A TMD thought experiment: Rebreaking Dream Halls.

[Lurker101]

I was thinking that TMD is basically a think tank for the eternal Magic formats. It is one of the most respected M:tG web sites, if not the most respected. I was thinking about pulling the TMD community together to see if we can collectively build a dream halls deck that works. Anyone can contribute to the deck and anyone can make changes they feel are warrented as long as you explain why. Please no full decklists, try to maybe cut a few cards or add a few cards each post so everyone can get involved.  The only thing you cannot change is obviously Dream Halls. The deck should have 4 of them. I'll start off:

Drain Halls

4 Dream Halls
4 Mana Drain (To get Dream Halls out faster)
4 Orim's Chant (To lock your opponent out/helps make Dream Halls one sided)
4 Abeyance   (Same as chant and cantrips for more pitch cards)
Maybe some Megrims?
Anyone interested?

[Purple Hat]

this might be useful

Turbo Zvi taken from:

http://www.germagic.de/nda/deck.php?id=99

3 x Gaea's Blessing
1 x Inspiration
1 x Lobotomy
1 x Impulse
1 x Counterspell
4 x Memory Lapse
4 x Mana Severance
4 x Ancestral Memories
4 x Sift
4 x Meditate
4 x Intuition
4 x Dream Halls
4 x Lotus Petal
4 x Ancient Tomb
4 x Svyelunite Temple
4 x Crystal Vein
9 x Island

[FadeToBlack]

Why was Dream Halls ever good in the first place? Can someone explain please? That'd be a good starting point I assume...

[Smmenen]

Who said it was ?

Dream Halls was restricted in a wave of 18 restrictions in 1999.

Explanation here:

http://www.crystalkeep.com/magic/rules/dci/update-990901.txt

It was the "Gush" of 1999, meaning that the other restrictions rendered it a moot issue. 

[FadeToBlack]

Touche...so it was plucked out before it ever could be abused.

And as far as Zvi's deck goes, how exactly does that work? I take it you repeatedly draw out your deck abusing Ancestral Memories/Blessing to recur it all until you could Lobotomy out your opponent?

[Hi-Val]

Touche...so it was plucked out before it ever could be abused.

And as far as Zvi's deck goes, how exactly does that work? I take it you repeatedly draw out your deck abusing Ancestral Memories/Blessing to recur it all until you could Lobotomy out your opponent?

Yep, you'd Lobotomy them if they were Sligh and had burn that you had to worry about, otherwise you'd Inspiration them to death. Basically, you cast Inspiration on them and then Lobotomy them, after you've Lobotomized their whole hand. Playing against Sligh, you hold a counterspell when you Inspiration them, since they might have drawn a red card and a red burn card. If they don't burn you, you can Lobotomize their burn out. You do this because they'll be drawing every card in their deck, so they see all their burn and Fireblasts hurt a LOT. I built the deck in paper form, since it's actually the worst to MWS with. It still takes like fifteen minutes to kill with.

[FadeToBlack]

Seems easy enough. I assume you could modernize the kill with Brain Freeze which is less messy/risky than making them draw their deck out. Could something like a High Tide esque build work?

[Rock Lee]

Seems easy enough. I assume you could modernize the kill with Brain Freeze which is less messy/risky than making them draw their deck out. Could something like a High Tide esque build work?

opportunity, thirst, drains, freeze, cunning wish. You're done.

::EDIT:: Of course, running this deck with grindstone hate, mostly blessing, running around like crazy, is foolish. And its more difficult to setup and more vulnerable than Painter.

[Xyre]

Back when it seemed like Dream Halls and Time Spiral both getting off was a possibility, I slapped together a mono-blue, 4 Halls/4 Spiral combo deck. Needless to say, it suffered in the places you'd expect it to, namely it couldn't hit five mana and a Halls with sufficient speed, and without Halls the engine was dysfunctional to say the least. I don't think it's going to happen.

[slyfer]

Yes, the main problems are imho:
1) dangerous simmetrical effect to get rid of
2) Dream halls in play and start "combo" = cast spell with card disadvantage =
         a) must use high cc cards to draw, to compensate
         b) counter wars to get rid of
         c) without dream halls, those cards like opportunity, time spiral, etc...are pretty bad in Vintage...
3) painter has 6/7 red blast maindeck
4) high cc cards, means that you basically scoop to fish UR deck (null rod, shaman, daze, etc...)
5) needs useless cards like mana severance to be fully optimized, otherways you could have bad draws

So dream halls is not *today* that powerfull to deserve limitation. Props to Wizard (this time...)
I think the only possibility is to play it via show and tell, but doesn't solve those problems

[Purple Hat]

the optomal kill card is probably something like electrolyze.  Ultimately I think the deck will fail though.  it's gonna be tough to make it better than slaver, and I think we all probably agree that if you need UU3 on turn 2 or 3 you're probably going for a drain shell.

EDIT:  Then again, a dream halls deck is probably the deck best suited to abuse 4x chrome mox due to it's high demand that all cards share at least one color.  The only problem is that you're generating card disad to power out a card disad engine.  you could replace most of your off color moxen with chrome moxes, it opens you up to null rod, but makes you a little more explosive going for UU.

[Katzby]

Yep, you'd Lobotomy them if they were Sligh and had burn that you had to worry about, otherwise you'd Inspiration them to death. Basically, you cast Inspiration on them and then Lobotomy them, after you've Lobotomized their whole hand. Playing against Sligh, you hold a counterspell when you Inspiration them, since they might have drawn a red card and a red burn card. If they don't burn you, you can Lobotomize their burn out. You do this because they'll be drawing every card in their deck, so they see all their burn and Fireblasts hurt a LOT. I built the deck in paper form, since it's actually the worst to MWS with. It still takes like fifteen minutes to kill with.

Not to be nitpicky, but this is not correct.  I'm a stickler for proper preservation of MTG's history.  Turbo Zvi's kill involved Lobotomizing the opponent and then playing Inspiration in response, not the other way around.

Remember that Turbo Zvi was pre-6th edition rules, so we had no stack back then.  Once batches entered a state of resolution, all spells in the spell stack had to resolve before any new spells could be played.  So, the idea was to first play Lobotomy on an opponent (who had, presumably, an empty hand), and respond with Inspiration on him, then resolve these two, LIFO.  Even if the opponent drew a Counterspell and a Dissipate off the Inspiration, he wouldn't be able to play either of them until the Lobotomy has finished resolving.  And at that point, he has no more than one of these left in his hand and is therefore unable to use the Dream Halls to play the other one.  The deck would then cycle through and Lobotomy the opponent a second time, if necessary, without Inspirationing.  Then it would repeat this process.  It was not necessary to hold a Counterspell back as you have said.

What did Turbo Zvi do against Sligh?  Let the Sligh player draw all the Fireblasts it likes and take them to the face like a man.  No need to even use the Lobotomy trick in this case.  The Burn and Fireblasts did not "hurt a LOT" as you've said.  Why?  Remember, player death due to 0 or less life happening immediately did not come about until 6th edition rules; players only died from having 0 or less life under 5th edition rules at the end of a phase (or beginning/end of an attack sub-phase).  However, player death due to the inability to draw a card has always occurred immediately.  So, even if the Turbo Zvi player went into negative life during his main phase, it did not matter because the Sligh player was going to be losing due to the inability to draw before that phase ended.

The fact that different types of player death were checked for at different times under 5th edition rules was the reason that Turbo Zvi contained the time-consuming Lobotomy/Inspiration kill.  Otherwise, it could have easily shortened its game by 10 minutes or so by using an Unyaro Bee Sting or something in place of the Lobotomy.


Katzby

[Sporkcore]

Why not build the deck in a Drain/Painter's shell? Make the kill Painter's/Grindstone, fill the deck with draw like Meditate and TFK, and plenty of pitch spells. With a Painter's Servant out, you could pitch an Island or Mox to play the draw because of Dream Halls. Maybe even play a Brain freeze in case you have trouble finding the Grindstone. It might not be better than the Painter's decks that people like Rich Shay have been winning with, but it's an idea.

[Purple Hat]

Why not build the deck in a Drain/Painter's shell? Make the kill Painter's/Grindstone, fill the deck with draw like Meditate and TFK, and plenty of pitch spells. With a Painter's Servant out, you could pitch an Island or Mox to play the draw because of Dream Halls. Maybe even play a Brain freeze in case you have trouble finding the Grindstone. It might not be better than the Painter's decks that people like Rich Shay have been winning with, but it's an idea.

doesn't painter just accentuate the issues with your deck being based around a fundimentally symetrical effect?

[FadeToBlack]

Why not build the deck in a Drain/Painter's shell? Make the kill Painter's/Grindstone, fill the deck with draw like Meditate and TFK, and plenty of pitch spells. With a Painter's Servant out, you could pitch an Island or Mox to play the draw because of Dream Halls. Maybe even play a Brain freeze in case you have trouble finding the Grindstone. It might not be better than the Painter's decks that people like Rich Shay have been winning with, but it's an idea.

This sounds pretty strong since the playing with Painter allows you to splash for other colors/not having to worry about running out of cards to pitch. The problem is...why is it even worth playing Dream Halls at that point?

[Sporkcore]

Why not build the deck in a Drain/Painter's shell? Make the kill Painter's/Grindstone, fill the deck with draw like Meditate and TFK, and plenty of pitch spells. With a Painter's Servant out, you could pitch an Island or Mox to play the draw because of Dream Halls. Maybe even play a Brain freeze in case you have trouble finding the Grindstone. It might not be better than the Painter's decks that people like Rich Shay have been winning with, but it's an idea.

doesn't painter just accentuate the issues with your deck being based around a fundimentally symetrical effect?

What Painter would do is help with the card advantage aspect of the deck. Any dead card such as a land drawn off some spell becomes a card to pitch in order to play some other card. Having a Painter on the board with Dream Halls means that you most likely won. Being able to pitch a land or extra Painter or whatever card you want to play Meditate, A. Recall, TfK or some other draw spell makes it so you could cycle through your deck much quicker than if you didn't have a Painter. You could think of it like resolving a Yawg. Bargain with open mana, where once it's out, you could just start going off.

This thread just seems to be a brainstorming session. This is just another idea to jump off.

[Purple Hat]

if you don't play painter you can play all cards that are either blue or gold containing blue with the exception of mana sources.  This is a big advantage because when you drop dream halls all you need to do is draw spells while your opponent needs to draw spells of the same color.  if your opponent is playing multiple colors this can actually be an issue for him, like getting blue card hosed with force of will.  Most vintage decks play at most 22-25 cards of a single color pre-board.  This number tends to diminish post board as people bring in answers from off colors.  by running 35-37 cards that share a color a dream halls combo deck can make dream halls is less symmetrical, playing painter takes away that advantage.

[Skadrian]

and for two mana you can play mana severance. The effect is the same(you can pitch all cards you find(except for mox and lotus)), it can already be pitched and doesnt help the opponent

[Smmenen]

I strongly believe, as much as I believe anything in Vintage, that Dream Halls is garbage.

To design a deck, you need a framework for thinking about design.   

With Dream Halls, you need to ask: what are the requirements for a successful Dream Halls deck?

In my view, there are three:

1) You need the means to play Dream Halls relatively quickly.

2) You need the means to protect Dream Halls (force it into play, etc)

3) You need a way to combo quickly once Dream Halls has resolved.

I believe that Dream Halls is a very  bad, outmoded mana accelerant and will prove utterly unplayable. 

[Phele]

Who plays Dream Halls, when he can play Tezzeret for the same casting cost?

[Purple Hat]

I think the question of whether dream halls comes out any good will have to wait until we have an idea of what dream halls looks like.  At this point all we know is there's a potentially breakable card out there.  Steve's framework is a good starting point I think but to assume that the deck can't work based on that framework seems a bit of a stretch without at least a preliminary concept of how we'd go about building to those criteria.

Whether it's better than Tezzeret also seems too early to answer since we don't actually know what Tezzeret is going to look like as a deck.  Will Tezzeret combo play a full compliment of chrome moxen?  if not dream halls combo could be more likely to hold up drain on turn 1, if so how does that effect the stability of either deck?  Once again, these are questions that we can't answer without actual deck ideas to look at.

I'm not saying dream halls is going to be overpowering, I'm just saying that before we can really evaluate these questions we need an actual concept.

In that vein I'd like to propose the following as a completely untested concept:

Dream Halls

4 chrome mox
1 mox sapphire
1 black lotus
1 lotus petal
1 mana crypt
1 sol ring
1 mana vault
1 tolarian academy
5 island
4 flooded strand
4 polluted delta

4 mana drain
4 force of will

4 Strategic planning
3 Mana Severence
3 Ancestral Memories
1 Brainstorm
1 Ponder
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
3 intuition
4 Accumulated Knowledge

1 Electrolyze
2 Gaea's Blessing
4 Dream halls

Now whether, ultimately, this deck actually works is not really something I'd be willing to bet on.  but it's certainly a direction that the deck could go in.

EDIT: oops, I'd like to find room for back to basics, but not putting in dream halls will probably be worse for the deck in the long run.

[dr. Leeb]

An ill-fated experiment in my view 

The difficulty in getting Dream Halls on-line, and the crap you need to run for when you do, seems to much to overcome.
Props to the one that cracks it 

I just like to add one crap card that might actually work in this deck:

Ideas Unbound:  : Draw three cards, discard three cards at end of turn (sorcery - freaking arcane )

The drawbacks are obvious, it is a bad card. It has less power than the alternatives mentioned, but it might make the deck a little more "reliable".
It can filter dead hands for 2 mana and is just powerfull enough to combo-off with dream halls in a single turn.
Not saying that it is great at these two tasks, but the possibility to do both (with and without dream halls) makes it worth considering...

[rikimaru75]

How about trying Dream Halls with Painter and running Time Spiral to generate a storm count and kill with Ignite Memories?  You could make it red/blue/white and/or finish with Chaotic Backlash or Brain Freeze.  That way you can run Enlightened Tutor/Idyllic Tutor and Personal Tutors with a bunch of draw spells.  And since you're running painter, you can run your standard sets of Pyroblasts and Red Elemental Blasts too.  Any thoughts?

[Purple Hat]

yeah...I tried out my completely untested concept in a coupple goldfishes last night....it's absolutely terrible.  I think consistency is a huge issue and I'm not sure it's fixable since you have to play a bunch of inefficient cards to make the deck work.

[AmbivalentDuck]

The thing I haven't seen anyone mention is Ancestral Vision.  My guess is that it's going to end up in any viable Dream Halls-based deck since unlike Opportunity it's not complete trash in the early game.

[Jostin123]

Why not build the deck in a Drain/Painter's shell? Make the kill Painter's/Grindstone, fill the deck with draw like Meditate and TFK, and plenty of pitch spells. With a Painter's Servant out, you could pitch an Island or Mox to play the draw because of Dream Halls. Maybe even play a Brain freeze in case you have trouble finding the Grindstone. It might not be better than the Painter's decks that people like Rich Shay have been winning with, but it's an idea.

I think Painter's Servant would be absolutely terrible in the main deck.  Painter's Effect is symmetrical.  You can't set it to blue because that makes your opponent's force of will that much stronger; the same holds true for their blasts.  It would also fare poorly against TPS.  If you attempt to play this early, the card advantage you would need to sacrifice for tempo would leave you vulnerable to a timely permission spell.  After that, they would be able to able to much easily combo off, using your own Dream Halls to play their own spells and kill you.  I think a strong build is possible, but a completely new kind of shell and theory application  would have to be created to give this deck its best shot.  However, I definately think that Abeyance is a step in the right direction.

[Purple Hat]

The thing I haven't seen anyone mention is Ancestral Vision.  My guess is that it's going to end up in any viable Dream Halls-based deck since unlike Opportunity it's not complete trash in the early game.

in what way?  the only way to cast it is to suspend it for 3 turns

[Implacable]

The thing I haven't seen anyone mention is Ancestral Vision.  My guess is that it's going to end up in any viable Dream Halls-based deck since unlike Opportunity it's not complete trash in the early game.

in what way?  the only way to cast it is to suspend it for 3 turns

Yeah, how is Concentrate not better?  And really, there needs to be an early-game draw engine, like Impulse or Meditate, followed by a Dream Halls-based draw, like Opportunity, Concentrate, or what have you.  But after a lot of testing, I've been having trouble seeing how a deck is competitive when a deck's win condition is five mana and doesn't always win the turn you cast it.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Ancestral Vision on turn 1 gives you 3 cards on turn 4 with no mana investment that turn.  Without the mana investment, you're free to play Dream Halls or any other high CC card in your deck, possibly off Drain mana from defending your Vision.  In the late game, it's either free or pitches, same as Concentrate or Opportunity.

Also, we need to take Tezzeret into account.  For the same 3UU, you get a planeswalker that fetches out Time Vault and proceeds to give you infinite turns.  Seems like a few copies of him would be good in any deck that can cheat him into play.

[Purple Hat]

I don't understand how being able to give you 3 cards on turn 4 or later provided you use up mana in the early game to cast it qualifies as not complete trash in the early game.