When casting Patriarch’s Bidding, how often do you have a grave full of slivers? Do the games go on for a long time, or is there some other factor here?
When you need to
recover from your own
Toxic Deluge or an opponent wrath, this card is the right solution. Tribal decks will benefit the most out of it so watch out for them. Generally it will pay you off if you have 3+ slivers on your graveyard. If at least one of those dead slivers is a key one like dorks, lords or combo one, just go for it.
If Toxic Deluge has worked well for you, have you also tried Fire Covenant?
Right now I'm using it in other decks and i found
Engineered Explosives and
Toxic Deluge more efficient in term of resources.
How useful are Striking Sliver, Venom Sliver, and Sentinel Sliver? These seem like the weakest of the slivers you’re packing.
Striking Sliver: this might feel a weak sliver but it saves us from combat damage sometimes and it's a cheap CMC sliver, very helpful when you need to tutor for a sliver with
Sliver Overlord in order to combo out with
Intruder Alarm and a dork sliver.
Venom Sliver: giving deathtouch to our baby means that people will attack you less and block you less, which is great.
Sentinel Sliver: attacking and keeping our babies untapped is good when you have slivers with activated abilities.
Be sure to include how you work around Dormant Sliver’s downside. It won’t be obvious to all readers.
Dormant Sliver: it's a great draw engine, with the setback of having an army of walls. If we need to attack and win the game and this baby is on the battlefield,
Basal Sliver,
Hibernation Sliver and
Necrotic Sliver helps to get rid of it.
What are your targets with Worldly Tutor and Eladamri’s Call? Can’t Sliver Overlord just get all the same things?
They cost less then our standard commander ability, can be used before our turn. Main targets can be
Gemhide Sliver /
Manaweft Sliver because they are great in general, and can help us cast our commander.
What does a good starting hand look like?
We generally want a couple of lands (at least one with green), at least 1 ramp card, 1 or 2 slivers, a tutor or draw card and 1 protection/interaction card. Our plan is to benefit from our commander as soon as possible, and sometimes we tutor for a
Gemhide Sliver /
Manaweft Sliver asap, so we can have a lot of mana in early turns. Having some protection will help us in order to live longer, or keep playing for more turns. If you have fetches in your opening hands, the first land you will fetch into will be
Breeding Pool, since green/blue are great colors for early turns; as a second pick I would fetch into
Watery Grave /
Overgrown Tomb, depending on what fetches we have and what cards we kept, for example
Utopia Sprawl or
Vampiric Tutor.
In the intro you said that you are often the first target in your pod. What kind of decks are you going up against? Because if you’re always the one getting targeted, it could just be a power discrepancy. It might also be useful to go over what your good/bad matchups are, but that's fully optional.
I really don't say that, I just advice people in a "fun" way to be prepared to be some sort of archenemy.
I would like a bit more of an explanation for why you’re using Sliver Overlord as opposed to The First Sliver or Sliver Queen as the commander. Have you tried using these as a commander? And if so, how did they play differently that made you want to use Overlord instead?
In the past I've also tried
Sliver Hivelord or
Sliver Legion as our commander, but they are too casual compared with a tutor on your command zone: they might work if you want to lower down your deck power, but generally you'll have to fix your list in order to draw/tutor more.
Sliver Queen can be a great commander, but not on a sliver tribal deck. That way you can build a deck to fully support combos around her without wasting slots on slivers or on cards that support the tribe. Same goes for
The First Sliver: the best
Food Chain commander, ever: he can access all the colors in order to support a really solid combo and let you to cast your whole deck for free.
In the section for “Finding the right tool when needed” would you be able to include some examples of which cards you would grab for a given circumstance? For example: how do you know when you should grab Crystalline Sliver as opposed to Sliver Hivelord? Are there any slivers that you grab for a given matchup?
Tutors are used in order to build our strategy: we will look for
Gemhide Sliver /
Manaweft Sliver if we want to speed up the cast of our commander, or we will find for combo pieces / card draw cards if we plan to run out of cards soon.
What turn does Sliver Overlord typically come out? At about what turn are you able to combo off? Besides the combo cards themselves, what prior setup do you need to have before you can combo?
Generally those combo may happens around turn 6-7+, depending on how good your starting hand was and regardless of interaction. You can easily block someone else's combo and protect your strategy.
How often do you win using combat damage versus a combo? Also, which of the combo cards are typically dead cards?
None of the card I've picked up can be considered as a dead card. In single card discussion each card got it's purpose and alternative uses.
The fact that I'm using combat damage instead of combo is totally depending on the matchups, having this information is not helpful at all. It might lead player to pick the "most used" one instead of the "most effective one" depending on the situation. I don't want to mislead player that way, I'm sorry.
How often do your opponents gain control of Sliver Overlord and then steal all of your slivers?
Generally not so often. I usually try to keep a protection spell in hand when I do cast
Sliver Overlord, depending on what I'm facing. Spot removals are great agains
Gilded Drake, general counterspells does the magic too. It's good to know your opponent's decks in order to understand what their strategies are.
It seems like you have very few draw spells. Do you go into top-deck mode a lot, or is this just not an issue?
It's generally not an issue since our commander is something pretty similar to a draw engine. If we're eager on draw,
Dormant Sliver is pretty efficent and it has great Synergy with top deck tutors.
Hope this can help.
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