Welcome back!

This has to be unplayable in Vintage right? The plus ability is pretty meh. What are you really looking to hit with the minus ability? Oath of Druids maybe? I'd say Lodestone Golem, but I think if you can resolve a  non-creature, non-artifact spell against Shops you're probably winning anyways. You can get a Monastery Mentor or a Young Pyromancer, but at that point in the game chances are they'll have made some prowess monks or elementals that would make this guy little more than a very awkward removal spell. Maybe kill a mox or something? The ultimate ability is cute with BSC, but even that falls flat against a 2 toughness blocker as the bot dashes back to your hand. Even with as powerful as the effect is, 4 mana and wait 3 turns is a lot of work to make that happen.

The hype level in this thread is completely unacceptable. LET'S KICK IT UP A NOTCH!

It's been too long. I'm feeling the itch.

So it's sort of like a Recoup where it's  instead of  + the casting cost of the spell and instead of Flashback for  it's got overload for  ? I think the ability of Recoup to allow you force the issue after a Gifts pile makes it better there. I suppose this could be a way to cheat the cost on a super expensive instant or sorcery, so there's certainly potential here. Maybe with Time Stretch or Enter the Infinite or something like that?

It's definitely interesting. I think it hits the issue of costing  and being a sorcery though. As flexible as it is, most of the time if I can resolve a spell that costs that much it should be winning me the game. At the very least this seems like an awesome Burning Wish target if that deck ever comes back into vogue.

If the attendees of this event play Magic as well as they trash talk you might as well just give me that mox right now Craig. Saves everybody the time and cuts out the middle man.

You must be talking about a different Mox. Me and Bill Copes have already agreed to a prize split on this one. Also the second place prize. And somehow also 3rd-8th prizes also. And Craig's dignity.

Craig's reaction the last time I laid down the trash talk in one of his threads:

Interesting. Sphere effects typically get better with more sphere effects. Maybe this card could be the tipping point when working in conjunction with Glowrider and Thalia.

I think I took one look at this card and mentally tl'dr'd it. You mean to tell me that they printed other cards in conspiracy that weren't Dack Fayden?

I was wondering if perhaps some of this confusion might come from having seen Maze of Ith used? H is absolutely correct, untapping a creature alone does not remove it from combat. It only works in the case of Maze of Ith specifically because the card states that using the ability removes the creature from combat. Your example with the Blightsteel Colossus and Voltaic Key also does not work. Blightsteel would still be attacking despite being untapped in that scenario.



Master Decoy is another matter entirely. Master Decoy taps creatures, it does not untap them. If you were to tap a creature before it can be declared as an attacker it is not able to attack if it is already tapped at the time you declare attackers.

I don't think that putting this card on wheels and making it so you can't cast it off workshop makes it any better.

To my knowledge Steve was the only person to take on this undertaking. He's updated it here or there and crammed it in with some of his paid content. It probably wouldn't be difficult to update one of his older free lists by just making obvious cuts and adding the staples that have been printed since.

I am not sure that I'm the best person to write a reply to this. It's been a long time since I've played the card, but I'll try.

You mention that Mana Drain is a   Counterspell, but nothing else. Counterspell is a   counterspell, there's more text on Mana Drain and that's what makes Mana Drain unique and special. Not only are you trading your spell for their spell, but in the process you are also stealing their mana, draining their mana if you will. It can be a massive tempo swing. You can counter some spell of theirs and then return to your turn with an added resource boost. You can leverage this into casting an expensive spell either ahead of the curve or being able to cast that spell as well as keeping a counter up. Given the right combination of cards this can also be leveraged into winning the game. Ever win a counter war by Mana Draining somebody's Force of Will, gone back to your turn and cast Yawg Will for   and still having   in your pool and all your other mana untapped? It's an incredibly powerful play.

I understand why Mana Drain has fallen out of vogue. They've printed a lot of powerful counters since Mana Drain's heyday. The game and decks have shifted as well. It's not as much keeper decks sitting there and playing draw go. I think Mana Drain still has a place in the right decks in the right metagame though. It fills a niche that nothing else quite does. Spell Pierce/Flusterstorm/Mental Misstep are situational counters. Spell Pierce and Flusterstorm lose value as the game grinds on and paying the mana becomes less of an issue. All of them are useless with a Lodestone Golem on the stack. Force of Will is the unshakable gold standard for counters, but it requires you to have an additional blue card and 1 life point or   lying around. Even when it does the job it doesn't give you that mana boost next turn.

Whether or not Mana Drain is right for your deck is another question. I don't think that Drain is a must have for control decks the way it once was. I suppose it depends on if you expect to have the mana available to cast it and once you resolve it if you will have a high enough density of appropriate spells to dump that stolen mana into. Maybe try out one copy and see how it goes?

The hyperbole is strong with this one.

It's sort of a strange project for Abrams. The bar has been set impossibly high by the original trilogy and at the same time remarkably low by the second trilogy.

Must...contain...hype....

I think this is a terrible idea.

1) The anti-synergy is bigger than just Chalice @ 1, Spheres and Golems also make Gitaxian Probe awful. The gulf between a 1 mana and 0 mana is as wide as the Grand Canyon. Your most consistent mana source is also ineligible to pay for it. If another deck had Gitaxian Probe and was playing against you, they would probably sideboard out some/all of the probes because they are so bad when those cards are on the table.

2) The information gained by casting probe isn't as important for a shops deck. The decks that can best use probe are the ones throwing haymakers. Combo has a lot of hands that fall apart to a Force of Will. If you probe and see Force of Will you can hold off and wait for a piece of disruption or a bait spell. If you see Misdirection or mental misstep you can hold off on that Ancestral Recall. Shop decks aren't built on 1 punch KOs, they're built on presenting opponents with a steady stream of disruption and threats. Gonna counter my first turn sphere of resistance? Well, ok, but I've got this Lodestone Golem coming down next turn. Got a counter for that too? Well next turn there's a Forgemaster coming. I can do this all day and eventually you're going to run out of counters. Can you win the game before I do that? The information gleaned from resolving a probe will probably not change your gameplan much. You can't just sit around and NOT play a threat because they have Force of Will. Maybe you can play your lesser threat and hope that it gets countered instead or figure out what to play your chalice at with more certainty, but it's probably not that different from what you would be doing in the dark.

3) There's really no way for your deck to leverage any added value out of Probe. You have only 3 blue sources, so if you have extra mana lying around you're probably still taking damage to cast it. You don't have Yawgmoth's Will or Snapcaster Mage to recur it from the Graveyard. You don't have Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time to benefit from the filling of the graveyard. You don't have any storm spells or Young Pyromancer/Monastery Mentor that benefit from the additional free spells being cast. All the decks that run Gitaxian Probe are able to squeeze extra value out of it in these ways.

Dave Williams 

Seriously, need to keep him on as a commentator or something.

Same. Specifically Matte Black. I haven't tried the hyper Matte sleeves, but I'm intrigued now that I've heard about them.

Was anybody else a bit thrown off that both Efro and Chris Pikula audibled into Shops after going 3-0 in the first trimester with another archetype? I figured if you were running that well in the first 3 matches you wouldn't want to change horse midstream, but I guess since they're both still undefeated there's something to be said for the surprise factor.

Hey Dave,

I took a look over your matches to see if I could spot any mistakes.

1) I thought there was a case to be made for you to be more aggressive with your mental misstep in your opening hand against Steve in game 1. I understand that his deck certainly has juicier targets than a preordain, but not many. The traditional magic wisdom is that when you're down on cards, as you were on the mulligan to 4, it's traditionally a bad idea to trade 1 for 1, but Dredge isn't a traditional magic deck and card advantage is sort of a bust when you consider that the deck's engine has inherent card disadvantage. When Steve followed up with the Brainstorm Efro and TomM were also questioning whether you would use the Misstep. I would be curious to know what your thought process was there. You ended up using it the following turn on a Delver of Secrets, but by then Steve had managed to find his own Mental Misstep and also got a token off Young Pyromancer for his trouble. This came up again in Game 2 when you allowed Mystical Tutor to resolve while holding two Mental Missteps. Mystical Tutor is a premium spell in that situation. I think TomM and Efro's commentary around the 35 minute mark was spot on. It sets you back somewhat on the potential draw to 8 and discard/slow dredge plan, and perhaps you felt VERY strongly that Steve's target would be Ancestral and then you could remove the possibility of Ancestral Recall as a topdeck, but I still think countering that Mystical was absolutely the right play.

2) Around the 16:00 mark in your match with Steve you correctly tapped your undiscovered paradise EOT to bring it back, but you neglected to make landfall on your turn to get the Bloodghast into play as TomM noted in the commentary. I can't believe that this is anything other than a mistake. Having the Bloodghast in play seems strictly better than not having him in play. Steve had an active Young Pyromancer so have the maximum number of zombie tokens could have meant the difference between attacking for lethal or coming up just short. Is there something I missed? It's a little difficult to see your graveyard, but it didn't seem like you were short on black creatures to feed to your Ichorid between the Golgari Thug and the Stinkweed Imp. You're also a very good percentage to hit more Ichorid food with your Bazaar dredges.

3) In game 1 with Efro I noticed that you activated Bazaar on your upkeep, but chose not to discard the Dread Return in hand. Again, it's a bit difficult to see exactly what you had in your graveyard and the hand cam seemed to be a little behind where the board state was, but it seemed like that should have been one of the cards discarded in that situation. I realize that Efro's deck was unknown to you at this point and I'm not 100% on the contents of your graveyard, so I'm willing to believe that maybe you had enough therapies and another Dread Return which almost certainly would have won you the game and perhaps you were playing around something ridiculous like a maindeck Ravenous Trap.

4) I was curious to know how aggressively you were mulliganing in those games where you got down to 1 card. Were you keeping any hand with Bazaar or were you looking for Bazaar + Anti-Hate only? It wasn't clear from the hand cam. If you were mulling bazaar hands I think that may have been a mistake. If you were keeping any Bazaar hand and you mulled to 1 twice in two matches that's a very bad beat as it's only a ~7% chance.

You're telling me somebody activated Mindslaver on you 8 times and didn't win the game?


Was this the only Slaver deck ever to not include some sort of gigantic robot to be welded in/tinkered for?

Seriously, 2 posts in the last 7 years? Gifts is bringing some folks out the woodwork.