Thoughtseize

Sorcery

Target player reveals their hand. You choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card. You lose 2 life.

Discussion (47)

aholder7 on Modern Mogis Lockdown

13 hours ago

okay so a few things of note here.

first. i'd suggest running 4-ofs for your best cards. there isn't any clear reason why you'd want 3 ofs in this scenario except mogis who is legendary in which case it's fine.

second. Lightning Bolt. it's one of the best red cards in the game and it's cost effective way of solving problems cannot be understated. i think it's important that it gets a slot in this deck.

third. your win con appears to be Mogis/burn. Mogis is a very slow way to win. normally for a control deck you are controlling them until you can drop some threat that you can protect that will win the game shortly after that or at least create such a lock as to make getting out of it futile. mogis will never turn on in your deck so at most it's going to be 2 damage a turn from mogis assuming they aren't doing a wide strategy. perhaps a planeswalker like Liliana, the Last Hope who you can +1 to help remove creatures and win off of her ult.

fourth. your mix of control spells is heavily weighted towards destroying creatures after they hit the field. thats something you want to respond to but people play other cards that you'll need to deal with. enchantments like Wilderness Reclamation, artifacts like Amulet of Vigor and non-permanents of all kinds. you also will lose pace with decks that use creature that have ETBs such as Omnath, Locus of Creation and Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath which yes you can kill but you'll be losing card advantage. you need a few more proactive responses and ways to gain incremental advantage over your opponent. discard spells like Thoughtseize or at least multipurpose cards like Kolaghan's Command and Collective Brutality can help. other proactive cards such as Blood Moon and Ghostly Prison can shut down or at least slow opposing decks to keep them from racing ahead of you.

with the above things in mind i'd suggest something along the following changes.

cards to remove:

-3 Crackling Doom: soul shatter and other remove should be sufficient

-3 Lightning Helix: lifegain is great for stabilizing but the power removal comes from it's mana efficiency. on turn 2 being able to play a discard spell and hold up a Lightning Bolt for their creature is much more powerful than the life gain from helix. still a great card for sideboard to bring in against lightning fast agro decks like burn or zoo.

-1 Soul Shatter: i'm not sure you need any of these in the mainboard. you have Anguished Unmaking to get around indestructible should it come up. Dreadbore and Anguished Unmaking can kill planeswalkers. That leaves hexproof is the only thing that this gets around that you don't have an answer for already. hexproof is uncommon enough that i'd personally put this in the sideboard, but considering how many of this effect you have in your deck i'm assuming your meta has enough hexproof to warrant 2 mainboard slots.

-4 Divine Gambit: 1 for 1 at best, 1 for 0 at worst. the ability to exile most types of permanents is powerful but the downside seems too risky and likely to set you behind.

-3 Anger the gods: you don't need 7 soft sweeps. with the amount of removal you have a board wide damage spell is likely for hitting tokens or other wide strategies. for most of these scenarios 2 damage should be enough. in the scenarios where 2 isn't enough, 3 likely isn't either. Wrath of God or similar would be a better bet for those situations.

-1 Pyroclasm: you probably don't even need 4 soft sweeps in the main unless you are expecting a dearth of going wide strategies in your meta.

-3 Mogis, God of Slaughter: without a way to turn him on or a way to create a true lock outs like teferi-pool you aren't going to get as much value out of mogis as you need to make him your win con.

cards to add:

+4 Lightning Bolt: this is solid removal or a damage to face if you don't need to use it as such.

+2-4: Thoughtseize: considered one of the best discard spells in the game because it hits basically everything at the cost of 2 life.

+2-4: Duress: you can choose Inquisition of Kozilek or Raven's Crime or another discard spell of your choice. i'd suggest at least 6 discard spells and you can decide the split between your discard spells depending on how aggressive your meta is.

+2 Kolaghan's Command: small creature removal, artifact removal, discard spell. very versatile.

+4 Liliana, the Last Hope, a strong contender for win con. i went with 4 copies because it doesn't have innate protection and you want it early if you can as it provides good value.

+1 Path to Exile: to make it a 4 of.

+1 Fatal Push: to make it a 4 of.

??? Tibalt's Trickery: I don't know if this is a good idea in control. you are giving up a card to change what card your opponent is casting. but they are still getting something. so you are 1 for 0ing them in a way. if they are casting a spell like Scapeshift for the win then obviously this will help but the risk of them flipping an equally scary threat off the top is very real. but your choices in counterspell are pretty limited.

if you are willing to mess around with your mana base you can probably make good use of Blood Moon as well but that would require some careful maneuvering in a 3 color deck.

wallisface on I tried building a lockdown …

17 hours ago

From looking through the list, i have the following thoughts:

• typical control decks can attack from many different avenues. Your deck seems very focused on just killing creatures (which is terrible vs non-creature decks). As well as that, a lot of your spells are quite high cmc (3 mana to kill a thing is a lot). I’d suggest some more proactive and lower cmc control, like Inquisition of Kozilek and Thoughtseize.

• Divine Gambit and Tibalt's Trickery don’t seem good as your opponent gets to replace whatever you’re stopping

I would recommend the abovementioned hand disruption, but also leaning into more of a typical Young Pyromancer shell - they are a fairly controlly deck for Mardu colours, and have a lot of decent interaction. It would also incentivise you to play with a better (lower) mana curve, and make the likes of Kolaghan's Command available to you, which is a strong card.

loricatuslupus on The Demise of Aggro in …

2 weeks ago

What with everything going on in the world I, like many others, have been playing an increasing amount of Arena over the past year or so. Standard is as Standard does and I won't complain about that - I tend to avoid it apart from when a new set releases anyway - and that didn't used to matter because Historic was so excellent, with a diverse range of decks and strategies. For fun best-of-one I predominantly play an Orzhov vampire deck (The Drain Train) or sometimes a more silly Mardu troll one (They See Me Trollin', They Hatin'), and win or lose enjoyed the back and forth of playing a match. Even playing against Control, while sometimes frustrating, at least feels like a game where my opponent reacts to my plays and I can try to bait out counters or force sub-optimal board wipes etc. Now over half of games feature Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, and that's just not a card I can compete with. I should clarify that at 8CMC I think he is perfectly reasonably costed and SHOULD be a game ender, but I can't beat him being consistently cast or cheated in on turn five - especially when the Uro that helped get him there undid the first two turns of damage with his incidental lifegain and I now have only three or four to kill my opponent before they exile my entire board with enough loyalty to do the same thing the following turn. What, if any, are the options for aggro players? If you go all in and dump your hand on the field to attack for as much as possible ASAP (traditional way to beat combo or midrange decks is to race, right?) and can't kill them you lose literally everything. If you hold cards back you run the risk of not having enough of a clock, and also have to spend a turn removing Ugin before you can rebuild anyway. In the meantime your opponent just completely ignores you and does their own thing - even running hand disruption such as Thoughtseize is of minimal benefit when their ramp cards are also cantrips and cards in the graveyard help them escape Uro. I no longer feel like I am having fun, and honestly can't understand how playing out the same game every time can be enjoyable for the ramp players. Is there an answer, or do I just have to accept that best-of-one Historic is just no longer a place I can play the decks I enjoy? Traditional is fine as I run Simic Merfolk with mainboard counters and can bring in lots of hate but sometimes I just want a quick game, and with Historic being ranked play only it feels bad conceding when I see I'm against another UGX deck...

Red_X on Eldrazi Exile

3 weeks ago

Your only way to cast Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher is Blight Herder right now, which means you're casting 4 and 5 drops on turn 7 at the earliest. I'd add in some lands that create colorless mana. The first ones that stand out looking at it are Corrupted Crossroads and Unclaimed Territory, but you'll need to look through other options.
Your curve also doesn't really start till 3, so I'd add in more 1 and 2 mana spells. Probably removal and discard, look at things like Heartless Act and Thoughtseize. You might also consider Hedron Crawler, which both ramps and provides the colorless mana, but its a weak card in general and might not be good enough.
I'm confused by the Unsummon, Necromentia, Unmoored Ego, and the Ashiok. Your deck generally wants to play a creature on each turn from 3 to 6 so you can kill creatures and then win the game. If you're spending mana casting cards to tear apart your opponent's deck, you're not winning the game. If you want more ways to exile cards, try something like Soul-Guide Lantern or Cling to Dust to help fill out your curve and give you some more utility. You can run the big exile cards in the sideboard for combo matchups. I like the deck.

rjife on Jund

3 weeks ago

I love jund, and this deck is no exception, though there are a couple things that I think could be improved on:

Grim Flayer is much better than ambitious aetherborn, and considering you're running kroxa, running a few Satyr Wayfinder is definitely plausible.

I have been very unimpressed with eat to extinction, as Abrupt Decay and Assassin's Trophy deal with anything for less mana.

In the 4-drop slot, I have found that many jund decks tend to run Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet, and many others run no 4-drops at all.

Here are some other jund staples you may want to consider running: -Kolaghan's Command -Chandra, Torch of Defiance -Liliana, Waker of the Dead -Thoughtseize

Have fun junding them out

Caerwyn on I need some help getting …

1 month ago

Throwing in a single copy of a card is not going to help you too much - you want to build for consistency, which means running 4 copies of most cards (sometimes 2 or 3 copies of the card of it had a high mana cost or you otherwise only want to cast it later in the game, so you don’t need to draw it early). The other exception is some cards in Vintage where you can only run one copy, but they’re powerful enough that the chance of drawing your single copy could swing entire games in your favour.

I don’t think your deck is powerful enough for Vintage, since you made a comment about that format, but discard decks can be quite effective at kitchen table.

You should look into “8-Rack” lists, one of the top discard strategies. 8-Rack runs 4 copies of The Rack and 4 of Shrieking Affliction to deal a fair bit of damage per turn. Then you lock down the opponent by using cards like Thoughtseize, Raven's Crime, and Inquisition of Kozilek to keep your opponents from being able to do very much.

Another popular discard deck is Pox. Pox uses Smallpox and similar effects, like Rankle, Master of Pranks, to slow down your opponents, while running things like Flagstones of Trokair and Bloodghast to break parity.

Omniscience_is_life on Blazing Specter on a Budget

1 month ago

If you're wondering about all the cards linked in red, those are ones that aren't legal in the chosen format. But don't fear! If you go into the editing page for this deck, on the top you will find a drop-down list of formats--scroll to Vintage and update it, and you'll find a much calmer, bluer list

As for the deck itself... Blood Crypt, maybe? Thoughtseize?

fatalzintomyum on Collected Conjouring, CoCo's weird cousin

1 month ago

With black in the deck you get Never/Return as well as Grim Tutor, maybe fetching another Collected Conjuring. Inscription of Ruin in dreamland can be cast with kicker off of conjuring, but it still has two relevant options, killing tarmogoyfs and shadow cards. Pain's Reward is very risky, can draw tons of cards, but I would play it in a deck that can consistently have your opponent be at less life or have pressure on the board. Pelakka Predation  ^Flip is kind of a freeroll, so that might be an option. Waking Nightmare effects might be too slow. Though the most value might seem to be accrued though getting 3 cmc cards, this is not as ruling as it is with coco. Thoughtseize is excellent hand destruction and has proven itself. Collective Brutality is just another way to sweeten the two for one. Night's Whisper and its ilk can be good, but better than the blue card draw? It would take testing to tell.