BEAUTIFUL post, emidln.

I'm den_rudy's teammate who wanted to try DRS as a 2-off (and almost convincing him to join me). Our preception was that nearly half of the field would be Workshop-decks, and so this seemed like a good testing ground for the card. I ended up dropping after the first round to focus on judging the event, without ever casting the card, so nothing to report on that front I guess. I'm pretty sure the card adds too little in general to be a "correct" inclusion for the current ritual-builds of the deck though, the question to me is whether it has value in a workshop-heavy metagame.

mmcgeach is right about assessing DRS's weakness against CotV and turn 1 sphere effects. I do think he can still be valuable against shops, especially on the play, allowing you to keep your ability to tutor for and resolve Hurkyl's Recall (your main plan for game 1) - while also being strong against BUG Delver and Snapcaster-based strategies (and just being a strong and flexible card in general, if not spectacular by Vintage standards). Post-board, he increases the amount of pro-active plays you can make on the first turn and enables Trygon Predator pretty well.

If testing matchups was all about figuring out strategies and percentages, you would be right.

If all we wanted from our testing was a perfect understanding on how Doomsday's sideboard-plan operates versus MUD, you would be right.

But that's not the case. Testing is also about building the player's skillsets. Since you all seem very much aware of how different the blue combo vs MUD matchups play out on the draw and on the play, it would seem only logical to also play games on the play, in order to gain knowledge and experience in those scenario's as well. It's not as if in those games the MUD player just straight up conceeds. Especially when it comes to mulligan-decisions, which are vastly different on the play (where you mainly need to evaluate your manadevelopment in the early turns) than on the draw (where it's more about the amount of defense you can muster).

You also completely ignore the MUD player. I'm not that experienced with MUD, so getting to play some games in different situations is also valuable for me. Even if I never play MUD in tournament play, it still helps me understand the matchup better for when I'm playing Doomsday again - it's common knowledge that it pays off to have at least some experience being the "bad guy" too. Letting MUD (i.e. me) be on the play the whole time might also skew my own perspective.

There's also an argument for things be more fun when you alternate play/draw during testing, but I'm assuming that should be a non-factor when deciding on testing methods. However, having fun correlates with playing better too, so it might not be completely irrelevant either.

All in all, Steven, your reasoning is valid. But, it is also horribly narrow-minded. "Focusing on what's important" should not lead to tunnel vision.

I got your suggestion, my message implied that your remark with regards to our testing process was in fact valid. The point I was trying to make is that we are conscious of how it might skew our preception, and how I believe that we are sufficiently aware in order the assess our results with the necessary crutiny.

Xouman: as Tobi noted, the biggest risk when they have countermagic, is Doomsday resolving and them being able to disrupt your actual kill mechanism.
Most basic piles with Duress require either 2 more mana (in which case you can simply replace petal with duress) or having 3 lands in play + a landdrop (or just 4 lands) in order to save mana on your drawspell (because you can Gush twice). I could list some piles for you, if you like, although I'd need to think them through just like you would - I don't actually have any piles memorized, I've just come to recognize the conditions under which the deck can go off, and build my piles on the spot from there during tournament play.

Thanks for the advice. Most of us (our team) has been playing competititve Legacy/Vintage for long enough to know how to (critically) evaluate our testing results, so I think we're pretty good at avoiding some typical pitfalls. We do in fact alternate play/draw when testing matchups. But, especially in MUD's case, we're well aware that we should make a sharp distinction between games on the play vs games on the draw.

I would like to add that being otp vs otd can make a large difference in the type of opening hands Doomsday gets to keep. Our general approach is to play "unbiased" games pre-board, meaning mulligans decisions are weighed against an "unknown" opponent.

I was piloting the MUD deck during our latest session. My teammate (Bart) wanted to test a list with Dack Fayden, specifically to see how it fared against MUD.
I played Mikael Johanssons' maindeck (7th place at BoM9: http://www.bazaar-of-moxen.com/en/bazaar-of-moxen-coverage-bom9,24/bom9-vintage-main-event,c152.html), since I considered it the strongest build vs combo.

Dack Fayden looked promising, even though it really needs support from the sideboard in the form of Ancient Grudge/Chewers, since MUD can otherwise to easily answer it through Phyrexian Revoker. Our impression was that the card itself was good, but that Doomsday is likely not the right shell for it. I would certainly consider it for Grixis Superfriends, Tezzeret or some sort yet-to-be-build Welder-concocion (neo-Slaver, so to speak). The ultimate is worthless, but just getting to steal one thing is often gamewinning, and once you pressure a second minus-activation, which is soon, thing steadily get dire for them.
That being said: 3 mana is a lot to ask against MUD, and openings which would allow a fast Dack Fayden would often be just as strong, if not stronger, if they had included Trygon Predator instead.
All in all, the presence of Dack Fayden in the maindeck didn't have enough impact to seriously change the matchup. MUD remains heavily favored pre-board, as was to be expected. And, at least in my opinion, the sideboard package of chewers/grudges + maindeck Dack, didn't significantly overperform when compared to other packages, like mana/trygon/sabotage (which is just the one we're used to playing.

We will probably be testing Doomsday, MUD and Jace Control this week, but when I get back to piloting Doomsday myself against BUG and other controldecks, I'll try and fit an exptirpate or 2 in the board.

Well sure, even though it obviously depends on what information you have available.
By any means, the primary strenght of Doomsday as a strategy lies in its versatility. If they can ineract with the graveyard, you kill them with Maniac.

In which case the basic DD-piles become:

A. Gush in hand, 2 lands in play, no mana floating or landdrop)

-top-
Petal
Recall
Lotus
Maniac
Probe
-bottom-

B. Cantrip in hand, 2 lands in play UU available (or U + landdrop)

-top-
Probe
Recall
Lotus
Maniac
Gush
-bottom-

(and of course there's a million variations on this,...)

I've beaten this horse to pulp already, but for completeness sake, I'll once again note that our group is playing a build with 4 maindeck discardspells + 1 probe, which means we may often have more information about our opponent's hand available than other builds. So any statements I make should be seen in that specific context.

It's an interesting discussion, I think. In case you have no information about the contents of your opponents hand, what wincondition/pile do you prefer?

There's a lot of assumptions that can/may/should be made, just from this question.

If we're casting Doomsday, I generally assume we're at a point in the game where either:

1) You've cleared the road (either through discard or by winning a counterwar over something important, which would mean our opponent is out of options). This implies, however, that we do in fact have information about our opponents hand);
2) You have no choice but to go for it (e.g. they Tinkered up a BSC);
3) You've amassed enough countermagic and feel comfortable you'll be able to power through.

Our question in itself thus implies that we are finding ourselves in either scenario (2) or (3).

I'll also assume that avoiding graveyard interaction means killing through Laboratory Maniac, since Tendrils will most likely require casting Yawgmoths Will in order to get to a high enough Storm-count.

We've discussed this in our team, and a general approach we like is going with Yawgmoth's Will > Tendrils G1, in order to try and incite the opponent on bringing in (too much) graveyard-hate (principally grafdiggers cage, since that card has gotten ubiquitus among sideboards). Which would in turn allow us to go for a kill without graveyard-shenanigans games 2-3, while our opponent is stuck with functionally dead cards. We also consider Maniac to be the lesser known "tech" (even though it's long become industry standard for Vintage-DD) - if our opponent is only familiar with Legacy DDFT, they might assume we are strictly on the storm-plan, which might drive them to overvalue effects like Leyline of Sanctity.
It's clear that this only applies for metagames with unexperienced players though. So let's abondon this train of thought for a second.

I can think of multiple arguments which do favor a storm-kill (thus using Yawg. Will, since you need it to generate storm, usually) though, regardless of the knowledge/experience/playskill of our opponent. Here are some of them.

- There's 3 main axis of interaction through which our opponents can try to stop us: Countermagic (which interferes with any pile we make, so it shouldn't impact our decision), graveyard-hate (when Will-ing) and creature-removal (when Maniac-ing). Of the latter two, creature removal is more commonly played in maindecks than graveyard-hate (at least, that's my general impression here).
- In case something DOES go wrong, like them having Mental Misstep for your Ancestral Recall or something like that, having Yawg. Will in your pile will allow you to try again later (often the very next turn).
- Aside from Extirpate and Faerie Macabre, which only see a limited amount of play, graveyard hate will generally be permanent-based (meaning you can play around it) or susceptible to our own countermagic. Abrupt Decay sees more (certainly maindeck) play than either of those.

So, to summarize my reasoning:
- Either line exposes us to countermagic;
- Avoiding use of the graveyard will often imply killing through Laboratoy Maniac;
- There will generally be more opportunities for our opponents to interact with Gray Ogre than with our Graveyard;
- Including Yawgmoth's Will your piles offers a backup plan in case something goes awry;
- Abrupt Decay is harder to interact with than most of the commonly played (instant speed) graveyard-hosers.

Very interested in other people's thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading,

Tom

This boils down to the same situation as you describe: Doomsday + a cantrip requires an additional blue mana to kill the same turn.

Japanse Teferi's Realms? Serious #SWAG!

RE: Abrupt Decay. As mentioned in the brief SB-plan I posted, I'm actually with Soly on this one. The 1 Abrupt Decay in my board doesn't get sided in vs Workshops, for the exact reasons he mentions.

Yeah, although I'm guessing that's what the Decays and Hurkyl's come in for...

Just throwing this out there: Teferi's Realm. Serenity is obviously superior, but this functions in a similar way and doesn't require white mana.
It's also Awesome, because it's blue and references "phasing". Gotta love those old crappy keywords.

The card is actually pretty decent, even if it is somewhat gimmicky and 1UU is quite a bit of mana in the face of mana-denial strategies.
On the other hand, it can also answer hatebears in a pinch, which Serenity only partly handles (Spirit of the Labyrinth and Canonist can be answered with Serenity, but Thalia and Gaddock Teeg cannot).

We're playing vintage tonight, but I'm gonna be the Bad Guy this time (playing prison MUD). Let's see how our other resident Doomsday pilot decides to combat me this time around.

Absolutely true.


All I was trying to point out, was the reasoning behind den_rudy's (my teammate's) claim considering this specific scenario. While watching the stream on-site, we all had the same reaction you did, and Gwen also admitted after the facts that he shouldn't have FoW'ed to protect the first Oath.

Just like he admitted making some mistakes when we talked through some of his earlier matches (including his match vs UR Delver on stream in round 8) throughout the tournament. He played far from perfect (as few of us do anyway), but he did end up playing well enough / having a strong enough deck to take down the tournament.

And that was just plain awesome .

I work for an insurance company. I'm on the IT-side of things (notably, I'm a business analyst working on BI), so I'm far from an expert on the subject, but it does mean I got to learn a few things about insurances which most people don't care about, and it sort of taints my view on certain aspects of life.

E.g., when going to a tournament by car, I actually started worrying about what to bring along. Because you see, when you crash your car on the way there, the car itself and the physical welbeing of you and your passengers (which obviously eclipses the value of any worldly possession) are fully covered. Your stuff, however, is "only" covered up to € 2500 (at least, that is the standard here, and for a host a reasons which surpass the scope of this post, there is little to no differentiation when it comes to car insurances on the Belgian market). So when you go on your average holiday, a suitcase full of clothing, a regular camera, basic laptop and some general niceties will easily be covered in case bad stuff happens. But given the current prices of Eternal staples, I would hardly be able to cover the loss of just my Legacy deck with that amount of indemnity payment. Not to mention what happens when we make the 8h trek to BoM, with 3-4 people each carrying a Legacy deck, a (powered) Vintage deck, sometimes a Modern deck (which has also became retardedly expensive) and a binder full of staples because we're all idiots who think switching decks or reconstructing our entire sideboard the night before the tournament is a recipe for succes. Oh of course a cube and half a dozen EDH-decks, because why not.

I also sometimes look at my cabinet full of Magic cards, and wonder if it's really a good idea to keep well over 15k euros worth of cards anywhere else than in a secured safe. I don't own much when it comes to furniture, but just the single shelf with my "tournament stuff" probably eclipses all other belongings in my appartment. And even though I made sure to explicitely mention them in my property insurance contract, I'm pretty sure I'd have a really difficult time fully recouping the lost "vaue" of those in the off chance it all goes up in flames some day.

So yeah, you're certainly not the only one who worries about carrying around these insane amounts of cardboard value. To mitigate this a bit, I've stopped carrying around my binders of playables when I go to events, instead taking the time to construct a single 4-card-per-page binder with cards I intend to lend out, trade, or might need for last minute decisions with regards to my deck/sideboard. As is, for most Legacy events, I'll be carrying around 1 deck (worth 1-3k euros, depending on what I'm playing) and a binder with somewhere between 200 and 600 euros worth of cards to trade/lend out/maybe use. For vintage, I'm often carrying around 2 decks these days (we have difficulties getting enough players for our events, so I'm basically always lending out a deck with the power/expensive staples I'm not using myself to someone, just to try and get people interested), so we're probably talking between 4k and 6k right there

However, sometimes things do get out of hand. Taking this year's BoM9 as an extreme example:

-1 Legacy Miracles deck. 5 revised blue duals, 10 fetches, 4 Jace, 4 (german) FoW,...nothing too pimped out. 2500 euros?
-1 Modern BWr brew. 8 fetches, 4 Bitterblossom, 4 Thoughtseize, 4 Liliana, bunch of planeswalkers and other €5-€10 cards. Pretty sure this reaches €1500 too these days.
-1 Vintage Doomsday deck. As far as vintage goes, this is not that bad, I guess: 3 moxen (although the 3 most expensive ones), BLotus, Recall, Walk, 4 (revised) Underground Sea, 2 Tropical, 4 FoW, 4 Delta, 4 Misty, some moderate pimp (beta Demonic, beta rituals, german Vamp, judge foil flusterstorms, that sorta thing)...you know, that still seems pretty bad, actually. €4000?
-1 binder with approx. 500 euros of cards to lend out / have available as deckbuilding options.
-3 EDH-decks of which I have no clue about the current value. They don't contain fetches/duals though, and contain no pimp whatsoever, so it can't be that bad, right? Ok, given the rate these types of cards go for these days, it might actually be pretty bad. I really don't know.
-1 beta Mox Sapphire I was selling for a friend. €1000 euros.
-1 sealed display of Tempest which I was selling for a friend. €500.

So...10k (euros) worth of cards, not counting EDH decks or any other of my belongings, traveling at 300 km/h through France (we went by train, in case you think we're racecar drivers or soemthing). I'm pretty sure this qualfies me as a complete nutcase. Time to get myself checked in, I guess.

Tom

Yeah, I'm still not really convinced that this midrange appraoch is really where you want to go with Doomsday. Espeically if you mention that it only slightly impacts the Workshop matchup - which IMHO is the only thing which keeps Doomsday from being the straight up best deck in the format.

Btw, I'm very well aware that this last statement seems very exagerated and cocky. It's just the conclusion I've come to draw from our testing over the past year or so. Most if not all of our blue decks would do badly or go even at best against Doomsday over an extended series of testing sessions, so if it wasn't for the lousy Workshop-matchup, I wouldn't want to sleeve up anything else. I consider my result at BoM (I consider 11/220 still pretty good) to be a testament to the strenght of the deck, more so than a demonstration of my strenght as a player (I'm pretty sure about half of my opponents during BoM and the 2 trials I played beforehand were more experienced and probably better players on a technical level).

Traditional combo-control (with vault-key + tinker-robot as kill conditions) just seems better suited to make use of Confidants and Deathrites as the game progresses.

But if you want to keep your list a secret (which is your good right, of course), I can't really comment in any meaningfull way on the strenght and execution of your concept.
Get back to us when you're ready to share, 'cause sharing is caring .

You're right that in that exact scenario, the Grixis player wins the fight over both Oath's (and probably the match) anyway.

However, by FoWing on the first attempt, you at least give the opponent a chance to mess up. Given the mulligan to five, it's pretty clear that Gwen's all-in here, so making the play that would at least push through Oath in one more scenario, seems pretty decent.

Scenario: opponent has FoW, Drain Flusterstorm. You have 2x Oath, FoW, blue spell.

Given:
- Oath of Druids 1 on the stack
- FoW (opponent) on the stack targeting Oath.

Option 1: let FoW resolve and go for Oath 2 --> Opponent has Drain + Flusterstorm left, so Oath is never going to stick.

Option 2: FoW the FoW. Opponent now has two possibilities:
2a. He Flusterstorms the FoW and has Drain left --> same result as option one (No Oath, no party)
2b. He Mana Drains the FoW (a pretty juicy drain-target, btw) --> your second Oath sticks.

So, just considering this specific scenario (and I'll admit that there are many others, some of which favor FoWing first and some of which don't), the second line is definitely better, since it at least gives your opponent a conceivable chance to screw up.

I'm sorry, could you explain what "gwsx" means? I'm unfamiliar with the term.

TBH, I'm having a hard time seeing the advanteges of playing Deathrite / Bob in Doomsday.
On the other hand, it would be easier to discuss if we'd have an actual decklist to look at  .

I'm not in the mood right now to write a sufficient answer to all the questions contained in your post, so I might expand this response later on.

As far as Probe goes:
- The DD-lists with 0-2 Dark Rituals are less interested in speed, favoring more control elements instead. More aggressive lists, which lean more heavy on Dark Ritual, sometimes have more probes. The playset of discardspells in my list sort of takes care of getting the information about my opponents grip.
- Lists like mine, which already echew the 4th Preordain, would rather complete the playset of preordains first, before adding more probe's.
- The life loss (assuming we're generally not interested in actual Peek) actually matters in scenarios where you've got to pass the turn after casting Doomsday (which you generally avoid like the black plague, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, sometimes).
- Gush is vastly superior when it comes to attacking the DD-pile. As a matter of fact, you can't go off (at least, our team hasn't found a pile yet) with Doomsday into Probe if you don't have any extra mana or landdrop (although a single U is sufficient to get things going: Recall-Lotus-Petal-Will-Maniac).
- You really only need Doomsday + Gush (and the 2 lands to altcast it) or Doomsday + cantrip + U available to combo out. More probes wouldn't offer any (relevant) additional piles or spellchains.
- The decklist is actually rather tight. Adding more probes would either push out some of the defensive slots (which I would rather not, again the whole "combo-control" thing), the SDT (which can in fact go, but I'd rather have preordain 4 or another counterspell of some sort) or Time Walk (which is not that great in this deck, but necessary for a couple of DD-piles that win through Chalice @ 1).
- Contrary to TPS, our blue count is pretty decent for supporting Force of Will, thanks to the Gushes, Preordain and other countermagic.

With regards to the workshop matchup and the comparison with TPS: especially on the play, you're definitely right. This is why you sometimes see additional Moxen, Sol Ring or Mana Crypt in the board of Doomsday: to allow us to develop our mana on turn 1 on the play vs Shops.

The basics + bounce plan is pretty effective in Doomsday as well - although in those scenario's, it generally takes Dark Ritual or BLotus to get Doomsday on the stack, which is a constraint TPS doens't suffer from. Doomsday can support up to 2 basic islands maindeck, which is not to shabby I think. Anyway, the less explosive nature (compared to TPS, since the deck still tends to kill by turn 3) of Doomsday, is why you see people going for more of a mid/late-game plan in Predators and/or Chewers instead of the straight basics+bounce plan found in traditional TPS.
I would like to add, however, that Doomsday does allow to win through extremely locked-up boards. If they pile up on spheres, but couldn't resolve a creature to pressure you life total, there's always the 4 counterspells/bounce/removal/lands + Lab Maniac pile. It's not pretty, but it does allow wins from positions where TPS would most likely be dead in the water (think chalices at 0, 1 and 2 and that sort of nonsense).

I've only briefly dabbled into classic stormcombo, but to me, TPS felt a lot less "controlled" as a combodeck.

Mindset when playing Doomsday: controlled and methodical. Win the counterwar and go for a sure kill.
Mindset when playing TPS: aggressive, "jam bombs and hope one resolves".

The draw7's in TPS serve a hybrid role as "duress-effects" and winconditions, which is a quality Doomsday hasn't, but you're also *garanteed* to win once you assemble (and resolve) Doomsday + any cantrip/gush. TPS generally generates a new 7-card hand for both players instead, which will often result in a lethal stormchain, but does have a certain rate of failure too.

Keep in mind that Doomsday has all the necessary tools to perform a more classic Gush-Bond or Ritual-Tutor chain into Yawg.Will into Tendrils as well. You can get plenty of wins without having to resolve the actual Doomsday itself.

Lab Maniac/Gush also allows for a lot of flexibility, since it allows you to sidestep commonly played hatecards like Null Rod and cards which attack the graveyard (although TPS can win without Yawg.Will too, obviously). Especially against MUD, the Maniac package allows you to kill even through multiple spheres (Torn of Ametyst is especially easy when you're only casting Maniac and Gushes).

My personal opinion is that Doosmday is a superior deck, just because I like combo-control as an archetype more than straight speed-combo. But it's definitely a matter of taste as well. The principal advantage for TPS, is what happens when you don't have countermagic/discard to fight (or knowledge about) your opponent's disruption. With TPS, you force them to trade their disruption for your bomb and move on, whereas with Doomsday, you risk just losing on the spot if they let Doomsday resolve and have a meaningful way (*) to stop your kill-mechanism. But naturally, as is the case with most combo-control decks, the whole "art" of it is obviously to never put yourself into that position in the first place (unless you absolutely have to).

Grtz

(*) And a good grasp of timing, since many DD-piles can include a Duress or Flusterstorm to play around anything which doesn't target your draw-spell to attack the pile.

The main permanent I'd like to get rid of in the early turns is Chalice of the Void @1, since that will often impeed you from digging towards more sideboardcards or your killconditions.

I dislike putting percentages, but generally I would descibe our build somewhat like this (based on my own testing and tournament results):

- vs TPS: advantaged (we can play the controlrole better and have a pretty good critical turn, but they can catch us off guard early)
- vs Gush storm: advantaged (not sure if better or worse than traditional TPS)
- vs Grixis and Big Blue: advantaged (the discardspells really tear these matchups open)
- vs Keeper: advantaged (I used to play keeper and got stomped by Doomsday, which is why I switched decks...)
- vs Oath: slightly advantaged (depends on what build they're on, RSD-Oath seems quite capable to hold their own versus DD)
- vs BUG Fish: slightly advantaged to even (see supra)
- vs RUG: most difficult blue matchup I've encountered thusfar
- vs Landstill: not sure. We should have enough disruption to plow through, and they hardly pose a relevant clock. So...favored, in the same vein that Legacy Stormcombo is favored vs Legacy Landstill?
- vs MUD, prison style (stax, tangle wire,...): we're dogs MD and slightly better than even post board, still disadvantaged over the match.
- vs MUD, combo style (metalworker, staff,...): better than prison MUD, making the matchup slightly favored over a 3 game set.
- vs Junk Hatebears: massive favorite
- vs Reel Fish: massive favorite
- vs 4C Humans: haven't encountered this yet, but seems highly dependent on their build
- vs Death & Taxes: haven't encountered this yet, seems bad if they play like a full-blown prison deck.
- vs Dredge: haven't encountered this yet, but we should be able to race them

My sample size is pretty small for most of these matchups, so take with a serious grain of salt...

I get how upping the Ritual count can help against BUG Fish. There's certainly merits to playing a slightly more aggressive list like you do.
On the other hand, you suggest cutting the Thoughtseizes (in my list) for them, which is someting I don't like either.

They thing is, BUG poses different angels of attack, but aside from pure countermagic (and especially Flusterstorm), none of them stop you completely.
The way I've beaten most of my BUG Fish opponents up until now (which may or may not have been a fluke), is by getting a look at their hand, stripping the countermagic, and then constructing a Doomsday-plan around the angle they don't have covered (i.e. strand 'em with GY-hate and go for Gush-Maniac pile, or strand 'em with removalspells and go for Willy-Tendrils).

There's probably some bias in our own testing as well. Our most hardcore Vintage player is Gwen De Schamphelaere, who has a preference for "big" blue mana drain decks (Control Slaver back in the days, Tezzerator now). Typically a matchup where it's more about resilience than speed, and thus where discard shines and Rituals are kinda unnecessary.

As Soly mentions, a difference in playstyle does actually matter.

Just out of curiosity, Immanuel: why weren't you at BoM? I believe Bart and me were the only Doomsday-pilots in the field (and they mislabeled at least one of our decks), so you needed to come and represent man .

Ok, I did in fact get that impression from the way your post was phrased.

Not that you wouldn't have the right to dispute either me (I AM a chump and I'm well aware of it) or our results (because result-oriented thinking has its own series of pitfalls to be concerned with). I did mean it when I thanked you for the feedback, since I really do appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

As a response to Mr. Soly's statements:

1) I'm not trying to ignore your past results with the deck and I respect your opinion on the red sideboard cards. I was only trying to confirm that you were in fact playing 4 colors (even if it is for just a single Fastbond). My teammates went for Predators as their main plan against MUD and I just followed their reasoning. All I can say is that Predator has been great for us so far. I've seen the strenghts of Ingot Chewer when I was playing Jace Control in the past, so I'm aware of how good it is, but up until know we haven't had any reason to move away from the Predator-plan.

2) I believe I explicitly state that Flusterstorm is not ideal versus BUG Fish, and thus not worth bringing extra's in. I'm well aware how it works against an opposing Flusterstorm + open mana, because I'm not retarded. Thank you for pointing that out.
You have more experience with the deck than me, so if you say BUG Fish is a bad matchup, I guess it must be. As I mentioned, I've only played 3 tournaments with Doomsday so far. In those, I've encountered BUG Fish 5 times (3 times at a trial, 2 times at BoM). Currently, I'm 4-1 in matches and 8-4 in games. So that limited sample size is all I had to draw conclusions from. My general impression is that they have the right tools to defeat us, but that you are often able to clear the way to perform either of your 2 kill-mechanisms (if they have abrupt decay left, go for tendrills/will or just construct a maniac-pile with an additional draw-effect. If they're left with graveyard-hate and/or null rod, go for maniac/gush). I've also been able to capitalize on my opponents tapping low for Confidant or Null Rod, allowing me to force through with a Flusterstorm of my own (which, as you mentioned, doesn't work if they keep more mana available). I will admit that some of my opponents may have played too aggressively due to inexperience playing against DD.
Just to make sure: you're aware that I'm with you on the "no more than 2 Rituals" appoach? 'Cause your post seems to suggest otherwise.

3) We wanted the Dismember-slot to be something we could bring in against workshops as well. I like Toxic Deluge a lot, but I'm less confident in how we're going to cast a 3 mana sorcery against MUD. Kuldotha MUD is the most common version of the deck around here, and we felt Dismember was better at dealing with a turn 1/2 forgemaster. I'm well aware of how much stronger Deluge is against Fish- or hatebear-style decks, but those are way less prevalent and much less problematic matchups than MUD. So that was our reasoning.

4) Dredge: our previous lists played 4 Leyline + 1 Spellbomb. I never played against Dredge with Doomsday, so it seemed reasonable to include 4 hate-slots, as is the case with any other deck I've played in Vintage (and given that I've mainly played Mana Drain decks up to this point, I'm actually used to having 6-7 slots vs Dredge). If it's really unnecessary, that's excellent news since it would allow for more usefull sideboarding.

5) We stuck to a traditional SB for now, and probably will do so in the future. I only mentioned that the thought of an Oath-board peaked my interest, since it actually sidesteps Flusterstorm and seemes easier to pull of against MUD. But lots of stuff peaks my interest, and little of it usualy ends up in a final decklist.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback I guess.

Yeah, I get the argument for playing red MUD-hate over Predators. But what about the maindeck Fastbond?

Immanuel:

Against traditional Mana Drain decks (Grixis, UBg Jace Vault, Tez, Oath...):
-1 Hurkyl's Recall, +1 Flusterstorm (always)
-1 Dark Ritual, +1 Spellbomb (optional, you keep the dark rit in case they have confidants, for the reasons you've stated)


Against Fish style decks (BUG, Merfolk,...):
-1 Hurkyl's Recall, +1 Abrupt Decay

You can't cut dark rit here, since they can attack your black mana through wasteland and null rod.
Flusterstorm is an awkward card here. You need some to fight theirs, but you don't want to get stranded with them in hand while they are playing creatures and stripping your hand with discard (since the card is way stronger offensively than it is on D). So I don't bring in the 3rd one. This is the main reason why the matchup is pretty close to even (although I still feel Doomsday is slightly favored).

Against Hatebear-style decks and 4C Humans, one of the Flusterstorms comes out as well, to make room for the Dismember.


Against MUD:

-3 Mental Misstep
-2 Flusterstorm
-1 Doomsday
-1 Duress
-1 Thoughtseize
-1 Preordain (otp) / -1 Thoughtseize (otd)

+3 Trygon Predator
+2 Steel Sabotage
+1 Hurkyl's Recall
+1 Dismember
+1 Forest
+1 Mox Emerald


Against Dredge:

-3 Thoughtseize
-1 Duress
-1 Hurkyl's Recall

+4 Hatecards (Spellbomb, Jailer, Surgical, Crypt)
+1 Flusterstorm


All in all, a pretty traditional sideboardplan.

Inspired by Gwen's transformational board in Tez, we might give Oath a try as well. I do think Oathing into Maniac is a pretty strong line against MUD and Dredge, who would have very few ways to intereact with it. Although I suspect that Oathing up a Maniac against BUG Fish, might expose us to Abrupt Decay way more than necessary, so we might need an actual fatty for it to work in those matchup anyways.

As you might see: I'm still experimenting with the deck. BoM was my 3rd tournament with it, and up until now I've just been leaching off my teammates's experience. So feel free to point out any blatant misconceptions I may have about it. I will say that the deck feels really strong and criminally underplayed, and is also an absolute blast to play.

Kind regards,

Tom

Yeah, I had a short discussion with your brother about that after our match.
I suspect your approach with the deck is a bit more aggressive than ours. We like to play between 13 and 16 disruption spells in order to play like a combo-control deck.

I will give the Night's Whipser a shot in the SDT-spot. As I mentioned, the Top was something I tried at at BoM and I still need some more game time with it in order to see if it's good enough.
The LoA also looks interesting, so I might give that one a try too.

But 4 Rituals seems really excessive to us (we consider even the 2nd one to be a flex slot and tend to board it out against other blue decks), which pretty much excludes Necropotence from the equation too, at least for our approach.

And you've Doomsday'ed your way to a whole bunch of top8s since, as I've seen on Morphling. Welcome to the forums.
It was a pleasure playing against your brother at BoM9, even though he kicked me out of top 8 .

It's pretty close indeed. But Steel Sabotage answers Chalice of the Void (@1) on the stack and can be cast off a basic Island, which is still the land you rather fetch for in the early turns. I wouldn't fault anyone for splitting it 1-1.

As far as Ingot Chewer goes: I like the card, but not enough to include a fourth color in the deck. Even now the Tropicals and Forest (post board) are annoying sometimes.

For reference: the matchups I faced:

R1-2: BYE
R3: UW BladeStill, W 2-1
R4: MUD, L 0-2 (he nutdraws me g1 otp and manages to answer my t2 Predator with FoW backup off a mull to 5 g2)
R5: MUD, W 2-0 (opponent mulligans into oblivion in one of the games)
R6: BUG Fish, W 2-0
R7: Merfolks, W 2-0
R8: Pack Rat Control, W 2-0
R9: BUG Fish, L 0-2 (see stream & comments in the coverage thread)

The games without comments next to them all boil down to "I strip their hand of relevant interaction, and safely kill them with Doomsday/Yawg.Will in the mid/lategame". I don't think I ever made a pass-the-turn-pile throughout rounds 3-8, and only had to expose myself to an unknown card without having counterbackup myself once.

Thanks for caring. Duly appreciated.

Your wish has been granted.

My list, which carried me to an 11th place finish at BoM9 (losing the win & in on stream).

Dooooooomsday, by team MCG
(aka Wizard Stompy)

1 Duress
3 Thoughtseize
2 Flusterstorm
3 Mental Misstep
4 Force of Will
1 Hurkyl's Recall

1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Ponder
3 Preordain
1 Gitaxian Probe
1 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Gush
1 Fastbond
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Time Walk
4 Doomsday
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Yawgmoth's Will

1 Laboratory Maniac

1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
2 Dark Ritual

2 Island
2 Tropical Island
4 Underground Sea
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Polluted Delta (which should have just been a split of blue fetchlands I guess - never came up, ever.)

SB
3 Trygon Predator
1 Mox Emerald
1 Forest
2 Steel Sabotage
1 Hurkyl's Recall
1 Dismember
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Flusterstom
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Jixlid Jailer
1 Surgical Extraction

I used to play 4 Leyline of the Void and switched to the more diverse dredge-hate prior to BoM9.
I haven't encountered Dredge since I play this deck (2 BoM trials + main event), so I have no clue which is better.
The SDT was a last minute switch (used to be Misdirection or MBT). It was good for me during the tournament, but it's just a flex slot, and I can get how it feels clunky sometimes. It also slighty increases the effectiveness of Null Rod (little more than a mild nuissance in general) against us. I'll probably keep it in for the near future, but I'm still evaluating its performance.

I was the Doomsday-guy losing his win and in for top 8 on the BoM9 stream.
Link: http://www.twitch.tv/bazaar_of_moxen/b/525801678 (match from 1:36:30 to 2:01:00, although the games are pretty uninteresting).

For those who watched the match: I definitely punted the first game by not going for a pass the turn pile when I was at 10 life. I was in a tunnel-vision mindset where I was hoping to topdeck a cantrip/Gush in order to immediately Doomsday and kill my oppponent without having to pass the turn, because against BUG Fish, pass the turn-piles are generally super dangerous. You need to go for a Maniac-kill (not enough storm for tendrils) and they have a lot of stuff which could mess you up. Only when I looked at my scorepad after dropping to 7, I realised that I had lost the opportunity to just go for it and hope for the best - my opponent apparently didn't have anything, so it would've been worth it.

A possible pile would have been:

(2 life after getting hit by the Clique from 5 life post DD, 2 USea + Island + Mox Jet for mana):

Gush
Gush
Duress
Brainstorm (or other cantrip)
Laboratory Maniac

Draw Gush. Altcast Gush floating UU; Jet into Duress to clear any counterspell/removal spell; replay land; Gush again floating UU (UUUU total); cast Maniac and Brainstorm FTW.

There probably a pile which doesn't lose to wasteland too, but I don't feel like looking for it right now.

I could (and will) blame fatigue (played all 3 main events over the weekend) and being stressed because I have no previous experience playing on stream. But in reality I just messed up badly and feel disappointed in myself for doing so.

The second game, I kept a one-lander + petal with Brainstorm, Doomsday, Time Walk, Vampiric and Demonic Tutor. I don't really like those type of opening hands against UBx decks, preferring the more controlling hands with discard and/or counters to be able to go for a safe kill later in the game (being turn 3 or 4). But mulliganing away that amount of sheer power didn't seem right either, and Brainstorm could go a long way to help me get to some disruption and an extra land. He Strip Mines me and I Brainstorm with the floating blue to search for more lands, drawing into two fetches and a FoW. I decided to get rid of the Doomsday (because going all-in on that would risk me getting blown out hard), instead opting to try and assemble a Yawg's Will chain. Unfortunately, him follwing up with Deathrite Shaman off the Mox risks messing up that plan. Because my opponent taps low for Demonic on turn 2, however, I decide to go for it anyway, hoping my Force of Will (pitching Time Walk) suffices to force things through. I know this is unlikely, given he probably has Flusterstorm, but I didn't like my chances against active Deathrite Shaman and more open mana (after Demonic Tutoring) if he had the Flusterstorm anyway, and I could still hope to try again later through Doomsday, since the losing the Yawg.Will and the tutors would still allow me to go off with Gush-Maniac Doomsday piles. It didn't pan out, since he did have the flusterstorm for my Will, but given the amount of disruption my opponent had, it seems unlikely for me to have won that second game anyway.

I could write up a more elaborate report of the event if anyone's interested.

I just watched some of the coverage again. Pretty unfortunate that the coverage guys didn't do my deck much justice. Another teammate (Sander Hendrickx) top 8'ed the BoM8 Event with almost the same list (and could have won all 3 games of the quarterfinals by constructing different piles), and the combined win ratio of our 3 players piloting it (myself, Sander and Bart, who went T32 at BoM9) is pretty insane over just the last year. So at least to us, the deck seems really strong, despite Raph Levy's claims on the stream. Among other things, he correctly assesses the combo's weakness to Flusterstorm, but fails to credit the presence of a full set of discardspells and our own Flusterstorms to combat it.

I guess if someone ever gets the chance to play Doomsday on stream at a feature event, he should offer to do a decktech on it to explain some of the finesses of this machine that were missed this time around.

I will agree with my opponent's (and Raph's) statement that some of my adversaries during the swiss were unexperienced playing against Doomsday, and may have played suboptimal because of it. However, I did feel like I played pretty good during the tournament (7-2, with 2 byes from winning a trial with the deck in Brussels) - it's just a pity I didn't get to show much of it on the stream.

I ended up in 11th place, earning a Tropical Island for my troubles. Hardly spectacular, but it still marks my best BoM result up to this day.

The sour taste of punting that first game did end up getting washed away when my teammate lucksacked skillfully plowed his way through the top 8, winning the whole shabang with the Tezzerator deck he brewed up during breakfast. Bart, our second Doomsday pilot, ended in the T32, scoring an Italian Mana Drain. Our final 2 other players were on MUD, but both dropped early. But with such a great haul, it seems safe to say that this was a very good BoM for our team .

Thanks for reading,

Tom

If resilience to removal + a quick clock is your concern: why not Geist of Saint Traft?
You could easily turn 2 it off a mox or hierarch, and it hits even harder than the Dragon.

Good luck to everyone attending BoM9. I'll be there with a bunch more Belgians. Look for the yellow Belgic Magic shirts and don't be shy to come and say hi. Getting to know other enthousiastic players is the main reason I'm playing these events.

However, my deck will only contain one single Human. Let's just say I'm more of a Yawgmoth's Will than a Cavern of Souls kinda guy .