Hi Soren,
We obviously have different approaches to these situations.
Burn is the natural enemy of Elves. To offset that somewhat you turn defensively, meaning you weaken your deck overall against 5 of 6 colors ( including colorless ) to make it stronger against 1 color.
I think that is not a good strategy for a couple of reasons.
1- I think it's safe to say that all 6 colors are played roughly even : this means that by including 4 copies of
Absolute Law in your deck you severely handicap your deck for 5 out of every 6 match-ups.
Absolute Law is a 100%
dead card against every opponent not running Red. So you need this ( on average ) in only 1 out of every six match-ups. I don't think that is worth the sacrifice.
2- By adding these defensive cards you weaken the overall beatdown power of the deck.
3- There's no guarantee you'll draw
Absolute law when you need them. You have no way to tutor for them. What are you going to do when you face burn but you don't have one in opening hand or don't draw one within the first three turns ? Are you going to take a mulligan and waste a possible good hand ? Are you going to stop casting Elves until you get an
Absolute Law.
4- Even with
Absolute Law, you still might lose.
I take a different approach.
I make the deck as deadly and as fast as possible, without
weakening it for 5 out of 6 matchups and try to
defeat Burn with speed. Burn may have a suboptimal draw as well and better be having their burn spells ready from the get go or it might be too late to start burning away the elves. Emrakul on T3 is possible.
The change that you've made that struck me the most however was you going down to 3
Gaea's Cradle.
That's the move that indicates the most to me we're operating from different mind sets.
Gaea's Cradle is worth its weight in gold and I'd rather add a fifth than go down to three.
First of all, there's
Wasteland that can take them out and second, more important, I want to be able to tap the cradle for 4 or 5 mana and then
play a new one and tap it for 4 or 5 mana more.
The cradles,
Titania Priests and Archdruids are the engines of the deck, you need 4 of all these.
I also don't agree with removing a number of "1 drop dorks"
Those small elves are what fuel the above mentioned three cards.
I can tap a
forest for an elf and actually gain 3 mana with it ( 2 net ) because Cradle, Priest and Archdruid now produce one more mana.
Utopia Sprawl or
Birds of paradise don't give me that bonus.
I'm going to try next if I can run this reliably with 10 forests and 4
Cavern of Souls ( + 4 Cradles of course )
Thanks for your replies, you keep this place
alive