Viashino Heretic  2R
1R, Tap: Destroy Target Artifact. Viashino Heretic deals to that artifact's
             controller damage equal to the artifact's total casting cost.
1/3

In testing out PTW's latest Gay/R builds I began to wonder why he filled one slot with a gorilla shaman. It seemed (to me at least) that the shaman was merely adding redundancy to the job that null rods already do in the deck, with the added benefit of a small man. Several times gorilla shaman seemed to fall short for me. These shortcomings become painfully obvious when facing the slaver and 7/10 split matchups which seem to be becoming more and more frequent in the tourneys I attend. The inability of gorilla shaman to hit artifact creatures coupled with the fact that killing anything over 2cc is next to impossible led me to look for a different option. In looking through my boxes of cards i came upon the Viashno Heretic, which I had forgotten about since around 1999. I was wondering if anyone else thought that perhaps this creature could be used in the slot normally reserved for gorilla shaman in an attempt to try and shore up one of Gay Red's big weaknesses: its inability to do anything meaningful against fat like Sundering Titan and Platinum Angel. I tried to weigh the pros and cons of the two creatures, and heres what i have been able to come up with:

Gorilla Shaman

Pros:
Can be cast turn 1 (helps with standstill)
Gets to work immediately if necessary
Can eat more than 1 artifact in the same turn
Is a monkey (and thats just cool)

Cons:
Cannot kill artifact creatures
Killing anything higher than 2cc is probably not gonna happen
Is only a 1/1
Killing artifacts other than moxen eats up lots of your tempo


Viashino Heretic

Pros:
Can be a decent blocker against goblins and other small men
Can hit any artifact for two mana
Cancels out some tempo loss by doing damage
Can be enchanted with curiosity or sigil of sleep in a pinch
Can do a crap-load of damage if he eats big men

Cons:
Costs three mana
Costs three mana (this is a big one)
Can only be used once a turn


In closing, is the three mana cost of heretic just too big a barrier for him to replace gorilla shaman? Would shaman's creature slot be better used to shore up a weakness rather than give efficient redundancy? What do you guys think?

just need to make sure of something:
Can Stifle be used to counter the fading ability, resulting in the fading card having no counters on it?

My question is this: When goblin recruiter's ability resolves and i reveal the chosen goblins to my opponant, do they stay revealed when i stack them on top of my deck? essentially, does my opp. get to see the order i place them in?

I have recently begun learning to play food chain goblins and have been encountering some problems in my (admittedly limited) playtesting that I was hoping some players more experienced with the deck might be able to lend me a hand on. To start things off, here is the decklist i have been using (pretty basic, but just for reference, if theres something blaringly wrong here let me know):

Mana (25):
6 Mountain
4 Taiga
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Elvish Spirit Guides
2 Ancient Tomb
2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Sol Ring
1 Chrome Mox
1 Mana Crypt
1 Lotus Petal

Combo (4)
4 Food Chain

Men (31)
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Recruiter
4 Goblin Ringleader
4 Goblin Lackey
3 Goblin Matron
3 Gempalm Incinerator
3 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Goblin Warchief
1 Goblin Tinkerer
1 Skirk Prospector
1 Goblin Sharpshooter

I have been having some trouble identifying when the correct time to try and combo and when to just beatdown in certain matchups. In my testing the deck is not fast enough to try and beat down another combo deck (barring a turn 1 lackey). Is it worth it to try and mull to a combo hand if facing a deck such as trix or any various tendrils build, or is the best bet to bank on them not being able to race your beatdown if your original hand is not a combo hand? This same question applies when facing another, faster beatdown deck (I have been losing to other beatdown decks in testing, and I am convinced that I am playing the deck fundamentally wrong). What role should I try and take versus the top tiers of decks?  
I apologize ahead of time if it seems that I am just begging for someone else to do my work for me, but there is not alot of T1 in Texas, and it is hard to get good players to test with. I thought it might me better to get some expert input before I go and figure it out for myself so I at least I can get off on the right foot for some real serious testing.

Thanks for any help

In my FCG version I found that with the wastes in, I found myself color screwed every so often and decided to remove them, this is the base i think is best for the deck without power or proxies:

(25)
1 Chrome Mox
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Strip Mine (still seemed worth it to run 1 as it can be randomly good)
2 Bloodstained Mire
3 Elvish Spirit Guides
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Taiga
6 Mountain

I could also see cutting 1 or both of the mires for an added tomb/esg if you feel they are needed, I chose to only run 1 tomb because drawing 2 is never a good thing

If I activate a Mishra's Factory during my upkeep and move +1/+1 counters on it from Forgotten Ancient, will the counters stay when the Factory reverts to being a land? If I moved 5 counters and reactivated the Factory on a later turn will it be a 7/7 or do the counters drop off because it is no longer a legal card type?

It also shuts down artifact lands (if anyone uses them)

Im looking for a judge to clear something up for me: Exactly what constitutes passing priority? Let me give you the situation:

My opponant is playing mono black and he has yawgmoth's bargain in play. He casts Promise of Power, pauses, and looks at me. I take this as him passing priority and tell him I am not going to counter his spell. After that he tries to respond to his spell by drawing cards with bargain (so that he will get a bigger demon). I tell him that once i pass priority that the promise resolves and he does not have a chance to draw cards before the demon comes into play, and he calls the judge. The judge rules that he can indeed draw the cards because looking at me does not constitute passing priority and I gave up the information that i was not going to counter the spell of my own volition, which i felt was unfair:

The way i understand it is that after he plays a spell, then he can respond to that spell before passing priority to me. After he casts a spell and passes priority to me, if I choose to pass it back then 2 players have passed in a row and the stack begins to resolve with no other room for responses. If my opponant did indeed wish to respond to his own spell, then he would have stated that he was responding to said spell as he cast it, not after he knew I did not have a counterspell. I thought that by pausing and looking at me, he was asking me if i was going to counter it (which im pretty sure he was) and by letting him take it back and draw the cards, which he would not have drawn if i had countered the spell,  he was at an unfair advantage. What exactly constitutes passing priority if looking up at your opponant does not? I do not know anyone who actually says "I am passing priority to you now"--So how is one to define it? I would like to know if my understanding of the stack is correct and how you would have ruled in the situation.

Thanks!

My bad, JO beat me to it

A sligh Player can respond to the triggered ability before it resolves, but if he is casting a spell (I assume red) it will cause another activiation that will have to resolve before the spell does. I.E. (responding to his activation) you can not kill a 2/2 dryad with a shock, but you could with Grim Lavamancer.

I have another question about this then. The floor rules clearly state that the game must be played in a timely manner, however it is unclear if that applies only to playing slowly--i.e. taking 2 mins between each decision--and your deck just taking alot of time to win--i.e. casting and resolving 30+ spells can take alot of time in a turn even if the players is going as fast as threy can. I do not think that a Judge can penalize a player simply for playing a slow deck (keeper, anyone?). If i have a legitimate reason to continue my turn (such as casting more and more spells), then it is not my right as a player and competitor do do everything in my power to win on that turn, rather than saying "well, ive already cast 10 spells and taken 8 minutes this turn, I guess ill just stop going off and pass the turn for your sake".  

On nother note, JJ Storrs just wrote an article on brainburst about just this situation (allbeit that he actually advocates eating up the clock on purpose, which I am in no way doing). its actually kind of odd, because he uses this very same deck as an example in his article here

http://www.brainburst.com/db/article.asp?id=3747

...Maybe he reads themanadrain's forums    [/url]

I was playing at a local PTQ a few weeks ago and something I thought that something I experienced there might be worth a discussion on these forums: Should the time limit on rounds be evenly divided among the two participants? I.E. as Magic Online does it (for those who dont know, in a 50 minute match time online, each player is given 25 minutes of priority and if they go beyond that time, they are disqualified). Now to most of us, this seems to be a very stupid thought, and to be honest with you it seems that way to me as well, but allow me to explain what prompted this:

At an extended (I know it's not T1, but the same principal still applies) PTQ a few weeks ago I was playing a combo deck (Words of Wind Enchantress). Now for anyone who has played that deck it is quite hard to pilot effectively because there are several points on the turn you go off where one can kill themselves, either directly by decking yourself or indirectly by allowing your opponent to counter a key spell and manaburning you to death. During the course of the 7-round swiss, I had several players (4 to be exact) express dissatisfaction with the rate of my play, one having gone so far as to call a judge and try to convince him that I was stalling the game (which i can honestly say I was not). Now on the turn you go off with the deck, you will cast anywhere between 10 and 30 spells, draw your entire deck, generate infin. mana, and activate words of wind a bunch of times. As i did not want to acidently kill myself or to do something stupid as a result of rushing my play, i took as much time as was needed to ensure victory. Some of the games ended fairly shortly, as I drew exactly what i needed and ended the game in a hurry, but a few of the games in question had final turns lasting between 10 and 20 minutes. I had two opponants tell me that if I knew my deck well enough, that i would not have had to take so much time to go off (though this may have been true, I really dont think that i could have made it go any faster). I know this same issure comes up in alot of control matches in T1, and i was wondering what the majority of the population thought.  

So heres the Question:

Is it within a players right to take as long as they deem necessary to finish a match or is it the players responsibility to keep the game going at a "normal" pace? And, if it is the players responsibility, would adding a time limit to play time (as in chess) solve the problem?

A deck very similar to this has been doing very well in extended tourneys under the name "Dump Truck", you might wanna do a search at BB for some decklists to help improve your build.