@topical_island said in How do I beat Jeskai:
Firstly, I've found Abrupt Decay to be very good against Xerox, assuming you run a deck that supports those colors.
Abrupt Decay does nothing important, as the cards I beat you with may be Mentor or pyromancer in theory, but the reality is I win my games on the stack.
That said, I think there ARE more than a few things to be discussed in this thread that can benefit players in games against Xerox. My current theory is that there are basically three methods that beat this deck. Or said a different way, when you beat this deck, you almost always do it by achieving one of three things: Kill them fast, Kill their tempo advantage, or Kill them with card advantage.
Kill them fast may work, but that is very difficult to do as (A) the xerox player would have to get matched up against you in Round 1 if you're on Dark Petition, as you're going to lose to almost everything else in the format, and (B) Xerox is favored against Paradox.
One of my favorite matchups to play either side of is a Control Oath build vs. Xerox.
Oath is good versus Xerox when played correctly. Thusly, I only fear a handful of people when playing Xerox vs. Oath.
Kill them fast: Dredge tends to give Xerox problems because its difficult to control and kills Xerox much faster (on average) than Xerox can kill Dredge. PO similarly can have a good matchup depending on tuning, for the same reasons. Oath might be a distant 3rd here, but this is very build dependent as both Xerox and Oath have a ton or room to tune.
Dredge is favored Game 1, but good luck game 2 and 3 as Xerox gets the best cards in the format. And PO Can beat 4 Pyroblasts effectively since when? Oath I already discussed.
Kill their tempo: This is a way for things like Shops and perhaps Standstill or Humans to fight against Xerox.
Humans is a fucking terrible, garbage deck. Get out of here with that. Standstill is also not favored against a good Xerox opponent. I Love to play against Standstill - they're slower, and generally your spells match up so much better against theirs.
Standstill, Big-Blue, Big Mana Thieves, and some Oath. One thing to recognize about Xerox is that while they have a ton of cards that have "Draw" written on them, very few of these actually net cards right away, or at all.
I agree with this, though I disagree with how easy you make it sound. Ruben Gonzales slaughtered me with Nights Whisper, because I couldn't Misstep or Pyroblast them, so he was always up on cards. PO and STandstill are a joke against Jeskai, though.
Fighting an attrition war with Xerox can be the correct line. Imagine whittling down the cards in hand for example, then resolving a simple Standstill.
Fighting an attrition war with the most stable deck in the format is almost ALWAYS a losing battle.
Recognizing that sort of thing will lead us to correct plays such as intentionally running an Oath into a FoW to gain a simple 2 for 1. Or not spending mana to attack with Mishra's Factory, where the damage/tempo is meaningless, in order to hold up mana to pay for a potential Flusterstorm.
So you're saying don't be a 5 year old when playing magic, and you can be successful with obvious lines. Gotcha.
I wouldn't normally care to tear apart a post like this, but your statements are blatantly not guiding people in the right direction, and this post could in theory be a great post for new players. I can't allow you to post in a way that SOUNDS so definitive, while spewing falsehoods.