Negate vs Mana Leak in current Meta

[MirariKnight]

Yeah good point that's pretty critical, totally forgot about him. Everyone seems to go the Pridemage route and I haven't seen anyone play him in a while, but he is one of the worst creatures for Oath

[honestabe]

right now, just about every deck is running creatures.

Play mana leak

>_<'

but often u WANT your opp to play one...

-.-

Umm....  no you don't.  I'd much rather have an opponent not play a confidant, or meddling mage, or Qasali Pridemage.

Right now, everyone;s playing disrutive creatures, or Bob.  Neither of which are good for an Oath playe

so what does this tell us? oO

spell pierce costs only 1 mana.
sorry just dont understand..

all we wanna do is protect our oath as safely as possible. and with 3 mana available we can oath, spell pierce and FoW/ MisD..

just think that spel pierce is the way to go.

I disagree that in the current meta "all we want to do" is protect our Oath.

There are "so many insane plays" (to quote a rather conspicuous collumn about vintage) in the current Meta that end us, even with an active Oath.

Time Vault

This thing can kill us, instantly. Even if we Oath once, if we get no more attack phases we're caught high and dry.

Confidant

Doubles... that right DOUBLES the chances of Vault being drawn, and with counter back-up to boot.

Prior to getting Oath

T1 / T2 Oath is certainly not always possible, especially in the counter-heavy meta. Imagine cast duress and seeing:

FoW, Mana Drain, a blue draw spell, Island and some irrelevant other stuff when they already have a land down. Are we going to Oath anytime soon? no. This is a hand we could see in Fish, Tezz, Oath, Drain Tendrils, etc....

Meddling Mage

On Oath with lots of counter back-up can = GG.

Magus of the Moon 

We are running 2 basics. The rest of our land is turned into a nasty shade of red that does nothing for us. unless we already have basic forest in play or Oath in play, this is GG as well.

Tinker

While this is less of an issue for us than for most mages, as we have a decent shot of racing the Tinker target, it can be a problem. Sphinx can block our Dragons all day long for a net gain of 4 life , plus swing at us. And if the other targets come out before we get an active Oath, it can spell disaster.

While in the abstract I agree that Spell Pierce is likely the best second-string counterspell to use offensively, I question the basic assumption that we will be using our counters offensively all of the time. Who's the beatdown? We play a list that is very heavy on disruption because we recognise that Oath is no always on the beatdown in this meta. We often have to lock up the board with Null Rods, rip our opponent's hand apart with Seize effects, and counter some "key" (pun intended) plays before we can drop our threat and go for the jugular. In a world of 4 mana instant wins and aggro/disruptive decks built to fight them, Oath can't afford to go balls to the walls.

r


As anyone who was at ELD's Lotus can tell you, the game is not NEARLY over once Oath is resolved.  With the prevalence of controll-heavy blue decks, often, you use up all your duress/counter effects in order to land oath.  this essentially means your opponent has 2-3 turns to win, usually with little to no disruption.  With Tezz, winning like that is VERY possible

Even vs Stax, Jesters cap can steal all your dudes before they get out there. (happened Game 1)


If resolving oath was an insta-win, I'd of top 8ed ELDs lotus, but instead, just about every game ended with me finding myself vault-keyed, or dead to tendrills, AFTER oath was already out.  For this reason, I don't think Oath is the way to go, despite many decks making room for a few creatures

[MTGFan]

I'm kind of a sucker for MUC, to be honest, and I know this is sort of irrelevant to the current discussion in this thread, but I'm curious what you guys think is the best tertiary counter for MUC in this format (After 4xForce and 4xMana Drain),  if you were to do something silly like play MUC. Right now I'm thinking Mana Leak, because I also play 4 Chalice MD and don't necessarily want to overload on the 1 mana counters like Spell Pierce and Spell Snare, so that I can feel comfortable in my ability to function under Chalice @ 1. But I'm also intrigued by simply running Counterspell too, because after all, its MUC and has primarily blue sources. But is Leak still better for all of those situations in which you have only 1 blue open and say, sol ring mana or off-color moxen?