All is Dust ∙ Eldrazi Giants ∙ The U/W Mirror
Videos with KYT and DougP ∙ Canadians ∙ … and All is Dust
All is Dust – You don’t want to know what Mulldrifting calls this.
I have been very happy with the U/W deck posted earlier this week. I made some small modifications to the deck list, but nothing too sweeping…
U/W Eldrazi Giants version 1.1
4 All is Dust
2 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
2 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
4 Everflowing Chalice
1 Jace Beleren
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Sea Gate Oracle
1 Sphinx of Lost Truths
4 Spreading Seas
2 Day of Judgment
3 Oust
2 Path to Exile
4 Wall of Omens
4 Celestial Colonnade
4 Eldrazi Temple
2 Eye of Ugin
4 Glacial Fortress
5 Island
3 Plains
4 Sejiri Refuge
sb:
1 Jace Beleren
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Baneslayer Angel
2 Day of Judgment
2 Gideon Jura
4 Kor Firewalker
1 Oust
I swapped out one copy of Jace, the Mind Sculptor for one copy of Jace Beleren. In all my testing and tournament play, I have come to the conclusion that no one really needs four copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor; every time some miser goes from four copies to three copies the next tournament, they seem to do a little bit better. The one Jace Beleren is equivalent to a Jace, the Mind Sculptor for purposes of hassling an opponent’s Jace; however you can also start off a little turn earlier to initiate the card advantage Jace trades.
The other main change was to cut one Sphinx for an Oust. The Standard format is a bit faster than the Block format where Daniel Gardner excelled with the original build of this deck; I wanted to respect my opponents’ Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarchs, and Sprouting Thrinaxes. It is possible the deck needs more instant speed copies of Path to Exile for Celestial Colonnade, Gideon Jura, or Eldrazi Conscription, but so far Oust has been outstanding.
This deck has been very good against everything I’ve played against so far but in particular “regular” U/W decks. I was lucky enough to test against DougP and KYT earlier this week and they actually recorded the games. KYT hasn’t finished editing them but you can check out the first game; notice how DougP trash talks me the whole time while their asses get ka-blammo’d.
That’s right: Ka-blammo.
If you pay attention to DougP’s strategy, it seems like he is trying to deck me by eliminating all of my Eldrazi Cthulhus; presumably the Canadians can win with their “everything else” or I will just run out of cards; at any point that I am actually in danger of being decked, I can just draw up with Eye of Ugin and discard a last Eldrazi, or I can draw-and-discard with Sphinx of Lost Truths. In sum, I don’t think that the right plan for the U/W deck is to try to deck the U/W Eldrazi giants.
If you listen to DougP’s commentary at the beginning of the video, he talks about watching me get battered around by Kor Skyfisher; what happened in that match was that I kept playing something awesome (say Jace, the Mind Sculptor); my opponent would play an Oblivion Ring on it, and I would play another copy (replace with Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre or whatever); he would play Kor Skyfisher and pick up his Oblivion Ring, Legend Ruling my face.
My opponent was a mono-White deck based on Emeria, the Sky Ruin, so as cute as that Oblivion Ring interaction may have been to watch, it probably doesn’t surprise you to read that I won the match in overwhelming fashion (I have four Spreading Seas and two infinity copies of 10/10 Vindicate for his only card that matters); however I underestimated my opponent and managed to lose the second game.
He simply made ten Soldiers with Martial Coup and hit me twice while I failed to find an answer. I was configured to beat I-don’t-know-what, and only had three copies of All is Dust and no copies of Day of Judgment at all in that game, and I failed to death, losing Game Two.
I feel that if the regular U/W deck wants to win, regular U/W has to be the beatdown and try to beat up Eldrazi U/W with Celestial Colonnades or Martial Coup tokens. If the game goes long, Eldrazi U/W is going to batter regular U/W with Eye of Ugin… Essentially infinite, un-counter-able card advantage.
To answer your question – Yes, I would recommend this deck for play this weekend. Good luck friendlies!
LOVE
MIKE
11 comments ↓
Hold on Hold on, How was I “Trashtalking you all game” hahaha. Thats too funny. I had a lot of fun covering this match though even though we didn’t end up doing anything. I am interested in testing some other of the formats contenders against it though, more for my own personal gain because I want to know how they fare! Game one with UW though, Blah…. Can’t win that one often….
Mike, have you considered a lone miser’s Emrakul? (maybe in the SB?) In that second game, if you would have fetched it with Eye instead of Ulamog, I think you would have won pretty much on the spot. You would have cast it (IIRC you had well over 15 Eldrazi mana at some point), taken an extra turn and annihilated him. I guess Ulamog is probably gets the job done just as well, but guess I just like the idea of taking that extra turn. XD
I only realized after our match that Eye was pithable and would give me a better chance against infinite inevitability. Only two Needles total though and I don’t remember if I saw any when they would have mattered in game three.
I love this deck. The only decks I’m running into trouble against tends to be vengevine. I’m thinking that with Vengevine becoming so popular in aggro builds lately, more instant speed removal (path to exile?) might be in order. Another possibility would be into the roil i guess as it at least forces them to play out vengevine and cantrips nicely on top of it. However I am a bigger fan of removing vengevine from the game.
On second thought I’ve not tried the second build of this deck with the extra oust, which, thinking about it is far superior to into the roil so ignore my noobishness there please lol.
I’ve been toying around with a UW (maybe going UWB) Control Deck that revolves more around Tezzeret. With the artifacts in standard right now (Everflowing, Khalni Gem, etc.) you can get some pretty crazy amounts of Mana into Iona or maybe an Eldrazi. Also Khalni Gem lets you activate any color of Obelisk of Alara, with Tezz you can do it twice. Prophetic Prism can also allow for this. There isn’t much Artifact hate in my meta.My current build is almost similar to the Flores Borderpost deck discussed earlier, just added some New Jace and updated the artifacts to allow for some ramp.
Played this decklist at my last FNM from a sudden interest after KYT showed me your decklist. Lost only 1 round to polymorph which seems to be a very rough match up if you dont resolve a quick Jace, but otherwise a breeze through most other decks including my last matchup of the night vs U/W control. He kinda rolled over when i played Ulamog, and finding no solution in the form of PtE.
I find it very interesting that this deck is getting little to no treatment in the mainstream magic scene. Nobody at SCG, Channel Fireball or any of the main sites is really talking much about it. I find this interesting as it has (in my experience so far) a great matchup against U/W (and Planeswalkers), Jund, Next Level Bant, Mythic, and Vengevine Naya, it also runs well against the t2 decks like vamps, RDW, Polymorph and Naya Allies. Is there some secret flaw here that I haven’t run into? Are the people I’ve been playing against that play all these main decks just not good enough to beat it (where say, a pro may be?). This deck seems better than conventional U/W in pretty much every way I can think of and people are still sticking with that over it. What could it be? Is there some stigma about actually casting Eldrazi? Can a very skillful opponent consistently play around it? Is it just the human tendency to resist change and what is new and stick with more familiar feeling decks?
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. I’m a huge fan of this deck and have played both this and Grixis Hits (another greatly under appreciated deck) to great success. I love your deck design theory and can always count on finding something original here, something sadly lacking on most of the other sites these days.
Something that they said early in game 1 reminded me of the Mono W extended deck I loved so much. You had cast two chalices, and they had not much going on in their hand, and their comment was: “Big chalice is big. But that’s ok, we can draw a bunch of cards and…”
…And the sentence trailed off, as if they didn’t know what they could finish the sentence with, or what exactly they were going to do with “a bunch of cards”. Which is what made me flash back to the Faeries/Mono White exchanges you wrote about so long ago.
I think there are a lot of parallels between this deck and the Mono White deck – Eldrazi Temple (of the False God), Eternal Dragon is a bit like Eye of Ugin/Eldrazi Blessing in terms of inevitability, and All is Dust is a lot like Akroma’s Vengeance. Was it by coincidence or design that these two decks seem so similiar?
I’ve been testing this deck, and generally like it. However, I’m having a little trouble with the lack of fetch lands, or other ways to shuffle your library.
One of the things that makes Jace 2.0 so amazing, is combining his brainstorm ability with any fetch land. This allows you to shuffle away cards you don’t want(like excess land). I’ve now in a couple of games gotten very land flooded. It was frustrating to have Jace online, and not be able to rid myself of the excess cards.
Also, slightly concerned about the lack of Deprive, or Negate, even in the sideboard. Against RDW, this makes the match up quite troublesome. Kor Firewalker and Baneslayer from the sideboard for game 2 help, but it’s often still a very close game. Wall of Omens is nice, but not always in my hand. Perhaps I should be mulliganing more aggressively.
Additionally, All is Dust, Ulamog, and Kozilek are not good in the RDW match up. They come online far too slowly. I’m also finding that spreading seas is often a useless card against it. Their curve is so low that a single Seas is just fairly ineffective against their tempo, especially by turn 2.
I also will admit that I’m unsure about how to sideboard properly with this deck overall. Could you please post up a detailed sideboard strategy against some common match ups?
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