[Deck] Return of Shop Combo

[Sean Ryan]

I agree with you on thrumming Stone, it isn't optimal, but adding situational cards seems wrong.

If you want game against Fish/Rod don't mess around, just splash red instead of blue.  Alternatively, you could go aggro games 2/3 with Juggs and Razormane Masticores.

[Prodigal_Sorceress]

One of the main problems with Caltrops is that Fish runs only a few creatures with 1 toughness, namely Icitian Javelineers and Cats (Savannah Lions), where as it also has Jotun Grunt and Dogs (Isamaru, Hound of Konda) to beat you down with no problem. Also, this only helps if you are on the play, considering that the typical fish deck will go Land, lotus/Mox/petal, threat (Cats or Dogs, usually), standstill/null rod. Unless you want to give them infi card advantage by dropping your caltrops against something with 2-4 toughness, you are kinda stuck, then. I play Fish, and I don't think that caltrops would do much. More than 1/2 of the beaters in the deck have at least 2 toughness, and, to be quite honest, Javelineers doesn't attack all that much.

I have been messing around with the list posted on the front page, and one of the problems is knowing when to mulligan. From what I have learned playing it, don't keep a hand that dosn't have at least a few combo pieces that you can drop first turn. We really need something that deals with meddling mage faster than Plague Boiler, as it doesn't seem to do all that much. Your friendly control player will just gladly bounce it, and half the time it takes out a lot of your mana sources. Are there any bounce spells that can be cast off artifacts? I know there is Crystal Shard, but that only bounces creatures. How do you guys deal with Null Rod?

[wiley]

Mmmm ... necro.

Anyway, a little birdy told me that you (harlequin) were working on a blue-er version that ran march of the machines.  This sounds like an excellent way to skirt the null rod issue (at least better than the ways I had thought of) and provides another strong kill condition outside of the multiple combos.  I doubt that you have incorporated spoiled cards from alara yet but would you be willing to post your current list?

I am still enamored with this deck and believe that it could do well if it shored up its absolute death to null rod problem.  Also, the new better than helm critter could make a The shining combo in this deck, would you include it or is the deck space too tight to include brain freeze?

[Harlequin]

I am having a designer's field day with all the new spoils.  I don't want to post any lists as of yet but I will give you a teaser.  I'm working on a deck called Worker8 (shout-out to FFT).  Here are some facts:

By Type:
14 Lands
39 artifact
14 creatures
16 blue cards
 3 enchantments
?? Instants and sorceries

17 Restricted cards (sept 1st list)
10 cards from Alar

By Distribution:
19 1-of's
 3 2-of's
 2 3-of's
 6 4-of's
 1 5-of

[M.Solymossy]

Oh Oh!

5-of is Island!

I win a cookie!

[wiley]

How did you guess?  I was thinking it was relentless rats ....


Yay FFt!  How is the testing for the deck going so far?  Care to pm me an old list of the motm list?

[Harlequin]

The old March list was .... frankly terrible.  The Old Shop Combo list had 2 major flaws:  1) Null Rod, in that it basically had a 10% chance of winning a match against a deck running 3-4 rods.  2) Resilance to Disruption.  When a win was countered, it usually had to pass the turn before attempting another win, this gave your opponent more time to find countermagic/duresses/removal.  This made games 2-3 particularly difficult.  The final crushing blow to the old mono-brown shop combo deck was the change and subsiquent restriction of timevault.  That automatically draws into question the role of Rings of the Brighthearth in the deck.

The deck I'm testing now shows promise.  This deck has gotten to the point where It goldfishes very nicely. It is much more threat dense, and has much more natural synergy rather than forced synergy.  When I'm gold-fishing, I usually "counter" the most important card in my hand and then see where the deck goes.  The recovery of this deck is astounding. 

What remains to be tested is the sideboard against combo.  The concept is to try and race combo game 1, and then sphere the ba'jesus out of them game 2-3... and maintain enough core-combo to win while the find answers to spheres.