Hmm both the 2nd and 5th place are playing without Necro and with Tinker but NO Jar. Do you guys want to find Black Lotus only?
Otherwise pretty cool Top 8 with lots of the top players and top decks in there.

I'd even consider to cut green at all and replace the Swarms with Cabal Therapies, which look great additional to Duress and even more with Trinket Mage to pay for the flashback cost.

The black mana requirement for Duress/therapy vs. Stax is not that bad when you have two basic swamps in your deck and enough fetchlands to get them. 1st turn duress can still grab a lock piece.

Actually I think he mentioned the Therapy/confidant synergy only for the Gifts/slaver and not the Stax matchup. I doubt that he brings the additional discard in against stax.

First, congratz to your great finishes with a really strong and perfectly tuned deck!

I have a question regarding your Sb plan against Gifts/Slaver: When you bring in 4 Confidants, 3 Therapies, Hymn and maybe Coffin Purge - what do you Sb out? You have to cut a lot of blue cards which drastically increases the number of blue cards to support Force of Will. So do you Sb out FoW? Seems a bit risky imo.

The decklist in Carsten's article is outdated.

And I can't find a member of Team CAB in the Top 8 you posted.

We will reveal it after the Paris tournament. (Actually it's not THAT different from the lists you see in carsten's article but there are a few differences and some cool tech )


/edit: I like Toad's build better

OMG

I will definately be there!!!

Toaddy I hope I can stay @ your house .

Is the attendance limited?

And why don't you spread the P9 between all the Top8 members? It sounds a far better deal to me.

No, they were horrible. :<

Hey Rich, congrats. You're list looks close to mine, but I have one point where I don't agree with you:

Why do you run Tormod's crypt over Phyrexian Furnace? Furnace is in my opinion a lot better. I already played a keeper list with 3 of them MD in Dülmen and all I can say is that it is was great. Ok, its a bit more mana intensive than crypt, but most of the time you dont want to to anything else than just remove the one Squee, or the one Sundering Titan, or Black Lotus or whatever. I especially like it when I can reuse it with for example Goblin Welder or Salvagers (which I played in my Keeper list). it draws you one additional card per turn combined with the little Goblin.
Give it a try .

340 on Europe guys ;D (although I had luck a few times with the east)

No.

I think that is heavily metagame dependant. If you are expecting a lot of Drain based Control Decks, go for Doomsday. If you are expecting more Workshops I'd play Death Long.

Yeah thats right. Kai attended in Dulmen last year and played(you guessed it) Budde Trix. I think TPS and Budde Trix are easy comparable to each other except the win condition which changed from Illusions/Donate to Tendrils...

Smmenen will play MeanDeath(Death Long), I'm sure... Im not sure about the rest of the team, but I think some of them will play Oath again or just do the same as Smmenen

 :shock:

I'm really interested in his list! Is it possible to get it?

/edit: thanks Toaddy

No. We already discussed this issue and came to the conclusion that the 2nd Mindslaver IS needed when you play Intuition. You really want to get it into your graveyard and not into our hand.

@ Toaddy: I already told you how great this article is.

Actually I  killed someone donating him my Mana Crypt and winning the coin flip in his upkeep.  

And yeah I really killed somebody via Donating him my Necro and Mindslaving him... it was the first round and my opponent played his first Type 1 tourney.
Well, he dropped after our match....  

@ Smmenen: I agree with Carstens post, that was way better than the 2nd part of your article.

I love this deck.

I actually know many people who would kill you if you just grab their deck and do a riffle shuffle...and pile shuffling after each fetchlands costs a lot of time, so normally I just cut my opponents deck. :/

Mark, congratulations! I was so proud when I heard that you won with Enslaver .

Next time, I definately have to come myself and we germanz will pwn you all.

-Kim

I've heard that they got lost...

Grmbl... I didnt understand one single word of what you said and not only because my English isnt very good, just because you spoke dutch english . I understand all your posts, but if I want to talk to you, it's really hard, so sry again.

I went 3-4 btw. and totally crapped out vs. Mandess and Sligh in the three following rounds after the meeting with Rudy.

I'll definatley going for something different next time, after the 4th round I didn't feel confident with Keeper anymore.

Your SB plan seems okay, but I have a problem with leaving Cunning Wish in the deck but not being able to fetch an REB with it. I often play Cunning Wish just to get REB to protect my next big draw spell.

My SB plan with your Sb would simply be:

-2 StP
+2 REB


I was wondring if Crucible is useful in this matchup, too, but I dont think so...


Have you already tested Engineered Explosives instead of Fire/Ice or one StP in the main? I think they are definatley worth a look at.

Yeah, we had the Idea too. Battling with the Dutch-> Wohoo.

No, it isn't->don't forget the Demonic and two Tednrils which are listed below the manasources...



@Smmenen: I realy like your recent changes, Steve. Mox Diamond seems to fit in the gameplan really well although I think that you may become problems with its cost forcing you to dicard a land.

Time Spiral seems rather bad to me. But Vampiric and Walk as well, so I think you made the right decision here.

BUT is this really as fast as Belcher is? I don't think so, maybe I have to test more with it, but until now I didn't have as good results as with Belcher.

Night's Whisper or Plunge into Darkness, nothing else comes to my mind.

Yeah, I think I am a Keeper player nothing else .

@MaxxMatt: There is only the Swiss round, no Top 8 or something like that.

I think there were about 6-7 Hulks in Dulmen this time, but only one managed to top 8.

Carsten and me were playing Smmenens maindeck card-by-card and we both finished 4-3 .

I lost two mirrors and vs. Ankh Gobbos...I was about three times mana flooded in one of the mirrors, I had a beautifuel starting 7 with lotus, crypt, Demonic, Duress, AK. But I drew 8 lands from the top and lost horribly.

I can't imagine how you want to draw good with this deck, sometimes you draw like a god, like I did vs. Sui, when I killed him after he just said Swamp -> go, but other times(or most of the time)I just drew mana after mana. And what  I really missed was one card: Balance!
Maybe I'm just a bad Hulk player, but I think this deck draws too inconsistent.

The only problem I have with running more brainstorms, is that this card is blue. I really had some mana issues with it. Especially when I want to cats a draw 7 after brainstorming that turn, I never really had the UU to cast both.

Other point: The Bayou. I'd never cut it, because there are situations, where you simply need to fetch B with land grant. and I never really had a problem with fizzling because I had the 2nd land in my deck, I've tested it without the Bayou after reading your article, steve, but I put it back after about 5 or 6 games, just because I was missing the black mana more often than fizzling with the bayou in the deck. Maybe you can board it out, yeah, that could be possible. Btw. It would be really nice if the land grant could fetch underground sea, than I would make a totally diffrent deck (by totally I mean cutting the tinder walls, adding more cabal rituals, only one land etc. )

Toad, you are my hero, i really needed some proxies .

@ Rico:
1. circumstance: Needs to come 1st or 2nd turn, because its a very crappy mid to lategame draw.

2. It needs many spells to become good. And those spells shouldnt be too expensive, because then you cant play many of them in order to grow yur dryad. And cards with lower cc usually have a worse effect.
The old GAT has like 12 free spells if I remember correctly. 4 Gush, 4 MisD, 4 FoW. Now Gush is restricted and MisD isnt as strong anymore.
Gush really made this deck shine. It was strictly better than Hulk in those days. But now you have to rely on a inferior draw engine like Thirst/DA or even Intuition/AK/DA. These draw engines simply cost a lot of mana, mana you dont want to spend, because then your dryads dont grow so fast.

And no, you are not right, when you say, that Tog isnt good without Cunning Wish->Berserk. It is still a house. A hell lot better than a dryad without mana spells to cats. When you play Tog you can simply put it into play and your opponents hordes just stop to attack, whereas your little dryad needs a lot of spells to become a real threat for your opponent.

Please show me a match, where the dryad wins a game which Tog could never win.

It's like JP said, the dryads could also be more carddraw or protecting for your combo (GAT is a combo). I really like to play vs. a deck that has less carddraw than me, but packs little creatures that are easy to remove. Dryads dont fight over an Intuition or Ancestral, I think that they are like STP in the control matchup, just overkill and not needed.

I agree with you that they CAN be threat if they come down first turn, then its hard to find a proper answer, but also in that case you can simply put a Tog int play and youre dryad wont attack anymore.