[Deck] ICBM Oath, or 12 easy steps to win Rochester

[Hydra]

2) In the instance that you are in answer-mode and not find-combo mode, and you need Force of Will or Mana Drain, Thirst for Knowledge seems superior to Impulse for Force of Will but not for Mana Drain. Since you are running a complement of Chalice and Null Rod, is Force of Will the better option. If you have Force of Will and Thirst for Knowledge in hand, do you pitch the Thirst instead of trying to find a Drain or another blue card and have more cards in hand? If you have set up a Chalice @ 0 and still found a need for Null Rod (Sensei's Divining Top, Granite Shard, etc.), would Impulse prove to be optimal to give you the option of Force of Will OR Mana Drain since it costs one mana less?

I don't think Impulse would ever be optimal in this deck, as Thirst is NOT a tutor slot, it's a card advantage slot.  Impulse will only provide you with parity, and as a control deck you'll quickly lose games if you don't have any way of getting card advantage.  This isn't Meandeck Gifts, there's no incredibly broken tutor that can be run in place of standard card advantage pieces to keep you in the game for the control on control mirror.  Most control games are won on the back of card advantage, and you NEED a way to refill your hand after the initial control exchanges if you plan on playing that strategy.  The deck doesn't need more tutoring in that slot, as you might as well be playing GWS Oath if you forsake the card drawing elements.

[Tha Gunslinga]

Workshop/Mox/Cap
Orchard/Mox/Oath
p.  I also have several other ways to cast cap, and you only have 4 orchards.  Therefore, you saying that you will have an active Oath before I cast and use Cap is a ridiculous statement. 

How many counters do you play?  Because I play 4 Forces.  On the play, I also can have first-turn Drain mana up.  Or a Duress.  Or a Pithing Needle.  Or a Null Rod.  Or I can Waste your land to keep you off activation mana.  Or I can have a creature in hand.

[Hydra]

Workshop/Mox/Cap
Orchard/Mox/Oath
p.  I also have several other ways to cast cap, and you only have 4 orchards.  Therefore, you saying that you will have an active Oath before I cast and use Cap is a ridiculous statement. 

How many counters do you play?  Because I play 4 Forces.  On the play, I also can have first-turn Drain mana up.  Or a Duress.  Or a Pithing Needle.  Or a Null Rod.  Or I can Waste your land to keep you off activation mana.  Or I can have a creature in hand.

Plus a first turn Cap is VERY difficult to activate, meaning the Oath player has at least a turn usually to find an answer.

[yespuhyren]

What answer can you find and use in one turn?  The only maindeck answers you have are:

2x Null Rod
1x Rushing River
2x Angel (having one in hand is an answer)

So I don't know how you will manage to consistantly find any of those in one turn, considering you have very little card draw/tutoring available.  But, there isn't really a point in arguing, because it is irrelevant.  I'm sure you hve beaten Uba players, and I'm sure I've beaten Oath players. 

[AngryPheldagrif]

Why are we arguing at all? I already acknowledged that I bring in extra creatures versus Jester's Cap in Stax.

[Smmenen]

Why are we arguing at all? I already acknowledged that I bring in extra creatures versus Jester's Cap in Stax.

Wait wait wait a second.

Between your Null Rods, Leaks, and FOWs, you can't stop Jester's Cap?  Your plan is to bring in more men? 

[AngryPheldagrif]

Why are we arguing at all? I already acknowledged that I bring in extra creatures versus Jester's Cap in Stax.

Wait wait wait a second.

Between your Null Rods, Leaks, and FOWs, you can't stop Jester's Cap?  Your plan is to bring in more men? 

Against Stax your goal is not to have cards like Force of Will and Mana Drain in your opening hand, it is to have Oath of Druids and win. Having extra creatures solves all of their stuff: Jester's Cap, Maze of Ith, Duplicant, etc.

[Evenpence]

Against Stax your goal is not to have cards like Force of Will and Mana Drain in your opening hand, it is to have Oath of Druids and win. Having extra creatures solves all of their stuff: Jester's Cap, Maze of Ith, Duplicant, etc.

Angry's right here.

[Tha Gunslinga]

Maybe we could get an article up; call it "ideal opening hand theory" or something.  It's like Energy Flux vs Uba Stax; the reason it's so good is that the Uba player will keep hands that are full of Bazaars and Shops, not ones that have normal lands, and therefore will die harder to Flux.

[SiegeX]

I just thought of a new tech to SB against the Oath player and would like to share it with the rest of you.  With no further ado, I present to you...

Varchild's War-Riders {1R} |Creature -- War-Rider| 3/4. Cumulative upkeep--Put a 1/1 red Survivor creature token into play under an opponent's control. / Trample, rampage 1 (Whenever this creature becomes blocked, it gets +1/+1 until end of turn for each creature blocking it beyond the first.)

The idea is to create 1/1 dorks faster than Forbidden Orchard can dish out (even in multiples), preventing Oath from ever triggering; all the while putting down a reasonable threat for just 1R.  The 3/4 body is less important than the time this will buy you to get your win condition on-line.

Note that once the Oath player has 4 or so tokens, you can refuse to pay the upkeep cost, shutting down the token generator.  I feel any more than 4-5 tokens and you're more likely to die via the 1/1 beatdown plan, undermining the whole point of this card.

I understand that this might be an extremely narrow answer, relevant only to Oath, but it's attacking the card on a whole new dimension that I haven't seen before.  I'm interested in reading how you seasoned Oath players might deal with this threat and more importantly what kind of damage this might do to your gameplan.

[LordHomerCat]

Why not play Goblin Bombardment for the same cost, never have to worry about Oath triggering, and damage the oath player at the same time?  Plus, thats a permanent solution, while this guy either dies eventually or gets way out of hand and they just kill you with the survivor tokens.

[scutakicker]

Interesting tech, but not something that particularly scares me. First, if Oath is already down you can't play it since it triggers Oath. Second, ICBM Oath isn't trying to find/play Oath turn 1/2 every game. I'll happily sit there playing Chalices, countering your spells and drawing cards while beating you down with rider tokens. You give me 1 token, then 2 then 3. You obviously can't give me a total of 6 tokens since that's a 3 turn clock. So you give me a total of three. Depending on the situation I either beat you down with tokens or take a few turns to generate enough tokens to Oath.

[madmanmike25]

There is no sb answer to Oath.....any card you attempt to play will either be countered or bounced(thats the common answer) .  And you wouldnt want to slow down Oath by making them take time to tutor up a bounce spell, thats just plain rude(especially if you have any disruption of your own).

But god, oath is fast and i hate it for that.  Its the best 2cc creature ever printed.

[ZeroGs]

Would packing 3 annuls help? (thats 11 counters, plus REB's) they will certainly have to gaes blessing their oaths back by that time, and I will just combo0ff. If they want to play the waiting game, with their artifacts so can I, I guess it depends on how good the player is. 3 annuls in the side dont really bother me as they can be useful here and there and also pitch to force, counter chalice, counter null rod. I'd be playing gifts BTW, Thoughts?

[Mantis]

The best way of batteling Oath is not attacking their tokens and not attacking their creatures. You will have to battle their Oath, aside from Ensnaring Bridge.

Ray of Revelation obviously works nice if you have Bazaar. Ichorid is a great example obviously.

A Fish deck with Aether Vial that sides in Kami of Ancient Law is pretty damn hard for Oath to beat. Moreso because Meddling Mage also kills their threat, while both are bashing face. Waterfront Bouncer was quite nice for a while but SSS killed him and he's not very reliable post board. I'm pretty sure StP is not the thing to run to beat Oath though. Kami of Ancient Law is not affected by bounce unless Time Walk enters the equation and it still beats down for 2 every turn. I used to run that sideboard in UW Fish and even SB it in over Kataki and others if the opponent didn't play Artifacts.

I don't think the other top tier decks will really benefit from having a devoted anti oath sideboardplan (gifts, grim long etc.).

What are you going to use Annul for? To counter Chalices? Seriously though, a good ICBM Oath player is not going to play their Oaths blindly and walk into an Annul. If there was a blue Oxidize, I'd even pick that over Annul when playing Oath tbh, it's really that bad.

[Kieranwolf]

What are you going to use Annul for? To counter Chalices? Seriously though, a good ICBM Oath player is not going to play their Oaths blindly and walk into an Annul. If there was a blue Oxidize, I'd even pick that over Annul when playing Oath tbh, it's really that bad.

Annul still needs to be dealt with, and mingles with other relevant counterspells against the card. It uses up a duress or a counterspell on its own, and makes a one-land first turn better. In short, if sided in properly it increases counter threat to Oath. How is that bad?

I can see how enchantment destruction is good, but you still need to have it the turn before Oath triggers in order to avoid being beaten up by hot chicks or big ugly things. You need annul just a bit earlier, really, and there's no untap step for the Oath player in that window of time.

The thing that really makes enchantment destruction better is that you have a turn to draw into it, using tutors and blue draw/bazaar. Annul just has to be there when Oath's on the stack. It's not narrow if Oath needs to resolve Oath to take the game fast enough to matter.

[The_spooky_kid]

Annul is not that great of a card overall.  It is extremely narrow and is only good for countering oath of druids.  taking out 3-4 actual counters/ threats to add this in against me just gives me more of an advantage in the control game.  granted it is 1 blue cheaper than counterspell, you are better off running chain of vapor or another bounce spell.  Its much more versitile...

[Grand Inquisitor]

Annul is not that great of a card overall.  It is extremely narrow

I think this is a very contentious opinion.  Annul is extremely useful in the Oath, Fish, Stax, and Combo matchups, and it can also help against lesser seen decks such as Dragon, Belcher, etc.

There is no sb answer to Oath.....any card you attempt to play will either be countered or bounced

A bit fatalistic here, as it's really a lot more complicated as to why some cards are good against oath and others aren't.  For example, devout witness is pretty good at destroying multiple oaths, however, it's slow, requires mana and cards, and triggers oath itself.  On the other hand goblin bombardment is an extremely efficient (albeit narrow) answer provided you don't kill with creatures yourself.  There will always be answers to answers.  The trick to finding the right answer is selecting one that emphasizes the advantages you have in the matchup you're trying to affect.  For example, this is why red elemental blast was a much better answer than swords to plowshares for keeper against hulk.  The matchup dynamic was such that they were fighting over card advantage, not removing tog (usually) REB was good at both, and didn't sit in the hand idle while Hulk ramped up cards.

Kami is certainly a good solution for fish, since it beats in the meantime while waiting for oaths to take out, however, there doesn't seem to be as obvious a parallel for non-creature based decks fighting oath.  When I play combo control, I'm not trying strictly to answer oaths.  I use annul and bounce to buy time, but the real goal is to play the offensive role, and use your engine to combo out before they can swing for the win.  This seems to work, since, like many have said, they can't really afford to go all in on early oaths against other control decks, and while they do have some good hate, they probably can't stop a competent draw engine after turn 3-4.  Of course, this plan is complicated if you use confidant or thirst as a draw engine, or use DSC as your primary kill.

[Tha Gunslinga]

What do you Annul vs Fish?

[Mantis]

What do you Annul vs Fish?

Yeah I can't think of another artifact threat that Fish plays outside of Jitte post board and maybe Aether Vial. Null Rods and Chalice don't harm either side of the Fish mirror much. Like Spooky kid and I said, Annul just is too narrow. Even when you have it versus Oath it's just not better than Kami of Ancient Law, Meddling Mage and maybe even bounce cards.

[Grand Inquisitor]

I don't think the other top tier decks will really benefit from having a devoted anti oath sideboardplan (gifts, grim long etc.).

What are you going to use Annul for?

I guess I thought the annul question was directed at general sideboards, not the sideboard of fish decks specifically.  For combo & Gifts stopping chalice and null rod, and for drain decks, stopping vial is extremely helpful.  Not to mention that I've seen lots of fish board in arcane lab or rule of law which is even more problematic.  While much less common, some people still throw down standstills every now and then.