Hey, great list and excellent article!

I am just wondering about arcane denial as a hard exclusion. Are situations where arcane denial can function as a draw three, and situations where less threatening/crippled players can be made threatening not relavent enough to warrant inclusion? Just curious about your thoughts on the matter. Thanks!

Thanks! The idea behind why Arcane Denial is bad can be boiled down to a very simple concept: if your opponents aren't playing bad card, then you can't make them draw bad/useless cards off Arcane Denial. The other reason is that the deck already had enough slots devoted to countermagic, and the ones in there are all better than Arcane Denial.

Hi, very nice decklist.

I have two questions that I hope you can find the time to answer.

I dont have acces to Timetwister or Tabernacle. Is this deck any good without those? And if I had to buy one of the them, which one is best for this deck? I'm thinking that Timetwister is best since it is part of combo and therefore good in all match-ups where as Tabernacle is only really good in certain match-ups.

Hope you will answer me, cheers.

have you thought about Gemstone Caverns? Seems like a situational Chrome Mox. It's not a super bad draw later cause it's just a land.

Gemstone Caverns is a card that, from my experience, is completely useless outside of dedicated fast combo lists (think Sidisi ANF or Doomsday Grenzo). Here are a few reasons as to why it's bad in this specific list:

• We still like High Tide quite a lot even if it's not a key card like it is in JVP, and we don't need the colourfixing provided by it at all
• The chance of getting it in our opening hand is REALLY low
• In a deck that's as focused on card advantage as this, even if we were to have it in our opener, it would immediately set us back two cards (Caverns itself and the card we exiled for it).
• At the same time, it only provides a fairly miniscule mana advantage in a deck that's already one of the best in the format at quickly getting to high amounts of mana.

Makes sense to me,just wanted to hear your thoughts on it

Most games I like to drop totem in favor of walking ballista. It is probably just my meta. I do like having a win condition outside of stroke or JMS... How much do you rely on totem? Any thoughts on Ballista?

I rely on Cursed Totem a lot. In a deck like this, you usually want to maximze slot efficiency, and Walking Ballista is not an efficient use of a card slot here.

Right on buddy. My meta plays a lot of extract lobotomy effects, (probably a 60/40 mix of shepards vs sheep... ie usualy half the pod can't grap threat assessment or anything in the way of a logical thought process) they always go to veil immediately .... Once they do they usually think of me as not threat so it takes a lot of the heat off and helps to have a little more firepower when you get power artifact to stick on a monolith. I am sure you are right overall though.

Oh, playing and building to your Meta is definitely important. If they continuously attack you with cards that exile your win conditions, adding another one is probably a fine thing to do. Do they ever go for Rings/Power Artifact/Basalt Monolith/Grim Monolith/Sensei's Divining Top? Because if they don't, adding Blue Sun's Zenith on top of Stroke of Genius should probably be good enough. Or you add Walking Ballista, draw your whole deck with Top and bounce your own Cursed Totem before you win.

What exactly are the differences between the 2 authors decklists? I believe one has dispel and the other 2 drop mana rock, prophetic prism maybe? And the other runs lotus petal and FoF. Is that right? If that is the case what are your arguements towards the 4 cards?

I recenetly built this deck and I am struggling between a few of the flex slots. I would like vekalken shackles as I have a less competative meta and we have a lot of decks like kalia and new selvala and derevi(The main match I need to try and improve my matchup in) Steel sabotage is a card I keep looking at aswell. Are there any under the radar cards that might actually be very good in a slightly less competative meta that were not mentioned? We have a lot of graveyard decks, boonweaver karador, a gitrog monster, derevi, kalia, new selvala, captain sisay, atraxa, breya. ect. Thanks in advance Sigi :)

Your 100% dead on. I have to add BSZ & WB. Most of the time they go straight for veil, rarely do they hit the other combo pieces like rings etc. They just assume I am out of it after veil is gone, but every so often they will pick out stroke and Ballista. I most of the time keep a Laquatus In a sideboard as well depending on the pod.

Azemotay: Neo's and my list are very close to each other - the only other difference is that I'm running Strip Mine while he isn't. Lotus Petal, Dispel, Prophetic Prism, and Fact or Fiction are all cards that are interchangeable depending on playstyle. I prefer a slightly more controlling and card advantage-heavy version of Teferi, so I like Fact or Fiction a lot. The list as a whole has been moving in that direction as of late, which is also why we've included Manifold Insights. Prophetic Prism and Lotus Petal both increase the deck's speed, and Dispel is basically the 11th best Counterspell we can run if we really need one more than the 10 we already have.

Regarding Lotus Petal, it's basically the super flex slot in my list. Whenever I have something I want to test, I toss it out and add that card instead. For instance, I'm currently testing Silent Arbiter to improve our Edric and Tana/Tymna matchup, and Lotus Petal was the card I took out for it (on a side note: Silent Arbiter is amazing against those decks, and will probably make its way into my main list very soon).

If you have trouble dealing with those decks and they don't go off on, say, Turn 3 regularly, trying out Ward of Bones or maybe even Portcullis might be worth a try. The issue with Portcullis , however, is that ETB effects still happen and its trigger can be responded to, so it won't actually bother Selvala all that much. Then again, with Cursed Totem and Torpor Orb, Teferi is already well-equipped to deal with (some aspects of) Selvala.

One of my group has recently started playing a tuned zur list. I've decided to try and use this list against it as I love that you can go for fast combo or switch to stax if needed. However I think shackles would help stop zur. What would you recommend removing for it given your experience with the list?

can you explain how does the python script work?

A2hley1989: If that person is on the Storm/Doomsday build of Zur, Zur only serves as a backup plan for the deck in case things go wrong - slotting in a card only to deal with the backup plan of one deck isn't worth it.

shiffster: What exactly do you need explained? It basically follows every step of the combo and checks whether you can or can't go infinite based on what your input.

He generally tutors for necropotence and gift of immortality then goes for empyrial plate for commander damage. He doesn't play the doomsday list as no one in our group wants to play it. Most people have pretty casual decks and we have a 6-8 person pod. It's just this one guy that goes all in. Thanks for coming back to me!

LabManiac_Sigi the script shuts down as soon as i put how much mana do you want to go for

A2hley1989 So it's Voltron Zur. Shackles should probably work fine there, and if you need a second piece of specific hate (albeit one that can't really be tutored for), Gilded Drake can also work.

shiffster That's weird. I checked, and it works on all my devices. That being said, it will only work under Python 3 (the specific version I'm running is Python 3.5.1; the script won't work in Python 2.

If my group doesn't play land hate should I consider Lotus Vale?

Suppose it makes comboing easier, but also makes high tide worse.

I have been testing Vedalken shackles and Portcullis since I had such a creature heavy meta, it finally donned on me. Why wouldn't I just swap back to Ugin? Thoughts Sigi? I did kinda have trouble fitting them both into the deck. I believe I tried cutting Map since I do not have a tabernacle. but fitting shackles was really hard. It was between either Memory Jar or Dispel. I ended up cutting jar since it has been the least performing card in my deck for how often my board gets hated out. Any advice is always appreciated Sigi :)

Also since the decks are so similiar and I like to watch the world burn. I bought the few cards to try out your guys version of Keranos Stax. Hoping to see it played on the community stream today :D

What do you think about cutting intuition? I've been playing Chain Veil teferi for over a year now as my main cEDH deck, and a friend of mine had also been on the deck for like six months, and we've both found that intuition just seems lackluster.

Also, why into the roil? I feel like there are definitely better cards that could take the slot.

Love the overall decklist! Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Treasure Cruise going into the list?

Intuition is basically any card in the deck if someone is about to win. You can tutor up say, 3 bounce spells, or a force + 2 counter spells. Or the answer and 2 random cards and pick a different opponent. It can also be exactly what ever card you want with proper piles to win. Say Transmute artifact + snapcaster mage + tezzeret. No matter what you get chainveil.

Also into the roil is an amazing bounce spell as it can target your own permanent as well. Can't tell you how many times I have paid for Mystic Ramora for 3 turns then bounced it on my upkeep and replayed it.

Sorry for the late responses - the last couple of days have been pretty hectic.

shiffster: NEVER play Lotus Vale, even if people aren't running much land destruction in your Meta. You want Islands to make your High Tide better, and Lotus Vale makes you randomly vulnerable to a card like Beast Within even way before you combo off.

Azemotay: In creature-heavy Metas, using Ugin instead of JTMS is indeed that way to go. IIRC, neo and I said exactly that in our State of the Deck post we made a couple of months ago. Hope you're also gonna have a good time with the Keranos deck!

kyuuri117: Intuition, while not amazing, is sort of a necessary evil. The deck is built to provide an Intuition pile for almost any situation you can face, and Intuition having instant speed also plays a big role. I'm a fan of the card, but it definitely takes some experience to know when and how to use it. Regarding Into the Roil, which cards do you think would be better? Into the Roil is, from what I've seen, the 2-cmc nonland bounce spell with the best potential upside.

AragornS: Thanks! This deck doesn't get too many cards into its graveyard, which means we can't really support Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time simulanteously. On top of that, we're more interested in card selection than just raw card draw, so DTT is significantly better here.