4. Advice on deck choice?
Advice on deck choice?

Hello friends!

I am seeking advice on what to play at our local eternal masters event. I expect the meta to have 3-4 dredge decks, 3-5 weary shops pilots and the rest an assortment of blue decks with a potential for a couple white eldrazi decks.

I have the resources for most blue decks and that's my preferred choice, barring Eldrazi.

Is Bomberman Oath a good choice for this metagame? I'm unsure.

My answer is biased as Bomberman is a petdeck of mine. In an unsure meta, I would most likely take Burning Oath or Bomberman Oath. Simply because of either speed or versatility.
.what would your list look like?

Bomberman Oath is a fine choice. If you haven't been testing too much (that is, enough to have your own opinion on what matchups up to that metagame), then I think you're better off playing a deck you enjoy, and something you feel comfortable with, as long as it's reasonably powerful/consistant ... and Bomberman Oath fits that bill just fine.

Whatever your choice, though, that's an unusually high amount of Dredge in a metagame, assuming "the rest" doesn't mean 20+ blue players. If you're going to play a list you found online, or from a tournament else where, I would definitely recommend upping your quantity of dredge hate (I recommend quantity and variety over quality when it comes to dredge hate). A stock list you find online probably hasn't been built with a dredge-heavy metagame in mind.

I recommended this in another thread too and after some further testing sessions I do stay by my judgement. Welder-Strix-Painter with Dark Confidant as a draw engine is a fine choice for the actual meta (and for yours too). It plays plenty of tools to play and win through several of the common disruption tools of Shops and Eldrazi and plays enough Red Blasts in the maindeck to have a good fighting chance against blue and Gush in particular. Maybe you give this a try. Anyway, I also think your are quite fine with Bomberman Oath as well which is a very flexible and still powerfull deck choice.

Edit: And sorry, I forgot about the dredge part of your meta. The mentioned Welder-Strix can even adjust for the Zombie Menace, a maindeck Nihil Spellbomb might help wonders and additional copies after boarding combine even better with Welder. Overall I would say the deck has more issues with Storm (even though Trinisphere out of the board is a godsend), Oath and Delver. Nevertheless: All of them are not unwinable.

last edited by Tom Bombadil

I played bomberoath 2 weeks ago. I got a nice 0-5 in rounds, winning only the bye.

Bant either destroyed my manabase with fetches or stony silence. Or they played meddling on oath (with 2 oath in hand and countermagic) . In other match he had 2 disenchants for my oath (with abrupt decay in hand)

mentor used therapies to sacrifice spirit tokens (as an effective time walk) and the drew into disenchant. Or just played so many tokens that griselbrand couldn't attack, while salvagers were in my hand with no option to be resolved against 3 counterspells.

Dark depths could just combo by turn 3 without playing any creatures (with T1 oath and grudge in hand) ,after locking me in first match with spheres.

I really thought bomberoath was a good option, but I got utterly destroyed even with dream hands.

I second the UBR Painter idea. Run Goblin Welder, Baleful Strix and Myr Battlesphere alongside a Thirst for Knowledge draw engine. Perhaps even make it a KeyVault deck.

I don't disagree with anything in this thread, but I want to warn you that the kind of advice your'e getting is less "Here is a deck that is a perfect foil to the metagame" and more "Here is a deck that I like which is a reasonable choice in the metagame". The description you've given is very broad, and people are likely to give very broad responses.

I would recommend following the spirit of these posts if not the letter of them, and playing something that excites you that isn't too far off the beaten path.

I think this is all good advice. I play Oath and am biased towards it. That said, with that Meta I would probably be looking for something that specifically targets Oath and Shops in the mainboard, especially Dredge if you think those numbers are good. Things that run Waste, Magus of the Moon, that sort of thing. I would take a hard look at that myself, figuring that if you can beat Dredge you can win the tourney, assuming Dredge beats Shops as it is ought to do. Painter variant? Two card Monte?

Failing that, I also think Oath is a fine choice.

how many blue decks are there? that can change what deck you play a lot.

Thank you everyone for the advice! I really appreciate it.

In order to give further clarification, I envisioned a field of around 30-40 players with the majority of them being on some kind of cantrip fueled deck. We do have a large number of dredge decks here usually though that may change as we had a member move away and he usually supplied 2-3 dredge decks.

Last year our meta was dominated by shops however the event at GP Melbourne was suspiciously absent of shops pilots and I believe the subsequent Golem restriction to further dampen this.

I really do like the baleful strix as a great answer to the eldrazi deck.

I was also considering playing mono blue leyline Belcher in order to be faster than the dredge decks and faster ahead of the eldrazi decks.
Is this just worse than a more consistent welder engine or oath based strategy?

Thanks again!!

@Ten-Ten my list would be most likely based off of Shuhei or Brian Kelly's list.

Is that person who moved away me?

@HoardingDragon

I would play Thought Knot Seers and Thorn of Amethysts if you got them. Probably in a Shop deck; like the deck that won the NYSE. Thorn is really good against "cantrip decks" and Thought Knot Seer is the new and good win condition.

I wouldn't play Belcher if I were you because then you might have to deal with Thorn effects. But Oath also seems like another fine choice.

@HoardingDragon said:

I was also considering playing mono blue leyline Belcher in order to be faster than the dredge decks and faster ahead of the eldrazi decks.
Is this just worse than a more consistent welder engine or oath based strategy?

Thanks again!!

I have played Belcher for the last month in mtgo dailies and tournament practice room. It can definitely beat Dredge even in game one. Eldrazi/Shops matchups can be difficult though if you cant find a good opening hand or some good sideboard options. Some Eldrazi draws might be unwinnable on the draw without active leyline and even then very hard.

@rbartlet sure is! 😛 hope America is treating you well!

@HoardingDragon so far, so good. I could always go for a few more vintage events, but I think that that would be the case no matter where I lived.

I hope that Masters goes well! This will be the first one I will have missed for quite a while.

For the record, I was normally acting as a broker in lending out decks; where the decks belonged to friends who were unable to play in the event, but were happy to have their cards played, and wanted someone to take responsibility for them. There was one Melbourne GP where I ended up with 6 powered decks to lend out.

@HoardingDragon hey so what did you play and how did it go?

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