Hi, first post, I'm the one who made it 1st @ the Quebec GPT with CRET Belcher.
True. The whole deck is designed to try to be as broken as possible on turn 1. Some "staple" cards in other belcher lists have not made the cut because of this. Things like Chromatic Star, Welders, Living Wishes, Helms, Cabal Ritual were all too slow/hard to cast. Chromatic Star also has bad synergy with Chrome Mox. The reason why there is only 3 Tinder Walls in the deck is because it's not that hard to get 1 green mana on turn 1, but getting 2 is rare. Because of this, having 2 Tinder Walls in your starting hand mostly said that it was a 6 card hand.Originally Posted by CalebD
Infernal Tutor in sideboard is mainly for EtW. Why you might say ? Because to do Wish -> Tutor -> Belcher you need 11 mana. The deck rarely produce 11 mana, but often produces 8 mana. 8 mana = Wish -> Tutor -> EtW, producing an often needed additional 2 tokens. If you don't believe it, goldfish the deck trying to always go off on turn 1.
Cutting Dark Ritual, the most broken accelerant after LED ? +2 mana is incredibly good.
Welders are slow, and are our only targets for creature removal, and the format has a lot of those (same goes Xantid Swarm).
Pyrokinesis is not in SB because it is an instant.
Most cards that breaks our deck are blue (FoW, Stifle)/artifacts (Rod/CotV/Needle/Sphere). This explains the 5 REB/4 Spree sideboard choices. Against deck that packs Rod/CotV/Needle, you SB 3 spree in, leaving you with 7 cards that are/get the Spree. If the deck packs Spheres, then you better kill on turn one, because a resolved sphere probably means you lost the game.
Anyway, this deck is a blast to play, without any card drawing, your hand is probably 90% of what you will play this game. Learning to mulligan is really important. I invite you to try and goldfish it.
JP
-- Team CRET --
Care to write a quick tourney report? At least of what you played against? It'd be very interesting to know.
where is everyone getting GPT decklists? I am having difficulty finding anything even remotely discussing them
This is all word of mouth, none of the GPTs from last weekend have been posted as of yet.
where is everyone getting GPT decklists? I am having difficulty finding anything even remotely discussing them
Team Unicorn is too hetero for me.While this is close it's still wrong. Every one knows it's an orgy of unicorns.******s?
TeaM NOVA for life.
I would if I remembered most of it, but as it is tradition for Team CRET, we were all high and wasted, smoking Js between each round. But I will post the top 8.
Our metagame is mostly aggro, and few players play Legacy around here, so we were only 22, a 5 round tournament.
Top 8 (The order for 4 to 8 might not be exact...)
1. CRET Belcher (Me)
2. CRET Belcher (MacRae, my teammate)
3. UW-Fish (Fleuvant, with Needles, FoW, Disenchant, 4x Stifle + Trickbind...)
4. BW-Confidant (Lior)
5. RW-Goblins (Sebastien)
6. Aggro Loam
7. Affinity
8. Raise the alarm.dec (lol)
9. CRET Belcher (Ugo Rivard, too bad he didn't make top 8)
Just what you played against for the rounds would be interesting, even if you remember absolutely no game details. But of course, if you don't remember that either, oh well ^^' And thanks for the Top 8.
I can try... ;) It's mostly the first 3 rounds that are "hazy"...
Round 1: Played against a good player that played U/R something, he did play FoW and Pyroclasm. I remember seeing a first turn Wooded Foothills thinking I had an easy matchup, but then fetched into Volcanic Island and Brainstorm in response to my first turn Seething Song, unfortunatly for him not finding a FoW. I also remember getting 12 tokens blasted away by a Pyroclasm, but winning with Belcher 2-3 turns later.
Sideboard plan: -3x Tinder Wall, -1 Wild Cantor, -1 ESG, +4x Pyroblast, +1 REB
Round 2: Draw against Ugo Rivard, a teammate.
Round 3: Fleuvant with MD 4x Stifle, FoW, Disenchant and some Needles and Trickbind in sideboard... He won the match on game three after having stifled/trickbinded my Belcher 3 times in a row, topdecking every ****ing turn, then topdecked a disenchant FTW (and I still had the mana to activated it a 4th time).
Sideboard plan: -3x Tinder Wall, -1 Wild Cantor, -1 ESG, +4x Pyroblast, +1 REB
Round 4: B/W confidant aggro discard thing. I won game 1, then game 2 by pure luck, I had 7 cards in hand, no permanants except a LED, no kill, he attacks with 2 Hypnotic Specter, chains with a Hymn to Tourach, leaving my hand with Land Grant, Dark Ritual and ESG... and I topdeck Belcher.
Round 5: Don't remember, but I win.
Top 8: B/W confidant aggro again. I win even more easily than in swiss.
Top 4: A land deck, waited for belcher both games and won easily.
Finals: CRET Belcher! I want to split, but my teammate wants to play it. He wins the dice roll, goes for tokens, I go for belcher and win. Game 2, he belches me on turn 2, but unfortunatly hits Taiga after 5 cards, I Burning Wish for Spree, kills the belcher, the Wish for EtW and kill him.
That's mostly what I remember.
That's more than enough, thanks ^^ I just wanted to know, what kinds of decks you beat. It's rather impressive that you went on to win after getting paired against two FoW.decs and two BW Confidants, all combo-killer decks (losing only one to boot).
Thanks for the compliment JP ;) I was playing UGr-Thresh. I managed to lose a game with Needle naming Belcher in play and 1 Pyroclasm in hand (which was eventually played to destroy 12 tokens, only to find my opponent refilling the land with little red men two turns later, damn that high percentage of acceleration in the deck). All to show that the deck is resiliant to hate. Not all Legacy decks can handle turn 0 pressure (when on the draw and relying only on FoW).
What impressed me the most was watching the deck win two matches against Deadguy and beat a UW-Fish deck running 4 Meddling Mage, 4 Fow, 4 Daze, 4 Stifle, x Needles, y Trickbinds (post-side), z Disenchants. Just nuts ! I'll definitly test the deck more and learn to play it/against it.
Anyways, these were my two cents.
It never occurred to me the amount of Red rituals out there. I like the list and I will be testing it for sure. 2 different win conditions is extremely solid.
With all the viable combo running it should be an interesting GP to say the least. It also is not looking like a good metagame for Solidarity. Combo (extremely fast combo) and Thresh/Fish/Countersliver is going to be everywhere I bet.
Last edited by Happy Gilmore; 04-11-2007 at 08:37 PM.
Team Unicorn is too hetero for me.While this is close it's still wrong. Every one knows it's an orgy of unicorns.******s?
TeaM NOVA for life.
Yo that was me (soto). I was playing Red Death and beat him because of my fast clock and he couldn't go off fast enough. Second game i forgot to side in Engineered Plague and he just covered me with goblins (my only blockers were 2 rotting giants but without any cards in graveyard. Third match i got the engineered plague in my hand but i didn't get to 3 mana to use it.
This deck is ridiculously fast and gets turn 1-3 wins very often if not "always".
Np, nice to see that you post here.
In fact, even decks that do play FoW, and have it in their first hand doesn't mean you are safe... The question is always what do you counter (unless my plan includes casting Land Grant, but I try to avoid Land Grant as much as possible against FoW)... do you counter the 3rd-4th spell that give me access to 4 mana (preventing a deadly EtW), or do you hope I have Wish or Belcher in hand ? If you do counter the mana spell, my kill spell is still in my hand, possibly with 1-2 accel left, which means I will probably get that mana back in 2-3 turns, but leaving you with a 5 cards starting hand. If you do wait and I had EtW, well too bad for you!
This deck is plain broken; they have printed a bit too much acceleration for the format.
-- Team CRET --
J'ai toujours raison. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I remember now. But I remember that first game you did remove my kill condition from my hand with an Hymn to Tourach on turn 1 and then your clock was fast enough that I didn't draw a second one. And it's true that I got slightly lucky that you missed your 3rd land drop in game 3...
-- Team CRET --
J'ai toujours raison. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
It's usually correct to go after the Ritual leading to EtW, especially if that Ritual is of Seething Song-variety in a base-red Storm. Against base-black Storm, you can usually let them get away with it as they can't really play into their Tendrils without casting a counterable non-accelerant. Post-board, if you have Goblin-sweepers handy, feel free to let them go off at their leisure and rather focus on stopping their future attempts. But yea, the correct call depends on the present Storm-count. 6 Goblins is nothing to worry about for a fast hand, even just 1 bigger-than-1/1 can stop the army alone (you'd be at 5 after that). 8 Goblins begins to be borderline problematic and 10 tends to already require a real hand to deal with through traditional means.
I could see this being an interesting MU with Faerie Stompy. Pre-board Pithing Needle, Chalice and Force of Will (die roll is critical, turn 1 Chalice at 0 is an absolute bomb against you, especially coupled with the possible Force of Will), post-board Engineered Explosives and extra Needles added to the mix. I dunno if the deck is exactly too broken, but it looks very solid. People need to prepare for Goblins even more now.
The Montreal Top 8where is everyone getting GPT decklists? I am having difficulty finding anything even remotely discussing them
http://mtgthesource.com/forums/showt...t=2587&page=20
Edit: Already posted ealier in the thread-my bad.
Against aggro decks, 8 usually won't win you a game, 10 is borderline, and 12 wins you games.
Faerie Stompy is a hard matchup. But Chalice @ 0 isn't THAT much of a bomb, seriously. We play only 12 spells @ 0, and we often don't even have one in our starting hands or we are using the LED/Chrome Mox only as an additional spell. If you manage a turn 1 CotV @ 1, that's another story. It cuts 15 cards, including 2 of the best acceleration cards: Dark Ritual and Rite of Flame.
-- Team CRET --
J'ai toujours raison. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Cutting Dark Ritual is the best idea, because it's not B for BBB but a two card combo requiring Land Grant for Bayou, Bayou or Lotus Petal. That's 9 outs, 8 of which are counterable and 4 of which show the opponent the Dark Ritual before he has to decide whether or not he wants to counter it. Dark Ritual bottle necks the deck into using black cards for Chrome Mox, filters for mana or Land Grant resolving and the deck has enough acceleration with out it.
4 Tinder Wall are fine, if the deck draws two, it can either Imprint one or pass the turn, gain R, and then cast the other.
2 Taiga are fine, the second is for drawing a second Land Grant and to increase the number of permanent mana sources in the deck.
Burning Wish and Living Wish are fine together, because neither of them serve the same functions in the deck, Burning Wish is either tutoring for Empty the Warrens or Diminishing Returns (LED) and Living Wish is either tutoring for Ancient Tomb or Minions of the Wastes (LED). Sure, both of them can tutor for answers, and Living Wish can tutor for Goblin Welder, but that isn't their primary purpose.
Edit: People who complain about Living Wish don't realize that it's the deck's third win condition, the deck needs to be able to survive against a Duress on the draw, and 15 win conditions allows it to do that. Bad opponent's will discard a Belcher or ETW and leave a Living Wish and LED in hand, letting the deck Living Wish for Minion of the Wastes and kill the opponent in one turn if he cracked a Fetchland or two turns if he didn't.
It also tutors for Wasteland after an ETW, allowing the deck to Time Walk the ETW against control decks who fetch non-basics to support their Pernicious Deed or Pyroclasm.
There's also a Magus of the Future, a creature with Future Sight on it rumored to be in the Future Sight set, I can't even imagine how sick that card would be in the SB if it costs 6 or less.
It is a fact that this deck will see turn 2, if it doesn't draw LED or the opponent draws Force of Will, not using Living Wish means that the deck will not have an Ancient Tomb to activate the Goblin Charbelcher on the following turn or not have the Goblin Welder to recur the Goblin Charblecher after a Force of Will.
Removing Goblin Welder because of Swords to Plowshares is retarded. If the opponent Force of Wills the Goblin Charblecher, then Goblin Welder is still a possible out. If the opponent Force of Wills the Goblin Charbelcher, then Wild Cantor is GG. If the opponent has Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares, then there's nothing that either of them could do, but at least Goblin Welder required the opponent to have a second answer.
There is such a thing as diminishing returns, not the card, the term, that applies to the acceleration in this deck; it will reach a point where that Dark Ritual (and the serious strains that go into casting it) and that Wild Cantor (which has no point in the deck if it were R/g) aren't adding anything relevant to your deck, while Living Wish and Goblin Welder add whole new dimensions to your game plan.
Edit: Bayou also increases the odds of bad Belcher activations.
I've placed many a tinder wall on many a chrome mox for that same reason, maybe I'll drop to 3.
4 Lotus Petal
4 Wild Cantor
1 Bayou
4 Land Grant
Looks like 13, not counting chrome mox.
Ok, so Living wish and Burning Wish are both looking for answers, only Burning wish can search up a solid win condition and Living wish can only fetch a 6cc creature that half kills you? Yes, I see how they're both necessary.
So we should be basing our decks strategys around the hope that our opponents are bad? I'm sorry, but after so many rounds of swiss at a large tournament I'd be dissapointed if I didn't meet a good player eventually.
And the deck already survives against Duress just fine. I can win all day against Pikula if I need to, it's thresh and FS that I'm worried about. I doubt Living Wish for Minion of the Wastes is any good against all three of those decks, actually.
Ok, how about removing Goblin Welder because of:
STP, Mogg Fantastic, gempalm incinerator, Lightning Bolt, Any other Burn Card, Darkblast, Engineered Plague, Pithing Needle, Pyroclasm, any other removal spell in a format made to deal with turn one lackey...
Not to mention the tempo loss you get when they kill welder, or the hands where you really, really wish that welder was an accellerant. Welder also has no interactions in hands winning with EtW, so he basically makes all of those hands 6 card hands.
And comparing a mana fixer to a recursion creature is pretty retarded too.
CalebD already answered a lot of your post the way I would, but I have some more points...
You obviously have a different way of playing Belcher. Maybe it's your metagame (every deck plays FoW ?), maybe it's a lack of will to build and playtest versions. We originally built this deck for Vintage (Team CRET mainly plays in Vintage tournaments), and the Vintage version played only 1 Taiga, 4 Welders, and 4 Gambles! And it was RG only. But Welders are excellent in Vintage, as most decks have way less answers to it. And you have a LOT of permanent artifact acceleration (5 Mox, Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, Mana Vault didn't make the cut), and Gamble for Black Lotus is nuts. But when converting the deck to Legacy, the lack of good permanent artifacts combined with the amount of creature removal made us drop Welder, which in turn made Gamble much, much worse.
The deck doesn't NEED a third win condition. And on that "15 win conditions allows it to do that", you obviously didn't do the math behind this. Assuming we really want that first turn kill, and we mulligan every hand that has 0 or 3 and more kill conditions (3 kill/4 acceleration rarely is good), and that we consider mulling to 4 losing the game, 11 win conditions is what you want.
At 10 kill conditions, it does improve your chances of not mulling by 1.4%, but it does increase the amount of mulling into oblivion by 0.7%, and 12 increases the amount of mulligans to 6 and decreases the mulligan into oblivion, but frankly, the only good kill conditions left are Living Wish and Infernal Tutor, and both are not nearly as good as Burning Wish and Burning Wish for Spree of Cave-in can save your ass more than often.
So 10 kill conditions seemed ideal, but because there are no other good acceleration and I hate having 4 Tinder Wall, the 4th Wish was kept maindeck.
First, CRET Belcher often produces 7 mana without LED on turn 1. And all those arguments are situational arguments. And only very rarely the deck has problems reactivating a Belcher, but that can only be found by playtesting the deck...
You talk about diminishing returns, but you play 15 kill conditions. But there are diminishing returns @ playing more and more kill conditions too. The more kill conditions you play, the more hands you will have without enough acceleration. And using the same algorithm as before, 15 kills actually make you mulligan into oblivion more often than 14!
That has to be the only point on which I agree with you. We often tried to play only 1 Taiga main, and it did make Belcher safer, but made us lose that precious 5 sources of black mana.
Here are the numbers I calculated, for 8 to 15 kill conditions. The algorithm only assumes that you mulligan any hand with 0 or 3 kill conditions, and mulliganing to 4 means mulliganing to oblivion. This was done 10000000 (10 million) times for each amount of kill conditions.
[X/60] means X kill conditions in a 60 cards deck.
| M : Y | means Y mulligans
| K : Z | means Z kill conditions in that hand
the rest is the amount of times it happens, and a percentage.
Clearly not the best presentation, but it works.
Code:================================== [8/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 4217001 times, 42.17% [8/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 1884968 times, 18.85% [8/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1619158 times, 16.19% [8/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 589491 times, 5.89% [8/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 670612 times, 6.71% [8/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 191297 times, 1.91% [8/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 827473 times, 8.27% ================================== [9/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 4197259 times, 41.97% [9/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 2189928 times, 21.90% [9/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1525107 times, 15.25% [9/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 647910 times, 6.48% [9/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 593000 times, 5.93% [9/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 197909 times, 1.98% [9/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 648887 times, 6.49% ================================== [10/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 4113890 times, 41.14% [10/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 2467891 times, 24.68% [10/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1447198 times, 14.47% [10/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 708187 times, 7.08% [10/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 532725 times, 5.33% [10/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 203896 times, 2.04% [10/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 526213 times, 5.26% ================================== [11/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 3982435 times, 39.82% [11/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 2717806 times, 27.18% [11/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1383007 times, 13.83% [11/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 767400 times, 7.67% [11/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 490059 times, 4.90% [11/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 213052 times, 2.13% [11/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 446241 times, 4.46% ================================== [12/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 3812324 times, 38.12% [12/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 2924669 times, 29.25% [12/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1341126 times, 13.41% [12/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 835892 times, 8.36% [12/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 463941 times, 4.64% [12/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 227461 times, 2.27% [12/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 394587 times, 3.95% ================================== [13/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 3613380 times, 36.13% [13/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 3099175 times, 30.99% [13/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1308420 times, 13.08% [13/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 913916 times, 9.14% [13/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 452414 times, 4.52% [13/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 246797 times, 2.47% [13/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 365898 times, 3.66% ================================== [14/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 3394708 times, 33.95% [14/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 3231319 times, 32.31% [14/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1294139 times, 12.94% [14/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 1000837 times, 10.01% [14/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 452087 times, 4.52% [14/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 272965 times, 2.73% [14/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 353945 times, 3.54% ================================== [15/60] | M : 0 | K: 1 -> 3161932 times, 31.62% [15/60] | M : 0 | K: 2 -> 3324386 times, 33.24% [15/60] | M : 1 | K: 1 -> 1285902 times, 12.86% [15/60] | M : 1 | K: 2 -> 1097326 times, 10.97% [15/60] | M : 2 | K: 1 -> 461535 times, 4.62% [15/60] | M : 2 | K: 2 -> 308426 times, 3.08% [15/60] | M : 7 | K: 0 -> 360493 times, 3.60% ==================================
Of course, it doesn't take into account hands where you have no starting acceleration (4x Seething Song anyone), or hands where you would put your 3rd kill condition card under a Chrome Mox, but it does give a good approximation of starting hands. And of course, those numbers could be interpretated in a lot of ways, but I strongly believe that 11 or 12 is the best amount of kill conditions, but because only 11 are really good...
-- Team CRET --
J'ai toujours raison. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Minion of the Wastes is awesome, as long as the deck can achieve the 8 mana threshold, 3 of which is produced with LED, it can end the game in a single turn if the opponent cracked a Fetchland and in two turns if he didn't. There is nothing an opponent can do against a 10/10 to 12/12 Trampler that can result in a game loss with 8 to 10 life in two turns unless he is using combo.
The deck has to be able exploit the opponent's SBing; Artifact removal, creature(s) removal, Pithing Needle etc. with a win condition that is immune to all of the opponent's hate. Minion of the Wastes is that win condition, because the opponent will SB out his targeted removal for mass removal as a response to the 7 ETW in the deck and/or Pithing Needle as a response to the 4 Belcher; and none of that matters when the opponent has to face down a 10/10 Trampler. Diversification of threats results in virtual dead cards, that was the entire point of adding ETW instead of tutors for Belcher in the first place.
Test the card, I've won entire matches because of it, and I know for a fact that it is the best win condition against Faerie Stompy if it resolves, and it's the same for any deck with out targeted removal.
Even good opponents discard ETW or Belcher with Living Wish and LED in hand, because the opponent doesn't necessarily know what Living Wish and LED can do and it's reflexive (you wouldn't have, unless I told you, and you know it). If the opponent discards the LED, that's fine, because the Living Wish can get Ancient Tomb and the deck can top deck mana sources faster than it can top deck win conditions.
Edit: Goblin Welder is also a part of the anti-Discard plan.
Wild Cantor doesn't produce Black mana, and counting Chrome Mox in a deck with 4 Black cards isn't sensible.
Gempalm Incinerator and Mogg Fanatic have nothing to do with Goblin Welder, unless you are a complete n00b and you try to cast Goblin Welder on turn one and cheat Goblin Charbelcher into play on turn two against aggro. Against Goblins, Goblin Welder is a 1/1 that adds storm to Empty the Warrens, and it can save your ass if they cast removal on Goblin Charbelcher. I have already covered the, "what if my opponent has an answer to Force of Will and and answer to Goblin Welder" argument, but I'll follow it with that the opponents will SB out their Swords to Plowshares game 2.
Edit: Go argue that Xantid Swarm should be cut from TES because of STP in their thread and see the reaction it gets, and Xantid Swarm has a much bigger role in TES than Goblin Welder has in Belcher.
Comparing Goblin Welder to Wild Cantor is only retarded if you think the deck actually needs mana fixing with two colors.
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