Madness With a Different Spin!

[Siral]

I looked around the decks that my teammates bring to our last tourney and this one better performed in a field of TPS, Keeper, Stax, WelderMUD, L&S, ZherbusBlack, many aggro and other prerestriction goodies.

He split the prices in the final with a Stax build, after going 5-0-1 in the swiss.

With the departure of TheAbyss as the most fearing hoser of this deck, Wild Mongrel will began the key of every madness deck, more than Bazaar,  and keeping it alive let you win a lot if not every game agaisnt a control deck and an other Aggro deck.

With so much combo in our field another set of counters ( rather than Logic... ) have been demonstrated his value, stoping a lot of first turn huge treat and letting you not to auto lose to it. After this critical turn 1, with all your armies untouched by the Pitching FoW ( all your cratures are Green... ) you can deal with Removals and other opponent Bombs with Logic and other FoW.  To let you keeping your hand full of cards you have a lot of weapon:

-Bazaar/Squee
-D.A.
-CarafullStudy to dig and fill your grave with goodies that function only from this position and resize and Adjust your hand
- some brokeness among the restricted cards ( Wheel, Ancestral, TimeWalk )

I rarely didn't see my temmates run out of cards and not able to counter or protect his cratures with a well placed FoW or a
Logic discarded to Mongrel or Bazaar

We realized ( after palying aggro madness ), that the need of counter in this deck is more complex and intimate that you could think.

Not only it let you protect your own life and board position letting not to scoop to a single spell resolved preside or after siding but it really let you to feel good when a control deck like keeper couldn't resolve a single removal while your Pet his beating him down. Many games has shved that a little few creatures and an higher count of counters ( paired with a good engine to use them... ) is better than thousand of creatures all of which could be single handly be killed by a resolved mass removal.

And only 4 Logic from the side usually didn't help the madness player to avoid the opponent to resolve Balance, Deed, Keg, StP and so on.

Of course the goldfish of this deck is a little slower than the path for the victory that follow AggroMadness, but IMHO , it is safer and you are able to protect yourself from 2 of the worst treat right now for every multicolored decks:

Back to Basics and Blood Moon

My teammates lose a game only to a resolved first turn Blood Moon in the top8 and another game to a combo that close the games on turn 1 and 3 . Not a bad score to a deck that, even I , wrongly judged "BAD".

Smmemen and JP, usually talked about the power of Hybrid Forms of deck and about their subdule nature and difficulty to sideboard agaisnt.

I found that this deck follows in this strange and powerful category, because if preside you have difficult to take care of his creatures, post side you have to take care of Pillars and Hate from your own Creatures-Hate, not talking about the conters and the creatures themselves.


This deck is more resilient than it appear after a first quick look and every good result should be watched with attention.
And this deck perform well every time this player find time to go to a tourney.

In his last tourney he found between him and the finals:
-Swiss-
Monored (Win)
TPS (Win)
Stax (Win)
TPS (Win)
WelderMUD (Win)
Stax (ID)
-Top8-
MissAmerica (Win)
BengaKiodo'sFactory (Win)
Stax


Fearing most of all StormBasedDeck, BtB and Blood Moon the side is tuned to fight them well.

Enjoy!


Control-Madness

MAIN DECK
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Basking Rootwalla
3 Roar of the Wurm

3 Careful Study
3 Deep Analisys
2 Cunning Wish

4 Force of Will
4 Circular Logic

4 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Anger
1 Wonder

1 Forest
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
4 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Tropical Island
1 Taiga
3 Volcanic Island
4 Wooded Foothills

SIDEBOARD
3 Chalice of the Void
1 Ray of Revelation
1 Artifact Mutation
2 Naturalize
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Tormod's Crypt
3 Pyrostatic Pillar


What do you think about it?
Discuss! \n\n

[SummenSaugen]

You're trying to combine two mutually exclusive ideas.

Control = cards in hand
whereas
Madness = discard

I respect your evolution of the idea, however the very mechanic demands much more aggression.  These ideas have been heavily tested already, and the same conclusion was reached each time.

[Siral]

I dont know if you've played UG Madness in t2, but madness was created to be an aggro-control deck and not a pure aggro deck. All the cards of the deck are chosen to create a good sinergy and even if the madness is an ability that work on discard cards this not means that it must always play with 0 or 1 card in hand. As all aggro control decks of this world your game plan is to play 1 or 2 threats (1 mongrel or 1 roar + 1 basking rootwalla) and try to kill your opponent with those threats. The card advantage that a active bazaar with 1 or 2 squee can give is incredible and even if for some reasons you have no cards in your hand you can still cast some spells like roar, deep or topdecked logic or rootwalla with the activation of a bazaar.

My Teammate who plays this madness deck is Matteo Rubini that with this deck was 4th in side event of the worlds at Berlin, so it's a deck that give good results every time is played.

And i dont think that control and madness are two mutually exclusive ideas....i think that with the right cards this ideas can really works together...

[Eastman]

Quote (Siral @ Dec. 03 2003,05:53)I dont know if you've played UG Madness in t2, but madness was created to be an aggro-control deck and not a pure aggro deck.

This is very true. Type 2 Madness is one of the defining examples of modern aggro-control (in t2, anyways)

[Shivan Knight]

Quote 4 Wild Mongrel
4 Basking Rootwalla
3 Roar of the Wurm

11 critters seem rather low to me, even for an aggro-control deck.
Have you tried to fit Arrogant Wurms or business stuff like Gorilla Shaman, Quirion Ranger - though they haven't particular synergy with madness ?

[BreathWeapon]

The decision to retro T1 Madness into an Aggro Control deck makes perfect sense. The deck no longer has LED at its disposal, so the previous lack of synergy T1 Madness had with the Aggro Control set up is gone.

I this case, the past of Madness is its future.

Note: I don't agree with the build at all, just the concept.

[jpmeyer]

You know what card I wish was awesome in Madness?  Psychic Vortex.

[Hyperion]

I think your take on the archetype is interesting, and does deserve consideration in light of the fact that it's unaffected by the new round of restrictions. The main reservation I have about a control Madness build is that the backbone of its draw engine is easily answered by Blood Moon and Wasteland, and is thus less robust than the engine in other control and aggro-control builds. Whereas in more aggressive Madness builds, Bazaar serves a somewhat different purpose, in that it's mainly there to help you avoid running out of steam in the mid- to late-stages of the game should it get to that point. The way this build is designed is such that it is significantly more dependent on Bazaar because the relative lack of aggressiveness means it will be playing into the mid/late game a lot more often. With that said, the Italian Madness build has certainly put up good showings in the past.

I included the build you referred to here (that was played by Matteo Rubini at Worlds) in the Madness primer written by myself and Rico Suave. There were some parts of your control Madness built I had questions about and hopefully this thread will serve as a good opportunity to discuss them.

1) This build seems like it should run Intuition. It has 4 Squees, ROTWs and Deep Analyses to fetch out in multiples, and running the lone Anger and Wonder means you won't draw them on a consistent basis. Intuition takes care of that nicely. Have you tested it or considered running it? If so, why did you decide not to run it?

2) The use of Cunning Wish is interesting. I would think that your relatively light mana base (only 20 mana sources!) would make using this card effectively more difficult. In addition, all it really gets you with the current SB is artifact/enchantment removal and Blasts. While I can understand that having access to these cards pre-SB would be useful in some scenarios, you do already have 4 Circular Logic and 4 Force of Will to handle potential problems. While you could wish for a Blast to get rid of B2B/Blood Moon, you could also just fetch out your basic Forest. Finally, it's a little slow to handle another very problematic card for Madness (Sphere of Resistance). To sum up, I guess I don't see the advantage of running Cunning Wish for a relatively small "toolbox" over a more redundant sideboard.

[Razor]

Only have a minute to post before Jiu Jitsu class.  No room for Intuition?  Some ideas:

Compulsion
Color= Blue  Type= Enchantment  Cost= 1U TO(U)  
Text (TO): ,Discard a card from your hand: Draw a card. ; ,Sacrifice ~this~: Draw a card.

Ashen Ghoul
Color= Black  Type= Creature - Ghoul  Cost= 3B IA(U)  
Text (IA+errata): 3/1, Haste. ; : Return ~this~ from your graveyard to play. Play this ability only during your upkeep and only if three or more creature cards are above ~this~. [Oracle 2002/03/01]

Krovikan Horror
Color= Black  Type= Creature - Horror  Cost= 3B AL(R2)  
Text (AL+errata): 2/2. ; At end of turn, if ~this~ is in your graveyard with a creature card directly above it, you may return ~this~ to your hand. ; ,Sacrifice a creature: ~this~ deals 1 damage to target creature or player. [Oracle 1999/07/23]

[Siral]

About intuition

In the first version of the deck 2 cunning wish was intuition but since sometimes the 8 counters doent's stop the threats of the opponent we need solutions over card advantage.

About running cunning wish you're right about low mana sources but we dont have any kind of problems testing so we continue to play the deck builded in this way

[Maxx Matt]

Nice to see you, Hyperion, looking at this deck from the right perspective.

You called exactly the same points I underlined Matteo and Siral during our testing.

Siral is right and wrong. Let me explain.
The only thing that prevents Matteo to be mana screwed in the half of the matches we played ( I used my ChaliceKeeper ) were Bazaar. Naturally they are the first Wasteland targets and this fact let him save some of his lands to play safely his high CC spells. The problem show himsellf when, having resolved a CotV for Zero, he couldn't cast his moxen "OneShot" and I could easily avoid him casting nothing but useless RootWalla.
So as Siral sayed, usually there aren't a lot of problems with the mana base ( some color screw happen more often than mana screw ) but IMHO the land count is a little low.

The presence of a second Anger is Crucial in this metagame full of Grave removal, more than the cunning wish, that is crucial only in some mathups ( see Stax and Control )

So my little Changes ( only due to testing evidence and not based on playstyle... ) are:

-2 Cunning Wish
+1 Forest
+1 Anger

Wonder really isn't useful in our enviroment during this period.. too much combo, too much stax, too much control.. in a few words.. there aren't so much beasts to superpass for win a game...

Intuition is a double knife weapon in this deck:
Keep your Grave full of goodies ( as intuition let you to do... ) and the opponent will get rid of them as soon as possible.
Draw them during the match and only the openminded opponent will know When and How Use his Ebony Charm or his Damn Crypt...
Revealing 3 Squee or 3 Roar or 3 Deep will show him the correct path too easily... let him "think" a bit more than necessary and usually he didn't have the correct timing for his choices and he will die...


The first enemy of this deck is BtB and Blood Moon.
With the second forest I see an improving of perfomances for this deck.

What do you think?


PS: The first post was mine (2 Nick Name and a single PC.. ah, what a poor student Am I...  ), even if Siral and Matteo entirely  developed this deck some months ago.
I was ONLY the Keeper player that reveal some weakness of this deck
After posting nearly the same deck with a time shift of 6 months I'm gla to see some of you changed a it theirs opinions about it! Continue helping us on tuning this archetipe!\n\n

[Toad]

Considering this decks has lost one of his best Madness outlet to dump Roar of the Wurm and Deep Analysis in the graveyard, wouldn't Quiet Speculation be worth playing as a 1 or 2-off in this deck ? It also have a nice synergy with Ray of Revelation, if people want to play it to have a cheap solution against D4RG0N.

[Matt The Great]

If QS could fetch incarnations, I'd be all for it, but that really hurts it compared to Intuition. It's also a sorcery, and can't be used EOT to bait a counter.