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tutelage/ball seems almost guaranteed in any game that runs past turn 5 with Vess.

and no, you don't run the tutelage out asap... you drop it when you can comfortably do it or have run out of choices.

Maybe the right way to do this is to run 1 tutelage and 3 Sign in Blood.

That way as desired you can tutor up our ghetto Bob/Top to take over any game.... extras dont clog your hand....  and you can still dig for 2 with Sign in Blood.

Jul 22, 2010 -- 7:30AM, the_rooster wrote:

Jul 22, 2010 -- 7:05AM, EvincarCrovax wrote:

@Legatoblue

The thing about Dark Tutlage is that you use it with crystal ball so you can always put a land or some low cmc spell on top. That way you can use any kind of spells you want in your deck and not have to restrict yourself to lower cmc stuff. If you use it properly it shouldn't hurt you too much and in the long run it gives much more cards then sign in blood. I've rarely taken more then 2 damage from it in a single turn and most turns I often take no damage.

The problem is, using two cards to set up some card draw is bad.  You're already banking on Tut/Ball to be around for two turns just to get your card investment back.  Then you're paying life and mana (tempo) every turn for one extra card.  Let me give you some generic scenarios (which are fine to discuss, since they handle theory as opposed to "what if your opponent has this card and this card blah blah").

You play out ball on turn 3 and tut the next turn.  You've spent turns 3 and 4 doing nothing besides setting up the ability to draw more cards.  So you don't even see your inital card investment even until turn 6 and don't start gaining anything until turn 7.  And this is assuming that you draw both of them without any tutoring or card draw to get you there by turn 3, and that you can waste two turns tapping out without affecting your opponent's hand or board.  In an age where Green and white are awesome and War Priest of Thune exists, that's iffy.

Now if you intend to wait until turn 7 or 8, you still face the same issues about getting your initial investment back but now you have to survive that long with a deck that doesn't run mass removal.  UW can rely on this plan because they had DoJ to slow aggro AND they have Jace and Mindspring, both of which immediately gain them cards.  Then there's the issue of turn 7 being when you want to drop Titan...there's the issue of a fast enough aggro deck having you at low enough life that Tut is potentially a game-loser even with Crystal Ball.

Bob was good because he came down quick and died easily, but iffy because he could smack you.  Phyrexian Arena was good because 1 life was 100% worth a card and paying more never happened, but iffy because it came down so late.  Tutelage is the worst of both and the best of neither.

Jul 22, 2010 -- 7:26AM, Niche wrote:

Maybe the right way to do  this is to run 1 tutelage and 3 Sign in Blood.

That way as  desired you can tutor up our ghetto Bob/Top to take over any game....  extras dont clog your hand....  and you can still dig for 2 with Sign in  Blood.

I can get behind this plan.  NIche, you do indeed know your black.

I a big prtoponent of Sign over tutelage and I agree with this plan of attack. My research indicates that I net 2.4 cards on average every time I use DT.

Thanks for starting a new thread, Niche. Nice to see the two lists so far don't have Lich in that. Not that he's bad. It's just most of the artifacts that we would be using with him destroy themselves anyway.

Speaking of artifacts, I'm neither a fan of Dark Tutelage nor Crystal Ball, though 1 Dark Tutelage and 3 Sign in Bloods seems like a fine comprise.

Jul 21, 2010 -- 8:16PM, Lumberboy wrote:

I am working on a mono black deck right now and this what I have so far: (I am turning my B/W deck into a mono one to see how it does.)

Creatures:

4 Gate Keeper of Malakir
4 Black Knight
4 Vampire Hexmage
4 Vampire Nighthawk
4 Abyssal Persecutor
3 Ob Nixilis, the fallen

Spells:
4 Grim Discovery
4 Consuming Vapours
4 Doomblade of Smother can't decide which is better.
2 Consume the Meek

Lands:
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Marsh Flats
15 Swamp

I like this list. I think it will win. It is just a minor change from my B/W deck which has been doing pretty nice at my local FNM's.  Thoughts or Criticisms?

I was originally going to say that Grim Discovery seems weird, but I keep forgetting the name of the fetchlands.  Therefore they can stay despite me not being crazy about retrieving lands that hurt you, though I guess perhaps Nighthawks and Vapors would make it up. And Grim Discovery does fetch Gatekeeper and Hexmage and it does synergize with Ob....

I was also going to you don't have anything to do first turn, but then I realize that only 1 cmc listed at the beginning of the thread is Brittle Effigy since discard hasn't gotten shafted so hard. So there's really nothing to say there.

The only things to say would be to use Doom Blade over Smother (unless your meta has a lot of other black decks or black decks with creatures 3 cmc or under--Consume the Meek is basically en mass Smother anyway) and drop a Persecutor for a Swamp (maybe). Good luck.

Why does no one like Mind Sludge anymore?  All the decks that are being stressed as bad matchups (D-force, Superfriends, U/W/x) all crumble before a 5-swamp Sludge on turn 5.  If you're going pure MBC, having something that can completely remove their hand on turn 5 is well worth the risk of facing down an Obstinate Baloth or a Vengevine , especially when you consider that the decks that are running those two cards should have them on the table well before turn 5.  If they have a Fauna Shaman active and you're afraid to Sludge them, simply kill the shaman and wait a turn.  Mind Sludge is still a devastating spell.

The only reason Blightning is gone is because of the timing.  Blightning comes out on turn 3, which is normally when your opponent will have a Baloth or angry plant in his or her hand.  Mind Sludge comes on turn 5, AFTER your opponent has played these cards.  Also, look at the larger picture.  If you Mind Sludge on turn 5 and follow it up with a Grave Titan on turn 6, that Vengevine seems a lot less threatening all of a sudden.

Speaking of Grave Titan, has anyone thought of running Everflowing Chalice ?  This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for the MBC build.  It lets you power out Titans earlier, while also allowing for a Phylactery Lich or two to sneak into your build.  Not only that, but it makes Sorin a turn 5 play, or even running All is Dust as a board sweeper, since we don't have access to Damnation .

I think Crystal Ball and Dark Tutelage are red herrings.  Crystal Ball could be playable if you put in Everflowing Chalices to power it out a little more effectively, allowing you to scry immediately after playing it (and also enabling the Lich), but even then it feels like a wasted slot.  Do not run Dark Tutelage, especially running so many 5-or-higher drops.  It's suicide black in a control deck, which is just wrong.  If you want CA, run Sign in Blood , it's still the most efficiently costed draw spell in mono-black.

I personally like the idea behind Brittle Effigy .  It would serve the same purpose as Mystifying Maze in this deck while being less restrictive and also good against anything with CiP abilities.  It frees up the spots in the sideboard reserved for Sadistic Sacrament , as it allows to have maindeck answers to Polymorph decks.

If you run Grave Titan, don't run percy.  They fill the same role, but percy requires you to build your removal around him.  If I had to choose, I'd run the Titan and put in some chalices to allow me to play him as quickly as the persecutor.

Consume the Meek is either a 1-of main or sideboard tech.  Against W/U/x control decks it's a dead card (they don't care if you waste it on Martial Coup ), and if you run All is Dust like I do you don't need it.

Doom Blade will always be better than Smother .  If you're too worried about Jund, which at the moment seems to be dying off, run Smother in the sideboard.

Running Grim Discovery with less than 20 maindeck creatures is just asking for trouble.  It's cute if you're running 4 Tectonic Edge s, in which case i may run 1 or 2 in place of sign in blood, but the only reason Vampires ever ran the card was to grab downed Vampire Nocturnus es or Gatekeeper of Malakir with fetchlands for extra triggers and Bloodghast recursions.  Along the same lines, if you're running control, you don't need the fetch lands.  Deck thinning is nice in theory, but in MBC your life is a precious resource.  The reason the deck has to run so much life gain is that it's going to be letting a bit of damage through over time, and pinging yourself for 1 to thin out a deck full of high casting costs seems counterintuitive to me.

Planeswalkers are going to be this deck's biggest problem.  When MBC was first a tournament powerhouse, there was no such thing as PWs.  Now almost every competitive deck runs the damn things.  I know I keep saying this, but ALL IS DUST.  It's just that good, and I've never felt bad having the chalices in hand with my build.  Beyond that, I believe Vampire Hexmage may be the better choice in the sideboard simply because it comes out of nowhere.  However, if you're running Phylactery Liches, then by all means run Pithing Needle .

Nantuko Shade , while good, is better in midrange aggro.  I would always run Gatekeeper over it and keep it in the sideboard if I need to shift the deck to a quicker build.  This is actually how a lot of the old MBC during Odyssey utilized the shade.  The hype is causing people to forget what he's really good at.

Anyway, here's a tentative list I've been working with, still subject to change.  There is currently no set sideboard for my build, as I'm still playtesting it.

Lands (25)
19 x Swamps
4 x Tectonic Edge
2 x Dread Statuary

Creatures (12)
4 x Grave Titan
4 x Gatekeeper of Malakir
4 x Vampire Nighthawk

Removal/Disruption (14)
4 x Doom Blade
4 x Tendrils of Corruption
2 x All is Dust
1 x Sorin Markov
3 x Mind Sludge

Accelerants (2)
2 x Everflowing Chalice

Card Advantage (5)
4 x Sign in Blood
1 x Liliana Vess

Finishers (2)
2 x Corrupt

Jul 22, 2010 -- 12:46PM, the_rooster wrote:

Jul 22, 2010 -- 12:04PM, garridy wrote:

You can say that Dark Tutalage can be used with crystal ball to make sure you dont hit any high CMC cards but at that point you are avoiding the most powerful cards in your deck. Not exactly synergistic in that respect.

You do still get a normal draw step.

Right. EOT scry, and if its a cheap card or a land and a bomb, put the bomb down on top of your library first then the cheap card/land. On your upkeep you reveal and draw the land for free or the cheap card... then draw your bomb during your normal draw phase. Win.

LTJ, a lot of the stuff you're going over has been covered recently in the old thread.

Here's the highlights:
1. Everflowing Chalice is poor topdeck, and as an accelerant running only 4 is not consistent enough to be worth adding the bad topdecks. You won't hit the chalice every game early to ramp with and in those games you will see them later when you don't need them. If we could run 8 ramp spells it'd be a shoe-in to play.

2. Mind Sludge has lost a lot of pop as you stated because you can tempo yourself vs. Jund, Naya or Mythic off a Vengevine or Obstinate Baloth. The other issue is that a Sludge simply doesn't beat WU control. They either dropped a Jace on 4 and are ready to Brainstorm out of the hellbent, or will untap and mind spring. Often times they're running heavy on cards in hand anyway and a sludge can't always shut them down. All of the scariest superfriends hit before sludge, and if they're on the play Gideon lands before this as well. Now don't argue Everflowing Chalice here, because they've got greater odds of running out a planeswalker pre sludge than we do of comboing chalice into sludge on 4 which won't even break their entire hand. Finally, you can work with Sludge/Targetted Discard as an answer to Destructive Force... but its very inconsistent and they've manipulated their draw powerfully with all of the ramp they're played to where unless you're beating them they will still draw into a 2nd and break the game open. In summation, discard...  not as good as it used to be.

3. Crystal Ball is as good as advertised. MBC actually really needs a way to build card quality as the game progresses. It's runnable without Tutelage.

4. Tutelage is a shaky card, but in a deck that runs 25 lands, 20 3cmc or less cards, and 15 bombs of 4 cmc or greater the percentages still favor this card to be used. It's not a card you want to ever draw 2 of... and it does what Sign in Blood cannot do as the game progresses... and that's build an iterative advantage over your opponent. I pre-ordered 3 to be certain, but I feel very comfortable utilizing it as a 1x Vess tutor target.

5. All is Dust often hits too late to change the game vs. SuperFriends... and if they suspect you're running it they won't overextend the team into it.... or they'll run everyone out way ahead of it and just wait for you with a Mana Leak. If you want to answer planeswalkers hexmage is still the premier choice, followed closely by Needle and then All is Dust for timing relevance.

6. Nantuko Shade does whatever you need him to do. If you're up against someone who drops a colonnade or sejiri refuge t1 you can throw him down and pressure them with just 1 card. If its any other list you can hold him back and play draw go as the game progresses... and finally drop him when you're ready to swing and pump for the win.

7. As for your list; Too many non-swamps to feed Corrupt, Tendrils, and Mind Sludge. 2-3 is typically optimal.  After all of that going on about everflowing chalice you've built a list with *2*? Cut this card please, or stick to your guns and bump it to 4 so you have a chance of getting one before your 9th card every few games. Math balks at this number. Typically lists also run singletons of cards and then use a tutor card to fetch them on demand. Running 1 Liliana Vess makes it pretty tough for her to go find your Sorin Markhov, or string corrupts together. Finally, 4 Grave Titans is pushing very hard for this list. You're going to hit a major traffic jam on turn 6-7 trying to run out Titans, Planeswalkers, AiD, and Corrupt... if you hit 6-7 mana consistently with those 4 tectonic edges you'll be tempted to pop.

You've got a lot of good takes on stuff. Keep at it.