[Deck] Charbelcher Combo 2004

[ELD]

I have played tons of charbelcher over the past few months.  I play it mostly in an arena league with some alternate rules.  You play one game vs anyone but the person from your last match.  You do this as many times as possible over the course of 2 hours.  In 2 hours you play 2 or 3 tournaments worth of matches when you're running a deck that only has 3 turns max.  When people say stuff like "I've hit my other land once EVAR" etc it is just a function of how many games they're played.  If you're playing 100's of games, you're going to see some crazy stuff.  Hitting the other land is not crazy, it's common place.  

Since the volume of games I've played is rather large, I'd like to point out some things.  Spoils of the vault does exactly what the math says it should.  It has killed me over one out of 10 times that I cast it.  I'm glad to see it's moving out of alot of the lists.  Hitting the other land in a 2 land version happens more than I'd like to admit.  The real problem is it tends to happen only when you're going for a quick kill with no card drawing involved.  When drawing through you deck, you'll often hit that other land or a land grant, sometimes even a tutor for land grant.  The suicide hands that drop a belcher and activate often cannot activate a second time.  When running up against another combo deck, hitting the other land is often game over as it gives them a turn to destroy you.  

Just for kicks, here's the worse thing I've seen happen thus far.  

First turn
land grant for trop/play it
remove esg
play channel
pay 7 for charbecher/activation
hit bayou after 1 card
play chromatic sphere, sac for U
tinker for another belcher
activate belcher
hit bayou after 1 card
little kid wonders why I'd want to do 14 damage to myself on the first turn to shock him

Sure, random things can happen, but I'm not sure the second land is amazing right now.  4 Chromatic Sphere might be enough to get the U mana.  Also, dragon sporting 4 force of will seems to be a solid beating to my face.  

As far as the Neo Academy list, I'm pretty sure the only reason Academy could run meditate and some other bad cards was because it ran Tolarian Academy.

[PucktheCat]

Just for a statistical perspective on the whole thing, when you go off with one land still in your library you will do less than 20 damage nearly half of the time (20 cards for 20 damage, 50 or so cards in library).  If you ever go off with a land left in your library simply make a note of it.  If you do it more than 2-3 times that way and you don't hit the land it is just luck.  It will catch up with you eventually.

That being said, there are arguments on the other side.  Living Wish > Savanger Folk against Null Rod seems like a big one to me.  That is a hard play with only one land.

Leo

[rvs]

Eld: you're wrong about Academy. Meditate isn't good, but it was the best thing available.
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.

[Bulls on Parade]

As far as the Neo Academy list, I'm pretty sure the only reason Academy could run meditate and some other bad cards was because it ran Tolarian Academy.

I've been heavily considering cutting both duals and the 4 Land Grants for an Academy and some other stuff, but I'm really using all the decent accelerators I know of (read: haven't tested 5th Dawn which has been described as promising in this area) besides Vineyard and Tinder Wall which are just no dice in this deck.
 As ridiculous as it may sound, the Mirrodin Block Talismans are the next cards I'm testing out, because the goal is obviously to be able to play them for free via Helm.

[heiner]

@ELD:

firstly: When the Belcher hits the table its mostly game, even if you have to belch 2 or even 3 times.

second: run a fetch land in your SB to wish for.

[goober]

no it isn't, a lot of decks can destroy it if you let them have 2 or 3 turns to get a destruction spell, or can wipe out you manabase with keg, deed, mox monkey.  Then the decks that can't do that can just go off and kill you.

[ELD]

I'll try and be more clear.  When one gets a hand that drops itself on the table such as

land grant
dark ritual
dark ritual
mana vault
charbelcher
2 cards that don't let you win first turn (welder/swarm/wish whatever)

and you fumble it's a problem.  Sure you can top deck some mana, but you only have a couple turns to do so.   You end up losing to an aggro deck that should normally have no chance.  Who wants to lose to a deck like FCG or even Suicide Black (just kidding about sui, you know you'll recover before they kill you).  

53 cards left with one land in opening hand to hit the other land
37.73% of the time

I'm not too happy about hitting my land well over a third of the time.  This is why I don't play belcher in serious tournaments.  Against a combo deck you almost certainly just lost.  Against decks packing any kind of answer, you just allowed them to cast null rod or artifact removal.  Here's a specific real life example

In a tournament in Worcester I played against belcher.  Game 3 I went 1st turn welder.  He goes turn 1 belcher.  I go turn 2 mox monkey.  On his turn he belched me.  He hit a land and I won after welding out the belcher for a mox that I ate with the monkey.  His welder plan was useless as mox monkey was supported by alot of mana as well.  GG.  As anyone who plays alot of competitive type 1 will tell you, giving an opponent extra turns can be very costly.  

All I'm saying is I've lost with and won against Belcher because of the second land.  If there is a way to cut it I'm all ears.  It seems to me that the dark ritual/bayou maybe more critical than tropical/brainstorm.  With U and B so important to the deck, it is difficult so see how one would make belcher immune to the dreaded fumble.

[goober]

That guy was me btw.

I definitly like taking out the second land just because you will win a lot more games by beingsafe after 1 land grant.  And those times when you don't find a land but still belcher you will be more likely to kill.  I find that the one Bayou is be best choice of Trop, Bayou, or both.  Far too often when I ran trop i needed the black to start off the Cabal/Dark Rituals.  And once you ge amssive stacks of black you can Sphere into the blue you need.  There are only a few blue spells in this and usually you won't need to cast more than 1 or 2.  Just pop the Lotus/LED/Petal/Sphere for blue and then play the Draw7 which will probably allow you to win.

[Mon, Goblin Chief]

Removing that land would be really nice, as it does cost you games. But with the current decklist I don't think it's an option, as I'm quite sure you'll loose more games to the extra-mulligans when Land Grant doesn't fix your mana.

It might be probable to remove the Tropical if someone finds something to replace the Brainstorms with.
A number of Pentad Prisms might work as additional color-fixing that allows you to cast the blue bombs.

[rozetta]

As far as color fixing goes, Pentad Prism is one of the most efficient cards available to date. You get 1 for 1 as long as you put an unneeded (ex. green or red) colored mana into it in the first place. Considering that a good amount of Belcher's acceleration provides colored mana, this is somewhat feasable.

Also Pentad Prism can provide a second turn mana boost  if you don't have enough steam to go off turn 1. However, using one-shot sources to get other one-shot sources is often what's going to happen, so it's effectively no boost at all, just a way to get those ESGs "on the table". Of course, ideally you'd want something like off-colored moxes to be used when casting this if you're setting up for turn 2.

Altogether, certainly worth a look, though.

As to the possibility of replacing the 2 Brainstorm, this is actually a rather valid point. Blue mana is not the easiest thing to come by in this deck and I can imagine that often a Chromatic Sphere might be blown for blue mana to brainstorm only to find it would have been better served producing black to power a ritual. The problem is, of course, that there's little choice when it comes to replacing Brainstorm, mostly due to the 1 mana CC. Obviously we'd be looking at something in black like Tainted Pact (not bad, but mabye a little slow), Spoils of the Vault (too dangerous), Plunge into Darkness (again, probably too slow) or Night's Whisper (possibly the most valid of these). Still, most of these options require burning that extra 1 mana which is a huge difference when trying to go off.

It would indeed be interesting to see if a more black-oriented build, with the single Bayou as a land perhaps utilizing Pentad Prisms and a slightly higher percentage of black search would speed the deck up significantly or at least make it more solid.

[heiner]

sure, it happens some times that your belcher gets destroyed or null roded because you didnt win the first time you activated it.
But, I have found out that that this happens about one or two times in a tourney and this is just ok. I can live with it, especially as the meta has not yet adopted, to hate out bellcher.
FOW is a much bigger problem for me !

[goober]

I don't want to live with loseing 1 or 2 games a tournament when I could just swap out a Trop and win them.  Force of Will is annoying, but if you play the Welders/Wish/Xantids correctly you can get past them.

[ELD]

When fine tuning a deck, we need to assume that we're all trying to win tournaments.  Belcher can win lots of games, no question.  It has alot of favorable matches right now.  To win a whole tournament you need consistancy.  In my view, one cannot just give away games and expect to win the whole thing.  This is particularly true when there is a top 8.  Nothing like losing in the top 8 after sweeping the swiss cause your deck just didn't get the job done.  

The pentad prism is an interesting card.  It will not let you win on turn 1 and at first glace it's not on par with Eladmari's vineyard, a card that doesn't make the cut right now.  Perhaps one could go with a tropical/4 brainstorm/4 force kind of build and use the prism.  On the whole I'd say that if one is to slow the deck down, one needs to make it more able to handle counter magic.

[bebe]

Okay. I'm convinced. I've lost tournaments twice when the deck crapped out and won a tournament once. I've been lucky with my belches but I don't need an added reason to lose as i'm quite capable of losing with the best deck. I'm going to try the one land version.  I think Steve is correct. There is no excuse to give a game up and I can't run my luck indefinately.

I like Brainstorm too much to play without them. Two seems the appropriate number in our testing. Blue mana is scarce but 1cc is manageable.

The pentad prism is an interesting card. It will not let you win on turn 1 and at first glace it's not on par with Eladmari's vineyard, a card that doesn't make the cut right now.

I think Pentad is great but I rather prefer the Barbed Sextants as Chromatics five and six. I was one of those who played with Eladamri's and found it won and lost games for me so I dropped them. It is the same argument for not running two lands.

[Mon, Goblin Chief]

The pentad prism is an interesting card. It will not let you win on turn 1 and at first glace it's not on par with Eladmari's vineyard, a card that doesn't make the cut right now.

I didn't mean Prism as a way to accelerate your mana but as an alternative/addition to Chromatic Sphere for color fixing. During turn one, assuming you have all the spells you need to kill but are missing some colored mana, Prism is actually better than Sphere, because it doesn't cost you mana. A combination of Prims and C-Sphere will probably work best.

Barbed Sextant will oftentimes be worse than Prism, because it is a worse colorfixer and it doesn't have an additional effect till a turn you don't want to reach anyway (This IS meant to be a turn 1 combo deck after all). Anyone playing Sextants should probably replace those with Prisms ASAP.

As for Vineyard, the comparison is not valid, imo, as Vineyard is not played because it gives the opponent a really big boost during his turn as well as doing nothing to help us during turn one. Both of these reasons are not true for Prism.  

Perhaps one could go with a tropical/4 brainstorm/4 force kind of build and use the prism. On the whole I'd say that if one is to slow the deck down, one needs to make it more able to handle counter magic.

I don't see Prism slowing down the deck in the slightest (see above) and even running 4 Brainstorms and only Tropical (which would imo make a bigger revamping of the deck necessary, because we have a harder getting B without Bayou) will not give us enough U spells to use FOW reliably. It may work, but we would nearly have to build the deck again from scratch, imo.

I like Brainstorm too much to play without them. Two seems the appropriate number in our testing. Blue mana is scarce but 1cc is manageable.

Brainstorm is quite nice in the deck, but I don't see myself cutting the Bayou because black mana is needed more often than blue to a start the action. So we have to remember we'll most probably have a harder time getting the U-mana for those nice little Brainstorms, which is why I'd really like to replace them with something black or green that does take up there function.

[Shades]

Brainstorm is quite nice in the deck, but I don't see myself cutting the Bayou because black mana is needed more often than blue to a start the action. So we have to remember we'll most probably have a harder time getting the U-mana for those nice little Brainstorms, which is why I'd really like to replace them with something black or green that does take up there function.

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