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Deck Reviews / [Modern] Mono U Tron, simple and clean

« on: June 15, 2018, 05:12:00 pm »

Mono U Tron,  simple and clean

The date of this deck is 6/15/2018. You get to play lands and ramp, control and blue cards and then you finish off your opponent with something big, fat and probably game-ending. This is my mono u tron list as of the above date.

For those of you looking to play an awesome Tron deck in Modern, that's competitive and fun, check out this build of U Tron. Eschewing much of the backbreaking and high priced pieces you may see in Tron today, this deck takes a look at what U Tron looked like 2 or 3 years ago with a few updates. Of note this deck leans on the power of the card Fabricate to call up whatever Artifact card you need and with this in mind, you can tailor this deck to your metagame and tune it to your liking. This deck has very good game against Control and Combo but it struggles greatly with aggressive decks.  I played this deck to strong finishes, including some top 8s when I first started playing Modern around 2013, and if you have any questions I would be happy to discuss them. Thanks for taking a look and reading my post about one of my favorite decks. I'm happy to share it with you. Cheers!

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Deck Comments / Re: Bogles - Comments

« on: November 12, 2016, 07:40:26 pm »

I really like this deck... is it competitive online?

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General Magic / Re: Favorite Card To Play

« on: August 20, 2015, 06:15:24 am »

One of my favourite cards is probably Cabal Therapy. Rn I think I own about 12 copies, 4 are Chinese and they're pretty sweet. I opened it from an actual Judgement pack way back when I was a kid and have kept it. I used to run it along with Duress in my R/B Nightmares deck when Torment was in standard. I have played it in many a mono-black deck and I love how it interacts with Mishra's Factory in my build of Pox (1 colourless mana to activate the factory, flashback Cabal Therapy). I play it in Storm because it's really powerful and combos with Gitaxian Probe to eliminate the guessing game. I play it in Dredge because it's a house. Strip yr opponent of a card, fart out a couple of 2/2 zombies and do it again. I think Dredge might be the best Cabal Therapy deck ever and I just love this card and I will find an excuse to play it whenever I can.

I think after that card I really like Lightning Bolt. It's the best Instant ever. The design is so simple, powerful and fun. I own a zillion copies of that card and I collected only Lightning Bolts exclusively for a while. I enjoy Remand and Eternal Witness, because they represent this kind of weird card advantage that puts the "Huh?" look on your opponent's face every time. And lastly, one of my favorite cards of all time is Fallen Angel. Time has not been kind to Fallen Angel, but for the low, low price of a creature, you can Unholy Strength a 3/3, flying, black, angel. I love it from a design aspect (this sad angel who fell from up above and starts making everyone sacrifice all the things because she's fallen and sad) and from how I used to just play it in all of my decks. Thanks for reading!

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Deck Reviews / [Legacy] 8 Ball (8 Tutor Tendrils) by Zachariah Henzel

« on: August 19, 2015, 06:21:12 am »

8 Ball (8 Tutor Tendrils)

I present to you my vision of the new Storm deck in Legacy. 8 Ball Tendrils - right to the dome!  Look out the window right now. It's a little gray and, you know, it could just be that a Storm is a brewin'.

Our business: 1 Tendrils of Agony to kill with and 1 Past in Flames to build our Storm-count. These are 2 of the most broken cards in Legacy. Everyone is trying to abuse Dig Through Time. Cool. We're going to kill you with many, many Drillz before you can ever cast it. We play 9 spells and then fire off a big, fat, juicy, lethal Tendrils of Agony. Always remember your Storm trigger, folks!

Our Power : 8 Tutors. This is something new for us in Legacy. With Origin's Dark Petition we now have 2 on-colour Tutor spells. It's true that Infernal Tutor is still our most powerful Tutor because it costs a mere 2 mana to cast, but with a second Tutor we now are more consistent than ever. And consistency is power. From >5 mana we can begin a Past in Flames kill with Dark Petition. It will also net us 6 mana when combined with a single LED from 5 mana, which is good enough to either begin a Past in Flames loop, or simply grab Infernal Tutor for Tendrils of Agony. Simply put, we are not only more consistent and more powerful, but we have more options than before.

It should be not ignored that we get to use Brainstorm and Ponder and to lesser extent Preordain to speedup, re-draw, hide cards, improve our hand, and build storm - all for the low, low cost of just 1 blue mana. We are storm, we have the ability to turn Brainstorm into Ancestral Recall and can just go off from almost nothing. Our Ponders are better than any other Ponders. A Peordain can just win us the game outright. These powerful draw spells or cantrips are the glue that hold our power together, supplementing an elegant array of 4-ofs in our deck.

Our Gasoline :  4 Dark Ritual and 4 Cabal Ritual. Rituals are spells that are temporary mana accelerators, and fuel our deck into overdrive. These are the best 8 fast-mana spells in the format - 8 ball again! They are instants and net us a bunch of mana on the cheap. You will cast some number of these in just about every game. Most importantly, they are all black in colour. No red or green here - just smooth, quick, dark, black mana.

4 Lion's Eye Diamond and 4 Lotus Petal. That's another 8 ball! These seemingly goofy 0 mana artifacts can kick us into high gear, while building storm. Infernal Tutor in concert with Lion's Eye Diamond is Black Lotus and Demonic Tutor (just please remember to retain priority and activate the diamond at mana speed!). Lotus petal is 1 mana and 1 Storm - and that is what is know as a two-for-one. The reason Storm is so brutally fast, hard to stop and resilient has a lot to do with these fast-mana artifacts. They're a lot like our rituals, but they will give us mana of any colour of our choosing. Usually, just 1 mana of a colour that is not black will do the trick. You will be abusing these cards with regularity on our fundamental turns or, in some cases, to play around permission.

4 Polluted Delta and 4 Non-Polluted Delta fetchlands of your choosing. 8 Ball means 8 fetchlands and here's 8 reasons to play an octet of these lands:

1.) to pair with Brainstorm so that we only draw the cards we want
2.) to fix our mana
3.) to pair with Ponder so that we only draw the cards we want
4.) to pair with Preordain so that we only draw the cards we want
5.) to thin the deck, which ups our spells-to-lands ratio by a non-zero amount
6.) to make sure we have access to basic Island
7.) to make sure we have access to basic Swamp
8.) to achieve 7 cards in our graveyard to Threshold for Cabal Ritual

I hope this convinces us that 8 is the magic number!

Our Interaction : 4 Gitaxian Probe, 3 Cabal Therapy and 3 Thoughtseize. Since New Phyrexia, Gitaxian Probe has been a must-have in Storm. Free spells are good. Card draw is great! And INFORMATION is even better. Now we're playing combo; so why not combo Probe with Cabal Therapy? Normally Cabal Therapy can have a miss rate and a hit rate depending on your experience, but Gitaxian Probe changes all of that. Pants your opponent and then strip them down until they have nothing less. It may sound sexy, and it is. There's a very good reason we're running this suite of sweet cards. Finally, 3 Thoughtseize are here because we are an Ad Nauseam deck no longer! This means we can throw our life total right into the wind. And it's important for us to be able to steal cards and turns and games from our opponent. That's precisely what Thoughtseize is for, and it is a huge upgrade from Duress or Inquisition of Kozilek.

Sideboarding should be crafted with a premeditation of bumps along the road you might encounter during your tournament matches, and as such, you need to have a plan in place so that you can put the petal to the metal.

Now go forth! Drop a big fat 8 ball on everyone next time you play Legacy. Tendrils the you-know-what out of everyone! Remember your Storm triggers and don't forget to retain priority with your Infernal Tutor on the stack with Lion's Eye Diamond. You're playing with power! Thanks for reading.

Zachariah Henzel 8/18/15

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Deck Reviews / [Legacy] PAST IN FLAMES TENDRILS OF AGONY

« on: August 19, 2015, 04:04:00 am »

PAST IN FLAMES TENDRILS OF AGONY

What's in a name? 

As some of you astute Storm player might spot right away, this is a land-light, Tutor-heavy, 2 preordain, 1 Tendrils, PiF iteration of Storm. We threw the Ad Nauseam to the board (it is very, very powerful but plays poorly with our 4 copies of Dark Petition) and upped our Tutor count to a whopping 8 total. 8 copies of a card that lets us get whatever we need. Infernal Tutor is still the best Tutor, because it will always cost an investment of 2 paltry mana. Dark Petition with >5 mana floating will enable a Past in Flames kill or leave enough residual mana in pool for Tendrils of Agony. Pondering and seeing some mixture of these 2 Tutors and having a gripful of mana is pure joy; it is really stinking powerful and surely will raise eyebrows quicker than a Zendikar fetchland's price on the secondary market!

We play with 3 Thoughtseize in the maindeck! How cool is that? How powerful is that? How in the world!? It's true, though, that we want to combo Cabal Therapy with Probe, but now have a truly powerful disruption package in these two discard spells. We're not worried about our life total and thus we can finally play a heavy number of this card and it's remarkable. Thoughtseize doesn't care and being able to steal away any piece of our opponents' hand is a big upgrade over Duress.

We are heavily in Black. Bayou, Badlands, Swamp and Underground Sea are actually our best lands. The Island will simply let us play around Wasteland and cast Ponder and Brainstorm. 8 Fetchlands to make our cantrips even better and 2 (count 'em!) business spells. 8 fast-mana artifact round off the important pieces of our deck. We're fast, we're powerful and we're consistent. Leave that Mystical Tutor at home and bring on the Past in Flames and Tendrils of Agony!

I am excited to present to you my new vision of Storm in Legacy. So take a sample hand, sleeve this up and remember your Storm Triggers and retain priority when you're putting those Tutors on the stack with an Diamond in play. Any comments are appreciated. This is perfectly fine SB plan for an unknown Legacy metagame, and as always prepare a plan for your own sideboard! Merry Tendrils and to all good night.