One night a couple months ago, my friends and I were arguing whether Goblin Guide.dec beat Lightning Bolt.dec, to the point that we actually proxied them up and ran 40 Goblin Guides and 20 mountains vs 40 Bolts and 20 Mountains (those numbers were slowly tweaked as the night progressed). Guides ended up with a fairly strong edge (repeatable damage yay), but the matchup was more strategically interesting than we originally expected. Ever since then, we occasionally talk about other potential two card magic decks.

Two card magic decks have 60 cards and a maximum of two unique cards, but otherwise no limits (60 is enforced because otherwise you always get the perfect ratio, so we don't want decks getting absurd to stop self mill). The 60 Chancellor of the Dross deck was the original deck to beat, but Simian Spirit Guide/Surging Flame is faster, which opens up Leyline of Sanctity decks into the meta. This post is mostly just wondering if anyone else has interesting insights into the format, like another way to beat Surging Flame besides Leyline of Sanctity.

I remember this being a fun brain exercise in the same vein as Mental Magic (aka RIchard Garfield, PhD) a while back.
We never really went beyond the rock-paper-scissors of dross/flame/leyline-memnite because Surge makes it hard to play anything.

Surging Flame dec is probabilistic, though - there's always some probability it won't fire (drawing fewer than 2 SSGs, or unlucking into 4 straight SSGs on a ripple). Chancellor of the Dross x60 always fires.

Chancellor of the Annex should squish Surging Flame some percentage of the time - not enough to be viable, but enough to make it lower likelihood of a turn 1 win. Nothing paired with it is likely enough to cause a win faster than the second Surging Flame that comes along, though .. I suppose the best bet is Black Lotus, so that if your stall causes you to survive the first turn, if you have 3 Lotusses you can cast a Chancellor which should stall the rest (the tax would need to be paid on each Surging Flame, even the rippled ones).

I never ran the numbers on the Flame deck, but I think you want around 25 Spirit Guides.

Chancellor of the Annex is interesting, but the flame deck only needs to cast a single flame to still kill you if you don't get the Chancellor into play. The first one will be countered, but you still Ripple into victory.

Mindbreak Trap is a riskier Leyline, but due to branching Ripples it isn't guaranteed to work. You also have the Gemstone Caverns play, which is incredibly inconsistent.

[quote="Dr_Demento"]Mindbreak Trap is a riskier Leyline, but due to branching Ripples it isn't guaranteed to work. You also have the Gemstone Caverns play, which is incredibly inconsistent.[/quote

Gemstone is better than Spirit Guide in most situations, but you can only really run it if you aren't playing best 2 out of 3 matches. Because as soon as you win your opponent chooses to draw and you can't cast spells.

Mindbreak trap kind of works, you just have to let your opponent pass on all their Ripple triggers on the stack and you can cast Mindbreak Trap. Pretty sure. It is 2 AM and my brain might be lying to me.

I think it would be fun to run the numbers on the probability of ssg.dec getting a turn 1 kill as a function of the number of rippling flames and ssgs in the deck. The first step would be to find the probability of getting a given number of ssgs in your hand as a function of their number in the deck. Gonna write a c++ program to figure that out.

isn't it just (x choose y)*(z choose 7-y)/(60 choose 7) where x is number of guides, y is number wanted, and z is number of not-guides?



PS: actually, assuming 60-card deck, you can refine that further by replacing z with 60-x.

PPS: unless I screwed that up, best shot at getting exactly 2 SSGs is with 17 total with about a 34% chance. then again you probably actually want to get two or more, which is a different equation. even more annoying is that you want to get at least one flame still. ideal hand has between 2 and 6 SSGs. maff. still you can just add the totals for all those.

PPPS: idea number for that appears to be 35 SSGs. that seems like it runs a high whiff chance, though. and the trees that descend off ripple are beyond my capabilities. so best count for firing off appears to be 35-25 in favor of SSGs but who knows if you can successfully fire off. although if you get 4-3 or 5-2 you can shoot two flames so that matters. anyway anything above 26 SSGs and below 44 will get to shoot at least once over 90% of the time

But I want to be able to express the probability as a function so I can use it for further calculations later.

assuming C++ can do combinatorics (I don't know if it can, I don't program) that should work as a function, albeit a multi-variable one. unless there's a different definition of function that I, as a not-a-programmer, am unaware of.

Well I'm not familiar with combinatorics so maybe it can. I'm just gonna do something with arrays.

Not really. The Ripple player can get around it by branching their Ripple triggers--they cast two or more Flames off of a single Ripple, then use the top trigger to cast a single Flames that they don't Ripple, and let resolve. They then use the remaining Ripple to branch again and repeat the process. Thus, no matter when you Trap, there's always going to be a Ripple trigger left on the stack to continue, and they can peck you bit by bit until you run out of Traps in hand and die. The only way out is for them to fizzle.

And you can't go all-Trap to give yourself the best chance to stop it, because if you do they can leave the full combo by the wayside and only Ripple out two spells at a time, rendering you unable to ever cast your Traps.

Surely they must run out of Simian Spirit Guides sometime?

Not before they kill you. They're dealing 4 damage per iteration, so they only need five iterations to kill you, which is ten Guides, and since an all-Trap deck can't put any pressure on them, they'll definitely have the time to draw them.

...Or they can just use three Guides to cast a fourth and beat you to death with it. That works too.

Force of Will and Surgical Extraction beat surging flame.

On the play.
You also need 4xForce and 2xExtraction to not lose to Spririt Guide beatdown afterwards.

not immediately, unless they start with a hand of 6 guides and one Flames.

also you win on the draw too. they can't wait you out and deck, you just wait until they have 8 cards, discard one, then Extract it.

If you can only have 2 cards, and one is a counterspell how are you going to win? Manlands are my only guess.
Surgical Extraction actually seems pretty good in the format. It's a no mana Traumatize and one hell of a combo breaker.

memnite, either of the spirit guides.

Decking in this case. Also, the problem with Extraction is that it bombs vs the rest of the known meta, manlands and chancellor of the dross.