MTG Combo: Surgical Extraction + Thoughtseize

square711 on April 2016: Shadows over Innistrad

8 years ago

Man, that armor looks horrendous. But that's obviously Olivia. Same skin color, same hair color, same curly hair over her cheek...

Geralf's Masterpiece is sort of a reverse Nyxathid with lategame recursion. Not sure I like it, especially being double blue. You probably won't have mana to bring it back and pay the Madness cost for the stuff you're discarding until turn 9 or something.

Pick the Brain could be somewhat good in BGx (especially Abzan, which can't play Slaughter Games), but it seems too slow. Triggering Delirium isn't as easy as turning Tarmogoyf into a 4/5, since it counts only card types in your graveyard, so you'll never cast it on curve. Much better to just Surgical Extraction + Thoughtseize their stuff.

And yeah, it kinda suchs the Heir is a 2-drop, but at 1 mana it'd be absolutely bonkers. A Delver of Secrets  ^Flip you can flip immediately AND use as a Madness enabler? Ugh.

TheAnnihilator on

8 years ago

The maindeck looks really solid, I only have a few criticisms for it:

I don't like Shadow of doubt despite having tried it a lot (I actually posted about it just now on MTGS -- I'm TheAnnihilator0798 on there).

The other thing I noticed is that Condemn is pretty poor against the Eye of Ugin decks, I'm running Doom Blade right now (maybe it should be Go for the Throat).

Now the sideboard:

I wouldn't run nearly as many counterspells as you are. What deck do you want them against? Scapeshift? There really aren't any other decks to bring them in against (maybe burn, but the common list plays more Nacatls and less burn anyways). If you were playing them to protect the T0 Leyline, I could see running a pair of Dispels, but as of your current list, I'd just play 1x Negate.

In the 2 opened spots, I'd throw in some Surgical Extraction. The Ghost Quarter + Surgical Extraction combo is how we win against Tron, but Surgical Extraction + Thoughtseize is great against combo too. Surg is also just randomly amazing against a few decks: Scapeshift (stripping countermagic or Scapeshift itself), G Devotion (stripping Garruks and EWits), Kiki Chord (stripping Chord of Calling or Resto), Reanimator (stripping whatever they target in the graveyard), and other decks too -- I'm thinking about using it against Eldrazi to get rid of Reality Smashers.