TT Combo Oath

[Thug]

TT Combo Oath

I would like to discuss this deck in this topic, it’s the deck I played at the open Dutch Championships and went 6-1-1 just to miss top8 on tiebreakers. Its based on an combo oath deck I played before in Eindhoven (of which I can’t find any results with decklists anymore) and that deck was based on a list I once picked of Morphling.de made by Roland Bode (I believe). This deck feels much more perfectioned than the two earlier versions and I think it’s a viable deck for most metagames.


Lands:
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Forbidden Orchard
4 City of Brass
3 Gemstone Mine

Artifacts:
7 Solomox
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Lotus Petal
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Mox Diamond
1 Defense Grid
1 Memory Jar
1 Darksteel Colossus

Black:
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Tendrils of Agony

Blue:
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
1 Windfall
1 Timetwister
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Hurkyl’s Recall

Green:
4 Oath of Druids
1 Crop Rotation

White:
1 Enlightened Tutor (amazingly good)
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath

Red:
1 Wheel of Fortune

Sideboard:
2 Claws of Gix
2 Oxidize
3 Orim’s Chant
1 Woodripper
1 Razia, Boros Archangel
1 Sundering Titan
1 Gaea’s Blessing
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
2 Defense Grid


Ealier version played with Cabal Therapy and Academy Rector (and added Future Sight consistency issues). But with Rector you still get hated by most hate cards, actually by even more. And therapy can be pretty weak compared to Duress. This all became very clear in the semi-finals I played with this deck in Eindhoven, losing 0-2 versus gifts, two times with Oath in play and active, but getting owned by Coffin Purge. I also missed multiple times with Therapy during that match.

I abandoned the deck for a while, just to pick it up some days before the Dutch Champs. I wanted to play a deck with Oath in the deck as a side-effect, and this seemed the perfect option to play the combo-deck again. I changed the Rectors for a Krosan Reclamation, but still wasn’t satisfied, so it became an Akroma to make the oath part even better. Duresses naturally made their way back into the deck and the remaining part was streamlined a bit more (adding cards such as Enlightened Tutor and Defense Grid.)

---

Here’s some more detailed information about cards, or parts of the deck.

Lands:
Most explosive combo decks like thus run 11 lands, while I ran 12. This is not because I think 12 is better, but because I wanted to avoid sitting on little mana against deck I would easily beat with a decent hand. The lands are pretty self-explaining. Orchard and CoB are obviously 4’ofs and Gemstone is the next best thing.

Artifact Mana:
Mox Diamond did make the cut, Chrome Mox didn’t. You would say Chrome is better because you will have unneeded cards more often than extra lands, but the factor that Chrome Mox often is an off-coloured Mox really works in its disadvantage. Mox Diamond is great for casting first turn Duress + Oath and similar things.

Black:
Only 1 Tendrils like I always do in any storm based deck, outside of some narrow situations its only good when you have storm count >8 and running more tendrils leads to more Mulligans and stalling out more often. You always have creatures to fall back on might you lose the Tendrils.
No Imperial seal, I don’t own one yet but even if I did I wouldn’t run it, because there no room and it isn’t better than any of the used tutors. Grim tutor is even more clunky, and was way too slow in the little testing I did with it.

Blue:
No Mystical cause it fetches too little different cards and gets over classed by Enlightened Tutor.

Green:
No Krosan Reclamation because it’s too slow with 2 creatures in the deck, it should have been in the sideboard but wasn’t because I only had about 2 minutes to finish my sideboard at the place of the tournament en couldn’t find it fast enough. Regrowth is a little slow, but deserves some testing, I haven’t tested it yet.
I never liked Fastbond in combo decks like these, and on top of that this deck relies too little on draw-sevens to make Fastbond worth the spot.

Red:
Hurkyl’s Recall is much better than Burning Wish, and it doesn’t force you to bastardise your sideboard.

Sideboard:
As mentioned my sideoard was made in a hurry, and wasnt optimal, but some cards are sure to stay. Cards that I boarded in a lot and proved worthy are:

Hurkyl's Recall
Orim's Chant (one of your little weapons against other combo, but a killer weapon)
Woodripper
Blessing (to be used in combination with either woodripper and/or titan because those creatures dont kill your opponent)
Titan (your opponent wont see this coming)
Defense Grid (you can't run swarm because of oath and this is the next best thing, its maybe even at the same level as swarm)

---

Strategy
The deck really had two strategies, storming by using draw-sevens and other draw spells, or dropping Oath (+Orchard). What often occurred in testing against slaver/gifts was that I would resolve an early oath and get it active, in response to which my opponent would spell all his tempo and cards to deal with the Oath just to see me win the game with a Tendrils. Your hand should really define your strategy, since neither of them is by standard the better choice.
Adding Oath to the deck made the deck much more resistant to hate cards, you won’t scoop to Arcane Lab, nor will you scoop to Spawning Pit/Claws of Gix. This is definitely a strong quality of the deck, as it makes sideboard cards of the opponent pretty weak since it just forces you to take the other strategy. A pretty good example of this will follow in my report.

This is all I got for now, and I would like to hear people’s opinion about the deck. I will soon be adding my report, but I have been busy with school past days and still have to type it out, expect I within 1-2 days.

Koen


P.S. for those of you wondering what TT stands for:
Its something I and my friend Arthur Tindemans came up with and place in front of deck ones of us has build/adepted
It stand for something like Thug and Tuur, or Thug and Tindemans.

[Moxlotus]

Why Akroma over Salvagers?  It seems like you have so many combo cards, this would be another way to randomly win early.  Plus once you Oath, have a good chance to win that turn.

[Ultima]

I am very impressed with creativity and possibilites that this deck holds.  I have a few questions.

1. How has the lone defense grid been?  It seems like it might be too random and are there other cards that seem more better as a 1 of such as another tutor?

2. How does the game against Stax measure up?  It seems that it could still be pretty tough since the manabase is so unstable, welders take down colossus, and they play multiple duplicants.

3. To which strategy does the deck generally lend to itself, are you killing more often with tendrils or oath?

These are some of my initial thoughts but overall I'm very impressed.

John

[The Chosen One]

How has DSC proven to be as an oathable creature? I would think he would be victim to welders(with so many of those little bastards getting played). Razia is just amazing(noted you have in SB). Other than that, no further questions, looks good... Nice deck

[And11]

I've also been toying with a similar build for som time and have these questions for you:

1) When comboing off (mox, Ritual, Draw7 for instance), haven't you had trouble with drawing into creatures and Oath's and therefor stalled out? This is basically why I abandoned TPS, since the lack of FoW's also means a lot more safe kills after a resolved draw7. In your build, you've basically switched to a crappy (all wasteable, no basics or fetch) mana base and inserted Oath 'n' stuff instead of FoW, equally dead cards, when going nuts with draw7's. This has come up a lot for me, when mixing these two gameplans. Of course, it makes beating ChaliceAggro a lot more easy - maybe you just have to live with the consistency issues.

2) Beating Stax seems almost impossible to me. All your lands get wasted and they have a billion lock components, you'll have to deal with with one copy of Hurkyl's Recall. Sure, you can go lucky with a quick Oath finding Akroma, but that's really your only chance. But if they sac the tokens to Smokestack and play Balance, ramps it to kill the Akroma or rips StP or Tinker/Duplicant, it's all over, assuming they've resolved Chalice or SoR etc,. Oath->Woodripper post-board is cute though.

Too bad you missed the chance for the title, man. Good luck with the deck!

/Andreas Petersen of Denmark.

[Thug]

First of all, I still haven't finished the report (typing out 8 rounds takes longer than I thought, maybe because I remember too much of the details.)

Why Akroma over Salvagers?  It seems like you have so many combo cards, this would be another way to randomly win early.  Plus once you Oath, have a good chance to win that turn.

I want to avoid as much hate as possible with the Oath part. Against stuff like Sphere, Chalice, Trini, Null Rod Akroma ststilleals 6 damage, where Salvager, Rector and Reclamation lose their ability to win you the game. Salvagers could be another sideboard option, maybe over the Krosan, since its slightly less risky and probably at least as effective. It does take up more spots though.

1. How has the lone defense grid been?  It seems like it might be too random and are there other cards that seem more better as a 1 of such as another tutor?

It might seem a bit random, but running cards as one-of's, opposed to what most people think, actually makes sense. Especially with cards like Brainstorm and Tutors running various answers or other bombs can be very good. Defense grid seems to be the perfect anti-control deck for the maindeck because it can nearly always be dropped first turn and later on it doesn't take up coloured mana for you real business spells.

I didn't see it that much during the tournament, but it was deciding in at least 1 game. Since I could just tutor for Will and win because I knew my opponent coucouldn'tterrupt me. If I wouwouldn'tve had the Grid I might have gone for a different strategy in that game, which would have had a change of stalling.

2. How does the game against Stax measure up?  It seems that it could still be pretty tough since the manabase is so unstable, welders take down colossus, and they play multiple duplicants.

It's all about the die roll.
If they start with an explosive hand, they win
If you start with an explosive hand, you win
Its really like that, pretty stupid actually.
After sideboard you'll see a lot more tense games since both decks can bring in answer to parts of the other deck.
After sideboard your number one goal should be to get Oath active, getting Woddripper and Akroma for the win.
But you should always keep the other strategies in mind, since they might have boarded in a lot of anti-oath cards.
If you can resolve H. Recall at the end of their turn you're in a very good shape, and because of this Tangle Wire is one of the cards you have to fear most. Since it stops you from dropping Oath, and from playing H. Recall eot.
Overall I think it's a pretty even match-up, and one of the worst matchups of this deck.

3. To which strategy does the deck generally lend to itself, are you killing more often with tendrils or oath?

I think I won most games with Desire and Will, which both lead to a lethal Tendrils.
But I think I won with Oath in about 33% of the games.
But often my opponent would find a way to deal with the Oath just to see me win with Tendrils, so Oath was useful in more than 33% of the games.

These are some of my initial thoughts but overall I'm very impressed.

Thanks, and always feel free to share some more thoughts.

How has DSC proven to be as an oathable creature? I would think he would be victim to welders(with so many of those little bastards getting played). Razia is just amazing(noted you have in SB). Other than that, no further questions, looks good... Nice deck

As an oathable creature its inferior to both Akroma and Razia.
But the fact that you run Tinker makes it better than Razia IMO.
If I felt Oath was a very strong card in a match I would always sidesideboard colossus for Razia (If I wouldn't need any answer-creatures.)
The amount of welders is pretty low over here, since Gifts gets played a lot more than Slaver does.
I only once played against Welders, and they didn't have much impact on our games.

1) When comboing off (mox, Ritual, Draw7 for instance), haven't you had trouble with drawing into creatures and Oath's and therefor stalled out? This is basically why I abandoned TPS, since the lack of FoW's also means a lot more safe kills after a resolved draw7. In your build, you've basically switched to a crappy (all wasteable, no basics or fetch) mana base and inserted Oath 'n' stuff instead of FoW, equally dead cards, when going nuts with draw7's. This has come up a lot for me, when mixing these two gameplans. Of course, it makes beating ChaliceAggro a lot more easy - maybe you just have to live with the consistency issues.

A draw-seven into an Oath with an Orchard in play or hand is far from a bad thing. Aside from the creatures there a very few dead cards, if any. Oath adds more bombs to your deck, which means you will always see at least 2 in a seven-card hand. If you only go for the combo route you have to add other bombs (extra tutors/draw effects) because otherwise the deck becomes too unstable.
I don't switched to crappy lands, I'm playing a different deck. This deck is much more aggressive meaning Wastelands can actually be in your advantage since they can just be too slow.
TPS shouldn't play much draw-sevens and the whole gameplan is totally different compared tot his deck so there no use comparing the two.
Fetches and Basics are simply not an option for this deck since you cant rely on having more than 1 land, so that land better should be able to produce coloured mana for all of your coloured spells.

Koen

EDIT: something seems to be wrong with the spell check, as it replaces the wrong words

[JigglyPuff]

i played this at a tournament and got 3rd except that i played eternal witness, fof, recoup and 1 krosan reclemation......get will good game.....

[Gabethebabe]

This looks like a cool deck. Though I always have some reservation for dual strategy decks because you´ll frequently find out that the deck lacks the focus of a single strategy deck.

Could 1 Sacred Ground replace a 1 Hurkyll´s in the SB? The Enlightened Tutor can find it. Also you have only Hurkyll´s and no Rebuild. Since MW could drop Chalice =2 (though they´ll have a hard time deciding whether it should be 0, 1 or 2) against you and not always are you drawing your Oxidize, wouldnt a little more diversity be a good thing?

Are there matchups where you side out your Oath win plan and go gor the combo route?

LED can be awesome and LED can be dead. How has the LED worked for you? TPS doesn´t run LED, why does this deck?

I´d say that Imperial Seal should take the slot of Enlightened Tutor. Your deck has more black mana and it fetches you other important stuff (Will, Academy, Tendrils). Since your deck doesn´t do any relevant thing with mana in opponents turn (like Mana Drain), the sorceryness should not be a major issue.

Have you considered Titan maindeck?

[Whatever Works]

Why no eternal witness??? Mill large portion of library... witness comes into play... get yawgmoth's will in hand... cast... win game... Personally I think that it goes better with deck, and its not exactly a dead card... can always hardcast it to return so broken draw 7 or countered card.

[PipOC]

Why no eternal witness??? Mill large portion of library... witness comes into play... get yawgmoth's will in hand... cast... win game... Personally I think that it goes better with deck, and its not exactly a dead card... can always hardcast it to return so broken draw 7 or countered card.

For the same reasons he's not using the salvagers kill.  it's pretty much dead against null rosd chalice, sphere...etc where akroma still bitch slaps for 6.

[Methuselahn]

I'm going to agree and disagree with Gabethebabe here.  I agree that this deck looks cool, but disagree with a deck lacking focus with multiple 'strategies.'  Not only do you have more room to work around hate, but you get to trump your opponent oftentimes by planning your game 2/3 strategy according to what he saw in game 1.  For example, if you are able to open with a broken Turbo Bargain or something and Oath never sees the stack, your opponent will sideboard for Grimlong, Belcher, Tps, etc., not bringing in their Oath hate.  So why not just have an Oath transformational sideboard here?..  Because Oath is a stupidly good bomb nowadays and it should be maindeck.

What I am interested in especially, that hasn't been talked about, is the Chalice Oath matchup.  The agressaggressivemirror seems to be grim for you here as Chalice-Oath definitely has Orchard superiority, not to mention an endless supply of hate against the deck.  I see the Claws of Gix, but is it enough?

[Gabethebabe]

Why no eternal witness??? Mill large portion of library... witness comes into play... get yawgmoth's will in hand... cast... win game... Personally I think that it goes better with deck, and its not exactly a dead card... can always hardcast it to return so broken draw 7 or countered card.

For the same reasons he's not using the salvagers kill.  it's pretty much dead against null rosd chalice, sphere...etc where akroma still bitch slaps for 6.

Another reason will be that it is unreliable. Sometimes you will reveal you Witness of Salvagers too early and drop nothing of consequence in your GY. An Angel or Colossus should never be bad.

Against an Oath deck I suppose the Oaths will go out and you will try to combo. You will not win the spirit token war, because they have strips. But you have a fast combo deck that can win before Oath does it´s thing, with the advantage that your orchards will delay their strategy.

I´ve goldfished the deck a little, replacing the Defense Grid with a Regrowth and until now I´ve find Regrowth 'useful' but not impressive. In goldfishing it acts often as a cabal ritual.

How stellar are Brainstorms? In testing they were pretty good, but since you lack the free shuffling effects of a 4-of (Land Grant or Fetchlands), they are not quite so amazing as in other decks and I could imagine dropping one for e.g. a metagame slot, Regrowth or Enlightened Tutor (Seal should replace Enlightened in any case in your decklist).

Funny was when I sleeved up the deck and found the deck had 60 cards when still there were some cards missing. I counted and recounted and checked and something was wrong, my deck appeared to have the same cards as your deck and it had 64. Until I found out that your deck wasn´t running FoWs

agressaggressivemirror

Something is wrong with the spellings checker because the first post of Thug was full of these kind of errors.

[Vander]

I had the plessure to play against Thug in Round 6 of that tournament and I have to say, I really liked that deck. Especially as he killed me in the second game with Desire for 11 AND 25 after Will resolved, which was the coolest kill I had against me all day.

As Thug said before Oaths are never dead cards, as most people, especially those not knowing the deck, will throw all their hate against the Oath and he gets to win with combopieces easily.

Sorry for not getting your opp. score up, I really made some bitter mistakes in the last 2 Rounds only winning one of them

[Thug]

This looks like a cool deck. Though I always have some reservation for dual strategy decks because you´ll frequently find out that the deck lacks the focus of a single strategy deck.

Could 1 Sacred Ground replace a 1 Hurkyll´s in the SB? The Enlightened Tutor can find it. Also you have only Hurkyll´s and no Rebuild. Since MW could drop Chalice =2 (though they´ll have a hard time deciding whether it should be 0, 1 or 2) against you and not always are you drawing your Oxidize, wouldnt a little more diversity be a good thing?

It's defenitly an option. I dont think you would tutor for it a lot, but diversity is always a good thing.
The sideboard is really complicated, cause you dont want to bring in too much cause that makes your main strategies worse.
The thing I like about H. Recall is that It can bounce Chalices and Spheres so that I can start storming. But it can also create an opportunity for me to drop an Oath. And it even makes Mind's Desire and Tendrils significantly better.

Are there matchups where you side out your Oath win plan and go gor the combo route?

Against Oath I will sideboard out 3 Oath and probably the Akroma for some additional Defense Grids and some Claws of Gix.
Against a combo deck that is as fast or even faster than this I might also sideboard out the Oath part, since I lack a creature that does anything against Them (something like Platinum, but Platinum is way to easy to deal with).

LED can be awesome and LED can be dead. How has the LED worked for you? TPS doesn´t run LED, why does this deck?

This deck has a lot more card that interact in a positive way with LED than TPS does. 5 draw sevens, tutor, will.
I like the card a lot and would never cut it, its almost never dead, at worst it's Tinker fodder, poweres up Academy or ups the storm count.

I´d say that Imperial Seal should take the slot of Enlightened Tutor. Your deck has more black mana and it fetches you other important stuff (Will, Academy, Tendrils). Since your deck doesn´t do any relevant thing with mana in opponents turn (like Mana Drain), the sorceryness should not be a major issue.

It could find a spot in the deck, but not over Enlightened Tutor. There are very little situations in which you dont want to see an Enlightened Tutor. The instant speed does make a difference, as does the life loss of Seal.
This is something that happenned in Testing. I started with a hand that contained an Orchard, Duress, Enlightened and Necropotence. First turn I duressed my opponent taking away a FoW, in my second turns upkeep I Enlightened fetcing Lotus to drop the Necro. If Enlightened would have been a Seal in this example I wouldnt have been able to Duress my opponent on my first turn, or I wouldnt have been able to drop Necro turn 2. Also losing life means losing draws with Necro.

Have you considered Titan maindeck?

Nope, its a lousy Oath creature. It doesnt trample, so it will never inflict any damage to your opponent.
There are too few deck that really suffer from Titan to play it maindeck
Side rant: I have considered sideboarding a Therapy so that I could sac the Titan to takeout even more lands, and so that I could shuffle it back with Blessing for even more LD, but this is probably overkill.

Why no eternal witness??? Mill large portion of library... witness comes into play... get yawgmoth's will in hand... cast... win game... Personally I think that it goes better with deck, and its not exactly a dead card... can always hardcast it to return so broken draw 7 or countered card.

A creature Base of Colossus/Witness is also something I tried for a while, and it wasnt all that bad.
If you get Collosus first you can regrowth Time Walk for the Win. Or just get Will for the Win.
But for the same reason as mentioned before I dismissed the Witness, it relies too much on other cards and my opponent not having certain cards.

So why not just have an Oath transformational sideboard here?..  Because Oath is a stupidly good bomb nowadays and it should be maindeck.

... I dont need to add anything to that, couldn't have said it better myself.

What I am interested in especially, that hasn't been talked about, is the Chalice Oath matchup.  The agressaggressivemirror seems to be grim for you here as Chalice-Oath definitely has Orchard superiority, not to mention an endless supply of hate against the deck.  I see the Claws of Gix, but is it enough?

Their weakness is they have to rely on Oath to win.
In the long run they might have Orchard superiority, but they can never be certain of it.
They can drop Oath first turn, but you might just be holding Claws or double Orchard or a Tutor etc.
They lose a lot of explosiveness becasue of this.
You have room for a lot of sideboard cards because you can sideboard out at least 3 Oaths.
I haven't actually played against Chalice Oath yet (or maybe I have but never seen the Chalices) but I dont think it can be any harder than Oath with Null Rods 

I´ve goldfished the deck a little, replacing the Defense Grid with a Regrowth and until now I´ve find Regrowth 'useful' but not impressive. In goldfishing it acts often as a cabal ritual.

It's funny that you mention Cabal Ritual, since I had a single Cabal Ritual in the deck for a long time. For some reason I was reaching threshold all the time. Regrowth seems just a little too slow, and I would actually run Cabal Ritual over it.

How stellar are Brainstorms? In testing they were pretty good, but since you lack the free shuffling effects of a 4-of (Land Grant or Fetchlands), they are not quite so amazing as in other decks and I could imagine dropping one for e.g. a metagame slot, Regrowth or Enlightened Tutor (Seal should replace Enlightened in any case in your decklist).

Because your playing with Oath I wouldnt recommand cutting 1. Oath provides free shuffling, and you dont want to get caught with creatures in your hand because the deck runs no blessing. But even in a deck like GrimLong I think runnig anything less than 4 Brainstorm is suboptimal. For just one mana you get to see another three cards, almost taking a double Time Walk.

Funny was when I sleeved up the deck and found the deck had 60 cards when still there were some cards missing. I counted and recounted and checked and something was wrong, my deck appeared to have the same cards as your deck and it had 64. Until I found out that your deck wasn´t running FoWs

Fow is card-disadvantage and it makes you lose Life, why wouldnt you ever play with that card? ........... 

Quote from: Methuselahn on Yesterday at 08:00:36 PM
agressaggressivemirror

Something is wrong with the spellings checker because the first post of Thug was full of these kind of errors.

Yeah something is definitly wrong.
I thought fixed most of the errors it made, but I guess I missed some afterall.
I won't be using it anymore, so my apologies for any spelling errors.

had the plessure to play against Thug in Round 6 of that tournament and I have to say, I really liked that deck. Especially as he killed me in the second game with Desire for 11 AND 25 after Will resolved, which was the coolest kill I had against me all day.

Hehe, I must admit that it was a little gallery play, since I knew the match was mine already. And I had to abuse the Minds Desire a little more, since it had been threating me so well during the day. Making an opponent losing 80 lives if always a funny thing to do, I'm glad you enjoyed it too 

Koen

[Clown of Tresserhorn]

It could find a spot in the deck, but not over Enlightened Tutor. There are very little situations in which you dont want to see an Enlightened Tutor. The instant speed does make a difference, as does the life loss of Seal.
This is something that happenned in Testing. I started with a hand that contained an Orchard, Duress, Enlightened and Necropotence. First turn I duressed my opponent taking away a FoW, in my second turns upkeep I Enlightened fetcing Lotus to drop the Necro. If Enlightened would have been a Seal in this example I wouldnt have been able to Duress my opponent on my first turn, or I wouldnt have been able to drop Necro turn 2. Also losing life means losing draws with Necro.

Not entirely true...You could have gone turn 1 seal for lotus, turn 2 duress/lotus/necro...but that's a minor point. I still think seal needs to be in there. It's another tutor for Lotus/Will/Desire. The deck looks good, but I'm confused as to why you don't run regrowth. What happens if you oath away your will? Is it just not an issue when you playtested the deck? The deck does look savage, however. I've never liked playing straight oath because of it's inherent weaknesses and have always wanted to play a deck using oath as an "alternate" win condition.

-Bob

[Thug]

If Enlightened would have been a Seal in this example I wouldnt have been able to Duress my opponent on my first turn, or I wouldnt have been able to drop Necro turn 2. Also losing life means losing draws with Necro.

Not entirely true...You could have gone turn 1 seal for lotus, turn 2 duress/lotus/necro...but that's a minor point. I still think seal needs to be in there. It's another tutor for Lotus/Will/Desire.

If you read it again you will see I ment that you couldn't cast Duress first turn and stil be able to drop the Necro second turn.
Seal defenitly is a strong card, but I dont think its better than any of the other used tutors, nor should it take the place of any of the bombs.
The only card it could replace is the Defense Grid, the question is whether seal will improve non-control matchups enough to justify dropping grid. I don't think seal will have a big impact on either the Stax or the Combo matchup, so I'll stick to Grid for now, since it defenitly wins gmaes against control.

The deck looks good, but I'm confused as to why you don't run regrowth. What happens if you oath away your will? Is it just not an issue when you playtested the deck? The deck does look savage, however. I've never liked playing straight oath because of it's inherent weaknesses and have always wanted to play a deck using oath as an "alternate" win condition.

Regrowth is too weak and slow on itself to justify runnig it because it might get back Will at some point.
If you Oath away your Will you beat face with your creatures, or you get Tendrils, or Twister.
If your opponent deals with your creatures, and you have milled away Will, Twister and Tendrils you lose, but It hasnt happened to me yet.

Koen

[Gabethebabe]

I agree with Koen that Regrowth is not an autoinclude, just because sometimes you drop part of your deck in your GY. I mean, if you do that, you´ve just activated your Oath and that *should* mean you´re in good shape.

What I don´t understand is why you stick with Enlightened Tutor instead of Imperial Seal. The only advantages of ET over Seal is that you don´t loose two life and that it is instant. Sure, in some examples (like the one you mention) this could be an advantage, but the ability to get Tolarian Academy, Will, Orchard, Tendrils, Ritual, Tinker, Desire as well as all the cards that ET gets and that you can cast it off a Ritual are just too convincing.

But OK, I´ll leave this discussion for what it is, you play the cards you like, I´ll play mine

[forests failed you]

I'm not really sure why regrowth is necessary at all.  It just seems like there are better Tutors availiable to the deck.

[nataz]

Regrowth is too weak and slow on itself to justify runnig it because it might get back Will at some point.
If you Oath away your Will you beat face with your creatures, or you get Tendrils, or Twister.
If your opponent deals with your creatures, and you have milled away Will, Twister and Tendrils you lose, but It hasnt happened to me yet.
Koen

I know that it shouldn't happen that often, but It can happen.
Have you ever tried k-reclamation?

[Gabethebabe]

I know that it shouldn't happen that often, but It can happen.
Have you ever tried k-reclamation?

KR is too limited to make it to the maindeck, but it definitely should be in the SB.
Against any kind of control KR is really dangerous, because a countered KR with an empty library = death.
Topdecking KR is generally not something that you´d want.

It is good against:
- Creature_removal.dec
- Dragon (et al) as a defensive weapon
- combo, where oathing up a creature and winning two turns later is NOT impressive.

[Gabethebabe]

So after discussing this deck, I took it to a tourney this weekend.
I played Thug´s list, with Imperial Seal over the Defensive Grid.

In the tourney I found a "real" example of why the instantness of Enlightened Tutor is important. An opening hand of Academy, Walk, Ritual, Twister, Pearl and two irrelevant cards lead to turn 1 kill: Academy, Pearl, Walk; Enlightened Tutor for Lotus, draw Lotus, Tap Academy, sac Lotus for Black, Ritual, Timetwister. 7 new cards and BBU floating was enough. This is not possible with Seal. But seal is a really really good card in this deck.

I went 4-3. Not very impressive. I lost a match against a bad UGB control deck that ran Counterspell because of a mulligan to a medicore 6 card hand and in the third and decisive game I had the choice (going first) to drop a first turn Oath or Duress him. I choose to Duress and I found out that he had no FoWs but two Duress in hand .... Ouch. Three points cast out of the window because of a bad/unlucky first turn choice.

I lost two matches to Workshops, with the note that they drew extremely well. When I had the good hand against MW.dec (Jet, Petal, Vault, Sacred Ground, Oath, Orchard) they just dropped Metalworker first turn and Staffed me the second. Also if they drop twice a first turn Trini against you, you know it is not your day.

About the deck: I think they idea of it is flawed. The combo element is very strong. The Oath element is not. I think this deck is not fit for Oath. You don´t have countermagic to protect your winning path. Dropping Oath and allowing your opponent two untaps and a free run to do whatever they want/topdeck is a dangerous road to victory. A "real" Oath deck untaps, oaths up a creature and sits on its countermagic.
Whenever I dropped Oath, I felt really unsecure about the win. I´d much rather win NOW. I went 2-5 in games against Workshop. I really felt the disadvantage of my manabase.

Of course, one tourney is not enough to make a good estimate about a deck, but I for sure will not sleeve it up again, I´d much rather play TPS. Not being able to FoW hurts a lot, having a vulnerable manabase hurts a lot as well.