I would like to add my sympathies and best wishes to the chorus of the rest of the vintage community. When I was starting out in this game several years ago, I had a trade binder stolen that amounted to nowhere near what you've lost, and I remember what a blow it was to my countenance. The way you are handling this, Roland, is an enormous credit to a character that the TMD community has already attested to. While my collection had been more or less reduced to draft scraps and a single in-progress deck, if there is anything outside of material contributions I can do to help (I will, of course, be keeping an eye out for any suspicious dealings or cards matching your descriptions), please let me know.

While I am duly impressed by both your finishes with the deck and your well-written article, I am not so impressed with your analysis of Smokestack. I think this point, in particular, is thoroughly misguided.

Since you don't provide any particular definition for "mid-to-late" game, I will offer one: a state of semi-developed or well-developed mana in which players can play either their high-curve cards (say, Gifts Ungiven) or a mid-curve and low-curve card in the same turn (Mana Drain or Thirst plus a Brainstorm). If you have something different in mind when you say mid-to-late game, please enlighten us, as vagueness about this sort of thing leads to a lot of running in circles (See: Luck in Magic).

Allow me, based on this definition, to introduce you to another card that is a very suboptimal draw in the mid to late game. In fact, I would estimate that 8/10 times I draw this card in that game state, I lose the game. It is so weak in the late game, in fact, that it is usually significantly less powerful than drawing a land with an empty hand in this state. This card is Dark Ritual, and everything I've said about it is completely insignificant. So insignificant, in fact, that it's retarded half-brother is usually at least a two-of.

Combo is willing to play cards that suck in the mid-to-late game because it is designed to, ideally, never, ever go there. It wants to force other decks to play entirely during the early game with hands full of cards that are bombs in the mid-to-late game, leveraging tempo cards like Dark Ritual to ensure those bombs never come online.

Stax, in its traditional forms, is very similar to combo decks in this respect, except that it "combos out" over a number of turns. Rather than compressing the entire game to fit inside the frame of the first 2.2 sources of mana, it expands the first 2.2 sources of mana over many turns, by using Gorilla Shaman/Null Rod/CotV/Karn to shut out opposing moxen, and then attacking the opponent's land. The latter is accomplished chiefly by Waste effects, recurred or otherwise, and Smokestack. Smokestack may do all of the things you said, but it is absolutely the most powerful card available for perpetuating this under-developed, early-game state. This has always been the goal of Stax decks: to retard the game so much that their opponents are reduced to playing, if anything at all, only support cards, and no actual threats, and Smokestack is absolutely the best card in your arsenal to ensure your opponent remains in this game state permanently.

I don't want to sound to negitive, so I'll end on an unrelated note: it's good to see someone else playing Time Walk in a 5c "Stax" deck. It's constant disinclusion from lists since Cron's has perplexed me to no end, as it really is about the best play this deck has turn one off a 5c land and a mox, and probably the second-strongest turn one play it has after Trinisphere.

You and your team are soooooo greedy.

Seriously, how regularly do you have the four+ mana per turn necessary to make this guy better than Isochron Scepter within a relevant timeframe? I like the cute Reset kills with Fire/Ice and all, and I can see how Izzet GM could crack a Drain mirror in half if you both hand 10000 mana, but it looks like you're really bending over backwards to accomodate that possibility. When was the last time Intuition/AK was fast enough for this format?

I will grant you, though, Izzet GM + Time Walk was pretty hot the last time I cube-drafted it.

Wrong answer. Crucible + Strip + Chalice at Zero is a hell of a lock to work around. If they counter Chalice, you have nothing to weld out, and nothing to weld in, unless you fancy exchanging your crucible for a chalice at zero after they drop their moxen.

Smennen is bang on about what to do with this hand.

If you're willing to make this leap, that your opponent, given a FoW, will Force your Dark Ritual, then you can lead with Dark Ritual and, if it resolves, skip the duress and win right now. This plan loses if your opponent kept something like Force, a single bomb like Recall or Gifts, say, a Chalice, and mana, since they won't Force until they absolutely have to, but leading with Duress doesn't seem to remedy that in any way, since you can either take their bomb and lose to Chalice at one, or take Chalice and be playing through lots of cards + FoW. Making this assumption, the only situation where Duress would really be relevant is if they had only one piece of fast mana to support both Chalice and Gifts (say, a Mana Crypt), or had no relevant pieces at all and were on the unprotected Recall into goodies plan, which seems like a fairly weak plan on the draw against a deck that plays both FoW and Duress. If you can put your opponent on only rolling with certain hands and certain plays, then leading with Dark Ritual seems much stronger.

EDIT

This is assuming that there are not situations where he would Force Ritual and follow up with something dynamite, but would not Force the Duress that could steal his cash play. I'd say that's a fairly solid assumption. Obviously if he Force's Ritual and follows up with something insane, you're in an awful position, but if he Forces your Duress and follows up with the insane play he was protecting, you're on equally unsteady ground, and you now have Ritual to try to win right now, instead of Duress to try to counteract you're opponent's insanity. I wouldn't think anything that doesn't have your opponent dominating your turn two Will/Necro, or winning on the spot, would be worth protecting from Duress with Force.

If it were simply a matter of trading card for card with your opponent, it would be arguable that Garza Zol was better, depending on the density of cards your opponent could draw that scare you vs. cards you could draw that would stop scary things your opponent did. The problem, though, is that they don't just get an extra card, they get an extra untap step too.

I could see it in a more comboish Oath, like the Krosan Reclamation play mentioned, or one that plays, say, Mystical Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Regrowth, so that you could aggressively search out Time Walk after Oathing, depending on what ended up in your graveyard, but in builds like ICBM I think the extra untap breaks the camel's back.

I want this hand to win, or put itself in position to win (eg Necro on the table, reset the grip) no later than turn 2, to minimize the chance of running into multiple disruption spells against Fish, Stax, anything with counters, etc. Aside from Stax, these decks really have a tough time getting proactive disruption spells online turn one, and can usually muster at best one reactive disruption spell, FoW, by then. Those are the odds I would put myself up against with no outside information (for those of us who aren't good enough to focus on stuff like body cues and still play our deck): How do I win turn two through a FoW?

I'm assuming we're against an unknown opponent. The relevant plays without knowing another card are: Brainstorm followed by Imperial Seal, Imperial Seal followed by Brainstorm, either one of these followed by Sol Ring, or Sol Ring followed by Demonic Tutor for X, which may lead to another series of plays if x = Black Lotus or some other mana source. All of these plays, except for Imperial Seal followed by Brainstorm, point towards turn two wins. If we use Imperial Seal to fetch Lotus, and then Brainstorm into Lotus, this hand could potentially turn into a turn one win if we see a Dark Ritual as well, allowing for: Seal -> Lotus, BS into Lotus Ritual X, putting back Grim Tutor and X, Lotus Ritual Sol Ring Demonic Tutor for Will Will Floating one, easy turn one win. This requires a Dark Ritual within two cards, and our opponent to not have FoW, though, so I'd consider this play suboptimal.

Sol Ring followed by Demonic Tutor for Black Lotus intrigues me, because you can cast both Grim Tutor and Imperial Seal on turn one, giving you a mighty powerful set of options and setting you up for what appears to be a ridiculous Will on turn two, and one that would not be vulnerable to an opposing Duress. Your powerful turn two Will is, however, short a mana or a storm if you Grim Tutor for Duress and, well, short a duress if you Grim Tutor for a mana element of some kind. Turn two unprotected win doesn't really seem that sexy given the number of options this hand has.

Ultimately, this hand is short on one element or the other if you lean on just the tutors to find exactly what you need, which leads me towards turn one Brainstorm; not itself a key element of comboing off, but it will likely turn itself into one of the key elements you need, making your tutoring paths more clear. Brainstorm is a semi-random element, and it's better to sort that out before you tutor rather than after, so you know for certain what the hand needs to win. The Brainstorm is made so much stronger by the fact that you can still I. Seal on turn one, getting rid of things you don't need and finding things you do.

Seeing the cards Steve saw, I followed a few of the pathways and keep coming up either a mana or a storm short of turn two Will with Duress backup. This was, of course, my first reaction to looking at these cards, since my ability to play Tendrills is more or less restricted to "Fuh Fuh Fuh tutor for Yawgmoth's Will," something that severely hampers my ability to play decks like Grim Long with, you know, other threats.

Anyway, I digress. The point is, Will does not appear to be a viable pathway with this hand given the parameters I set for myself at the beginning, to put myself in a position to win turn two through a FoW. We may have to reset those parameters given our options, but this hand looks like it has enough power to be able to do SOMETHING ridiculous on turn two.

The first thing that jumps out at me immediately is that, if we're not going to cast Imperial Seal right now, we either have to get rid of it, or keep a hand that includes both Sol Ring and Time Walk, in order to make it effective before our opponent gets a swipe at a second land. Time Walk + Imperial Seal looks like a mana free tutor, but it's also a storm free tutor, it costs us a card, and it severely hampers what we keep from our Brainstorm.

Now that we have Dark Ritual, we can support Grim Tutor without having it tie up our entire ability to play spells during the turn. However, it's still a very expensive way to find the card we need. We can also stil play out the Demonic Tutor -> Black Lotus -> Sol Ring -> Grim Tutor + I. Seal plan. Alternatively, we can put back I. Seal and Time Walk, and use the two Tutors for Black Lotus and Duress, using Duress to push through Wheel. This seems like an awful lot of work for a Wheel with one mana open, but unlike rureddy31's play, falls under the parameters I've set for myself.

Given that this hand doesn't look like it can simply bend the opponent over the table on turn two, I think my play of choice would be putting back I. Seal and Time Walk, casting Ritual, Sol Ring, Grim Tutor for Duress, and pass. This leaves you with B2x next turn for mana, and a hand of Duress, Demonic Tutor, and Wheel of Fortune. Next turn, I would Duress, garnering more information about the opponent's hand, and, depending on what I saw, reset my parameters to adapt to my opponent's capabilities. This could include Tutoring up Lotus and Casting Wheel floating a kind of junky R mana, or baiting with Wheel if our opponent shows us the stones, probably involving Recall in response to Duress, and Force + more gas that requires us to get some blue cards out of their hand before they steamroll us. Alternatively, I could put back Sol Ring and Grim Tutor, cast Ritual Demonic Tutor for Duress and I. Seal for Lotus, putting myself firmly on the Wheel plan right now, in exchange for having mana of my choice available rather than R after resolving a turn two Wheel. Neither of these plays seem absolutely fantastic from my perspective, but I don't have enough experience with Grim Long to know whether or not Wheel with 1 mana of any colour and no land drop yet this turn is good enough on turn two. Any opinions on this from players more experienced with the deck?

The other alternative along my parameters is to put back Grim tutor and Time Walk, Ritual into Demonic Tutor for Lotus, drop Lotus. If it resolves, RRR, Sol Ring, Wheel floating RB. If it's countered, Imperial Seal for Lion's Eye Diamond. Next turn, Sol Ring, LED, Wheel floating BBB and any Will at this point goes nuclear. If the Lotus resolves and the Wheel is countered, you end up casting Imperial Seal, fetching Ancestral Recall, and casting a turn two recall with B2 available to you that turn. This is a more aggressive approach, and exchanges some degree of certainty in forcing through your Wheel for a much more powerful Wheel if your opponent doesn't have the Force, giving them an unmulliganable hand, and giving you information about what they're playing and what they have left, leading to what they might have in their hand. This is the approach I would take in a Stax heavy metagame, or if my opponent had mulliganed without much consideration, something I'd take as a sign of a more aggressive combo or Stax deck, rather than something more likely to have Force. This approach also becomes weaker the further into a tournament you get, as you're less likely to run into players keeping weak hands, players playing poor decks, etc., although you should have a better scouting report on your opponent by then. Much of the strength of this play also depends on exactly how strong the Recall backup plan is, something that I would again require more experience to comment on.

All in all, independant of any of the tournament factors, I would probably go for the final plan, but this is a product of a more aggressive stance and probably overvaluing Ancestral Recall to some degree. Thoughts?

I'm not going to argue with the rest of your post, since I don't know how to play magic, but this bit seems counterintuitive. How does brainstorming now guarantee your mana for next turn? Your odds of drawing a land are worse if you brainstorm now than if you brainstorm after seeing an additional card. The only card that I could see being more relevant if you resolve brainstorm now rather than later is Vampiric Tutor, which could put Lotus on top if you're fearless, or some other source if you smell FoW.

I find it very strange that milling your opponent repeatedly looking for the desired stacking of their deck could be considered stalling. It seems fairly obvious that putting three cards in your opponent's graveyard, and using up three mana in your mana pool, is advancing the game state. If the order of the library is relevant, which it is with blessing, milling their library into their graveyard over and over in an attempt to reset blessing as the bottom card would be an attempt to advance the game state.

You just owned your own post.

I'm curious as to what your plan is against faster combo. It seems like this deck would have an awful time against, say, a competant IT player.

Yes, you're drawing a ton of cards, but you want them all on the table. This deck doesn't have a whole lot of cards it wants to hold; it wants to apply pressure right now. If you're trying to play wretches, LoA will make your manabase cry.

Wretch would work if room could be made for Aether Vial, which would also probably make Remand a lot better, but like Eric said slots are tight. You'd probably have to cut off-colour moxen, and it would mean Confidant comes down on turn 3 instead of turn 1, which is two missed draws.

I think this is the wrong deck for him, and personally I've never been a fan of cards you need to keep mana open for in aggro, but if you wanted to play him, Aether Vial is the way to go.

The only black card you mentioned in all of that was Duress. I understand that this deck started as an experiment to see how Confidant would work in Fish, but I wonder how important the black cards are to this deck, and if UWR Mox Fish might be stronger, because the key elements of this deck that keep getting talked about seem to be the moxes and the monkey/chalice set that allows for them.

Also, I was wondering what, if any, artifacts with activated abilities were tested. I know you said you didn't like Jitte, and I seem to remember something about SoFI; I suppose Vial wouldn't be very good, although it seems like it would be a beating in a UWR version, although, without the Confidant draw engine, it might be too much deadweight. *shrugs* just spitballing.

Reading lists is tech.

That said, you're somewhat right about Will. While you can win without it, removing it is a serious pain, and if you've already gone through the first half of your turn setting it up you've probably wasted an awful lot of momentum. This, of course, doesn't change the fact that the deck really desperately wants a good business spell, and it isn't mystical tutor.

I wanted Breakthrough to be good so badly, but it just wasn't. If you can dump your hand and generate a ton of mana, you get to look at the top four and keep the gassiest, which makes it mildly better than Impulse for setting up and getting crap out of your hand.

I've considered are Consultation and Spoils, but the results are inconclusive. Spoils is occasionally better and occasionally worse because of the Mirage Tutors, but because it would probably be in place of Mystical anyways, so this interaction probably isn't enough to make spoils stronger than consultation.

The biggest problem with not having land grant is the mana ratios. I find myself either mulliganing a lot of no-landers, or getting stuck with a land in hand having played one already, thus not being able to cast infernal tutor. It's not really a storm thing at all.

That being said, I've already noted some of the problems with Land Grant in the three sample hands, and I think Vegeta covered the rest. The problem is especially evident with Draw-7s in the deck.

I guess I might as well post the list I've been working on:

//NAME: DiscoInfernal
// Winning
        2 Tendrils of Agony
        1 Timetwister
        1 Necropotence
        1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
        1 Yawgmoth's Will
        1 Memory Jar
// Search
        1 Imperial Seal
        1 Vampiric Tutor
        4 Infernal Tutor
        4 Brainstorm
        1 Ancestral Recall
        1 Demonic Tutor
        1 Tinker
        1 Mystical Tutor
// Disruption
        2 Duress
        4 Unmask
        1 Hurkyl's Recall
        1 Chain of Vapor
// Acceleration
        3 Cabal Ritual
        4 Dark Ritual
        1 Lion's Eye Diamond
        1 Black Lotus
        1 Mox Sapphire
        1 Mox Jet
        1 Mox Emerald
        1 Mox Pearl
        1 Mox Ruby
        1 Mana Crypt
        1 Sol Ring
        1 Mana Vault
        1 Lotus Petal
        1 Chrome Mox
// Lands
        2 Underground Sea
        1 Island
        2 Swamp
        1 Flooded Strand
        1 Bloodstained Mire
        4 Polluted Delta
        1 Tolarian Academy

There are all kinds of problems with this deck. You need at least UU for Mystical Tutor to do anything this turn, and it, along with Hurkyl's and Chain, is absolutely awful when it's not brilliant. The only reason it makes the cut is the genuine need for one more business spell, and this deck DOES need that business spell. Memory Jar can be a nightmare to get out of your hand, and drawing Tinker and Jar can be frustrating. Despite all of this, the deck feels like it has enormous potential. It could just be that when Infernal Tutor works, it's like playing Grim Long with two free mana, so what I'm feeling might just be Grim Long going extra broken when it's not crapping on itself.

Thoughts?

You're right, you could board just about anything else, but that's because you're playing against Storm Combo with Accumulated Knowledge.

One of the great strengths of Unmask is the ability to cast it before resolving your mana. An adept player can stick you by Forcing a Dark Ritual cast off your last remaining source of Black Mana. I've run into this mostly after casting draw-7s, but my build doesn't run Land Grant and carries more lands than the ones in this thread.

Getting to Recall or Will first and then Forcing their original spell off your copy is cute, but for the most part this is a sketchy soft counter that doesn't hit Oath of Druids or Stax parts. I can't think of a deck that would rather have this card than Mana Leak.

I guess I'm going to be the one to play devil's advocate here, since everyone else seems to be having fun whacking off on turn 1 with this thing.

What matchups have you improved by building a blisteringly fast deck that folds up on itself 10% of the time?

Turn 1 kills are all well and good, but they don't kill any better than turn ten kills. Of your three goldfishes, all three fold to Force of Will (1 and 3 on Land Grant, 2 on Demonic Tutor), and, what's more, your opponent KNOWS that they fold to Force of Will. You also can't win around a turn 1 Sphere of Resistence. You've given up resilience for speed. What matchups does this speed improve?

Furthermore, all three of those hands win if Infernal Tutor is Grim Tutor. Your deck is over-exploding; you have more mana than you need to go off. Why not just play with Grim Tutors and be able to tutor properly when you have cards in your hand?

Without Unmask, you have precisely 2 ways to get rid of a Bargain or Tendrils in your hand without casting it. You also need a ritual in hand or you get stuck on 2 x Infernal Tutor.

If you're going to add blue to the deck, add Brainstrom. It's the best Hellbent-enabler this side of LED, and better than Ancestral Recall at least half the time with Infernal Tutor in the deck. It will also reduce the number of hands that you get stuck with all mana and no gas, but you'll have to cut some mana to fit it in (probably ESG, which is doesn't add to storm count and only nets one mana), meaning some of your turn 1 kills will have to slow down a bit.

That's all for this five minutes. I'll probably come back with more later.


EDIT Vegeta hit two of the nails on the head, except he said "every" instead of "this"

Actually, tutoring for a second Dark Ritual goes fairly far in setting up a game-ending Will, and if you have Threshold, a second Cabal Ritual nets you mana.

Vegeta: Was that a specific reference to Coffin Purge? I was just throwing out something off the top of my head that I had had to play around in the past. It's possible that my reduced comfort level with the deck (after all, I had never seen it before Richmond, and I'd been more or less on hiatus since the summer prior to picking it up) and the metagame caused me to tense up at possibilities I didn't have to worry about. I still find that I will occasionally set up over multiple turns, which makes Tormod's Crypt a concern.

Brian: I did consider putting in a bit about Jester's Cap; however, that has more to do with strict numbers than with diversity. Having four of the same threat is not necessarily a problem against Cap, even if you only have one path to victory.

MoxLotus: I did not test post-board, so Bob and the additional Tendrils weren't relevant. I figured for this sort of experiment, it was best to test this deck in a more "natural" form.

Was Remand in your maindeck? I copied it down hurriedly. I might have missed something.

The bounce does help, but I never seem to draw 2-3 artifact sources and the bounce spell to make it enough. It's possible I'm dropping a mox here or there that I shouldn't on auto-pilot, but I'm usually pretty good at balancing playing around Chalice and holding enough for storm. It's possible that I was too aggressive shuffling the bounce spells away in this experiment, because I'm used to not needing them to win, and without the right colour moxes I find they have a tendancy to leave me with 4 mana too many and U or B too few.

Keep in mind I am by no means presenting a conclusion based on my experiences. I'm sure the results had as deep a grounding in lack of sleep, experience, and playskill as in anything. But it brought to mind a possibility I felt was worth exploring. Also, as much as I talked about IT specifically, I am more curious about the theory behind diversification/focus than it's applications to one specific deck.

First off, let me say that, while this is not a deck discussion per se, I have been toying with the Intuition Tendrils deck since Richmond, and it is in this context that the ideas presented here were developed. As such, I will be making reference to the deck frequently. Please try to keep any discussion centered on the ideas, and not on the deck.

I'm no good at the whole research portion of this, and my time is cramped these days besides, so you'll have to take my word for it that Stephen Menendian once said that the best deck in Vintage was the one that best abused Yawgmoth's Will. In recent years, a number of dominant decks, and some very good decks besides, can be traced to this basic premise. Any Long varient, Gifts, and to a lesser extent TPS, and most Mana-drain based Control decks, tended more and more to end the game with a juicy Will.

What the first two did, that the latter two didn't, was refine themselves to abuse Will, to the point where their entire game plan revolved around setting up the game-breaking sorcery. Whereas a deck like TPS had draw-7s to conceivably storm up a lethal Tendrils without Will, and something like Control Slaver could simply weld in something fat and go to town, the former two would confine themselves solely to a single Tinker->Darksteel Colossus playas an altenative to casting Will.

Enter Intuition Tendrils at Richmond. The deck forgoes even this least burdensome, card slot-wise, alternative win. Even more telling was that it trimmed itself down to a single draw 7, forsaking a TPS-like saturation of bombs for a trimmer, more efficient Will deck. Almost every win I have gotten with the deck stems from Will, and in the few situations where it doesn't, one of two things has occured 95% of the time:

1) I could have done things more easily if I had gone for Will, but was concerned about Will-specific hate (e.g. Coffin Purge) from the sideboard
2) I had had Will cut off from me, and was forced to go for an alternative, harder route

Looking back at these two situations, I was mightily concerned. I decided, for the sake of science, to experiment, at first with some Goldfishes, and then with real opponents. I took the 60 card build from Richmond and ran it against a handful of average players with average decks online, with one small change to the decklist.

I took Will out.

No replacement card. I simply played with a 59 card deck. While this may harm mana ratios and have some other small effects, those numbers are irrelevant in light of the numbers I came across. In the span of no less than 20 matches, I won three games. Those games were mana-heavy hands that had just enough disruption to resolve Bargain, and got good draws from the resolved Bargain besides.

A deck which previously Goldfished between turns two and three with disruption backup sputtered to win by turn five without bothering with FoW or Duress.

This may seem perfectly obvious to all of you, and I certainly hope it does, but for those of you not in the know, IT sucks without Yawgmoth's Will. Intuition is quite frankly terrible when you don't get to cast the cards you dump in the yard. Grim Tutor for what? There's no way to recoup the mana from overcosted tutors. You're more or less forced to sculpt a giant hand of mana, usually containing one of your two mass bounce spells, and Tendrils.

But with Will in the deck, it puts up top 8s like it's nothing.

Focused? Or narrow?

Control Slaver has been declared dead by enough people enough times to make anyone's head spin, but it continues to put up impressive finishes in large tournaments. What Control Slaver has, that IT certainly does not, is diversity. Especially with the new Burning Slaver builds, the variety of ways the deck has to actually win the game is enormous. Setting up a gamebreaking Will is one, setting up Tinker is another, setting up Goblin Welder with TfK, or Mana Draining into a big threat. Playing against Control Slaver, you have to worry about stopping Will, Welder, and Fat Men from Heaven and it is damn near impossible to do all three with one card, or one strategy. Conversely, against IT, stopping the Will stops the deck, as my little experiment demonstrated fairly clearly.

IT is clearly a very powerful deck, and there's no denying that the designers did a fantastic job. They created possibly the most efficient Will deck since the original Long got LED and Burning Wish banned. The question I'm posing, in my own roundabout way, is: is the deck too good at one thing? Does the deck's focus on resolving Yawgmoth's Will make it too easy to combat? At what point are you trading too much resiliency for too little power?

I'm wording my question poorly, but I hope the jist of it gets through.

Playing Sapphire into Chalice for 0 is tech.

I think there's a great deal more to be said for holding Timewalk than the above poster thinks. Simply put, untapping and dropping a land isn't that strong unless it's your second blue one. I can't count the number of times I've lost games I would have won if I had had knowledge of an opponent's Timewalk and played accordingly. While they've gotten less frequent as I've gotten better at reading my opponents, I don't think I can overstate how hard it is play properly when you have one less turn than you think. The more turns an opponent takes to try to set up, the more chances they're given to make these types of mistakes.

Congrats on your finishes, and on finally realizing how awful Duplicant is and how awesome Karn is.

I'm going to skip about a page of reading, since my dinner time is fairly restricted and I have to get to the gym beforehand. Pardon me if I repeat anything that's already been said.

I think, from JD's assertions, that I've been trying to make Ubastax play the way Morrison Stax plays. Part of this goes back to my days playing Kronstax extensively in a Gifts-heavy metagame, where a resolved Tinker, with it's pants around it's ankles, for Sundering Ben (when did this card get re-named after me?) was usually enough, and part of it is my natural playstyle. Further evidence of this is my attempt to somehow fit Karn into the deck despite the presence of Null Rod. The question is, can this work? It's been asserted that UbaStax doesn't do anything with the time it buys. So JD puts forward the question above: What can the deck do with time?

To be honest, I think one of the biggest things that contributed to this question was the removal of the fourth Bazaar. I'll get to why in a second, but for now I'll say that using Bazaar optimally in this deck is undoubtedly the thing I have the most trouble with. I still screw up Bazaar when I goldfish, for God's sake. It's too easy to just go into auto-dig mode, but often you end up in that whole "upkeep, mill two, next turn choose one of four, repeat" stage. Maybe it's my natural aggression, but laying off the gas pedal and just SITTING THERE, even when it's right, is one of the hardest things for me to do.

JD's feeling that the tutor chain and tinker gives Chang Stax something that Uba Stax doesn't have, I think, is misplaced. UbaStax should, by all rights, see what it wants to see 85% of the time with the time it generates, simply because of the sheer number of cards Bazaar can show you. This doesn't, of course, address what it is Uba Stax wants to see. I'll get to that in a second. But, in my opinion, there is not nearly the size of gap JD senses between the tutors and bazaar at finding what you need to find, and part of this gap was the use of only three bazaars, which in all probability caused him to see them at later stages in his "downtime," that time when both players are topdecking, and he perceives the gifts player as topdecking more effective cards. The other part of this misperception is that the 15% of the time when you DON'T see what you need and have Bazaar going is infinitely more than the 0% of the time you see a tutor and it doesn't find you what you need. It's hard to compare anything to 0% without it appearing inflated.

So what is it that Ubastax wants to see? Tinker has just the slightest tendency to end the game when it resolves. Ubastax only possible replacement for such "I win right now" power is Karn, and only then without the presence of Null Rod and with the presence of a great deal of lock parts. This solves just the "what do I do now" situations, and Karn's ability to go to town in other situations is the only thing that saves him from being a "win-more" card in what seems to be, if I'm not misinterpreting JD's view, a "win-more" deck, at least in the sense that the deck tends to go for overkill. What about in other situations? As I said earlier, Kronstax ability to run a naked tinker and just win, combined with the tutor chain, handed it wins it had no other conceivable right to. Is this effect replacable in Ubastax, other than the narrow situation above?

To be frank, no. Ubastax does not, and will not, get wins it has no other right to. It does, however, have a card that puts the opponent away under a little pressure, which is what JD wants Tinker to do the vast majority of the time. The card that Ubastax is searching for is Smokestack. It's been noted that Smokestack is the unique lock part in the plethora available to Stax decks, because it deals with what has already happened as well as (not instead of) what could happen in the future. This is why the fourth Bazaar is so crucial. Smokestack is the card, and the ONLY card, that brings this all together. It is the card that exploits those "what do I do now" situations, and the one the prevents control or combo from just "whacking off for infy turns," as Moxlotus put it. What makes the fourth Bazaar so critical, and what makes Smokestack different from a bomb like Tinker, is that Smokestack only accomplishes what Tinker does during the first part of the downtime. Look at JD's three topdecks where he compares what Gifts and Stax do with their downtime. Now move Smokestack to the front of that list. All of a sudden, the other two topdecks become irrelevant, and Ubastax wins that game. With one more Bazaar, you're going to be three cards deeper an awful lot sooner, and that Smokestack will come down more often when it has to. If we're playing Morrison Stax, and the third topdeck is Tinker, things are fine and dandy, and we win that game to.

The precurser to JD's question which I put at the beginning of this post was that Morrison Stax finds Tinker. Asking, directly afterwards, what Ubastax does in that time, is misleading, because what Ubastax does in that time is fundamentally different from trying to find Tinker, and likening the two is bound to lead to poor comparisons. Both cards put the game away, but Ubastax is put at the disadvantage of needing to do it sooner rather than later.

Way back in the dark days after the restriction of Trinisphere, before any major tournaments, the online metagame was a bit of a mess. JD may remember, if he stretches back long enough, a handful of games against a monstrosity of a UW Fish deck running Glowrider, which was a complete house against the Jank CS and Jank Combo that was rampant at the time. The theory went like this: Fish has bad cards. Other decks have good cards. Fish should, therefore, seek to prevent the other decks from resolving their good cards, so that it can win with bad cards. By playing bad cards which push back the resolution of the good cards, Fish can deal enough damage to win. Glowrider, Null Rod, Meddling Mage, True Beleiver, Spiketail Hatchling, and soforth, kept pushing back the resolution of backbreaking spells like Tinker, Tendrils, or Thirst For Knowledge (with a Welder). Just keep that window shut long enough to deal twenty damage.

What I was doing, was trying to play Stax with dorks. Ubastax overloads on lockparts in order to stretch out the downtime as long as possible, in the same way that that Fish deck overloaded on little bits of mana disruption in order to stretch out the opponent's downtime as long as possible. However, instead of keeping that window shut for just long enough to deal 20, it uses Tangle Wire, Sphere of Resistence, Null Rod, wasteland, et all to try to make room for Smokestack AND some number of turns afterwards for Smokestack to do it's thing. It's a matter of keeping the window shut AFTER the bomb hits, and one of the problems you will sense when playing this deck is that, if you don't explode enough with it, you will have turns when you can either keep the window shut, or you can play Smokestack, but you won't be able to squeeze in both, and will run out of ways to keep it shut before you find the mana for both. This, incidentally, is why I think Tangle Wire is so good in this deck. It shuts the window for multiple turns but only requires one turn of mana, which allows you to squeeze in both in situations when no other lock part would.

Anyway, I expect this to be rambling, circular, and full of all sorts of holes, but the gym is calling my name. Hopefully, finding out about the holes will help me understand the deck, and magic in general, a little bit better.

Karn making Null Rod a beater is hot.

When did JD join the ranks of sadistic prison players? I thought I'd join the ranks of masturbatory combo players before that ever happened. What a strange world we live in.

Anyway, have the Uniball detractors noticed how wicked good it + Tangle Wire is against decks with Islands? I did some testing against Gifts the other night, and if you can turn off Force for a turn it's basically game over. I also noticed that Tangle Wire + Null Rod is not nearly as hot as Tangle Wire + Gorilla Shaman.

I did some minor tweaking after that sesh and came up with

17
30
2 Uba
3 Wire
3 Sph33r
2 Null Rod
2 Shaman
1 Karn

I'm not sure if there's too much mox hate or what. Maybe I'm overly aggressive with Chalice for 0 (which, by the way, is also much hotter with Tangle Wire than Null Rod), but I find myself drawing into hands that only work if I either set Chalice at 0 or drop turn 1 Null Rod and basically muck on Chalice for a few turns. Maybe I'll drop back down to one Shaman and end up more or less where I started.

Possessed Portal, I choose YOU!

Or were we back to being serious?