If the Dream Halls makes the deck go off more consistently (which I'm assuming is why you'd even test it), that could mean less chance of fizzling and giving non-drain slaver workshop an opening to drop a 3Sphere or something.

Regarding Mana Drain: That's true, but specific to the control matchup.  It's possible the Dream Halls could be a sideboard card, or something to side out in control matchups.

Regarding getting a bum Draw7 hand: Fair enough, but near 100% of the hands that would fizzle with a Dream Halls in play would fizzle anyway.  The hands the deck tends to fizzle on are the all-mana and the not-enough-mana hand; the manaflood hand will fizzle no matter what, while the mana screw hand would almost never fizzle since you'll almost always have something to pitch to whatever random broken blue/black card you happen to find.

Not true.  Assume you have 3UU floating, and your hand is Dream Halls, Diminishing Returns, and some random blue card.  Diminishing Returns means you have to hope to topdeck mana; Dream Halls, Pitch for Returns is game over.

No, once you RFG dragon 1, the swords will never resolve (or more accurately, will be countered when it does resolve)...assuming the stack ever empties to that point.  If a permanent is RFG then comes back, it's not considered the same permanent anymore which means the Swords can't be targeting it.

The chain of events goes:

-You cast animate
-Dragon1 comes into play
-Dragon1 CIP trigger goes on the stack
-opponent casts STP in response to trigger
-you cast Necromancy in response to STP
-Dragon2 enters play
-CIP trigger resolves, all other permanents (including Dragon1) leave play
(at this point you have the opportunity to determine the order of the Necromancy, Animate Dead, and WGD triggers.  I don't believe it matters unless I'm missing something)
-Dragon1's leaves-play trigger goes on the stack and resolves, but since Dragon1 didn't remove anything nothing happens; Animate Dead's leaves-play trigger tries to put the nonexistent Dragon1 in the graveyard but also does nothing
-Dragon2 goes to graveyard due to Necromancy trigger
-Dragon2's leaves-play ability goes on the stack
-Animate Dead, Necromancy, Dragon1 (and I assume Bazaar) all come into play at the same time

(flag: FOO)

At this point you can choose what order to stack your triggers.

Animate effects, then Dragon1: This means Dragon1's CIP ability resolves, and the animate triggers don't do anything according to current errata because they're not in play anymore.  This means you have no permanents in play except a Worldgorger Dragon that won't create any loops, but if it leaves play for any reason and your opponent doesn't have Stifle, you can try the normal loop anyway when your animate enchantments come back into play.

AnimateCIP/Dragon1 CIP/Necromancy:

-Necromancy animates Dragon2
-Dragon2 removes all your other permanents...including Dragon1

Now you have ANOTHER opportunity to stack your triggers.   The stack already looks like:

opponent's STP/AnimateCIP/Dragon1CIP

And you have to add the Dragon1LP and the Necromancy LP.  The Dragon1LP doesn't do anything at all, so this time it doesn't matter.  So I'll assume you let that one resolve first so I don't have to acknowledge it anymore.  At this point:

-Necromancy LP resolves, Dragon2 goes to the graveyard
-Dragon2LP goes on stack and resolves, your perms come back into play again.  Go back to FLAG: FOO and this is your loop.  You can now go off at instant speed, or draw the game.

Dragon1, then animate effects: This is essentially the same as Animate/Dragon1/Necromancy, since you can still go into the loop and draw/win without the first two triggers ever resolving.

Wow, I never had a problem with Dragon.dec until I typed that post.

EDIT: I never did mention how to finish the loop.  Basically, after you've generated infinite mana, deck them with laquatus.  Then you can manipulate the stack to get to the point mentioned above where you have just a gorger in play (once you RFG all the animate enchantments, their CIP triggers stop mattering).  After all your triggers resolve, the STP fizzles.

What kind of psychological disorder would make you need physical abuse to make (edit: receiving) a blowjob fun?

Yes they are, but I wouldn't worry about it that much unless you're also running 4 Returns, Chrome Mox, and only 2 win conditions.  Or more than two pact, which I don't recommend.

Regarding Mox Diamond: I fail to see how it is possible for Chrome to screw you more often than Diamond in a deck running eleven land.  At least I can drop Chrome with no imprint as Tinker fodder or to boost storm.  It's also got much better synergy with, say, Fastbond.

Regarding Duress: For the longest time I was playing with Unmask (and a higher concentration of black cards) just to see how it would compare, and it was terrible.  Duress has most of the same problems Unmask does except it also happens to cost mana.

Sounds way too conditional; it's a two-mana, almost off-color card that doesn't do anything unless your opponent has already started disrupting you.  I'd stick with Gibbons if you're that afraid of control.

I also hate Brainstorm, and suggest trying out 2 Tainted Pact.  Monkey with the mana base a bit and you can reliably dig 10 cards deep if you need to.  

Regarding Necropotence: Necropotence is the kind of card that looks a lot worse in goldfishing than in actual games.  Yeah, against some decks it's only good played on turn 1 and in those matches I sometimes side it out, but against control I like having another topdeck that they have to counter.

Chrome Mox also helps in that regard since Necropotence is a perfect imprint to cast your Dark Rituals in the event that you already are going off.

Stifle isn't that good against Draw7.dec.  Unless it's stopping Mind's Desire, if you have a reason to cast it you've probably already lost.

I thought the whole point of playing this deck was so that in matchups where someone might actually be able to disrupt your combo, you play like an aggro deck that just happens to have a combo panic button.

The number of times I've been screwed by not having UU is far outweighed by the number of times I didn't have enough mana due to Chromatics before I removed them.  Once I took them out they haven't been missed; having the wrong mana is something you can often avoid with playskill, but not having enough mana is much, much, much harder to work around.  I'd sooner remove Sol Ring than ESG.

Re: Chrome Mox - I don't know if I'm having weird luck or what, but Chrome Mox has always helped me anytime I draw it off anything but a double mulligan.  Even if it's not fixing your colors, it nets a mana without "eating" one of your existing mana like Sol Ring or Mana Vault.

It seems weird to play Crop Rotation if you're not running ESG.  Part of the reason to play it is so you can do something like ESG -> Rotation -> 5-color land -> Dark Ritual -> Timetwister with the U you already had floating.  The only other reason is Academy, but sometimes you remove Academy from the game with returns and it just becomes a bad card in that situation.

Is Oxidize really necessary with Goblin Vandals maindeck?  Or have people stopped playing those?

Artifact removal's a bit less useful in the maindeck than counters.



Even if that is true (which I'm suspicious about), it's not like Dragon plans on giving you a lot of time to topdeck those hosers.  If it can Force of Will the root maze you try to play on turn 1 and then go off on turn 2, the disruption's done its job.

Dragon can run Duress and Force of Will.

Starcity's ask the judge agrees with JP...

http://www.starcitygames.com/pages/judgefinder.php?keywords=Morph&Submit2=Ask+The+Judge%21

About the Negators: I would rather play Hidden Gibbons.  The fact that you don't need to spend a ritual on it is huge, and it's not like your opponent can hold back on instants since that would mean not countering your attempts to go off.  It'd also be easier to randomly cast one to boost your storm count midcombo.  Also, I'd expect a control opponent to side out StP, but they'll probably keep Fire/Ice in expecting Xantid Swarm.

Anyone seen the Type 2 Steelshaper version?  I've heard rumors of turn 2 kills with it (in Type 2!), but I can't even get the deck to work:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/ash5

(Ctrl-F for "Hajime Fujii")

I'd test it but I can't even seem to goldfish it properly, let alone decide what to change other than the obvious (chromes for real moxen omg omg)

They're not so bad in MWS.

Though the bugs are worse...

Regarding the list with 4 Lim-Dul's and 3 Spoils: Does it bother you that you're running 7 cards that read "If your opponent Mindslavers, you die"?

EDIT: Actually, since there's also a Necropotence, that makes 8.

Brainstorm I am thoroughly unimpressed with.  Honestly the only reason I'm running 2 right now is because I can't think of anything else to put in their slots.  They sometimes keep you from crapping out (and are so good against Slaver I actually board a third one), but they also make it much more difficult to evaluate opening hands, and can spell death if they don't offer anything and you aren't holding a tutor.

I'm not missing Chromatic Sphere, but I am running Hurkyl's, Fastbond, Crop Rotation and Chrome Mox.  If not running all four of those I might be afraid of colorscrew, but the cycling doesn't matter that much.



My current "hate base" is 2 Pact, 1 Hurkyl's, 2 Chain, 4 FoW.  I don't know if this is just my play style or if it's actually the correct way to play the deck, but I seem to have the most success when I aim to go off on turn 2.  The reason I'm loving pact so much is that I usually have mana to cast it first turn, but since it's an instant I wait to see what my opponent does so I'll know if I should pact for a hatespell, or a mana accelerator to float extra after my first draw 7.  

Chalice/Null Rod is nowhere near as annoying as Trinisphere; if your opponent goes first and drops a first-turn sphere you're screwed until at least turn 3 and that's if you're topdecking from your eleven land.  A chalice can be beaten by Chain of Vapor, and assuming you have even one land that translates to a chain, or a vamp, or a lucky ancestral/brainstorm.

Stifle...pfft on Stifle.  Sometimes you just barely manage to go off, but a lot of the time you can just twister some more and try it again.  More often than not a Stifle just means you win with a storm count of 50 instead of a storm count of 10.

Other counterspells hurt, but once you know your opponent's running them you can plan around them.  Even if they do force your stuff and break your combo, you can often just cast a draw7 the next turn and try again.  Having yourself interrupted isn't so bad when one lucky wheel/twister can put you right back in the game.

When the dragon dies, Stifle the "when Worldgorger Dragon leaves play" ability.  Then their permanents don't come back.

It occurs to me that there is no reason to play Glimmervoid over Underground Sea unless and until you start adding off-color cards to your sideboard.

I know the 'void's drawback shouldn't matter that much, but you never know.

Is there any room in the deck for Underground Seas at all?  It would seem between that and Glimmervoid you could have enough nonartifact mana sources such that Null Rod wouldn't completely end the game (You can still drop moxen followed by free Frogmites, cast disciple/skullclamp off your lands, etc).  That might also open up the possibility for adding Chain of Vapor or something maindeck (though having that chained back to you with arcbounds on the table could potentially suck)

Note that I never said the deck was hopeless, I just posted my opinion on the problems with the deck so far.  In fact the last sentence of my post was a statement on what the deck would have to do to be "good" (as in "not a casual deck strictly inferior to existing choices"); hardly dismissing it outright.

I think some people are interpreting "this deck has problems to overcome" as "YOUR DECK SUCKS GO NETDECK A REAL PLAYER".  

EDIT: BTW, everyone who posted on the first page of the thread gave at least one positive solution (or direct rebuttal to something posted), or shared what they discovered trying the deck themselves.  Hardly as destructive as you seem to think.

If I haven't yet cast my first draw7, no way would I want to spend a mana on Duress (against random deck whose decktype I don't know yet; against control I've presumably sided in Xantid Swarms so I can try to go off using one of them...).  After I've cast my first draw7, the card advantage has kicked in and I'll almost always have fuel for Unmask.

That said, Force and Unmask are pretty much mutually exclusive.  I don't think of Unmask as being comparable to Duress, it's pretty much a Force of Will for black decks without enough blue cards to support the real Force of Will.

Similarly Pact isn't a replacement for Death Wish; in fact since it can remove your win conditions it can make Wish/Tendrils 2 necessary if you run too many Pacts!  It's really competing for a slot with Brainstorm; unless you're absolutely desperate for a specific card, it's usually an Impulse on steroids (even if you can get almost anything you want, you don't always want to remove 10-15 cards from the game unless you have a good reason).  But you can't really replace them straight across because:

-The "I removed all my win conditions" problem
-The "I don't have enough blue cards for Force of Will" problem
-The "I flipped over Tainted Pacts with my Tainted Pact" problem
-The higher casting cost

More and more I'm convinced two Pact is the right number.

EDIT: Some clarification

So like, this idea randomly came up in the StarCityGames thread about T1.5 vs. T1: Make the T1.5 not based on the Type I list at all, but instead make it based on the extended banlist.  You'd still have to ban the restricted stuff that was never legal in Extended to begin with, but other than that you could just go by whether it was legal when it rotated out of Extended.

Pros:

-Extended actually behaves more like 1.5 in terms of reaction to bannings.  As in, when you ban a card, you don't have to ban other cards to ban it more ("collateral damage" bans like Crop Rotation and the like).
-Conversely, cards that aren't strong enough to break T1 but might break 1.5 are banned in Extended (Entomb, Earthcraft, Ritual)
-Suddenly combinations of cards that aren't legal in any other format become legal, meaning Type I players would actually have a reason to play it.
-Anyone who plays Extended automatically has a legal deck, thereby creating more incentive for non-Vintage players to start playing (and possibly drift all the way to Type I.   )
-People will start playing the format in droves when Extended rotates

Cons:

-Some stuff like Kird Ape and Hypnotic Specter (remember, this proposal means no ritual!) would be banned for no reason (although this is somewhat alleviated by the fact that Crop Rotation and some other relatively fair cards are put back into the format)
-If some kind of degenerate combo shows up using, say, a card from Mirage and a card from Fifth Dawn, but doesn't make a difference in Type I, then 1.5 is stuck with it (although that's not much different from how things are now...)
-Suddenly Burning Wish, Diminishing Returns, Lion's Eye Diamond, Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond and Mind's Desire are all unrestricted at the same time and that just gives me the jibblies

Even though this isn't something that's likely to pass at Wizards, I think it makes a neat thought experiment.  It might even be a fun hobby format.

Some other notes:

-I don't have a banlist for the old old extended, so I don't know what the whole list would be (in fact part of the reason I'm making this post is that I'm sure some of the people here will know.   ).  Here's the stuff from pre-rotation Extended and current Extended (omitting ante cards):

My basic problem with Affinity in T1 right now goes something like this:

Faster "combo you out" builds = scoop to hate = why are you not playing:

-Storm combo decks that are just as vulnerable to hate (if not less so), but combo out faster?
-Food Chain Goblins, which is just as fast as any Ravager build I've seen but much harder to hose?

Slower "use threats and light control" = why are you not playing a Workshop aggro deck like TnT or Stacker?

It's the same thing I said about BroodStarRunner; someone tried to make an affinity deck and it mutated into mono-blue Workshop aggro with Myr Enforcers as the only affinity card.

I tried to make a Ravager Affinity build the day after PT: Kobe, and couldn't come up with a way around the above objections.  Get it to not scoop to hate, or get it to kill on turn 2, then we'll talk.

I think I've just about pushed the Unmask idea to its logical extreme:



Some notes:

-I was right about the increased value of Chrome Mox; you'll notice there's no Sol Ring in this build.  Usually it ends up being a bad Mox Jet, but that's ok since it keeps me from getting post-draw7 hands with a ritual "stranded" because I need all my colored mana for other things.  Even if it doesn't fix your colors, it nets the same amount of mana as a Sol Ring but doesn't need one of your existing mana to do it, and the card disadvantage is nonexistent the second you cast any draw7.

-I hate Death Wish.  For the longest time the second Tendrils was a Wish, but eventually it got cut when I realized that not only did it never win me a game that Tendrils couldn't have won (in goldfishing or in actual matches), it actually lost me a game where I was forced to Bargain down to 1 and the last card I topdecked was the Wish.  This version does need to run 3 win conditions; the returns barely bother me at all, but having to stop a pact or refrain from casting Chrome/Unmask just because you're afraid of losing win conditions is not worth the benefit of having fewer "dead cards" early game.

-I want Force.  Unmask does have a few benefits over Force (namely having more "situational" cards to dump to it, the fact that you can randomly cast it to boost storm even if you're playing against a deck with no counters, and being able to figure out what your opponent is playing right away so you'll know whether to worry about possible counters or not), but there are several problems I'm running into:

-Not knowing whether to use it pre-Windfall or not
-The fact that it's suckass in the combo mirror when you're opponent is doing stuff and you can't do anything about it
-The fact that you're almost always pitching Bargain/Necro, win conditions or tutors to it.  This is more subtle but until I noticed it, I had been randomly dropping games because either I thinned my deck of too many meaningful spells and twistered into all mana, OR I got forced to returns with like 15 cards between graveyard and hand because I had like a million mana but no other business spells, the whole time weeping at my Yawgmoth's Bargain sitting in the RFG zone.  It's not like I can change this too terribly much, even if I'm trying to avoid it; what am I going to do, pitch a ritual instead?

-Tainted Pact is so awesome. It's like an instant DT in this deck.  I actually had one game where I went first dropping Mox, Mox, land and passing the turn, then my opponent went Workshop, Trinisphere...I pact with sphere on the stack, turn over something like 6 cards to find a chain, untap, drop a land, tap 3 to chain my own mox, sac a land to chain the other one (floating a mana), sac my other land to bounce his sphere, drop moxen then cast Timetwister and proceed to win the game.  The only time I've had a pact fizzle on a single-digit number of cards was when the first two cards were Ritual, Ritual, and that was just astronomical bad luck (25 cards in library, one ritual returnsed away and one in my graveyard).  I think one step I'm going to take is to try and fit another Chain in the deck so that with Pact I have basically 9 cards that can save me from hosers opening hand if I went first (counting the forces).  Probably in place of the Second Tendrils since not having Unmasks to pitch to is a big deal in that regard.

Also, while I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet, the very idea of "Pact for Force of Will in response to you wrecking my ass" gives me the giggles.

Old school academy needed an academy in play to be good and ran stuff that could untap it.  This deck removes large chunks of its own library from the game, and has no way to untap an Academy aside from Crop Rotation -> Timetwister -> Crop Rotation (unless you draw the Academy again and have a Fastbond in play).