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Jan 18, 2013 -- 5:29PM, Hakeem928 wrote:

Dire Undercurrents outclasses Painful Quandary by a country mile, IMO. Against slower decks that aren't applying pressure, you can hold back your creatures and then absolutely overwhelm the opponent through sheer card-advantage; to me, this deck would be awesome if it could do this more consistently. Against the decks that are pressuring you I admit, it's a dead-draw, but against those decks you are probably losing anyway.

This is the only one I really disagree with.  Undercurrents is nice, but I find often with this deck that I already have more cards than I cast, and discard doesn't help if the opponent is top-decking and casting the spells immediately.  And *you* have to cast spells to activate it, *and* they have to be creatures, *and* they have to be the right color for the effect you want..

I'm making it sound worse than it is, but really it's only "bad" because Quandary is just *so* good.  Having to pay 2 cards for every spell is brutal, and 5 life is a lot.. both terrible choices.  They can basically only play a card every other turn after it drops, and if you have discard creatures alive, they can't even do that.  Every time I survive long enough to be able to drop it, it shuts the game down.  Sure, you don't draw cards like Dire.. but who needs more cards when the opponent can't cast anything at all?

Jan 19, 2013 -- 3:20AM, Hakeem928 wrote:

I think everyone is right to cut an expanse, there is a lot of draw in the deck and I hadn't considered that.

May be it's just me, but I had to reduce deck to 60 (normally I run 61), becusue of frequent mulligans without any lands or with only one. All my experiments with cutting expanses only made things worse.

Jan 19, 2013 -- 2:36PM, falclon wrote:

Jan 19, 2013 -- 3:20AM, Hakeem928 wrote:

I think everyone is right to cut an expanse, there is a lot of draw in the deck and I hadn't considered that.

May be it's just me, but I had to reduce deck to 60 (normally I run 61), becusue of frequent mulligans without any lands or with only one. All my experiments with cutting expanses only made things worse.

I run 60 cards with 24 lands and I have horrible mana issues aswell.

After about 90 minutes of playing with your deck I wrote, "Plays like a bad weenie build."  And filed it.  :p  Don't be offended

No offense taken, you are entirely accurate.

I do this every year - find the most dysfuntional deck, and after much thought manage to persuade myself that a feeble, inflexible weenie-aggro is the answer. It generally isn't. :P

In the case of this deck though, I am not finding many of the alternatives particularly seducing.

Jan 19, 2013 -- 4:33PM, Gegliosch wrote:

This deck cannot be played for late-game, it lacks control elements and fatties. Weenie plus draw/discard is the only option to make it work.

Got to agree here.  It needs to have the board, and more importantly the opposing player's hand, locked down during the mid-game to have a chance.  If it doesn't have control by the late game it's going to get cooked.