Common Practice: BR Tortured Existence Matchup Vids

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Michael Radzwilla

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  1. First, thank you for another video. I think you missplayed a lot in this matches (no offense), but some mistakes you noticed for yourself. In the first two matches – Faerie Aggro and WW – i think u should board in all your removal and play the super stupid “kill em all” controll game, because your late game is so much more powerful anyway. i would have boarded out the carrion feeder – mesmeric,package both times especially against faeries where fiend is mediocre and feeder, especially against vapor snag in his build, really bad. i dont think its ever correct to board in duress against faeries aggro, u just want to kill, kill, kill, play around ninja, daze and sprite – duress doesnt help here by any means. I am no expert with this deck also, but i played against it a good amount Again, no offense,, mistakes will happen ;-)

  2. G1, obvious comment but, you needed more land but you kept dredging so never drew any land.

  3. People keep playing TE decks in Pauper. Maybe because they’re a lot of fun, and _seem_ powerful? I don’t know. I know I played it a ton a couple years back, but it seems far too slow and uneven nowadays. Storm decks are sometimes going off on turn 1, now.

    I do know it virtually never shows up even as a 3-1 in the daily lists, which ought to be telling.

    I’ve been playing a lot of Post lately (not in 2-mans, because who wants M12, obviously), testing some Post tweaks, and I can tell you I’ve literally never lost a match to TE lists, even with terrible draws, etc. It has not enough disruption, not enough tempo, and its beatdown offers less punch/adaptability than affinity or goblins.

    I wish it was, and hope WotC tweaks the format (*cough*ban storm*cough*) at least a little. But…it isn’t tier 1, but a significant ways.

  4. ^ This is basically e.hustles deck you netdecked…. Its a shame you didnt mention him at all that I saw. And it says “This week Michael takes his Pauper BR Tortured Existence list” when you appear to not have done anything to change it at all and just copied it completely. You misplayed alot and maybe should have practiced with the deck more before making these videos… But thats understandable as the deck takes getting used to.

    And to Buddhabob74 above me… Post has a good matchup against almost everything… Yet one of its only bad matchups is storm so you want it banned. How fair of you. Alot of people think post should be banned since you get more mana than any other deck and for the most part made all other control decks obsolete. Also Storm is hardly played these days because theres so much meta against it like MBCs and alot of monoUfae decks which are hard matchups. And this deck DOES show up in DEs placing high when ran by the decks maker e.hustle (the only person ive seen run it well) in fact he won 1st place in the last HUGE pauper premier event. And tons of bad players have just netdecked the deck since then and have been failing all over the place with it. But I havnt seen e.hustle go below 3-1 in any DEs he enters with it…

    Wow I wrote alot… Sorry.

  5. @burt that’s one of the biggest downfalls of TE decks. they are sooo many intensive, and unless you have other ways of getting lands in your hand or just drawing extra cards while you can dredge, you are really struggling to do everything you want.

    i’ve made a few TE decks in my day, and my favorite (although unreliable), was BUG. the Green is primarily for mulch, and the blue is primarily for forbidden alchemy and deep analysis. then you have the regular gamut of black TE cards like the fume spitters, the scrabblers, the TE itself, etc.

    this got lands in my hand, creatures in my yard, allowed me to dig deep for whatever i was looking for, and still have plenty of black sources for the TE core. but doing Tri-color anything in pauper is near suicide against some of the big aggro decks like green stompy, affinity, or delver.

  7. what do you feel are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of this deck compared to the GB tortured existence deck?

    Also please play the decks a bit more before you make your videos, i’d love to see some more stuff with this deck after you have had more time to learn it.

  8. Firstly, thank you all for the comments. They are very helpful to me and very appreciated.

    Also, there are several comments about the frequency of misplays throughout the game. I think it is an inherent difficultly in focusing on different decks for each column that I often have to pick up decks with which I am previously unfamiliar fairly often, resulting in a “jack of all trades, master of none” situation. This difficultly is amplified by this deck in particular, which, compared to most other decks, has an incredibly high amount of possibilities each turn, and thus makes it more difficult to pilot and increases the amount of possible misplays. Some decks can be run pretty successfully on the fly, but this is not really one of those decks. I am of course not trying to justify the misplays or asking you to overlook them, but am just trying to explain that they are not simply the result of negligence.

    That being said, if you prefer to have several columns or mini-series of the same deck (or possibly slight alterations on the same deck), I would be glad to do that too. Any feedback on future content, especially in this regard, would be very helpful and appreciated.

    And to respond to your many comments:

    DC_Casanuda, I do think you’re right in that it’s correct to board in as much removal as possible, especially because removal can really through him off if he plans on countering things with Spellstutter Sprite. That being said, all of the Mono-U Aggro decks do rely on countermagic to some extent (some more than others obviously), and things like Duress and Mesmeric Fiend are needed to some small degree in order to attack their disruption. On the other hand, your assessment of Carrion Feeder in this matchup seems pretty accurate, and I think the correct sideboarding plan is to side them out in place of more removal.

    Burt, the problem with drawing normally in that spot though is that if we do not hit a Swamp, we are in pretty bad shape because we are also dead to his board next turn, so the priority was to get out of lethal range and regain control of the board. Once that was under control, there is plenty of time to take our normal draws and get more land drops.

    BuddhaBob74, the thing is that the TE of a couple years ago is not the TE of today, and the new additions of Fatihless Looting and the relatively new Fume Spitter (it’s only a year and a half old) really make the deck. Also, the red coupling with TE is a relatively new innovation, so it plays like a completely different deck. I can imagine that the reason TE will have some rough times against Post (especially ones without Feeder and Mesmeric Fiend) is that TE is essentially a midrange deck and Post is a late game control deck. This leads to TE not being about to be aggressive enough to stop Post and Post just beating up on TE once the game gets going. It would be similar to the reasons why the Pestilence deck really struggles against Post. Also, I do not think Storm has any reason to be banned at the moment.

    Kit, thank you for your comment. I did not intend to present the decklist solely as my own creation, though I should have taken more care to credit the deck to E. Hustle. Thank you for pointing that out.

    dasMetzger, I have never tried a BUG version of it before. I know that green does have access to Yavimaya Elder and things like Borderland Ranger which can help solve the dredge or land problem. You are right that mana bases in Pauper are pretty awful, but if you are already running green, perhaps Abundant Growth can really help fix that issue (in addition to mana fixing creatures for TE).

    The advantage of this deck over the GB version is that this has tons of access to removal (especially Death Spark). More importantly though, I think the the GB version functions much more as a midrange beatdown deck while the RB version functions much more like a control deck, so they inherit the advantages and disadvantages of each archetype.

    Thanks again!

  9. I want to see Storm banned because it leads to noninteractive and unfun games that are over in 2 minutes, which is one of WotC’s prime bases for banning. No, it’s not because of any love for Post, that’s just what I happen to be playing at the moment. Actually when I don’t play Post, I play Storm right now.

    TE decks have place 3-1 or better 7 times in July, out of about 200 decks, across 24 Pauper Dailies. So, that’s like 3%. Warrens was in 11 decks, so you’re right about that; I hadn’t realized it’d dropped so much. But as for your statement that there are no other control decks besides Post…you sure you’re a Pauper player? ;)

  10. He comments that E. Hustle was the deckbuilder in the introduction (I believe), and it’s also listed on the decklist. I’ll change the lead-in right now.

  11. In the affinity matchup (last game) it would seem that you should have brought back they Perilous Myr repeatedly, rather than the Ingot Chewer. You could then sac they Myr to the carrion feeder, making it bigger bad dealing two to the face each time as we’ll. It also seems like black cat would be a great addition to the deck. I plan to try it myself.