duals in 3x 2-color combinations.
3-6 shocklands (1-4 until future sets release) (to fetch with Farseek.  One per color combo might be enough - don't want to take too much pain...)
1-3 innistrad utility lands. (Gavony Township, Vault of the Archangel, etc)
Cavern if the creature types align at all, or if counters are at all prevalent.
4-10 Basics (Borderland Ranger, filling out Farseek, powering up 12x duals, etc)

This is a super-solid mana base for even double-color requirements, due to the green-base, and we easily have over half our mana sources in each color, without even considering Farseek (which is basically a tri-land in this setup)  I intend to do some math on this to see just how many of the shocklands I need, or how many utility lands I can afford, because:
A) I'm interested in casting my spells.
B) I'm not interested in taking a bunch of damate from my mana base.
C) I need a shockland or basic to power up my 12 taplands, so I'm not playing as if I have 20 vivid lands in my deck.

Thragtusk is an easy inclusion, with the green core, and which two colors I use to compliment that is more a matter of taste (JUND!) than anything.  This deck also has nowhere to go but up with the other sets in this series, since we get the other shocklands to complete the three-color wheel, and once all 10 shocks are available, there's no reason this can't be a 4 or 5 color concoction, based on what is needed for the meta.

I really like this green core (Thrag-Farseek), and I have a hard job in front of me to narrow down all the cards I could be playing to the remaining 25-28 slots in the deck...

No comments:

Post a Comment