Nice! but there is a new player advantage where you get placed against other new players for your first few matches. so expect to hit a wall
lol do new players not pack boardwipes. Claws Out is a win-more card, Elspeth is a good (annoying) pick. slip in some Divine Resilience. your mana curve is very bottom-heavy, can drop some lands (or add some utility lands)
are those fucken mice still standard legal. unacceptable no-skill cheese strats.
I miss Embercleave
I didnt know about the secret noob matchmaking that is disappointing. And yes i get board wiped all the time lol but it’s usually that one card that wipes their board too and i can recover decentlyish. Or that artifact that eats all 2cost creatures. That one fucks me more tbh
Abt the win-more thing, that card has def saved me plenty of times where i would have otherwise lost, but does that word more imply that another card would just be more reliable more often or something? Divine Resilience is similar yeah tho it wouldnt help me to push over a stronger board. I do trust your judgment over mine but when I saw divine resilience I thought a) kicked it costs more than claws out if I have enough cats on board to warrant kicking, b) offensively it only lets me bash my head against a slightly stronger board c) defensively it feels about the same. Like +2 is irrelevant to most removal but indestructible also seems like one of the weaker defensive effects because everything exiles anyway. Idk is my thinking way off here? Ill put it in and have a go tho
I think it’s win-more because if you can cast if for cheap on turn 3-4 you were going to win anyway. as a combat trick it’s ok, but if your board is wide enough (6-7 bodies on the board) to threaten a one-hit kill with it then again you were going to win anyway
oops I was thinking of the other 1-cost white ‘counterspell’, Restoration Magic, which would protect against targeted spot removal & exile. Divine Resilience protects against board wipes. but if you can recover quickly, maybe pack a few board wipes of your own? or aim to win before your opponent can cast one
your deck type looks like white aggro, go wide and big. you should aim to outheal red, and be faster than green. blue and black will mess you up
They banned the really good one
I’ve made some minor changes (on my phone with no access to the app rn) to this one but it is super easy and non-tedious to play. I always build my decks so there is a minimum of stuff to do while still being competitive and able to get to platinum if I play enough.
I hear rabbits is also ok.
I have found D00Mwake’s series of metagame snapshots to be worth the time.
This was my deck when I logged in today. Been feeling like I need more removal so I’m replacing Ouroboroid (odd fit in this deck anyway) with Airship Crash. It’s an instant, which I don’t love for my deck chill-out decks but at least I can cycle it out of my hand if I don’t need it.
Ok i cut 2 lands and claws out, and put 4 restoration magics which is def too many but i mostly wanted to have chances to use them to see if they work. Thankfully it is an uncommon so i could craft it. Cant craft any of the board wipes or fancy lands cause theyre all rares. Hexproof is obviously great but the main issue is my deck pretty consistently moves up the mana ramp by just dropping a dude for full cost, so i either play the big guy or i do something smaller that is basically useless to conserve the 1 mana. Maybe you could argue if the deck needs to do that to be good it isnt good, which fair enough! Though i must say i also didnt miss claws out at all so yeah thanks good call. I did however miss the 2 lands, i got a lot of bad opening hands (usually with 2 resoration magics lol so will def cut back in those). Anyway yeah still dont know if there are any interesting decks i can make without money or heaps of daily grinding. The tifa landfall deck is also full of rares and mythics i dont have. It feels like a weirdly big commitment to decide on a second deck!
Also had fun making a few 10 year old little brother type decks for the pauper event but could not get a win. Oh well
no, that sound really good. I think you hold one mana open once you see/suspect your opponent will play removal & then try to go “under” them: make them fear you casting a bomb so they save their good removal, while you poke them to death with one-off curve weenies
damn, now I want to try out this deck
Well i am still playing this at the expense of the entire rest of my life. I got some frogs in the jump-in thing so decided they would be the next deck after all. I like how they look, blue and green were the colours i most wanted to try, and i ran frog monarchs in yugioh, so. Must confess my sins here: i did buy two of the one-time-only incredible value gem packs, and blew it all on bloomburrow packs. It was shit value! I only pulled one rare frog out of like 40 packs. Fuck this game. But i crafted most of em and the deck is functional.
It really feels like a 2013 yugioh deck. You can move cards around to an absurd degree and to very little effect. I love it. I feel bad for the opponent sometimes because my turn takes so long. But at least im not doing some 9999 damage graveyard summon infinite loop. I’m just making some little frogs dude. This deck is definitely way worse than the cats but also much more technical. I feel like I could get good at it and make it almost not bad. I feel real uncertain about the decklist too. A lot of the higher cost frogs (3+) are kinda iffy, but also good idk. And I have struggled with getting a good balance of blue and green lands. I did use the abovementioned website to tweak the land numbers, so thank you! Wish I had some of those rare lands but at least I crafted 2 cavern of souls. Really want the one that gives two colours and enters untapped if it’s early game. Also struggling with how many sorceries/instants I should run. Too many and my frogs don’t get to do their combos but too few and they get owned. It feels exciting for now! I hope I never spend any more money.
Would also really like to try commander one day if I somehow discover 3 of my friends have been secret magic heads all this time.
Anyway decklist as of now
Feels like it is time for an update. I have continued to play froggies and have tweaked the deck a lot. The win condition is basically only valley mightcaller, which is just a 1/1 that gets counters so is very vulnerable. But by the midgame it is fairly trivial to make it threatening. 4xMockingbird and 2xdruneth/jackal make copies of it. Have cut sunshower druid, mistbreath elder, clement and long river lurker, taken treetop sentinel to 2 and dreamdew entrancer to 3. Dreamdew entrancer is the king of control in the deck. With roaming throne, dour port-mage, splash portal, and the ff14 catgirl I can get his effect off like 4 times per turn, locking down their whole board. I can also lock down a pond prophet or whatever to draw 2 cards. Also cut repulsive mutation to play into the flood maw. I also ended up mostly building the deck irl, but roaming throne being $30 is beyond what I’m willing to pay for a piece of paper so it is incomplete. I almost bought proft’s eidetic memory irl for 10 bux but it just got banned so I’ve been saved there. Card sure was good in the deck tho! I’ll probably never play with the irl deck except with a buddy on the kitchen table. No interest in going to a local standard event and getting graveyarded by spiderman cards.
Anyway the real update is I have discovered pauper, and feel like this is clearly the right place to put my time and money with this game. The cards are cheap, the decks are interesting and diverse, and I assume the general environment is just more friendly by nature. I have built a kiln fiend deck, which is certainly a little underpowered but is fun and pretty easy for a noob like me. Though there is some nuance with when you wanna play your instants to pump kiln fiend that I don’t feel like I have a grasp on yet. There is a pauper event at a card shop near my work every wednesday so I’m gonna go this week. I’m really excited to play this game with some local nerds. I have been playing a compromised version of the deck on arena (a lot the cards aren’t on arena and I don’t have all the ones that are yet) in timeless format which is pretty stupid because the opponent’s power level is all over the place but I do get some wins. I’ve also been testing how the first few turns play out on like browser based deck building sites etc. My main sense is that the deck runs out of steam really quickly and loses if the opponent has removal at all. So I have added blue because blue has better draw cards, and I can sideboard counterspells etc. I am mostly trying to not have the hand diminish on turn 3. So I had some fun doing searches on scryfall looking at all blue and red draw cards that are pauper legal and made a deck that hopefully can play a second or third kiln fiend before losing. Here is the current list:
So you wanna play as many cheap spells as possible to pump the kiln fiend and friends. Most of them are one mana draw a card with a combat bonus (trample, first strike, unblockable). Sadly the card that gives double strike doesn’t draw a card but I think it is worth running anyway. Manamorphose is an incredible card that replaces itself in all ways and gives kiln fiend a pump. Getting to choose the mana colour you create is also really helpful for playing the colour that’s in your hand. Looking at some other peoples’ versions of the deck I was really disappointed with their draw cards, especially faithless looting (it’s a minus 1 dude! Also if you flashback it with no cards in hand it does nothing!). The best one, grab the prize, is still unplayable as the only card in your hand and the artwork is fucking ugly lol. This is why I decided to add blue to the deck. Words of wisdom and ideas unbound are the most draw you can get for 2 mana afaik. I didn’t want any card above 2 mana cost because it’s a kiln fiend deck, I’m trying to play a lot of cards. I love both of these cards a lot. Words of wisdom feels very friendly and ideas unbound can get you an extra chance at lethal damage if you’re out of cards. The discard is pretty irrelevant cause if you play it you are probably winning or losing on that turn. And if you just play all the cards you don’t have to discard anything. Snap is great for removing a blocker and it lets you untap the colours most beneficial to you, really good for keeping the pump going. And you could bounce kiln fiend if they target it with something.
I wanna try red mage’s rapier as the secondary kiln fiend over festival crasher because if they remove the token you can still equip the rapier to a kiln fiend so it gets +5 per spell or they remove the rapier and you have a free 1/1. Though the 1 toughness vs festival crasher’s 3 might be enough to make it worse idk yet.
Keep safe over counterspell in the sideboard is because it says draw a card and realistically what do I wanna counter other than cards that target kiln fiend. Mutagenic growth was in the main deck but idk is it really necessary? I’m leaving it in sideboard just to keep it in mind. I’m also considering replacing eroded canyon (blue/red tapped land that does one damage on entry) with silverbluff bridge (indestructible blue/red tapped land) so I can run cleansing wildfire. But do I really need ramp? I don’t know. Also obviously pyroblast and hydroblast seem to be the most popular sideboard cards in pauper but they are too expensive for me so whatever. Buying a playset of each would cost the same as the entire rest of the deck did.
Anyway sorry for this long post of a noob’s thoughts. I will report back how hard I lost at pauper locals this week.
Pauper is excellent and also cheap to play on Magic Online (if you can stomach an interface from 2006.)
Thank you miffy that was a delight to read. Your description of the deck’s level of interactivity and ability to push the game state into unique directions sounds rly interesting. I learned about a lot of new cards reading your post. Commander seems so daunting to me, it is surprising that it is considered like the casual way to play. You need to choose 100 cards! A 60 card deck basically only has like 15 unique cards in it and I can barely handle that.
Here is my update.
I went to the wednesday pauper event at my local card shop. It was really chill and I learned a lot. There were 7 people there. I went 0-2 in round 1, then 1-2 in round 2, then got a bye. The 2nd round player had a look at my deck and gave me some good advice. He showed me slip through space, which is just better than enter the enigma because it is colourless, making it immune to pyroblast. He also told me ideas unbound was not worth it because of the double blue cost which is hard to cast in my deck. He was right! I took it out after that.
Thursday I went to a slightly further card shop that had a pauper event but I was the only person that turned up. Very sad. I got a tiny bit of store credit as recompense.
Friday night I went further up to one of the big card shops, and played kiln fiend again in their pauper event. I replaced the 2x ideas unbound with 2x keep safe. I also took crash through and warlord’s fury down to 3, and put in 2x mutagenic growth. I think I was just wrong when I wrote above that I don’t need it. It is a free instant that does 5 damage. It can win games.
I got the exact same results as last time, 0-2, bye, 1-2. The first player was playing a black artifacts deck with lots of discard with refurbished familiar, duress etc. He just drained my resources really quickly and I couldn’t do anything. The second opponent was really chill and he was playing flicker tron with a lot of combat prevention (hi non magic-playing reader. sorry for using jargon. Tron means a deck using the urza lands, which when combined (like the cartoon robot voltron) become way stronger. Flicker refers to two cards mentioned below). This was exciting because I had just decided to build tron as my next deck, and because kiln fiend and tron are basically on polar opposites of the speed spectrum. I want to win on like turns 3-5, and he needs at least three turns to set up his manabase to even be able to cast spells. So game 1 I was able to get in. It was thrilling to play against someone who really knows how to play tron. It is a technical deck with so many options, and you have no idea what cards they will play because they have access to the whole rainbow. Game 2 he sided in lockdown cards like stonehorn dignitary, which he was able to blink with ghostly flicker and ephemerate to stack multiple turns of no combat phase, which I just had to wait out. At one point I played words of wisdom to try dig into assault strobe or something for lethal damage, and after he drew he played union of the third path, gaining 7 life. He told me that he drew it from words of wisdom and I realised at that moment how bad that card was lol. I think I may have had a window where I could win had he not played that card. Then he eventually played rhystic circle, which I had never seen before. With the tron manabase this card makes it impossible for me to ever do damage to him. What really impressed me about this card is that it can prevent any damage from any source, not just either combat or effect damage. It is also an enchantment, which I feel like is the least common card type and I immediately realised I don’t have a single card in my deck that can remove enchantments. So I just had to concede right there. Game 3 was a race to see if I coud kill him before he could draw rhystic circle, but he was able to stall me until he drew it. It felt great to be outplayed by a veteran player with a high skill deck that I want to play myself.
So now it wednesday again, and I’m going to the local shop’s pauper night. I have changed the deck a fair bit this time. I have been playtesting the kiln fiend deck against the tron deck (by myself, at home, very pathetic i know) and have learned a few things. Here is I think the final decklist (might be off by a couple cards but I’m not gonna pull my cards out at work to check lol)
So I learned my lesson about words of wisdom, and replaced it with 2x wrenn’s resolve and 2x reckless impulse (they’re the exact same card but I figure running half each means the opponent doesn’t know how many I have). I initially dismissed this card because it felt like the downsides were too strong, but revealing the cards really doesn’t matter in this deck because it is so straightforward about what it is attempting to do anyway. You have nothing to hide really. The 2 turns limit on the cards also isn’t that bad. If you didn’t cast them in that time you were probably never going to anyway. It is just all around better than giving your opponent a card. I also took out the crash throughs and warlord’s furies because unblockable is simply better than trample or first strike. Unblockable may as well say it gives trample, first strike, flying and horsemanship. So I went 4x slip through space, 2x enter the enigma and 2x shadow rift. Shadow rift is just for flavour, it is effectively the same as enter the enigma but with better art. If anyone plays a shadow creature against me I will be so pissed tho lol. Swapping the 2 mana draw2 cards to red and the 1 mana draw1 powerup cards to blue hopefully balances out, but I also added one more island to be safe lol. As for keep safe as my counterspell, I replaced it with confound which is more or less the same but has better art, and could be used to counter something that targets their creature. I put it back in the sideboard though and put 4x apostle’s blessing in the main. I really underestimated this card. Especially with the two colour manabase, this being a colourless 1 mana counterspell is huge. I can attack with any one land untapped and feel pretty confident about getting in. Sure it doesn’t draw a card but the cost difference is enormous. The other main change is 4x annul in the sideboard, in case I play that tron guy again lol.
I’m hoping to perform a little better tonight than I did last week. I think the deck is much stronger than before even though it basically still has the exact same structure.
Excellent post
I am learning Lumera Scapeshift combo in pioneer. It involves: game actions
Pauper was good again last night. I am still losing but it’s ok cause I am learning. I went 1-2, 0-2, 1-2.
I made a last minute change to the deck, replacing the 3x red mage’s rapier with 3x burning prophet. I thought scrying before each draw1 pump spell would reduce the tendency to run out of gas by drawing into like 3 lands or whatever. I think this was true but she also doesn’t do enough damage on her own, requiring me to play a little slower which I don’t think I accommodated well.
Round 1 I played another artifacts deck. They seem very well represented at the locals. I am still learning the names of all the colour combinations but I am hearing “jund wildfire” on youtube and podcasts a lot and i think this was that. Artifact lands, cleansing wildfire, refurbished familiar, ichor wellspring, writhing chrysalis etc. In this round I mulliganned to 5 every game. The deck was just not showing me 2 lands and a creature, which is I guess my baseline for a decent hand. Game 1 I was able to win pretty quickly by casting snap on chrysalis and going in. Game 2 I got some pump going but somehow didn’t draw an unblockable spell and he had nyxborn hydra and writhing chrysalis in play both as 4/5s, so I didn’t end up attacking. He killed kiln fiend with makeshift munitions by sacrificing his various artifact tokens that he produces in abundance. Then I just drew lands for a few turns. One difference I hadn’t put much thought into between last week’s deck with crash through and warlord’s fury vs the current deck is those two cards don’t target, so I can just play them without a creature in play to draw a card. OH NO BUT WAIT I just realised writing this that I can target my opponent’s creatures with slip through space etc to draw a card!! Fuck! This would have helped yesterday. I even did that last friday! Why did i forget…. Well maybe I could have drawn some better cards had I remembered that. Anyway he killed me in the end by flinging his artifact lands at me with makeshift munitions. Very cool honestly. That card is strong! What if all your lands had the lava dart effect. Game 3 I sided in annul to counter makeshift munitions, which I did successfully (thank you friday night tron player). But otherwise I had an awful hand, but was scared to mulligan to 4. In retrospect I should have. I also drew like 6 lands in a row and he won easily.
Round 2 was mostly white with some green and black. Glint hawk, kor skyfisher, troll of khazad-dun. We had some back and forth in game 1 but he sealed the deal. Game 2 he hit my creatures with cast down on turns 2 and 3 and I had no momentum after that. He said I should have waited till turn 4 to play my nivix cyclops so I could protect it with apostle’s blessing and yeah he was right. I think I have not been doing that because I wanna attack as early as possible because my deck is so vulnerable and I want the opponent to establish their position as little as possible. Another lesson learned. He killed me pretty quickly and I didn’t see much of his deck tbh. But we had a nice chat while the other games were going on. He got killed pretty hard by another kiln fiend player the night before (wow there is so much pauper to be played in this city!) so there is hope for me yet. I would love to see what other local people are doing with kiln fiend.
Game 3 was a guy who was playing paper magic for the first time after playing on arena for a bit. Wow that was me one week ago! It was a delight to play with him. We both made some mistakes, forgot an effect or two, and had to read each other’s cards. He was also playing black artifact type stuff, pinging me with black mage’s rod and pactdoll terror, playing cast down and grim bauble on my creatures. I beat him quickly game 1 and then I assume he sided in more creature removal. We had a nice back and forth the other two games but I just had burning prophet in play most of the time and her damage just doesn’t add up. He won the next two games.
I think next time I just wanna put more resources into protecting my creatures. I’m thinking dispel in the main deck. I just need more one mana ways to keep kiln fiend alive. Will keep burning prophet for now, I do think she helped, and I wanna learn how I should change my gameplan for her scry to really add up to something. Guttersnipe in the sideboard and switch to a more burny control type plan??? Who knows.
