[Premium Article] 1st Place in Sandusky with Cobra Gush: Gushing post Champs

[Smmenen]

Sooooo....  I wrote a detailed, play-by-play, 30 page tournament report:
http://www.eternal-central.com/?p=2151

Why did I play Cobra Gush after devising Bob Gush for the Vintage Champs?  What is my list?  Answers inside..,

I designed this deck for the Waterbury, but couldn't wait another month to play it.  This is the best Gush deck in the metagame... 

[cvarosky80]

Excellent article. So, now that you've designed Bob-Gush for Champs, and a new Cobra-Gush deck for the Team Serious Open, should we now expect to see a Bob-Cobra-Gush deck for the Waterbury? Obviously, I'm just kidding (Although it does sound like a really insane idea, in theory) and in all seriousness, I really do enjoy these articles as they are just as entertaining, informative, and insightful as your SCG ones, but are not constrained to the article-size limits that your old SCG ones had (Meaning, I don't have to wait around for "Part 2" to get the full story).

[hitman]

I finally bought an article.  I think it was worth it.  I was pretty curious about the Gush, Mind's Desire and Yawgmoth's Bargain deck.  I noticed in your article that you wondered why I said I would keep that hand against Dredge.  One, I don't think Dredge is a turn two deck postboard so you have a little more time.  Two, because of one, I'm comfortable turn one Tinkering with that hand and Pondering on two.  Besides that, you're only like two mana off a turn one kill with that hand.  If your draw for turn is something like Crypt or Lotus, you just win on turn one.  I would keep that hand because they're probably keeping a hand with a Bazaar, a colored mana source and/or removal spell.  Even if you mull to Leyline, they have twice as many cards that remove that than a Colossus.  Since I wouldn't put him on keeping cards like Fatestitcher or Dread Return and targets in, I wouldn't be worried about an army of Zombies on the other side of the table more than any one of eight cards that remove a Leyline since he'd only have Cabal Therapy to generate an army of Zombies with.  Yeah, if he has the Chain of Vapor, you're probably not winning that game but the same is true if he's bouncing/destroying Leyline of the Void.  Anyway, great article and congratulations on the win.

[JACO]

This is a Top 3 Smmenen article of all time. I enjoyed it.

[Onslaught]

I went ahead and grabbed it too, highly recommend it to everyone. I posted a thread about Lotus Cobra in "Blue Based Control" a few weeks ago and it got no replies, so this article was like a dream come true to me to get some Lotus Cobra love going.

[marcb]

Just to echo whats been said. This article was fantastic. You made your thought process from designing the deck, to playing it, to SB'ing very clear. There was something to learn about every elememt of the game in this article.

[Kiriyuu]

Is it possible to pay for this other than with Paypal? It's not working for me.

[Smmenen]

Just to echo whats been said. This article was fantastic. You made your thought process from designing the deck, to playing it, to SB'ing very clear. There was something to learn about every elememt of the game in this article.

Thank you everyone for the great feedback. I'm really happy so many people enjoyed this article.  I will reply with specifics when m front of a real computer.

[Onslaught]

I re-read this article today, and I was thinking about the maindeck REBs. At first glance they are so unintuitive (to me at least), but the more I think about it they really make so much sense. I've tried a 4 Lotus Cobra, 3 Jace, 4 Spell Pierce deck before (with max accel - Lotus Petal etc.). Generating 5 mana is trivial if you get a Cobra down, allowing you to turbo out a Jace with mana up for Spell Pierce. In this scenario, REB fills the exact same role as Spell Pierce - while obviously being a much bigger blowout in most other situations against blue.

Spell Pierce is a bit more relevant against Workshops, but it wasn't so amazing in that matchup that it offsets the power of REB against everything else.

[cvarosky80]

I re-read this article today, and I was thinking about the maindeck REBs. At first glance they are so unintuitive (to me at least), but the more I think about it they really make so much sense. I've tried a 4 Lotus Cobra, 3 Jace, 4 Spell Pierce deck before (with max accel - Lotus Petal etc.). Generating 5 mana is trivial if you get a Cobra down, allowing you to turbo out a Jace with mana up for Spell Pierce. In this scenario, REB fills the exact same role as Spell Pierce - while obviously being a much bigger blowout in most other situations against blue.

Spell Pierce is a bit more relevant against Workshops, but it wasn't so amazing in that matchup that it offsets the power of REB against everything else.

I was wondering about the maindeck REBs as well, but then I came to an interesting realization, it stops Metamorph dead in it's tracks. It doesn't really do anything else, but being able to stop a Shop deck from cloning a Blightsteel, Golem, Cat, lock piece, or Trygon is a huge play, and one that Spell Pierce most times can't replicate in the mid to late game.

[Smmenen]

Excellent article. So, now that you've designed Bob-Gush for Champs, and a new Cobra-Gush deck for the Team Serious Open, should we now expect to see a Bob-Cobra-Gush deck for the Waterbury? Obviously, I'm just kidding (Although it does sound like a really insane idea, in theory) and in all seriousness, I really do enjoy these articles as they are just as entertaining, informative, and insightful as your SCG ones, but are not constrained to the article-size limits that your old SCG ones had (Meaning, I don't have to wait around for "Part 2" to get the full story).

Ha!   It's not that it hasn't crossed my mind  But Cobra and Bob serve overlapping purposes, as I sketched out in the article (btw, what a SWEET Graphic Jaco made for the comparison chart!  WOW!!).   Plus, if you start adding in Bobs, you can't play all the big bombs that Cobra permits.   They not only overlap, they run at cross-purposes.  

I finally bought an article.  I think it was worth it.  I was pretty curious about the Gush, Mind's Desire and Yawgmoth's Bargain deck.  I noticed in your article that you wondered why I said I would keep that hand against Dredge.  One, I don't think Dredge is a turn two deck postboard so you have a little more time.  Two, because of one, I'm comfortable turn one Tinkering with that hand and Pondering on two.  Besides that, you're only like two mana off a turn one kill with that hand.  If your draw for turn is something like Crypt or Lotus, you just win on turn one.  I would keep that hand because they're probably keeping a hand with a Bazaar, a colored mana source and/or removal spell.  Even if you mull to Leyline, they have twice as many cards that remove that than a Colossus.  Since I wouldn't put him on keeping cards like Fatestitcher or Dread Return and targets in, I wouldn't be worried about an army of Zombies on the other side of the table more than any one of eight cards that remove a Leyline since he'd only have Cabal Therapy to generate an army of Zombies with.  Yeah, if he has the Chain of Vapor, you're probably not winning that game but the same is true if he's bouncing/destroying Leyline of the Void.  Anyway, great article and congratulations on the win.

Thanks Paul -- I'm really glad you liked it.  Your point about Dredge being slower post-board is well taken.   I'm still not convinced about keeping that hand, but it is a very close question.   How would you have, exactly, played out that hand?  

[Meddling Mike]

Thread cleaned up. Everybody keeping their distance has been working out well, please don't mess with it.
-MM

[hitman]

It would be a lot clearer if you played a single Tormod's Crypt.  I would play Underground Sea, Mox Emerald into Demonic Tutor for Black Lotus, play Black Lotus and Tinker into Blightsteel Colossus.  That would leave you with the unknown card drawn on your draw step, Underground Sea in play, Merchant Scroll, Vampiric Tutor and Ponder.  If you had Tormod's Crypt, I would just upkeep Vampiric Tutor for Tormod's Crypt and play it. 

In your type of deck, I wouldn't play Nihil Spellbomb over Tormod's Crypt.  In Brian's Vintage control deck, I would play Nihil Spellbomb over Tormod's Crypt because it's more of a grinding style of blue deck and the added value can amount to a lot.  In your more explosive deck, the interactive cards you play only need to serve as speed bumps without generating value because the big bombs you're accelerating into will generate the value.  The more explosive the deck you play, the more efficient your interactive spells need to be so you're not wasting mana being interactive instead of explosive, which is what your deck is designed to be.  The slower your deck is, the more value you need to extract from every card so the minimal cost of one mana is worth it for the added value it gives you.  My two cents. 

Every card that stops Blightsteel also stops Leyline.  If you're afraid of Chain of Vapor on Blightsteel, you should be equally afraid of it on Leyline of the Void.  The further you dig to find Leyline. the more devastating their answer to your Leyline is.  With the idea that Dredge is slower postboard and the same cards beat both Leyline and Blightsteel, I would keep the opening hand and force them to deal with me instead of the other way around.

[V is for Vintage]

Hey Steve,

My name is Vito Picozzo, and I would like to clearly and definitively state that this deck was built by Jeremy Beaver and I immediately after the Gush unrestricting in Northeast PA.

The night Gush got unrestricted, I hopped onto ebay and snatched up a playset of foil cobras, and a playset of foil gushes, for roughly 200 bucks, because Jeremy and I had talked about the possible unrestriction of gush and the deck that we would play. The original reason to play cobra was to support gush underneath the workshop heavy metagame of the time (hence the myr battlesphere as the tinker target)

The first tournament of the neo-gush era was a Blue Bell in early October of last year. This deck was piloted by 3 players (Jeremy Beaver, Joe Pace, and Myself). Jeremy and Joe Made the top 8 with it, and I came in something around 9th-12th place. I had the opportunity to play Matt Elias playing oath of druids that day, and he wrote about one of our games in the commentary.

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/vintage/20250_The_Long_and_Winding_Road_Vintage_Deck_Explosion.html\

The Council open the same month features our teammate Nate Thompson piloting the deck

http://morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=1348

and myself the next month

http://morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=1363

You can go look at morphling yourself, our teammates continually racked up wins with variations of this deck for months.

At one of the Bloomsburg tournaments I had the pleasure of playing your teammate, Paul Mastriano. This was the first time Paul and I ever played, and since then have played a few more times. I consider him a friend in the community, and a good player. On the day we played, my cobra gush storm deck beat his tryant oath deck, and he decided to play cobra storm at the next tournament

http://morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=1385

Paul Top 8'ed the event with a cobra storm deck, and had had relative success with it for a while after, alongside members of my team. Props to Paul for picking up the deck when everyone else just assumed it was a gimmick.


And now you've picked up our deck, made your own tweaks, and have had success with it. Congrats. The rebs are neat, though definitely a metagame decisions, I can't imagine playing them in the shops heavy metas of the past, but we played rituals back then so I can't really say much lol.

The reason that I posted this was to give the readers a history lesson as to the origins of this deck. This deck was really one of our pride and joy builds, and though people have adapted it for their own, I do believe that at least some credit should go back to Jeremy Beaver and I, along with the rest of the team at Full of Win Games for it's conception.

Congrats again Steve on your success, I'm sure I'll see you at Waterbury!

-Vito

[Onslaught]

I'm pretty sure everyone instantly realized "Gush + Cobra = Vintage playable," so claiming credit for it is a bit odd (especially a suboptimal build running Rituals).

[Ten-Ten]

Congrats on the win Steve! Great artcle.  Well worth the money and time The Graphics were the icing on the cake.

My name is Vito Picozzo, and I would like to clearly and definitively state that this deck was built by Jeremy Beaver and I immediately after the Gush unrestricting in Northeast PA

I recommend reading Steve's book: Understanding Gush  
Cahapter 5, page 81. That's all i'm gonna say

[voltron00x]

Congrats on the win Steve! Great artcle.  Well worth the money and time The Graphics were the icing on the cake.

My name is Vito Picozzo, and I would like to clearly and definitively state that this deck was built by Jeremy Beaver and I immediately after the Gush unrestricting in Northeast PA

I recommend reading Steve's book: Understanding Gush  
Cahapter 5, page 81. That's all i'm gonna say

Not to be difficult, but the link Vito provided for my article is from 10/2010, which I believe predates the Gush book by several months.  

That said, I'm not sure what passage you're citing as I didn't purchase the book; and, perhaps this article acknowledged the existence of the work done by Beaver & co. - again, not sure as I did not purchase this article.

[Klep]

Those of you who have read the rules know that credit discussions are prohibited on TMD because they never produce anything in the way of positive discussion.  I don't want to see anybody else talking about who came up with what.

-Klep

[Smmenen]

It would be a lot clearer if you played a single Tormod's Crypt.  I would play Underground Sea, Mox Emerald into Demonic Tutor for Black Lotus, play Black Lotus and Tinker into Blightsteel Colossus.  That would leave you with the unknown card drawn on your draw step, Underground Sea in play, Merchant Scroll, Vampiric Tutor and Ponder.  If you had Tormod's Crypt, I would just upkeep Vampiric Tutor for Tormod's Crypt and play it. 

In your type of deck, I wouldn't play Nihil Spellbomb over Tormod's Crypt.  In Brian's Vintage control deck, I would play Nihil Spellbomb over Tormod's Crypt because it's more of a grinding style of blue deck and the added value can amount to a lot.  In your more explosive deck, the interactive cards you play only need to serve as speed bumps without generating value because the big bombs you're accelerating into will generate the value.  The more explosive the deck you play, the more efficient your interactive spells need to be so you're not wasting mana being interactive instead of explosive,

That's a good point, which I agree with.  You'll notice that every single list I've run for the last year ran T. Crypt in the Nihil Spellbomb slot (such as my Vintage champs list).  This was the first time I went to Spellbomb, and you've made me rethink that position.