b-tings
Basic User
Posts: 114
I'm gonna sing the doom song!
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« Reply #11 on: July 23, 2005, 09:30:32 pm » |
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This is not specific to the decklist offered, but a bit of a tangent on Memory Jar, which seems to be one card that EVERYONE is mentioning in a positive light. I've been trying to cut Memory Jar from my Stax deck forever. Actually, it's been about a week, but it feels like forever because I just can't find anything to play so I can cut it. The card is terrible against the majority of the environment (there's a lot of blue on the west coast). Here's why:
Consensus among players is that Jar is a "must-counter." That means, if Jar is resolving, your opponent does not have the ability to counter, or alternatively you tapped low enough for Jar not to be a threat for a turn and they're just setting up for the win next turn anyways (Gifts, mostly). In the second instance, Jar is clearly bad, but it's the first instance I want to talk about. If your opponent has neither the ability to counter your spells nor the abilitiy to draw into a counter to counter your spells, you should just resolve a threat (Karn costs the same amount of mana) and win. Considering you play 4 Chalice of the Void 4 Sphere of Resistance 4 Smokestack 1 Trinisphere (my build), cracking jar immediately is usually not an option. This gives your opponent time to set up for your jar turn, which mostly involves untapping. When you DO crack Jar, ignoring the fact that the cards involved influence your opponent's decision to keep their opening hand or not, in any random game you give your opponent a shot at 4 Brainstorm, 4 Mana Drain, 4 Force of Will, and probably 1 Mystical and 1 Vampiric Tutor. You're probably not in a position to play Moxen between Spheres and Chalice, but let's for sake of argument give you a mox and land drop off a Jar. Presuming you cast Jar off the first 5 mana you had available, that gives you seven mana. Sometimes this will be more, sometimes less, but I'd say seven mana for a jar hand is pretty generous given what I've seen, considering we're going to play it out with no spheres on the table, and no chalice for zero(this, of course, raises the question of why in hell you were keeping a hand with no spheres or chalice for zero, and why you're not dead yet from doing so, but we've read this far, we're going to finish the fairy tale). This gives you the chance to cast AT MOST two threats. That's 5 mana for the chance to cast two threats next turn on a good day, while your opponent gets 7 shots at 14 cards in their deck. If they draw Force off your Jar, you just traded two full turns of mana for a threat, as opposed to the one turn it would take for you to resolve the threat if you just put more redundancy in your deck instead of a Jar. If they hit Brainstorm, they get to set up their next two draws out of ten new cards you've shown them, which puts an opponent who didn't have enough gas to do anything against the Jar in the first place well back in the game. The mirage tutors have largely the same effect, although they can be better or worse than brainstorm depending on what you Jar your opponent into and what's left in their deck. Don't even get me started on Jarring an opponent who you've been trying to pin under mana denial the whole game into a Mana Drain.
Of course, this is all assuming you've CAST the Jar. If you're welding it in, that should be a whole different matter, right? Well, yes, but no. You can weld in a Jar under countermagic, of course, but you have to get Jar into the graveyard first. In your deck, if you have an empty hand, if you have a welder in play, and if you draw Gamble, you can do that without casting Jar (Note that I've switched to using prosbloom's deck here because my deck doesn't run Welders). That's a lot of ifs to resolve a Jar, and once all of those are fulfilled, you still have to ask yourself if Jar is better in the given situation than Karn, Big Tits, or Platinum Angel, or even one of your lock parts.
If you're welding in Jar because you cast it and it was countered, once again you have to ask yourself if Jar is better in this situation than just any old threat.
Welding Jar in does have one distinct advantage over casting it, namely that it doesn't take up your turn's mana, and as a result your opponent doesn't get to react since you can crack Jar right now (never mind for a minute that they can see it coming and play around you welding Jar in). This cuts your opoonents outs to 4 (We'll assume for a second that they're tapped out, but please take note of how generous I'm being to the Jar player. I'm really trying to err in it's favour so I don't let possible personal bias against the card get in the way of laying out it's pros/cons). So you're resolving two threats off the Jar, right now. This is only a gain IF you have no threats in hand to cast; otherwise, you get the same result by casting the threat in your hand and welding in a threat instead of Jar, unless of course your opponent is clenching a grip full of counters and Jarring stops them from doing anything. In this case, though, welding in a single threat should be enough, since your opponent probably can't do a whole lot to stop it if they're grip is stuffed with counters instead of search or other answers.
If this discussion seems biased towards the control matchup, that's probably because that's what's popular right now. Even so, against other match-ups, you're still jarring them into SOMETHING. Fish runs Force of Will, sometimes brainstorm, and Aether Vial. Combo (mostly TPS) runs everything that control does except Mana Drain, but they also run Rebuild (Gifts does too, but there are other control decks out there, despite what the internet will make you think). Rebuild in response to Jar's end-step trigger is Big Games unless you're gripping more threats, which of course brings us back to why you're jarring in the first place. Against other shops, you've got twice the lock parts, meaning twice the spheres, chalices for 0, smokestacks etc. to minimize your mana; you'll be lucky to drop a land and a threat, and if your opponent wins the Welder war, you're going to be in for a world of hurt when their Jar hand hits the graveyard.
...and Rack and Ruins in a pear tree.
I'd be happy to entertain arguments as to why Jar is better than I think and warrants a slot. I'm sure there's a hole or two kicking around in the text above, since I'm not really focused on constructing a tight argument right now. I'm more just getting all the points out into the open for discussion.
Believe it or not, I also have something to offer on the deck at hand. I think you should take a look at Cerebral Assassin, a Welder-centric deck with Bazaar of Baghdad that is more focused on reanimation than locking your opponent down. Gamble might very well mesh there. I think that the deck in question is going to have trouble with the Gamble + Animate Dead/Trash for Treasure plan, mostly because the more likely you are to discard the card you are looking to reanimate, the more likely you are to discard the animation spell. On an empty hand, you have a two-card combo that costs at minimum three mana, has a 50% of misfiring, and does not win the game on the spot. Those aren't odds I'd be looking to take.
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