Magic: The Gathering

[Commander Xillian]

I'm really just glad to see more living-metal creatures. That was the first cycle I seriously built for, Mirrodin, and damnnabbit I'm sold on anything that has to do with it.

[KrauserKrauser]

Here is that Ghost Dad deck that I finally got around to finding.

4 Dark Confidant
4 Ghost Council of Orzhova
3 Kami of Ancient Law
3 Plagued Rusalka
4 Tallowisp
2 Teysa, Orzhov Scion
4 Thief of Hope

1 Indomitable Will
3 Pillory of the Sleepless
4 Shining Shoal
4 Sickening Shoal
1 Strands of Undeath

4 Caves of Koilos
1 Eiganjo Castle
4 Godless Shrine
6 Plains
1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse
6 Swamp
1 Tomb of Urami

It could probably be updated a bit and strengthened if you brought it out a Kamigawa/Ravnica standard restriction that it was built under but it is one of the only decks that I know of that disproved the Auras are always bad quip that is thrown around for high level magic.

[lance]

Not really, the problem with auras is the card disadvantage when they blow up the creature that you were trying to enchant. Now look at the auras in that deck, 3 of them enchant your opponents creature to shut it down with an additional effect. One can be played as an instant and likely is how its played in the deck.
Only strands of undeath is in line with a traditional aura, except that it comes with inherent card advantage if it hits, and the deck only plays 1 of it.

[Master of Cards]

The new Auras and the totem armor mechanic really help the Aura deck archtype, (then they came out with a 2 mana cost blanket enchantment destruction ).

[Commander Xillian]

I am going to be getting the first building block in my new zombies deck! With my collection, and the Zombies Empire starter, I shall begin to build my Zombie Deck! WHOO!

Who want's icecream and Brainz?

[KrauserKrauser]

Well I don't know if anyone is going, I'm going to be at GenCon this year. I'll be playing some EDH and trying my luck at the Vintage Championship. If only I was fully powered, I could go with a better deck, but I think I'll do ok.

Wish me luck.

[Dark Hellion]

Vault+key will probably blow out any unpowered deck unless you play mad null rod + other artifact hate. Vault+key blows dick and ruins the format. That's why I refuse to play Vintage until they fix that dumb bullshit.

[Commander Xillian]

hey, Hellion, care for a game tonight? I have been REALLY overhauling my deck some, and I think it's looking more respectable now. Would you give this humble Greenhorn your sage advice?

Besides "Less monsters, More Spells", of course.

[KrauserKrauser]

I'm going with dredge as I have the bazaars but am otherwise power-less.

Had I my druthers I'd run some Oath variant as it is hella powerful.

Sadly I might just get blown out by graveyard hate as dredge is just about the cheapest competitive deck out there for sanctioned vintage and I'm sure half of everyone's sideboard will be filled with hate for my deck.

You never know though, the newer dredge decks can fight through a lot of hate.

[Dark Hellion]

What variant of Ichorid are you going to run? I used to do a lot of work on that deck along with one of my teammates so I would say I have a pretty good grasp on it if you want some tips. Really though, the sideboard is the most important part of that deck as you need to be able to deal with decks that run actual anti-ichorid packages as opposed to just repeated crypt effects (which are really easy to beat). The hardest sideboards for you to play against are something like 3xPithing Needle, 3xCrypt, 3xYxlid Jailer. Crypt is basically impossible for you to chain of vapor, Jailer hurts more than nearly anything else they can do and pithing needle on Bazaar T1 is a total kick in the balls.

My biggest advice with any Ichorid build is not to be afraid to slow roll a bit at the beginning. You don't have to go off T3 or 4. You can just set up to get a bunch of Zombies in play T5 and have the opponent concede when facing lethal next turn.

[KrauserKrauser]

Here is the list that I plan on running

4 Golgari Grave Troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
3 Golgari Thug

4 Bloodghast
4 Narcomoeba
2 Ichorid

3 Dread Return
2 Flame Kin Zealot
1 Sun Titan

2 Nature's Claim

4 Chalice of the Void
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Cabal Therapy

4 Serum Powder
4 Bridge from Below

4 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Undiscovered Paradise
2 Petrified Field
1 Dakmor Salvage

Sideboard:
4 City of Brass
4 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Nature's Claim
4 Chain of Vapour
1 Darkblast

It's alot like one of the lists that was posted on TMD not too long ago, with a few changes. I went with Leyline of the Void MD over Sanctity as a hedge against other Dredge at the event. It might be over represented and other than Oath and possibly TPS, Sanctity won't be that great in many first game matchups and basically awful in the mirror.

As for specific card counts, I've seen some move the Cities of Brass to MD and all sorts of variations in teh number of Thugs, Fields, Salvages, FKZes, Claims, Ichorids etc moving between MD and SB.

I feel that it is a solid list that should be really well positioned to hopefully start each match with a win in the first game and then grind through the hate in games 2 & 3.

If you have any advice on the list, I'd appreciate it.

[Dark Hellion]

From a purely theoretical standpoint I hate Bloodghast in any Serum Powder Ichorid build. Yes, it does make the deck faster and gives a more recurrable source of dudesweats but speed and recursion were never weaknesses to begin with. You literally can't race a deck like pitchlong or TPS except with some silly LED shenanigans and you don't want to rely on them. You always beat faster decks because you play some of the best stupid disruption (Therapy, Chalice, Leyline, Terastodon, etc.) not because you actually raced them. And Ichorids can always come back because you can eat Dredge 4s all day long. He is called dredge 4 because he is so shitty that he doesn't even deserve a name. Sure occassionally you use him to dredge 4 but he mostly exists to get eaten by Ichorid or pitched to contagions (if you SB them).

But, more importantly my dislike of Bloodghast comes from the pure theory of what manaless (or pseudo-manaless as is mostly the case now days) Ichorid actually wants to do in a game. The perfect game for it actually goes T1 play and activate Bazaar. From then on you never need play another card or use any other active abilities. You want to just use your draw per turn to dredge 5-6 and use triggered abilities to set up a situation where the opponent concedes at the end of T3. Now, practically this rarely occurs and you usually must play Chalice and therapy a few times and then win via a Dread Return but the fact remains that you don't have to. You want the deck to be able to win with a single activation of a single card and the rest of the deck just doing its thing. The deck never has to worry about the content of its hand, the content of its library (just how many cards are actually present) or what its actual on-board state looks like. Even your graveyard content is oddly irrelevant because the deck is so redundant that it just consists of a bunch of cards that all do the same thing. Bloodghast goes against all of this. It makes your hand relevant as you have to hold land and it makes you have to actually think about the proper time to play said land. So, while undermining a theoretic strength of your deck the card itself is actually weak. Its just some shitty beater that can return from your graveyard (albeit multiple times per turn with Sun Titan/Petrified field) that doesn't actually shore up any weakness of the deck and adds additional weakness to hand disruption that wasn't present before. If you don't play Bloodghast balance is always a losing proposition for the opponent. They will always lose lands (you have 1 in play, if that), cards (you have a handsize of 2-3 max) and your dudes come back faster. With Bloodghast, they can lock you out of recursion by Balancing away your hand, which blows. Now, maybe there is a very good argument for Bloodghast but in my experience with Ichorid (I've played like 500 or so games with it) it seems like such a win-more card.

Otherwise, I am curious about the lack of any of the "Go off" cards like Cephalid Coliseum, Cephalid Sage or River Kelpie. Now, while a common beginner mistake is to misuse these guys and dredge to much (and then get hit by MD crypt and lose) they allow you to pull of T2 wins quite often and increase your T3-T4 win percentage quite a bit. I am a really big fan of the coliseum because it generates U for post SB Chain of Vapor as well. River Kelpie is also absolutely nuts if you get it going because you can literally draw/dredge an obscene number of cards the second you dread return it and basically if you DR it and cannot win on that turn you weren't going to win anyways. While all these "Go off" cards are also win mores, they actually do just win when they work and all can be made to synegize with other parts of your strats such as Sage or Kelpie being blue and allowing you to play Force of Will (which is obscene when it works).

Also, I'd try to figure out how to sneak the Darkblast main. 1xDarkblast is super useful in a lot of game 1s if you are having trouble going off and need to wreck a random shitter.

All in all though, it looks like it should be consistent and capable of doing what its supposed to. There are certain numbers I don't like in it. 2 FKZ always struck me as redundant because you don't actually want to have to use FKZ to win, its just a nice thing to have and it is straight up the worst card in the deck. 2 Ichorid seems light to me as they are an excellent damage source and 2x Ichorid with some black guys to eat and 1 Bridge can set up a great damned if you do, damned if you don't situations for a lot of decks sitting on a single crypt effect. You can just draw cards and not activate bazaar and force them to blow crypt to stop your offense then proceed to Eot Bazaar, Upkeep bazaar and be back in business. I also always have the same internal argument I always have about Chalice; 3x or 4x. You only want to see 1 which suggests 3x, but you seriously want to see 1 which suggests 4x and I think its an even split. The biggest thing is to ask if you would rather have something like a 4th DR or a random solution card like Angel of Despair or Terastodon instead? Unless someone plays some super funky build I haven't seen, I don't think you'll have a straight up build disadvantage compared to any Ichorid deck playing in the field and it just depends on how good the anti-Ichorid boards are and how good the players are at playing with them. And how much lameness Vault-Key can generate, but that is a given for modern Vintage.

[KrauserKrauser]

My "going off" is centered around Sun Titan. He almost always gets back another Bazaar which allows for additional Bloodghast tricks and of course another round of bazaaring.

I feel the same way about FKZ with not really wanting to go up to 2, I might just take it out for the MD Darkblast because I feel that the more anti hate I can get the better I will be. First game is basically did they draw the nuts? Nope, then I win, on to game 2 and no number of FKZ is going to change that.

The only other change may be to take out a thug and add in an Ichorid since I am bringing in another Dredge target in Darkblast. I know for Game 2 & 3 you want to expose as little as possible in the graveyard at a time and more Ichorids would help more than a Thug.

[Dark Hellion]

I don't know if Bloodghast changes the math any but I am really dubious about going less than 4 Troll, 4 imp, 3 dredge 4. The smaller dredges really don't have enough to get you going early game and you never want to have to mul a hand with bazaar in it. You just need to get at least 4 dredge going T2 in order to really get off the ground at a reasonable speed against combo.

First game is basically did they draw the nuts? Nope, then I win, on to game 2 and no number of FKZ is going to change that.

This is actually the biggest mistake in thinking that most Ichorid players make. It is not a true as you think it is. In the hands of a good pilot combo can still go off T4 even after 2xTherapy + chalice/leyline with just a suitable hand. Your first game win percentages are often misleading because of several factors. First, if the tournament goes 5 or more rounds you will lose at least 1 game because you deck just shits out on you. You mull down to a hand of Bazaar+blank and just take 4 turns to get going or you mull down to 1 which isn't bazaar or you have a hand with Bazaar+darkblast+2-3xNarcomoeba and just jack off for like 4 turns. Also, several decks that you are like 75% against aren't actually you win 60% of the time and 30% are close games that go 50/50. They are just you kick their ass like 70%, they kick your ass 20% of the time and 10% of the time is a 50/50 were one of you barely eeks the game out and any play mistake would have made you lose. And as silly as it sounds decks like combo are actually easier not to make those play mistakes because it is really hard to see that your second Bazaar activation should have been dredge Troll+darkblast instead of Troll+imp or figuring out the proper number of Ichorids you need to put in play T3 to keep up the offense for T4. So, even though these decks are like 75% in testing, in tournament you go more like 65-70% against them and will thus snag random loses to decent starting hands.

My best advice is test the hell out of the deck both pre and post-board. A lot of Ichorid players don't actually test the pre-board games enough, they just go through the motions in a playtest gauntlet and miss out on a bunch of the subtlety that is actually present within the deck. Things like knowing when to block with zombies vs. when to let guys through, when you start not dredging, when to activate bazaars, how to properly dismantle a hand with therapy, etc. are all skills that will win you that random game 1 that can mean the difference between top 8ing and not.

[KrauserKrauser]

Well my Gen Con didn't result in taking home any prizes, but I still had a good time.

I played in the First Preliminary Tournament for some Byes at the main event and my matches went as follows:

Match 1 - Dredge Mirror Match, he wins the die roll, he wins the match. Who knew. Mulliganed into oblivion both games.

Match 2 - Tezz - Game 1 Turn 2 Key Vault, Game 2 Leyline, Jailer and he finds Yawg Will one turn before I could go busted after dealing with the hate. Mulliganned to oblivion both games as well.

Drop

Obviously my deck was not playing nice with me and I enjoyed teh rest of the day not really looking forward to the next day's main event.

Luckily I never had to deal with it as I apparently answered the wake up call from the hotel, hung up the phone and promptly slept well past the event start time.

So, not much in the way of Tournament magic for me.

I did however sell off a ton of cards at the auction and to dealers and went from fully unpowered to Ancestral (Traded in a Bazaar and bunch of random junk - Piledrivers, Metalworkers, etc.), Twister ($150), Ruby ($250), Pearl ($250), Emerald ($250) in the course of the con.

Also picked up a bifold business card for Gary Gygax at the charity auction and some random adventures from his personal gaming library for my random peice of history from the event.

All in all, a great trip, regardless of my ass getting kicked whenever I picked up magical cardboard.

[Commander Xillian]

knowing when to block with zombies vs. when to let guys through

Note to self and others: Never friggin' block with Zombie Master unless he's pumped, and never block with the Death baron.

Period.

[KrauserKrauser]

Agreed. Lords are meant to sit in the back and let the lackeys do the fighting.

[Commander Xillian]

Hey, it's hard work making sure all your zombies get their death touch. They're really getting a work out when you're not looking, running around.