Duress or Xantid Swarm?

[UR]

I’m not new to vintage… just somebody who attends tournaments on a very irregular basis (like once every two months or so) so my 'tech' is a little out-dated sometimes. I’ve decided to go and play more tournaments and my latest deck is 5-color Dragon with some minor tweaks to the internet-lists.

For the upcoming tournament I have two things left to do;

1) Borrow a Black Lotus and 4 Bazaar of Baghdad.

and,

2) Decide on Duress or Xantid Swarm in the mainboard.

I don’t suppose anybody can help me with the former, but the latter may be a different matter as there are some people here with enough experience to give sound advice.

As far as I figure they are both good cards but it depends on the other guy whether or not they are going to shine. I figure against TPS, you’ll want the Duress but against SC it would be better to have the Swarm.
My meta can be described as pretty open but predominantly Stax and Gifts. You’ll also see Oath, TPS, Slaver, Replenish, Fish and random yank.

So in a meta where Stax and Gifts are the top-decks, but with a lot of other decks as well, what would you include in the deck?

I’ve switched back and forth about 30 times now and now it is Duress again… I've read some articles on the matter, but most of them just say the it is meta-dependant... yeah, great... that helps 

[Joblin Velder]

Xantid Swarm.

[Luiggi]

Ditto.

Turn 1 Xantid Swarm is a must-counter card, and if it resolves you can essentially win at your leisure. Turn 1 Duress, while it's usually not bad, is just not as good as Swarm. I ran maindeck Duress and SB Swarms at Waterbury last weekend (I was running 2-Land Belcher) and in almost every round I would've preferred Swarms.

Luiggi

[Moxlotus]

Definitely Swarm.  Even if it is countered, you can reanimate it.  The card is really good.

[MoxMonkey]

Always Swarm.  He gets around Dragons Major problem and thats the number of hate cards that beat it.  Swarm on the board negates all Hate anyone can throw at you. 

[fitz712]

Xantid Swarm sounds better to me

[Greenebean]

Xantid Swarm without any question. Definetly Swarm, like it has been said, it hits the board and the other player really cannot stop you unless you read my tag line, but that is very rare:-D

[UR]

So Swarm it is... 5-0... not even a discussion 

Thanks people!

[Luiggi]

I mean, it's not that Duress is bad, because that's far from the truth. What is true, however, is that when running a fast combo deck like Dragon, Long or 2-Land Belcher, resolving a turn 1 Xantid Swarm against Control will give you a huge advantage in that game. It essentially means that their counters are now all dead, and they need to scramble and waste resources to find a creature-kill spell before you go off, something they are often not able to do.

With Duress, even if you pluck a Force of Will from their hand on the first turn, they're liable to have a Mana Drain or other disruption spell that can still prevent you from going off during the next turn, so many times they won't even counter it. Xantid Swarm is just a FoW-magnet, and unless your opponent has their one maindeck Fire/Ice or similar spell in hand, they'll do everything possible to counter it.

At Waterbury, during my Round 1 match, I had one of the most savage openings with 2-Land Belcher I've ever had: I went Bayou + Xantid Swarm, and that somehow resolved, so I knew my opponent had no FoW in hand, and then I went Black Lotus + Necropotence. GG, . (I still lost that round to a stupid mistake in Game 3, though, sniff sniff...)

Luiggi

[ELD]

Luggi's post backs up my opinion. 

At Waterbury, during my Round 1 match, I had one of the most savage openings with 2-Land Belcher I've ever had: I went Bayou + Xantid Swarm, and that somehow resolved, so I knew my opponent had no FoW in hand, and then I went Black Lotus + Necropotence. GG,

I would much rather play against swarm.  From my perspective, if my opponent goes first turn swarm, they now have one less card to combo out with.  Letting swarm resolve will occasionally make my opponent misplay and drop some mana artifacts and go for a bomb spell.  Forcing that will typically mean they have no gas to protect with their resolved swarm. 

To handle the situation of a first turn swarm, I have a simple board plan.  I board in cards that do not have to resolve on their second main.  Even on the draw, a swarm will mean I get one extra turn to find disruption.  Duressing an opponent after a first turn swarm often leaves them with a really weak hand.  Dropping crypt vs dragon is usually hurtful as well.  Of course, a strip/waste is often a way of preventing them from comboing out as well.   Lastly, I do have access to lava dart, so death is always a good answer to the insect.

At this past waterbury, I finished in the top 32 losing round one to being retarded and round 6 to a combination of having my deck tuned towards the upper tier and keeping bad starting hands.  I made sure I had game vs dragon and stax.  In my match vs dragon I was able to buy extra time by bouncing the swarm with echoing truth.  The extra turn ultimately allowed me to win the game. 

Swarm may be the better of the two options, but my opponents playing like 1st turn swarm is the nuts usually allows me to win the match.

[Luiggi]

So you're saying that allowing a turn 1 Swarm to resolve lulls your opponents into a fall sense of security and thus they might try to drop some other bomb that same turn that you can then counter, or just Duress on your next turn? In my experience most CS or Gifts players will try to counter the Swarm, because they know that things can get really bad if the combo player gets to untap with a Swarm in play and then play whatever spells they want without the fear of counters... For reference, what exactly were you playing in Waterbury, since I couldn't fulling discern that from your post.

Also, I think that my point about the Swarm might apply more to decks like Belcher and Long, that are usually faster than Dragon, and that aren't quite as vulnerable to something like Tormod's Crypt. Additionally, at least against Belcher, you might also be tempted to burn a Lava Dart on a Goblin Welder, rather than a Swarm, which means that a resolved Swarm could cause you more problems than against a combo deck that runs no other creatures you'd want to kill...

Luiggi

[Revvik]

Duress will stop Tormod's Crypt, a common turn one Worldgorger Dragon Combo hoser, as well as Ground Seal and Pernicious Deed (if an opponent plays one of these, Xantid Swarm becomes utterly worthless since they can activate it to destroy the Animate).  Xantid Swarm stops Force of Will and Mana Drain, as well as random stuff like Echoing Truth and Blue Elemental Blast, but Duress covers those as well.

Essentially, Xantid Swarm is excellent post-board versus control, when your plan becomes "use Bazaar of Baghdad / Squee engine over a series of turns with extra protection from Xantid Swarm to secure a win."  It's still not the most secure path to take simply due to permanent-based hate, and I've won many of my games against Dragon because of stuff like that.

[Luiggi]

I guess I should've read that this thread was specifically discussing Duress vs. Swarm in Dragon, because then I probably would've said Duress. I thought it was for combo decks in general. Oops, .

Luiggi

[Revvik]

Actually, this discussion is pretty relevant for most combo decks (non-UB) in general.
Someone like JDizzle could elaborate better, since I still almost exclusively use the crutch of Mana Drain.

[ELD]

I was playing control slaver w/ mox monkies, Triskelion and tormod's crypt main and Collosus SB. 

In my experience most CS or Gifts players will try to counter the Swarm, because they know that things can get really bad if the combo player gets to untap with a Swarm in play and then play whatever spells they want without the fear of counters

In my experiance, most CS players are terrible. 

Additionally, at least against Belcher, you might also be tempted to burn a Lava Dart on a Goblin Welder, rather than a Swarm, which means that a resolved Swarm could cause you more problems than against a combo deck that runs no other creatures you'd want to kill

Not that this thread is about anything other than dragon, but lava dart flashes back.  That makes it perfect for killing both welders and swarms.  BTW the tag team of mox monkey and goblin welder destroys belcher. 

[Luiggi]

Alright alright, just forget I said anything. I'll leave discussion of Dragon to people who know/care about it, .

Luiggi

[BruiZar]

I think I´d prefer duress. Seeing how Darkblast has become legal I´m not sure a Xantid Swarm will remain on the table for a turn. If xantid has more defense it would have been another story.
Its a hard choice though

[Dante]

Duress will stop Tormod's Crypt, a common turn one Worldgorger Dragon Combo hoser, as well as Ground Seal and Pernicious Deed (if an opponent plays one of these, Xantid Swarm becomes utterly worthless since they can activate it to destroy the Animate).  Xantid Swarm stops Force of Will and Mana Drain, as well as random stuff like Echoing Truth and Blue Elemental Blast, but Duress covers those as well.

Essentially, Xantid Swarm is excellent post-board versus control, when your plan becomes "use Bazaar of Baghdad / Squee engine over a series of turns with extra protection from Xantid Swarm to secure a win."  It's still not the most secure path to take simply due to permanent-based hate, and I've won many of my games against Dragon because of stuff like that.

Duress will stop Tormod's Crypt only if you are going first or catch them trying to hold back.  That doesn't seem so hot.

Duress will also only stop 1 of their counters, bounce, naturalize, BEB, etc.  Swarm will stop ALL of them.  Any deck with counters will have more than 1 counter/bounce/answer by turn 3 or 4 when you're trying to combo off or they just plain deserve to lose.  In addition, you can drop Swarm earlier than the turn you combo out - Duressing before your combo turn allows them to either hide cards with brainstorm or draw into answers.  Having to wait for an extra mana for Duress on that combo turn can be deadly, especially when you're typically losing a land drop for Bazaar.

Look at the top decks right now

Stax
Gifts
Control Slaver
Oath

Swarm is better against ALL of them except Stax.  Remember, if you're expecting permanent hate games 2-3, that's why you have a sideboard.  Maindeck, Swarm is better UNLESS your meta is DOMINATED by fast combo and stax (and by dominate I mean GAT type fields between those two decks).  Until that type of meta happends, in a 3c or 5c Dragon deck, Xantid Swarm is the better maindeck card against the field.

[wake_of_destruction]

Definitely Swarm.