Your list is interesting. I myself opted against the loam plan, but it's definitely an interesting route. I'm on a 41 lands "Jeskai" list myself, adding white for Leyline of Sanctity, Stony Silence, Wear and dropping the silver bullets in the mainboard for cards like Mystic Speculation and Serum Visions.

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/treasure-swans-20-41-land-swans/ My list if you're interested.

as far as this list goes, is a 3/3 split the way to go on your assault effects? I just can't imagine not wanting 4 Seismic Assault in here. +1 from me though!

Thanks!

Splashing white seems like a very powerful variant because Leyline of Sanctity is excellent against our worst enemy, Thoughtseize. Not to mention white can still cast Swans, neat! However our lists have very different goals. Yours is all-in combo, so the Leyline will help a lot, and of course it makes sense to include four-of Seismic Assault.

My list is combo/control, making it much more resilient against other control and midrange decks. Molten Vortex is excellent against aggro, though I can certainly see the value of four-of Assault; it's not clear to me which is better. I can't seem to find an example right now, but I have actually seen tournament finishes of Seismic Swans with less than 4 copies of Assault.

i am not sure if swans is competitive

Well it did win a Modern state championship here. Here I attempt to further improve the deck to tier 1.5/2 competitive. Or are you saying the only decks that should be tagged competitive are netdecks of the few dozen current tournament-winning archetypes?

Eidolon of the Great Revel would help with opponent lockout to get to the swan combo

well, to be fair, first off tiers are established by how much it is played rather than how powerful it is (though those two correlate) so since the deck does not have a lot of standings it would be considered tier 4. as for the state championship, most of the decks it faced had little interaction to stop the combo, it's no wonder it beat eldrazitron, especially since eldrazitron has no removal and a bad combo matchup. one tournament result doesn't make a deck competitive.

oh, yeah, and the owner of the deck even admitted it was bad.

How is any of your input constructive? If you don't enjoy it or don't think it's competitive, give suggestions on what you think would make it better. bah-bammmm. And the owners original list is bad. Bad it was also a budget list, and had one linear gameplan. This list is far more competitive than the states list that won.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! Far more competitive might be a stretch though. Like other people have observed, Swans is pretty much strictly worse than Twin since it just has to run fewer spells.

He's probably just a troll anyways. Defining tiers based on usage makes zero sense on a website dedicated to brewing, like I said before. If he's insisting semantics, we can just call it a prospective tier 1.5-2.5 instead.

defining tiers based on usage does not make zero sense. that's what tiers are, how often a deck is used. this website was never stated to be designed strictly for brewing

You already (correctly) explained that "tiers" refers to usage, and I already said that if we want to be semantically accurate, we can use a different word like "prospective." Further arguing the point isn't constructive, as C.LewisMTG just pointed out, and I said it's arguing semantics. "Semantics" refers to the meaning of words, so "arguing semantics" has come to refer to aimlessly arguing about the meaning of a word.

Also, whether or not the site "was designed strictly for brewing" (if we're arguing semantics, then you're incorrect because I only said "dedicated to"), the fact is this list is a brew. So it doesn't make sense to discuss tiers here since this list is tier 3 by definition, whereas we're obviously trying to change that.

If you do want to debate the semantics, maybe we can coin a term for a metric that runs parallel "tiers" that measures the usage of the deck in a metagame at mixed strategy Nash equilibrium instead of the current usage (tier)? If you don't like "prospective tier", maybe "power level" or "expected tier"? Another person might be tired of arguing semantics at this point, but you're in luck because I actually study philosophy, linguistics, and computer science!

Edit: agh! put the wrong link and it wouldn't let me edit

Does anyone think a singleton Flame Jab could be good in the Mainboard or Sideboard?

Our deck literally can't do anything without Seismic Assault or Molten Vortex, so when our control opponent Abrupt Decays, Pithing Needles, Phyrexian Revokers, or discards it (very common), we're sunk. Worm Harvest is one powerful alternative, but Flame Jab is faster and interactive.

deck idea is ok..

try to playtest

Flammendes Schwert 17

your calculations don't fit with playtesting.. I suggest to put in 2-3 Dakmor Salvage s

Hey thanks for checking out my deck!

I'm confused by the link you sent; it seems pretty unrelated. Are you saying I should try playing it or playtesting against it?

Also I'm very interested what you're saying about the playtesting. I only put 1 Dakmor since it greatly increases chance of immediate win, but figured more were unnecessary because even if you fizzled, you'd remove their entire board and win next turn with Loam. Did you ever actually lose after comboing simply because you didn't reach 10 lands?

Crucible of Worlds could be nice just in case. Throw in Fastbond for infinite sacrifice and replay. For the life to stabilise throw in Jaddi Offshoot or Courser of Kruphix

Thanks for the input!

Keep in mind the deck can only afford to play 20-21 spells (read the Why 39 lands? section), so it's already saturated. Also combo decks are already the fastest decks in Modern, so a card spent on lifegain (which just delays aggro, and only for 1 or 2 turns) just puts us another turn away from assembling our combo which instantly wins. If we did have space, we would just add more combo enablers like Faithless Looting, Day's Undoing, Mystic Speculation, Serum Visions.

Crucible is much worse than Loam (which we already have 4) in our deck. Loam gives us lands in hand to fuel Assault/Vortex and also dredges lands into grave to fuel Harvest. Crucible just puts lands on the field, which turns out to be nearly useless for us.

Fastbond unfortunately isn't legal in Modern.

Any reason why we wouldn't use Reliquary Tower to hold onto the lands we draw in between turns? Is it because we are likely to have combo'd off by then?

Yup, the only time Reliquary Tower is useful is if you get extra lucky on Treasure Hunt. Reliquary Tower is just generally winmore, because when would you ever need more help if you have so many cards? There are too many good utility lands to play everything. Ghost Quarter, Gemstone Caverns, and Halimar Depths are so much more powerful.

For me my favorite deck is zombie hunt. Mulligan until you hit a Treasure Hunt, drawing our deck of 52 lands until we hit another Swan hunt or Zombie Infestation. With luck we hit a reliquary tower along the way an make about 6 or 7 zombies, with 12 being a personal record.

For when you want to get away from Magic for a bit and play Chutes and Ladders haha.

Have you tried the white splash? You'd get some strong sb options for sure

Also Remand would be a pretty good counterspell in the same way it is for storm, the flavor of Swan Song is strong though