Champion of the Parish would do a lot of work I bet despite not being an ally. Ever considered him?Awesome deck +1 i'll be playing something like this on untap!

I found the deck right before you responded lol. Figured I'd respond here to not troll the other page.

I like your deck given what you're going for. In magic, you have variability vs consistency when you brew/tune a deck, and you go for variability. With that said, I agree with some people that your synergy weakens a bit for certain combos (like the mana dork becoming underwhelming or the Mirror dude having less potential); but I think you also give yourself access to more angles and CoCo helps you sort of stitch those together.

What's your mulligan strategy? Just in some superficial drawing and casting I see that you pretty much have to mulligan to get the right hand, but then when you get it, it goes off.

Like you say though, the results will speak loud lol

With 4 hardened scales, is there a reason to not play gavony?

It depends on how many Cavern of Souls and/or Ally Encampment you already play. Having too many lands that don't produce G for noncreature spells can be very crucial.

Hey guys, I'm going to the starcity open here in Atlanta with my allies build....gulp. You guys rock; ya'll are great brewers and have helped me soooo much. If any of yall want to practice with me some online, just hit me up. I think I need to tighten up my sideboard at this point, and as far as playing, make sure I don't make any play mistakes. I tend to make more play mistakes in paper than on modo, so I need to work on that. Any advide you guys can throw my way would be appreciated; this is the biggest tourney I've gone to so far.

So, you added Vials again. How did they go with 4 Scales?

They worrrked soooo much betters as a 4 of instead of 3. Same thing with scales. To me, the deck seems to really want the 4 of.

Wish you the best of luck, show em what you got ;)

So, I saw an Ally list placed 10th in Atlanta- Was that you?. Out of how many is that? Regardless, it is respectable that the list almost got into Top8.

That wasn't him. That's a Naya Allies build running Path and Scout's Warning.

It's been a while since I last looked at this deck, but I feel that it's going in the wrong direction. Drana, Liberator of Malakir is not a Modern-caliber card, because it fails the Bolt test as a 3-drop (look at the list of cards that do that and see Modern play - it's a short list, and it's almost entirely composed of creatures that have ETB effects), and no mainboard interaction means you're scooping on Game 1 to combo decks like Splinter Twin, Amulet Bloom, and the like. Hardened Scales is not worth it if it means you have to cut your disruption - Allies are explosive, but one well-placed Lightning Bolt can go a long, long way.

rothgar13 sorry, I am going to really disagree with your comment. With all due respect, but going by that logic. Tarmogoyf is also useless. Swiftspear falls into that as well. So does majority of the modern "staples" because they die to bolt. To extend that, all the ally cards are useless as well - because they die to bolt. All I can say in a short sentence is that if you let a single bolt stop your game, you are not playing Ally Aggro properly.

The point of having something not modern-caliber because it dies to bolt, it's just plain ridiculous. That argument, IMO, is not constructive in any way. In addition, your comments gave us nothing to think about, but just another point that we have heard from many others.

The whole idea of aggro-ally decks is to be explosive. Hardened Scales works especially well to bolster the game plan. How is it bad? Sure, against combo decks, it can be a dead card, but how about against aggro decks, which constitutes 50% of the meta? In post-games, even if we side out, it's still worth the slot because game 1 matters! We don't lose out much if we board out hardened scales, but we have something to gain when we have them on board.

Talking about match-ups, we have good and bad matches. Combo is not in our favour. Granted. But, don't forget about post-boarding. If you are thinking of t2 Bloom or t4 twin, please tell me which or what other decks that can easily stop them? I really don't think Jund or any tier 1 decks are having a good time stopping them as easily. As I said, we all have good and bad matches, as well as good/bad days.

Personally, I stand for Drana in the deck. If left unchecked, she is easily a game-ender by herself. To put that in perspective, if you don't bolt it, something is really wrong with that decision; you better have something else on hand to deal with her.

You're misunderstanding my argument. The reason why Drana is bad is not because she dies to Bolt - as you said, lots of things die to Bolt (though I'll point out that Tarmogoyf often doesn't). It's that she dies to Bolt as a 3-drop without having necessarily made much of an impact on the board. As aggro, that's a very painful tempo loss, and a tempo loss on T3 (or 4 if you Vial her in) usually means bad things for you. A 1-drop or even a 2-drop dying to Bolt usually isn't a dealbreaker - that's mana parity (or close to it), so you live with that. However, losing a 3-drop to Bolt tends to not put much of a dent in your opponent's game plan. They can Bolt you and drop a Goyf in the same turn, for example. That's not good.

With regards to Hardened Scales' explosiveness... again, I bring up the comparison to Bolt. Bolt can be evasion (kills a blocker), reach (3 to the dome), or disruption (kill a mana dork to slow their tempo). Given that you have precious few non-creature spell slots available (since AEther Vial and Collected Company are integral to the deck's function), it has to be versatile as well as potent. Hardened Scales only meets half of those criteria, and then only conditionally. Count the times where the Scales contributes in an equivalent fashion. I think you'll find it rare. And if you do come to the same conclusion as me (and I think you will), why not play Bolt instead?

The rest of your statements make me question how much attention you pay to the metagame. Look at Merfolk decks (a very close parallel to Allies, with the exception of being tier 1) how well it does against Twin, or Bloom for that matter (hint: not poorly). Combo will always be a relative weakness for Allies, but that doesn't mean you punt on it and move on. As you said yourself, Game 1 matters.

Drana seems like a win-more card to me personally. But some cards get value just by being a rod as well. Chances are that bolt was used on turn 1 or 2. Sure you don't want to trade 3 cmc for a 1 cmc removal spell, but sometimes it comes down to risk versus reward.

And 4x Suppression Field for combo _ bwaha

Question: who is the better 3 drop (in a game 1 situation), Adaptive Automaton who can get 2 for 1'd with Kommand or Mirror Entity who dies to a breeze and requires mana to sink?