Extract

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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Extract

Sorcery

Search target player's library for a card and remove that card from the game. Then that player shuffles his or her library.

hootsnag on Hurkyl, Tempo Master Wizard

1 year ago

Portent, Crawlspace, Web of Inertia, Dream Tides, War Tax, Glacial Chasm, Monastery Siege, Cryptic Command, Extract, Portcullis, Dissipation Field, Overburden, Archmage Ascension, Frozen Aether, Reins of Power, Rapid Hybridization, Siren's Call, Cyclonic Rift, Mission Briefing, Reality Shift, and Resculpt are just a few you could potentially use. You can very easily go creatureless if you want to. You just have to lean on different win conditions and use cards like Ward of Bones /etc.

jaymc1130 on cEDH is going to have …

1 year ago

At least, that is what some of my preliminary data is suggesting. There is a particular 15ish card package that fits into any deck with green that covers a deck's ramp needs, control needs, and combo win needs while also having synergy with each of the independent components leading to some unbelievably robust and powerful play patterns. Right now, in a limited sample size mind you, this package is winning better than 40% of it's games.

There aren't many instances of this occurring in our group's data set. In fact, there are 3.

  1. Paradox Engine. Before this card got banned we were seeing a vacuum win rate potential for this card of 40%+, which was absurd. We assumed it would get banned, about 6 months later, it was.

  2. Hullbreacher and Opposition Agent. When these cards were spoiled our group knew immediately they would eventually be banned, they are that fundamentally broken in cEDH settings. Sure enough, this 2 card package instantly began posting vacuum win rate potentials of 40%+ (over 50%+ before we learned play patterns to cope with how abusive the play pattern of this package was). Hullbreacher got banned, Oppo Agent is awaiting it's inevitable ban hammer.

  3. The Inception Package. This was a concept focused around using Extract and targeted discard to neuter fast glass cannon combo archetypes back in the hey day of the Flash Hulk meta. The concept dominated the meta completely and utterly 4 and 5 years ago and posted vacuum win rate potentials of 40%+ because the cEDH community had yet to realize that running 10+ critical cards devoted to a single combo line of play was very ineffective in the face of any exile effects hitting those critical combo pieces and turning the remaining 9+ cards into dead card slots for the remainder of the game. Over time, as more new cards were printed, the resilience of the metascape improved and the printing of Veil of Summer largely brought the Inception package back to parity within the metascape. Post Flash banning the concept became a less enticing option. Lucky break, no bans needed.

Which brings us to the current issue. The Summer Bloom package that has been powered up as of late with new card printings. It's too soon to tell if this package is problematic enough to require a ban, but it's possible that Summer Bloom should simply get the axe at some point, it is a degenerate combo card after all. The crux of the issue is that the play pattern enabled by this package covers every requirement of a competitive deck within these 15ish cards. Accelerated board development, covered. Combo win line, covered. Card advantage, covered. Consistent deployment of primary game plans by turn 3, covered. Ability to interact with and control opposing board states, covered. Now, it's not too much to ask for all these things from a set of 15 cards in competitive settings, but usually these 15 cards won't all work together to enhance each other's effectiveness and make those 15 cards feel more like 30 cards worth of value in game. This could be a real problem in due time, particularly since the package can be used in any deck with green as a color at the moment, which means the package can be ported into a wide variety of shells.

The package in question: Bala Ged Recovery  Flip, Life from the Loam, Summer Bloom, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Lotus Cobra, Tireless Provisioner, Gaea's Cradle, Boseiju, Who Endures, Strip Mine, Cloudstone Curio, Crucible of Worlds. Personally, I recommend a supplement to the package of Green Sun's Zenith, Dryad Arbor, and at least 5 mana dorks. Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth can also be used to supplement the ramp efforts, but aren't critical to the concept and are, in fact, vulnerable to opponents who employ the concept themselves.

Why is this package a potential problem and why is it posting win rates over 40% at the moment in testing? Well, it largely boils down to some fundamental principles of cEDH. Those principles? Playing more cards than opponents is good and improves the odds of winning, seeing more cards from your deck than opponents is good an improves the odds of winning, and using fewer cards than opponents to achieve a desired result is good and improves the odds of winning. Conversely, opponents that see fewer cards, play fewer cards, and who use more cards to achieve desired goals also improve your odds of beating those opponents. This particular package hits along each of these axes, it plays a lot more cards because it keeps reusing the same cards over and over again, it sees a lot more cards because it's constantly thinning it's deck as part of this play pattern reusing lands in particular, and it gets to save space because the core components every competitive deck needs are included already in just these 15ish cards meaning it needs to use less card slots to achieve more things, and the gameplans are consistently able to be deployed and put into place in the early turns of a game. Simultaneously the play patterns of this package are an extreme hinderance to opponents because their board states have a very tough time developing into useful configurations when their lands, artifacts, and enchantments keep getting wiped every turn cycle.

Again, it's very early in this, and I would hesitate to say it's Boseiju that's putting this package over the top right now, but something about this set up is very clearly problematic for the health of the format. I'd abuse this set up while you have a chance, the cEDH community is incredibly slow to adapt to new trends so there's a good chance this package will be abusable for a couple extra free wins per 100 games played for about a year or so. At some point I kind of expect some portion of this package to get the ban hammer, but I don't expect it soon. It took them almost a year for Hullbreacher and Golos after all, and I thought those were cards that ought to be preemptively banned from the format the day they each got spoiled.

Immortalys on Cards that exile Libraries in …

1 year ago

For my Circu, Dimir Lobotomist deck I am looking for cards that selectively pick apart my opponents decks. Think of cards Extract, Sadistic Sacrament and Denying Wind. The idea is to make a "mill" deck, but without having to actually mill all the cards, just my opponents wincons, and to have the "milled" cards go to exile to stop those nasty graveyard decks. They can't win with a deck full of lands, ramp and card draw after all, so why put effort into milling/exiling those cards? If there are very few cards like that, I will also accept cards like Life's Finale that don't exile but do search, Umbris, Fear Manifest that don't search but do exile, and/or cards that double up the existing effects like Lithoform Engine.

As a bonus, cards that trigger when an opponent shuffles their library like Psychic Surgery are also very welcome.

Virlym on Yuriko, Shadow of Fate EDH

1 year ago

Honestly, I wouldn't bother with the Thassa's Oracle line. There's much better generals out there for it over Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow (like any Thrasios, Triton Hero deck partnered with something that has black in it). Doomsday could still work with Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow as a game ender tho if you really wanted to keep that in. It's really your call, but I never liked setting myself up to lose if something gets countered (Trickbind makes you lose to the Thassa's Oracle line, and something like Angel's Grace will make you lose to the Doomsday line). Having said that, the following will assume you are focusing on Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow, and not a planted "good-stuff" strategy.

glaring issues in a general sense from your list :
1)You have poor ramp choices for Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow
2)Your land base is too awkward and has unnecessary things in it.
3)You have some turtle cards that don't really have much use in Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow

1)Mana Vault is more for a deck that wants big explosive turns, not ramp for small things over multiple turns. You are hardly ever going to want to dump 4 mana into untapping it. Same concept applies to Dark Ritual as well, especially considering it only gives you black mana. Lotus Petal falls into this category as well to an extent. You don't want explosive turns, you want consistent pressure. Mox Opal makes you life more complicated for a potential free mana, which leads into the next issue.

2)Your land choice is too awkward. You have artifact lands to turn on Mox Opal, but they serve no other purpose and can be wiped out with artifact removal. If you are running so many different lands, you generally want to be taking advantage of something where that matters (like Field of the Dead, and you usually want to avoid using the non-indestructible artifact lands unless you have a lot of artifact synergies. They are too vulnerable to just have for 1 or 2 cards. You have more fetch lands than you have targets for those fetches. You have 3 black fetchs, 3 blue fetches, 1 black/blue fetch, and 1 basic land fetch. You only have 4 basic lands, and 2 fetchable dual lands (giving you 8 fetches for 6 targets). Spire of Industry is honestly too reliant on other things that it can basically be counted as a colorless land with no utility.

3)Satoru Umezawa is cute, but doesn't help in a Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow. It's main purpose is to cheat in big things for 4 mana. Anything you have over 4 mana should already have a ninjutsu reduction to that. Spellseeker is only good for the Thassa's Oracle line and has no real impact with Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow aside from tutoring for a tutor, which is awkward (Solve the Equation follows the same line of thought). Viscera Seer's scry ability may seem decent to try and find something for Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow, but you would need to sac ninjas or enablers, which would lower the amount of triggers you would get. The only real payoff for it is if you're trying to win that turn and you sac your ninjas after they trigger Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow. Praetor's Grasp is too reliant on your opponent having something useful to you, and isn't reliable enough for what Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow wants to be doing. And if you're using it to remove you opponent's wincons from their deck, you might as well just use something like Extract for that as it's cheaper, or Sadistic Sacrament as it will hit more targets. Grazilaxx, Illithid Scholar is a little too fragile for the bounce it gives and you would be better off running Cunning Evasion. The card draw on it really isn't necessary. Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow tends to give you more cards than you need, you don't need additional card draw reliant on damage. Opposition Agent kinda just falls under the "good-stuff" category and will most likely have a prompt death by any1 after you get a land off it, otherwise if kinda just sits in your hand and people will assume it's just a counter.

Ninjas of note that aren't included: Thousand-Faced Shadow, get it, it's too good. 1 drop flier is an enabler spot, but it is also a ninja. Later on, it can be used to double up some ninja triggers as a toolbox card. Mist-Syndicate Naga, expanding your ninja army is really nice and forces value from your opponents to deal with the growing threats. Moon-Circuit Hacker / Ninja of the Deep Hours, extra card draw on cards ninjas with low ninjutsu costs.

Some more meta call ninjas: Throat Slitter / Dokuchi Silencer, removal is nice, especially when it's already lending towards what you already want to be doing and not taking up additional space. Mistblade Shinobi temp creature removal, can set people back a turn if you hit something big, has a tap effect, etc. Skullsnatcher, graveyard hate.

freezerboy on CopyCat

2 years ago

Didn't even know Extract was a thing. Gonna have to put that in my list

jaymc1130 on After 500 games of testing …

2 years ago

So at this point I've managed to get in 500 games of Hullbreacher and Opposition Agent play in various decks and that's a large enough sample size to be pretty confident in the results of the data.

Hullbreacher already got banned but I'll start with some statistics for it. 503 game played with Hullbreacher included in at least one of the lists. 318 wins for Hullbreacher decks in that span, and with everything accounted for the card wound up with an expected win share percentage of + 6.6%. In other words, just adding that card alone to a deck would bump it's win share % up from 25% in a vacuum to over 31% in that same vacuum. Our database has some 5,000 total cEDH games tracked and logged at this point, and 10s of thousands of individual cards performance's tracked as well. This probably won't come as a shock, but Hullbreacher, of every single individual card we've ever tracked and tested posted the highest single card expected win share increase of any card in MTG's history. By a lot. More than double the increase in win share percentage from the next closest card with a minimum 500 game sample size. In our data set it's confirmed at this point to be the most dominant performing card in cEDH history. Not to surprising it wound up banned.

Astonishingly (or perhaps not) the number 2 card on the list in terms of expected win share contribution in a minimum sample size of 500 games in the entire 5000+ game data set we've collected is Opposition Agent. 500 games on the nose, 206 wins, and a final expected win share contribution of +3.1%. Until these 2 cards were printed we'd never had a single card post even a +3.0% expected win share contribution and we'd seen some dominant numbers from cards like Extract, Timetwister, Wheel of Fortune, Force of Will, Ashiok, Dream Render, Paradox Engine, Carpet of Flowers, Thassa's Oracle and Deathrite Shaman over +2.5%.

According to the data I've collected so far, Oppo Agent and Hullbreacher are the two most dominant cards ever printed for cEDH and by very significant margins. It wasn't even a contest, these two just performed heads and shoulders above every other card in the format.

Almost certainly this data set is not perfect or ideal, it's a mere 500ish game sample size compared to data we might have for a card in Legacy or Vintage that might have 10,000 or even 100,000 games of tracked data over several decades that can be easily found on the internet, so take these findings with a grain of salt would be my recommendation. I know since I've started posting more and more statistics based approaches to evaluating cards and decks in cEDH that more folks have been doing the same (hard to argue with the benefit of the results and those sweet extra wins here and there based off an analytics approach) and I'd be curious to see what kind of data others have collected about these 2 cards since their release. I think it's pretty unlikely our group wound up with an aberrant data set, but it's the kind of result that is so over the top and even a bit unexpected (seriously? THESE are the two best all time performing cards for cEDH?) that even I'm a bit skeptical looking at the results of the data collection.

We've had a fair amount of time to experiment with these 2 bad boys by now, so I'm curious about the results of any one else who tracks data like this and what their data set might say about the performance of these 2 cards in cEDH. If you've got some interesting results to share let us know how they've been performing in your games.

jaymc1130 on Is there a better feeling …

2 years ago

SynergyBuild

Yeah, we’ve been resorting to filter effects more often than outright tutors lately. Doesn’t change anything about playing on Untap or MtgO though, way too many free wins for me. It’s almost become entirely pointless for me to even attempt to test competitive concepts outside that group, the general cEDH community of players just can’t handle competitive play at all. I’ve got like 200 games of data from Untap alone that I have to throw out because a 70% win rate isn’t remotely realistic in true competitive settings. I’ve tried some play over discord as well, but the players seemed even less capable if that’s even possible. I feel like I’ve wasted a couple hundred hours “proving” what we knew about this card the moment it got spoiled and it seems a bit of a waste in the absence of identifying a true counter. At least with Flash we solved that issue in the span of like 20 games of testing and theory crafting to come up with the Inception Extract based strategy.

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