Living End Lives!!... at least, at tier 2
Modern Deck Help forum
Posted on Oct. 23, 2019, 11:17 a.m. by ZendikariWol
I've got this living end deck that I'm trying to get up to tier 1. Suggestions would be appreciated.
Grixis Living Arcanist (Tier 1.5: Help Wanted)
Modern
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ZendikariWol says... #3
I have been playing the game for 10 years and I learned TODAY that tier is not a power metric. Learn something new every day.
Anyway, I'm aware of the problem, and Crashing Footfalls doesn't necessarily help against Rest in Peace when my main gameplan is casting from my gy w/ Arcanist. I guess I just put more As Foretold in my sideboard? What would you propose I remove? Unearth is in for consistency against Jund, Annul is my best plan against RIP thus far, Ancient Grudge is my defense against Whirza, and Creeping Chill is, obviously, what I've got against Burn.
October 23, 2019 12:46 p.m.
If you go with the living end plan then
As Foretold
is far superior to
Dreadhorde Arcanist
, its an enchantment, so its damn hard to remove for most decks.
(imho arcanist is burtal when it has plenty of cmc 1 sorceries to flash back form the grave, in such situations its on par with snapcaster mage or dark confidant, however this deck lack support for it)
If you want to stick with the 6+ cmc random colored dudes then you need some way to ramp into them as plan B, or maaaaaybe you could try to build a transformative sidebaord to mill your opponent (in slow interactive matchups).
But in all honesty
Hedron Crab
&
Stitcher's Supplier
are very bad options compared to the miriad of cycling creature at living end's disposal.
You could easily jam
Wurmcoil Engine
&
Pathrazer of Ulamog
into UR living end variants - and stuff like
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
Flip as a discard outlet, and as a spell recursion engine.
P.s: I completely get the sentiment behind the deck.
My second ever brew attempt was trying to make
Skaab Ruinator
work in modern with a self-mill deck. It did go very poorly.
(Back in the stale Twin & Pod meta days)
Problem is that dredge is part of the format and hate cards are built (and put into sideboardds) that are ready to fight dredge, and completely obliterate other pure graveyard based decks.
To say the least its hard to make work a graveyard based deck.
On the other hand decks that have secondary gameplans like Living End, Hollow One, Phoenix decks, Obzedat's Vengeance ...etc. can find success.
Xica says... #2
...tiers tend to describe how popular a given deck is.
In the sense that "how likely am i to encounter the deck in question during a major tournament?"
So no.
Your homebrew won't ever be a tier deck, unless it blows up, and everyone starts t copy it left and right.
More importantly you need some way to fight through hate cards - in this case Rest in Peace & Leyline of the Void .
The cascade living end decks do this by swapping Living End for Crashing Footfalls and casting big angry beat sticks like Archfiend of Ifnir or Horror of the Broken Lands .
The UR variants tend to swap to a control game plan that is enabled by Curator of Mysteries .
This deck accomplishes none of that.
Its simply a dredge deck without cards that feature the titular mechanic, or answers card for the hate that is going to come your way in game 2 & 3 in your 75.
(And Cathartic Reunion is terrible with living end, as the deck is risky enough already against counterspell decks and the card just increases the problem.)
While its true that before the ban of Faithless Looting "go-fast living end" variants were able to succeed via ignoring hate and jamming whatever hit hardest into their creature suit, the card is banned and the sub archetype is effectively dead as a result.
Right now you cannot "go under" interaction with living end decks.
October 23, 2019 11:52 a.m.