Why not try to abuse the Painter for its own protection and use ALL blasts available. 50% of the blast are strong anyway as most of the metagame either play red or blue spells.
You can also use ponder/brainstorm to manipulate your library to find only the proper blast until you resolve of or your 8 painter servants (plus ponder/brainstorm) in your deck.
As soon as the Servant enters the game you can be the control deck for one turn. As soon as you untap you should be able to resolve the second combo part and either wait another turn or combo out immeditately depending on the matchup/situation. 20 counters and/or 16 instant "destroy target permanent" spells for one mana should be sufficient to protect your combo.
I donīt know if you will improve the deck when you "waste" slots to cards like CB/SDT/Trinket Mage/Fabricate...
This is I would try first:
"The Paint Shop" by MMD
4 Painterīs Servant
4 Grindstone
4 Ponder
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Blue Elemental Blast
4 Pyroblast
4 Red Elemental Blast
4 Pyroblast
4 Enlightened Tutor
4 Volcanic Island
2 Tundra
1 Plateau
3 Polluted Delta
4 Flooded Strand
2 Island
4 Ancient Tomb
You should be able to combo out on turn 4 constantly.
Turn 1: Enlightend Tutor/Ponder
Turn 2: Brainstorm/Grindstone/Ponder/Enlightend Tutor
Turn 3: Painter`s Servant/1-2 Blast
Turn 4: Activate Grinstone/1-2 Blast
You can certainly combo out on Turn 3 (even Turn 2) but this is neither realistic nor safe.
I am not 100% sure if the 8 Blue Blasts are really good enough and needs to be tested but I always wanted to build a deck around them and the Servant really abuses them best. Perhaps a combination of Orimīs Chant/Thoughtseize/Daze will stabilize/improve the deck. But I will definitely try the 16 Blast version first.
You may want to play Flash Flood instead of splashing R and being able to counterspell/destroy only a part of spells.
Anyway, this approach looks bad because you are too much dependent on having Painter into play.
I donīt think that it will be a big issue to find/resolve/protect the Painter with my list. As soon as you have a Painter in play you can switch to control mode until you find one Grindstone.
I need to test if the eight blue blasts need to be substituted by any combination of Orimīs Chant/Spell Snare/Daze/Counterbalance+Top (or even Duress/Thoughtseize).
I donīt see a problem to "splash" red as the average CC is 1, so Wastelands donīt hurt that much. Also my Meta is full of Landstill and Threshold were red blasts really shine.
I personally donīt think that Flash Flood is superior to any Blast as it does not help to keep the Painter in play nor to counter other non-permanent threads. In the same way cards like Guttural Response and Active Volcano are less attractive for me as well.
I donīt think it is unlikely to have a Painter in you hand on turn 2-3:
1-4 out of 60 in your opening hand: 40% (Painter)
1-8 out of 60 in your opening hand: 65% (Painter/Enlightened)
1-16 out of 60 in your opening hand: 90% (Painter/Enlightened/BS/Ponder)
If you also add the Brainstorm(Ponder)/Fetchland "combo" and 1-3 draw phases (as you donīt want to cast the painter before turn 2-3) your chances of having a painter on turn 3-4 isnīt that bad.
I have a question: let's say they have a couple of gaea's blessing in their deck, and you do the painter combo on them (not knowing they have the blessings and thus not holding stifle in your hand to counter the blessing effect)...would this be a tie if you continue doing the ability? i mean if some one accuses you of wasting time because the grindstone is a may ability, can't you just say your going to keep grinding till the blessing is one of the last 2 cards?
It works like this:
All the library goes to the yard as an effect of the grindstone.
The trigger of the gaea's blessing(s) is(are) put on the stack.
You'd better stifle, make your opponent draw or do something or your combo is screwed up. My solution to that is to activate tormod crypt in resp.
The yard is shuffled into the library.
If you go to Dreadnought as a plan B, you have Stifles maindeck. These should be enough to stop any Gaea's Blessings or Feldon's Cane (wtf!) or whatever.
Keep moon-walking.
Did anyone try anything out other than a dreadstill shell?
I think it could do in survival or something. Trinket Mage to fetch grindstone and everything else to fetch Servant. And it's UG, which color you all love. Think FoW, Brainstorm, Intuition, Tradewind Rider etc. etc. etc.
"You're English is terrible and inconsistent."
-DownSyndromeKarl
This is a different route: I posted in the Stax thread as well, but am interested in everyone's thoughts:
Bare with me for a minute; this may be terrible and I haven't done any testing yet. But a stax shell with a combo win may be good.
This combines the broken openings of stax with the painters grindstone combo. I pulled the chalices as they are quite dis-synergistic with the e-tutors and grindstones. This also, allows e-tutors which can in fact find you important lock pieces. The obvious problem being painter and grindstone being bad on there own. Thoughts?
4 Trinisphere
3 Crucible of Worlds
4 Enlightened Tutor
3 Smokestack
4 Mox Diamond
3 Ghostly Prison
4 Armageddon
3 Painter's Servant
3 Grindstone
4 Magus of the Tabernacle
4 Flagstones of Trokair
4 City of Traitors
4 Ancient Tomb
3 Mishra's Factory
2 Wasteland
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
8 Plains
Yes, there are lots and lots of different answers to grave shuffling. I'm just saying that having them maindecked leaves more sideboard slots for answers to real issues this deck would have. Yeah, I know... Tormod may already fit in some slots, since it can be fetched by Trinket Mage.
Keep moon-walking.
Absolute Law > Painter's servant
Painter can at no point be touched by kill spells then all you need to worry about is counter.
what about llawan + painter's servant to wait the kill grindstone?
I second the Uw control shell route...I've done some testing and came to some conclusions:
CBalance + Top is pretty much a given - against various decks (Thresh, Homebrew, Burn, combo etc) you are better off tutoring for CBalance instead of a combo piece. But against those matchup where CBalance usually sucks (Stax, Rock variants) you can go for the combo, so you can maximize your tutoring power and essentially play two different combos, each of which are useful against different decks.
The red splash is very powerful, I'm currently running seven Blasts maindeck. Basically, if they want to disrupt the combo with counters OR removal, Blast will always be useful (plus, every second deck seems to run blue). It only isn't good when you're dealing with discard...so maybe go down to five or six. A green splash for Reap would also look very attractive, but it does nothing if they counter your Painter (for the same reason, running 16 Blasts seems not so hot, because the Blue Blasts can't force it through counterspells).
Fabricate is pretty much worse than Intuition, and I'm not sure either one is worth running unless you play more than five two-mana-lands.
I think both Snare and Daze don't belong here, the first one is just not needed that much, the second one because a controllish deck can't use Daze very well.
Chalice@1 kills the deck if you don't manage to get out your Grindstone before it, since you can't even tutor for an answer then. This makes a case for expensive tutors (Intuition), or at least some Serenities/Explosives in the side.
Meddling Mage probably belongs in the sideboard, naming Grip, Extirpate, or just Swords to Plowshares.
georgjorgeGeistreich sind schon die anderen.
I don't get why you would play Absolute Law. Please elaborate.
The problem is Gaea's Blessing. Remember that thread about why people hate you? I don't think people hate you but many don't take you seriously as a deck designer. Ever think it has something to do with the fact that you're wasting time advocating Jester's Cap, an artifact that cost to play and to activate, when in fact good ol' Tormod's Crypt will do the job for ? Just something to think about.
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