MicroBrews #3: Mad Stax
Hello, and welcome back to MicroBrews. I’m Swaggy, and I’ll be guiding you through a new brew.
Today, we’re taking a spin on an old Extended deck. From what I’ve heard on Constructed Resources (back when Jon Loucks was a cohost), it was originally a Mardu list back then, but now, we got it in a Selesnya version. May I present to you…
Selesnya Martyr Proclamation
4x Noble Hierarch
4x Martyr of Sands
4x Serra Ascendant
2x Kami of False Hope
4x Knight of the Reliquary
4x Ranger of Eos
4x Path to Exile
4x Ghostly Prison
2x Crucible of Worlds
3x Wrath of God
3x Proclamation of Rebirth
4x Windswept Heath
3x Temple Garden
1x Stirring Wildwood
2x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
2x Mistveil Plains
1x Dryad Arbor
4x Ghost Quarter
1x Tectonic Edge
4x Plains
1x Forest
Really short overview:
A Stax-esque deck that aims to make sure your opponent doesn’t kill you by combat damage by locking them out of the game in several ways, then attacking with large threats until they die.
Combos:
1. Martyr of Sands + Proclamation of Rebirth/Active Emeria, the Sky Ruin: This combo lets us gain life equal to the number of white cards in our hand every upkeep for by forecasting Proc and sacrificing the Martyr. Now, I’m already hearing you: “But Swaggy, nobody’s gonna get to in Modern! It’s such a fast format! Don’t worry, we’ll get there. Believe me, I’ll show you later.
2. Kami of False Hope + Proclamation of Rebirth/Active Emeria, the Sky Ruin + Mistveil Plains: This combo prevents all combat damage dealt to us. This is better against decks like Infect, or just good at stopping Zoo style decks. Now, here’s where Mistveil Plains comes in: if we just we’re doing this every turn, we can tell our opponent that they will deck, and we won’t if they don’t have any interaction with the combo. I don’t know how relevant it is, but I saw it in a couple of Martyr Proc lists, so I figured it had some relevancy.
3. Crucible of Worlds + Ghost Quarter/Tectonic Edge: Every turn, we can replay our pseudo Wasteland and kill one of their lands. Eventually, we can destroy all of their lands, because they won’t have enough basics to fetch out of their deck.
Stax:
Ghostly Prison: This card is one of the best tools in our deck to help not die to creature decks. Decks like Zoo, Death’s Shadow, Infect, Affinity, Bushwhacker, Goblins, etc. are halted in their relentless beating until they can scrape up enough mana to push through the tax.
Wrath of God: Our other big creature control. Nothing too glamorous, just the most efficient sweeper we have in our colors. Gets rid of everything.
Path to Exile: Another freeball. It’s just the most efficient removal in the Modern format: why wouldn’t you play it?
Ghost Quarter/Tectonic Edge: Helps keep our opponent’s from casting big scary stuffs. Also kills manlands/tronlands.
Finishers:
Serra Ascendant: Hey, in a deck that’s aiming to have a jillion life, a 6/6 flying lifelink for seems excellent to me. Also helps us keep our life high, in case our opponent tries to ding us below 30.
Knight of the Reliquary: We’re gonna be fetching and Quartering, so he’s gonna get swole. Also, there are specific lands we want to find at certain times, and KotR will happily guide the way towards them.
Tutors:
Ranger of Eos: Comes with a respectable but not powerful body, and helps us find the one drops we need to combo off with, or maybe just our massive beatstick Serra Ascendant.
Ramp:
Noble Hierarch: An efficient mana dork with a relevant ability. Especially good when you can play a Turn 2 Ghostly Prison and lock your opponent out of attacking for a while.
Strengths of this list:
1. Great against decks that only can kill through fair means: This deck is strong against decks that are linear and can only beat you down through life total. Decks like Burn, Affinity, Merfolk, Zoo, and other streamlined aggressive decks are all favorable matchups, because of the amount of sweepers, removal, lifegain, and anti-attack cards we run.
2. This deck has a better end game than almost any deck in Modern: By being able to gain “infinite life” over an infinite amount of turns, or preventing all combat damage dealt each turn, Selesnya Martyr Proc can effectively shut out every deck in the format besides infinite combo or deck with a gigantic boardbreaking card (Abzan CoCo with Murderous Redcap as a infinite combo, or when Tron casts Ulamog as a gigantic boardbreaking card, for example). Eventually, we’ll win, because we can’t deck ourselves, and hopefully they won’t have enough interaction to bust through us.
Weaknesses of this list:
1. Infinite Combo/Gigantic Boardbreaking Creatures : As if you didn’t know this would come up in the weakness category. These decks just happen to have better endgames than we do, because, well, eventually they’ll cast a card that will kill us that we can’t really stop.
2. Decks with Large Amounts of Interaction/Disruption: Since we’re aiming to go long, if we’re playing against a deck like Abzan Midrange, they’ll be able to Inquisition of Kozilek our Proclamation of Rebirths, or Path to Exile our Kami of False Hopes or Martyr of Sandss, or Abrupt Decay our Ghostly Prisons or Crucible of Worlds.
Matchups
In this section, I will give Game 1 matchups against the Top 10 (in my opinion and not in any particular order) decks in the Modern Metagame.
: 47.5% Jund, 45% Abzan.This is one of the matchups with a large amount of interaction. Abzan is much more scary than Jund, because they have faster ways to apply pressure and they run exile effects. Since they have multiple ways to kill most of the stuff we put out, our best hope is to resolve a Ghostly Prison, a Crucible of Worlds, and a Ghost Quarter, and maybe have a Path to Exile as backup, so we can try to destroy all their lands, then make them attack us with their threat and pay mana instead of disrupting us.
Affinity: 58%.Assuming they don’t go ape, we should be able to draw the game out enough to get some Ghostly Prisons out, then get Kami Proc out so they can’t kill us. We have maindeck sweepers, ways to kill their manlands, removal and some large dudes just to eat up attackers.
Infect: 58%.Very similar story as affinity. If they don’t go ape on the first couple turns, and you can get some sort of disruption and assemble Kami Proc, then you should handily win the game. It’s probably easier to win when you get all your cards out, but they run Spell Pierces and other forms of disruption. Also, lifegain is somewhat irrelevant against them.
Burn: 58%.YOU ARE A LIFEGAIN DECK. GAIN SOME LIFE.On a more serious note, like against most aggro decks, if you can get a combo going, you should handily win. The big issue is that Ghostly Prison is pretty mediocre against them, and they have ways of dealing you direct damage. If you are able to make your Martyr of Sands gain 9 life, you should have Time Walked them ~2-5 times. I think in this matchup, I would hardcast Proclamation of Rebirth (which you should almost never do, because you want to forecast it late in game) just to get back a Martyr to net some life and put the seal on the game.
Dredge: 55%.You have a lot of cards that will mitigate their aggro, but Wrath of God is a bit more of an overpriced Fog. Like against any aggro deck, Ghostly Prison is your best card to have in your opening hand, and especially against Dredge, because they are an extremely mana-light deck.
Death’s Shadow Aggro: 54%.Noticing an aggro trend with all these prominent decks? Yeah, this list is built to be solid against the aggro decks of the format. Ghostly Prison is a good, but not standout card in this matchup. Try to get Kami lock on them, and if you can, just resolve a Wrath of God, then try to get a fat Knight of the Reliquary or Serra Ascendant out to close the game.
Jeskai Nahiri Control: 52.5%. They have a lot of interaction, including Path to Exile, so assembling a lock is going to be difficult. But Nahiri’mrakul isn’t just a straight of win, because by Turn 6, you’ll probably have 7+ permanents out. So you have more turns against them to help win
Bant Eldrazi: 52%.This is a bit of a different animal than the other aggressive decks (no weird Eldrazi joke intended). Bant Eldrazi can have aggressive starts, but usually, it is a bit more midrangey than the other aggro decks I listed above. They have stronger threats, which make Ghostly Prison worse but Wrath of God becomes better, because it takes longer for them to restart. Eventually, however, they can just tap our stuff with Eldrazi Displacer + Elder Deep-Fiend, and wreck our hand with Thought-Knot Seer, so if we don’t put enough pressure on them, they can just kill us.
Abzan Company: 45%.They run Path to Exile, they can combo off and basically put us out of reach for killing them with Kitchen Finks, and they can just kill us with Murderous Redcap combo. So we need to hold onto our Path to Exile’s until they cast their Redcap, kill it in response to them trying to combo kill us, and try to assemble Kami Proc and tell them we’ll deck them.
Tron: 50%.We’re running Ghost Quarter + Crucible of Worlds, so we can wreck their landbase. However, if they resolve one of their big guys, we’re kinda toast. Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Karn Liberated, Emrakul, the Promised End, whatever. We done.
Tips and Tricks
1. Knight of the Reliquary can get us any land we could want!You need a Ghost Quarter? Boom! K Relly got it for you. How about a Emeria, the Sky Ruin? Pazzah! K Relly got you covered. What about a Stirring Wildwood or a Dryad Arbor? Abracadoozle! K Relly found them! You can also make him double as swole by getting a Windswept Heath and fetching a Forest/Plains.
2. Crucible of Worlds is secretly amazing:Crucible puts a lot of elements into the deck. With Windswept Heath, it allows us to never miss a land drop. With Ghost Quarter, we’ll be able to knock our opponent off of good lands and eventually Strip Mine them every turn. With Stirring Wildwood and Dryad Arbor, we’ll have a creature that can be reanimated every turn. With Emeria, the Sky Ruin, we can prevent our opponent from just Molten Raining us and making our combos not work. Sure, it does die to Kolaghan's Command. But man! Crucible is a unbelievably powerful card, and it definitely deserves a reprint in #MM3 .
3. You can play all your big, durdly cards in your flex slots!:To be fair, I don’t know how many flex slots this deck actually has. I’d estimate around 3ish? In any case, this is the list you can probably bust out your cool, big, durdly cards. If you like playing with a Sword of Feast and Famine, this is certainly a deck you can throw it into. If you like running Oracle of Mul Daya or Courser of Kruphix in your deck, this seems like a somewhat reasonable place to throw some in. Heck, Elspeth, Sun's Champion could certainly be your killer endgame if you want to. Just go ham on tech-ing you list out! Play your sick, sweet cards. This deck certainly needs tuning, but if you want to edit the shell to your likings, be my guest! And tell me about it! I loooove hearing about this stuff.
Final Words
Well, I hope you enjoyed this week’s MicroBrew. We got a spicy deck, which, in theory, is good against an aggressive meta. For all you Legacy Stax players, this might be the closest thing you can do in Modern that’s similar to that rampy, locky, grindy gameplay.
Remember, post your lists! This is a place where people can share ideas and talk about brews together. And, if you’re lucky, I will choose one of the coolest lists to deck tech or reconstruct here! You can find me here, as always, or on twitter at @Dustydeckbox .
Happy Tapping!
Dylan says... #1
Love the article
September 22, 2016 8:26 a.m.