Besides the obvious counter spell vs discard argument, when the deck isn't splashing black and opening up its mana base to Wasteland?

But the difference between Bonesplitter and Sigil of Distinction is the latter increases the ass on the critter, so Trinket Mage can either stand up to or run over fishes etc. IDK, it'd have more appeal if it were breaking Goyf on Goyf stalemates like it was in Legacy, but I still think it's worth considering.

As an aside, have people tried running a set of Negate?

Ethersworn Canonist is a great SB addition, and I think Sigil of Distinction will be a solid MD choice since it's more or less turning Trinket Mages into Juggernauts. I'm getting a lot more aggro-wins vs fish and co' with it, which makes me think it's worth the slot just for the option of more efficient beat down.

Sigil of Distinction   
Artifact - Equipment
Sigil of Distinction comes into play with X charge counters on it.
Equipped creature gets +1/+1 for each charge counter on Sigil of Distinction.
Equip: Remove a charge counter from Sigil of Distinction.
 #219/249

Is Trinket Mage a legitimate threat now?

Sigil of Distinction   
Artifact - Equipment 
Sigil of Distinction comes into play with X charge counters on it.
Equipped creature gets +1/+1 for each charge counter on Sigil of Distinction.
Equip: Remove a charge counter from Sigil of Distinction.
 #219/249

Verbal warning for off-topic posting.  -DA

The card is made for Bomberman, you get to lock down their combo and your combo is artifact based, "More bears for the board."

Edit: Same for Suicide Virus, kind of.

Wow, that's even better than I gave it credit for, it's like a Sorcery version of Probaso Gifts with less dead cards. It's not Gifts Ungiven, but then again it doesn't need to be if it's just 3UU=GG with out the graveyard.

From what I've gathered Tezzeret and Time Vault replace Auriok Slavagers and Aether Spellbomb altogether, and even Trinket Mage is debatable, altho' tutoring for Black Lotus and removal is quite good.

Tezzeret appears to have put Auriok Slavagers out of a job, between Mana Drain and Trinket Mage for Black Lotus it shouldn't be that difficult to cast Tezzeret, tutor for Time Vault, activate Time Vault and then tutor for Voltaic Key. Untapping artifacts and turning artifacts into 5/5s for alpha strike is just insurance vs Pithing Needle.

Pitching to FoW and dropping White ain't too bad either.

With unrestricted Chrome Mox, I'd be more inclined to test a Diminishing Returns over a Time Spiral based deck.

It's a great card, I've been using Strategic Planning and Careful Study in Titan and Slaver decks for awhile, just curious why you never bothered to increase your robot or welder count while you had the extra outlets tho' ?

Have you tried a Deep Analysis, Intuition and Strategic Planning package?

Seems interesting, pre-boarding Cerebral Assassin's Oath of Druids and cutting its Goblin Welders, more or less. If you're not focusing on Tidespout Tyrant, Platinum Angel has better synergy with Thirst for Knowledge and lets you Tinker as well. Opposing Goblin Welders can be removed with Darkblast or Chalice@1.

Oath/Reanimator just seems like a sweet premise tho'.

One question, what's the point of disruption? Right now the format is at a loss for removal, since Merchant Scroll and Brainstorm got axed, and it's difficult for control to answer Empty the Warrens, let alone answer Empty the Warrens in a time efficient manner. Shouldn't we be running 4 Empty the Warrens and 4 Simian Spirit Guide just so we can force them to counter our acceleration instead of our bombs (Demonic Consultation is also fucking awesome)?

I'm sure the old Long shells are viable, but the old Long shells aren't exploiting the huge, gaping hole in control's ability to answer resolved threats.

Yeah, DA is awesome. T1 Careful Study followed by T2 DA is digging 5 cards deep with + 1 CA, and double Bazaar of Baghdad activation and T2 Deep Analysis is digging 7 cards deep with card parody. As long as you don't walk into Mana Drain, your out pacing the rest of the field in cards seen/drawn.

Living Wish is good because it tutors for Bazaar of Baghdad, and I don't think I'd use Living Wish over Vampiric Tutor and Imperial Seal if I couldn't tutor for Bazaar of Baghdad. I'm not positive on Living Wish tho', it's a card that helped me a lot in Dragon, and in principle it should be helpful here to, but it's speculative.

-3 Living Wish and -3 Fobidden Orchard for +1 Sundering Titan, +1 Goblin Welder, +1 Bazaar of Baghdad, +1 Tolarian Academy and +1 Animate Dead was the list I was using. Right now I'm debating whether or not MD Leyline of the Void is "correct," over either Serum Powderor Frantic Search, Time Walk, Vampiric Tutor and Imperial Seal or Wheel of Fortune, Windfall and Memory Jar

It's tough choosing between restricted bombs and disruption, especially free, uncounterable disruption that GGs people so hard.

Yup, I'm BreathWeapon on 2+2.

Other than Tinker, I haven't found a restricted bomb worth drawing/tutoring for other than Memory Jar, Wheel of Fortune and Windfall, Balance is just too unpredictable.

I'm not advocating using MD Worldgorger Dragon and Squee, Goblin Nabob; I'm advocating not using Wolrdgorger Dragon and Squee, Goblin Nabob altogether. I don't see a point in MDing 2 Dragon/1 Queen for a combo finish when Sundering Titan will do, you have 4 Animate Dead for the Dragon Combo, but you have 4 Animate Dead and 4 Goblin Welders for Sundering Titan, so the Iron Giant should be the central plan.

Read the Runes is mana intensive, at 3cc it's on par with a Careful Study and worse than a Draw 7, and unlike Dragon you don't want to trade your acceleration for card advantage when you rely on it as Goblin Welder food.

One card I've been considering is Living Wish, tutoring for Bazaar of Baghdad, Sundering Titan and Goblin Welder is huge, and tutoring for Tolarian Academy, Forbidden Orchard lets you either start hard casting Deep Analysis and Sundering Titans or activate Oath of Druids. Alternate reanimation targets are useful,Platinum Angel, Triskelion and non-artifact creatures to circumvent Goblin Welder, Enchantment removal is a god send vs Leyline/Planar Void and Wish->RFG flips the bird to Extirpate.

Avoid Exhume, reanimating opposing Goblin Welders = :*(**

Baseline is,

4 Force of Will
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Chalice of the Void

1 Tinker

4 Intuition
3 Living Wish
1 Demonic Tutor

4 Deep Analysis
4 Careful Study
1 Ancestral Recall

3 Animate Dead
3 Goblin Welder

3 Sundering Titan

3 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
3 Forbidden Orchard
Artifact Mana

SB
1 Sundering Titan
1 Platinum Angel
1 Simic Sky Swallower
1 Goblin Welder
1 Enchantment Removal Creature
1 Bazaar of Baghdad
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Forbidden Orchard
4 Oath of Druids
1 Darkblast

I've been building/piloting CA since the B&R announcement, and I've been running over most of the "format," minus Storm combo. Being able to MD Leyline of the Void and Chalice of the Void is what gives it such an edge, when other decks can't cheat costs with the graveyard or accelerate with the artifacts, getting Sundering Titan and Goblin Welder on the board is just an after thought.

Thirst for Knowledge is a terrible Careful Study, you want a card that either finds Bazaar of Baghdad or Chalice of the Void on turn one or puts Sundering Titan or Oath of Druids on the board on turn two. Worldgorger Dragon and Squee, Goblin Nabob are terrible, post board it's about graveyard hate, so Oath of Druids > Worldgorger Dragon, and Squee, Goblin Nabob is useless with Careful Study and "bricks' Oath of Druids.

SB Ray of Revelation and Darkblast are HUGE, you want to be able to Intuition for either to shut down Oath of Druids and Goblin Welder based decks.

I think you're running too much land, you could get away with 9 mana producing lands easily, or you could just cut lands for Serum Powder.

Restricting Ponder does make sense, if the goal is/was to create a 2cc standard for hand sculpting then restricting Ponder was a necessary evil to force us to choose between either Impulse and Night Whispers or 1cc Sleight of Hand and Opt (or Careful Study if the rest of your deck can support it).

My guess is they set a bar for hand sculpting similar to the bar they set for tutoring and decided Ponder exceeded it.

Is it just me, or is 4xEmpty the Warrens and 4xSimian Spirit Guide the starting point for Neo-Storm Combo? With Merchant Scroll -> Echoing Truth gone and reactive answers unwieldly with out Brainstorm, just dumping a hand full of Goblins on the board and running over the opponent seems kind of huge.

Good article,

People are seriously overrating Ichorid, whose main advantages come from its game 1 dominance and people's unpreparedness to face it post board. With so much hype, you can expect SBs and even MDs to be designed to deal with Bazaar of Baghdad.dec, so people falling back on Ichorid are going to be in for a huge world of hurt.

I think Bazaar of Baghdad is going to dominate, there's just so many different things you can do with it.

Have people got Counterbalance/Sensei's Divining Top to work? There doesn't appear to be enough 2cc spells to go along with Counterbalance short of Mana Drain, Impulse, Night Whispers and restricted targets, and it needs at least 16 2cc spells to be consistent, and it's counting on 1cc cards to be relevant in the format.

What adjustments are being made to the mana bases, are people just adding 1 Strip Mine and 4 Wasteland and/or using 8 blue fetchlands?

Intuition, Deep Analysis and Careful Study are officially the shit, being able to Intuition for either Life from the Loam and Stripe Mine or Dark Blast is going to be huge.

Careful Study feels like the new Brainstorm, if you're using Intuition/Deep Analysis as your draw engine, you're getting a lot of mileage out of Careful Study in Goblin Welder based control.

I think Islands have to go with Goblin Welder, Oath of Druids, Auriok Salvagers/Trinket Mage or Phyrexian Dreadnoughts, old school Decree of Justice and Pyschatog just get ran over by Bazaars and Shops.

Force of Will > Unmask, people are counting on the restriction of Merchant Scroll and Brainstorm to reduce the number of Force of Will, and I don't want to scoop after the opponent resolves a Goblin Charbelcher or a piece of hate.

Here's a work in progress,

4 Force of Will

4 Leyline of the Void
4 Chalice of the Void

4 Intuition
4 Deep Analysis

1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall

1 Tinker

4 Goblin Welder
4 Exhume

4 Sundering Titan

1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Imperial Seal

4 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Vault
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
5 Moxes

SB
4 Oath of Druids
4 Forbidden Orchard
3 Ray of Revelation
3 Ancient Grudge

I figure Leyline of the Void and Chalice of the Void are just going to be unbelievably brutal forms of disruption when people shift to Impulse and Night Whispers to hit their land drops or just start running Bazaar of Baghdad.dec.

Bazaar of Baghdad is going to go rule the format, Dragon just became the dominant combo deck, Madness should compete with Workshop Aggro for beat down, Reanimator should be viable and Cerebral Assassin and Dawn of the Dead are reasonable off shoots.

I have a strong suspicion 4 Bazaar of Baghdad, 4 Leyline of the Void, 4 Chalice of the Void and 4 Force of Will are going to be the first 16 cards in a competitive deck.

The DCI just made a clear political statement in favor of the Iraq War, because there isn't a single deck post June 1st that wont contain 4xBazaar of Baghdad.

These restrictions went too far, restricting Merchant Scroll would have been enough to bring Flash and Gush in line while reviving control, but restricting Brainstorm just swept the rug from under Mana Drain's feet and now Storm combo will be 100% reliant on either Belcher or Doomsday. Restricting Ponder is absurd, Sensei's Divining Top is still legal and so is Sylvan Library, why not restrict those to while you're on a roll?

Are Impulse and Night Whispers suppose to be the new golden standard for library manipulation now?

That depends on your definition of "facts," considering that Flash hasn't been optimized, post FS Ichorid is two weeks old and Doomsday/Gush isn't legal for three weeks, the only "facts" I can provide come from the results of my play testing. Regardless, I think Flash is the fastest, most disruptive and consistent deck I've seen in Magic ever, Doomsday/Gush is almost as good as unrestricted Necropotence was and Ichorid just feels like its playing a completely different game. I don't think Mana Drain's are even playable with out Leylines of the Void, which makes the format pretty disgusting. I'm sure hate.dec can survive in the metagame, because hate.dec always does to an extent, but that doesn't change the fact that the environment is either skewed heavily away from Mana Drain or heavily toward Leyline of the Void.

I'm just one guy tho', so be your own judge.

Well, I figure it's either LDV OR Demonic/Vamp/Seal/Mystical and not all of them together.

LV is a free, uncounterable answer to an opponent's deck that turns the game's interaction into mulligian for LV and mulligan/draw/tutor into an answer for LV. Perhaps Ichorid and Flash are such unfair threats that they deserve an equally unfair answer, but there's a huge difference between a counterable 1xArtifact that was tutored for and an uncounterable 4xEnchantment that is mulliganed for. LV is almost as bad, if not worse, than Trinisphere was on the environment, it's just dependent on people using the best decks in the format instead of being innately unfair.

I think Mind's Desire in a control shell is worse than Gifts Ungiven in a control shell, because while both cards end the game, Mind's Desire is a sorcery, 4UU, relies on revealing other Mind's Desires and/or Sins of the Past and can't be tutored for with Merchant Scroll or used as a set up card. Draining into it isn't that great either, because in order to be lethal it needs acceleration to generate storm, at which point you may be better off playing Combo Desire. Mind's Desire does cause design restraints, it's impossible for any card not to. Just look at the Extended decks and see the amount of acceleration and Desires/Sins they have to use to get it to work, and they even get more legitimate Desire targets in their tutor package than you do in your control package.

But, that's getting off topic, the point is that Flash and Doomsday/Gush are utterly insane by comparison, and if you are restricting and unrestricting cards on the basis of their power level, then Flash and Doomsday/Gush are raising the bar. Doomsday/Gush feels really close to the power level of Yawgmoth's Bargain or Necropotence and Flash is utterly retarded short of Leyline of the Void.

I'm not certain what the status of Wasteland is in a Gush environment, but if Wasteland is around, I'd go with at least one Island to support Brainstorm into another land with out the fear of having the first land Wastelanded. Swamp for Duress seems awful, because it's setting back the fundamental turn for Gush either way.

Is it just me, or is Lim Dul's Vault + Gush just insane? It's like getting a free Mox Sapphire/Jet, free +2 cards, free +1 storm, padding the hand with chaff for a stack with Brainstorm(s) and tutoring for two cards at the same time for one card at instant speed that pitches to Force of Will and Unmask. I think it's better than Demonic Tutor and the Mirage Tutors, albeit a little slower, it's way more resilient.

Edit: I'm not debating whether or not Mind's Desire should be unrestricted, rather, that the current decks are superior to unrestricted Fact or Fiction or Mind's Desire.

But is Fact or Fiction into Fact or Fiction or Mind's Desire into Mind's Desire comparable to the speed, power and consistency of Ichorid, Flash and Doomsday? I understand that Fact or Fiction seems intimidating, but Fact or Fiction in and of itself does not end the game, and if a deck can can cast Mind's Desire (4UU) thru' control's counter walls, thru' aggro-control's counters/discard/mana denial and thru' Prison's mana denial, doesn't it deserve to end the game? I'm not certain that Mind's Desire into Mind's Desire even matters, because as long as Mind's Desire reveals a threat(s), regardless of the threat(s), it's GG. The actual threat density of your deck isn't changing, your just getting a higher probability of the first Mind's Desire and less probability of fizzling (I think). Doomsday is ending the game for half of the mana, for black mana, and it's reducing the amount of acceleration in combo, increasing the amount of disruption in combo and adding a draw engine. That's INSANE for combo. The June 20 Ichorid, Flash and Doomsday metagame is literally leaps and bounds better than anything else on the restricted list at that point.

At a guess, I imagine Fact or Fiction and Trinisphere need to come off the list before Mana Drain and Workshops are going to be able to compete against the post June 20 decks, and even then it's debatable. When Leyline of the Void is a serious MD consideration, or even a necessary MD consideration, you seriously need to re-evaluate your environment.

I meant 6 mana, two of which is UU, or 4UU. Mind's Desire is definately not averaging turn 1.5, more like turn 2.5, and furthermore, a banned and restricted dicussion thread is more than appropriate for a banned and restricted topic, and retaliating with nothing but hyperbole and flames is definitely spam. Yes, the card is good, but compared to Ichorid, Flash and Doomsday + Gush, I don't think it's as degenerate as other people are making it out to be. Just look at Classic, where Mind's Desire is unrestricted with Lion's Eye Diamond, Chrome Mox and Burning Wish, and Flash is still the superior combo deck. Mind's Desire was pre-restricted almost three years ago, and pre-restriction is the only B&R mistake Wizards every really regretted, so I don't see any problem with giving Mind's Desire a legitimate chance to break the metagame for three months. Hell, restricting Gifts Ungiven was completely arbitrary any way, you may as well take some chances and see where they get you. Look at Gush for fuck's sake.

@Steve, How are you winning with with out Fastbond in Gush Tendrils? Hurkyl's Recall and Tendrils of Agony aren't really going to end the game before your opponent ends it. You're not casting any bombs, you're just assembling a multi-piece combo engine around singletons, which is just really unstable. At least the creatures could kill on their own right. With out any pressure, I don't see how you can really count on Gush. Isn't Doomsday clearly the place to start busting Tendrils + Gush?

Are you blind?  Full warning for trolling and blatantly ignoring moderator instructions. When a mod says stop discussing a topic, you stop discussing that topic.
-Klep

Comparing Gifts Ungiven to Fact or Fiction isn't sensible, because Gifts Ungiven + Recoup is closer to Doomsday than it is to Fact or Fiction, and Gifts Ungiven - Recoup isn't the problem, so the sensible thing to do would have been to unrestrict Fact or Fiction and not restrict Gifts Ungiven. People can still argue that it should be restricted because it's a 4xTutor, but that's bull shit, because Doomsday is a 5xTutor, so should we restrict Doomsday in three months because we restricted Gifts Ungiven? You'd have a serious argument for it, considering that Doomsday is awesome with Street Wraith AND Gush.