First of all, you should replace 3 dimir gates with 3 grixis lands so you have red mana for free, to activate the obelisk. Do the same with bant lands instead of the azorius gates.

I suggest that you play the 3rd tower gargoyle, that card is hard to kill cost-efficiently, especially if you paid only 3 mana for it .
You have a lot of valuable permanents, so planar cleansing seems bad. You should consider arrest and dissolve to avoid getting murdered by things like baneslayer angel, spider spawning, planar cleansing, etc.; there's a lot of scary expensive spells out there.
Gods willing seems worse than cloudshift because the latter triggers your sanctum gargoyles; and 4 copies seems way too much anyways.

If you have trouble against aggro decks, wall of omens and dead weight seem easy inclusions. You can cut some amount of courier's capsule, esperzoa, and all the meteorites (since you can have all colors of mana with no effort anyways, and you have the dead weights and obelisks to kill 2 toughness creatures).

Hey thanks, I'm going to make a copy and make your changes and see how it goes, mostly for a chance to play it a different style. (Counters - I don't play, but I should have 1 deck with them..) I agree with your reasons for the changes, however I'll explain why I'm mostly going to keep this the same way.

Esper colored lands: I found early on that I don't want to be putting out all 5 colors in lands too early in the game for fear of getting too much red and green. By the time the meteorites are out, they take care of the colors needed for the Obelisk, and if I don't have red and green I happily "get by" with what the Obelisk can do. That plan's worked pretty well in practice, dunno.
Gods Willing: I reaaaaally have been saved by these too much, I realize cloud shift would save my creatures too, but I guess the difference is it is an offensive and defensive battle trick. Cloud shift is great defensively and only an oh-shi* reset button on offense. Cloudshift would also work with Esperzoa too
Planar Cleansing is there because I know I can Gargoyle stuff back, and is sort of my way of having universal artifact / enchantment / mass (runescarred & friends) removal over specifically creature removal.

Yes, though, somethings gonna change to fit 4th mr tower gargoyle in. He is as you say, efficient. I'll figure that out later.

So question: I was going to consider this a conflux deck because it USED and anticipated possibly using all 5 colors, but not all 5 colors in lands. Do the color categories each post in this forum pertain to the cards colors and/or abilities colors or is it based on what land you use?

I think you are misunderstanding something here. If you replace a dimir guildgate - a card that can produce blue or black mana - with a crumbling necropolis, a card that makes blue, black and red mana... you are gaining red mana and not losing anything. It's a strict upgrade, like replacing cancel with counterspell.

Yes I misunderstood, and looked dumb too. But if I do that can this be called an Esper deck?

It only matters what color your spells are (top-right hand corner) when determining what type of deck it is. At least as far as this subforum is concerned.

Essentially, whatever colour/s your deck tells you it is when you're selecting it in game - that's the colour/s as far as both the game and the forum is concerned. It's all about casting costs, not ability costs.

don't ask me why this deck works, i'm buzzed and just threw it together based partially on the Dimir deck Stevo posted. i just went 5-0 with it including two very, very unlikely come-from-behind wins.



of note: have Paragons out allows Cloudfin Raptor to climb all the way to 5/6 just by dropping Strix's and Agents.

That's actually something I never realised. Raptors kind of work out of colour in Paragon decks because the boost eventually filters down due to increased P/T in the other creatures.

But it is missing the biggest part of what made the other one some awesome for me! Hysterical blindness! And less deathtouch means less deathtouch abuse with all the shinanigans.

While I wish cloudfin fit into the other build, I feel it would knockoff the equilibrium.

Oh, I totally agree. I'm not advocating it in the Dimir build one bit - just making a separate observation. The other deck is perfect as is I think.

Hey there! I haven't posted for quite some time, so I thought I'd share my new artifact deck with you. Without further ado, here is the decklist:



Warning: If you want to be successful with this deck, you need to know what you're trying to do and you need to think. I hope nobody gets hurt while trying the latter.

Comments:

This deck runs on loads of synergy. You try to pump the Fiend, get card advantage from the Bident, Sanctum Goyle lets you reuse your used Amulets and Capsules and/or other removed artifacts, Esperzoa lets you recast Sanctum as well as getting you more fuel for Fiend should you be empty-handed. The Sphinx and Obelisk serve as late-game bombs, Sphinx lets you swing with everything while you get tokens to chump with and Obelisk is just great all-around, with the 3 trilands its possible to have access even to the red and green ability, but it works perfectly fine even without them. Do NOT underestimate Tower Gargoyle, with 4/4 body he is hard to remove, good for offense as well as defense and can be as cheap as 3 mana! Removal of choice is Weight and Arrest, I need my removal to be usable early and the 3 life loss from Ulcerate was too harsh agains aggro decks. These removal spells unfortunately have no synergy with the rest of the deck, but you need some sort of removal if you wanna be competitive.

Land count is "only" 21, but you also have 4 Amultes at your disposal, which can even be reused. Believe me, you get all the mana you need and sometimes even more than you can possibly use.

Adventuring Gear was a card I've tried, but I decided a creature would fill the slot better, so it isn't in the current build and I have no intention to re-add it.

Last thing I wanna say is that you must play this deck smartly, there is a lot of synergy you can use to your advantage. The most important thing is to realize what kind of deck you are playing against and adjust accordingly, play defensively against a fast aggro deck and play aggressively against slower decks. There are 9 lands that come in tapped, so choose carefully when to play those...sometimes it will be best to play all of those first, but sometimes it will be better to get an early Strix or Fiend and start putting pressure on your opponent.

Win/loss: 8/2 - lost to a creatureless deck with a lot of removal and to a strong jund deck.

that's very similar to the artifact deck i'm using now, but i really think you could cut way back on the taplands. 9 is a bit much, especially since you're running almost nothing with double mana symbols. since their only purpose is to diversify your (one) obelisk, i would just use Darksteel Ingots instead (which have the advantage of being great lategame Esperzoa bounce targets)

I might have been a bit misleading, I don't use my trilands to help me use all of the obelisk's abilities, that is just a sweet bonus. Mainly I run them to fix my manabase, there is only Bident and Sphinx that use two of one color, true that, but there are a lot of color-demanding creatures such as Strix or Tower and so far having less than half of manabase come in tapped hasn't been a big problem for me, the important thing is to really finding the time where to put them in so it wouldn't hurt your tempo...but I might drop some over time, if experience shows that it indeed hurts my tempo often enough.

However, I have no intetion to put any Ingots in, that would be a very redundant card in my deck...I have all the mana I need, usually even more, I don't need ramp that much and cardslots are really hard to find, getting any Ingots would mean either cutting on removal or cutting on important synergy in the deck.

I will keep an open mind on the taplands though

Esper Birds

24 Creatures
12 Spells
24 Land

1cmc

4x Dead Weight
3x Cloudfin Raptor

2cmc

3x Tidehallow Strix
3x Think Twice

3cmc

3x Guard Gomazoa
4x Pestermite
4x Lilianna's Spectre

4cmc

3x Tower Gargoyle
3x Skymark Roc
2x Bident of Thasa

5cmc

3x Angelic Edict
1x Baneslayer

Land
5x Plains
5x Islands
5x Swamps
3x Arcane Sanctum
2x Azorious Guildgate
2x Dimir Guildgate
2x Orzhov Guildgate

Concept: All evasion creatures and battlefield control using Bident of Thasa, Pestermite, Skymark Roc and Guard Gomazoa. Above average draw.

Pretty simple stuff. Play creatures and race. Evolve Cloudfin several times over for early defense if needed, until Gomazoa shows up. Use Bident to pick apart their army by forcing attacks into your creatures. Block the bombs with Gomazoa or run them into a Tidehallow Strix, pick apart the little ones with your higher toughness birds. Skymark Roc eats tokens. Dead weight for early kills against aggro and bringing bigger threats down to size so they too can be killed with Bident/Troops. Angelic Edict anything that strategy can't handle. Pestermite creatures who are in the way of you swinging for lethal or to get a bunch of draw off Bident.

Gomazoa and Bident are the MVPs of this build IMO.

Very interested in the thoughts of my fellow Magic players.

I know you said Gomazoa is one of your MVPs but it's strange to see it in a list that wants to be attacking. I guess he's good at helping you win the race because you get to swing in with your fliers and not have to worry about dying on the backswing. It still feels "off" in the list, though. I also don't like including multiple copies of a legendary permanent but that's just my own OCD-like tendencies. Bident is a very strong card with all this evasion so two copies is probably correct.

I also think the Cloudfin Raptor isn't the kind of card you should be running as anything other than a full playset. It's value diminishes greatly for each turn beyond the first so maxing out gives you the best possible chance to land one ASAP. I also think you should max out on the Strixes because two power with evasion for two mana is an excellent deal. Think Twice is a nice source of draw, but I think this deck wants to be tapping out most of the time so Military Intelligence could just be better because it's a just one-time investment. Liliana's Specter is pretty decent but I think I'd rather see a disruption spell that interacts with the board instead of your opponent's hand; you could play Frost Lynx or Vapor Snag here and it would be easier on the mana, too.

I haven't played the deck so I could be off base here, but I think I would do this (keep in mind you may have to rethink the manabase if you decide on some of these suggestions):

-3 Think Twice
-3 Guard Gomazoa
-4 Liliana's Specter

+1 Cloudfin Raptor
+4 Vapor Snag
+1 Tidehollow Strix
+3 Military Intelligence
+1 ???

Feel free to tell me how stupid I am for suggesting the removal of the Gomazoa.

The Spectres have been underperforming.. and their early casting cost has been problematic at times. They're the first cut. That opens up 4 spots.

As far as Gomazoa goes.. these are my feelings. The deck isn't full of P/T value creatures bc they're all fliers. I can't block more often than not with my offensive force, especially huge threats. Gomazoa gives me that out.. and he is absolutely crucial to that 'Bident Battlefield Control' concept. Often, I will take a turn off attacking with all my creatures that have 2 or more toughness, and use Bident to force the enemy to attack and lose several key pieces.. or he will spend trick spells like Undying Evil, Cloudshift, etc. to save them. This works out for me bc I will just do it again next turn, and lose nothing most of the time (2O% of the time.. something like Primal Bellow happens).

My thoughts were
+1 Raptor
+1 Angelic Edict
+2 ?

Maybe some bomby-er type cards? I'll try yours and see.

Has anybody tried playing Switcheroo in an artifact deck? It combos well with Esperzoa, unless they have an artifact, but even then they would have to spend mana playing that artifact each turn if they want to keep Esperzoa. I've playtested this a bit vs the AI, but I can't get the rest of the deck stable enough to take it online yet.

Seems pretty good, I had someone do it to me with species gorger when I only had 1 creature. In an artifact deck giving your opponent glaze fiend seems pretty good too, again unless it's the mirror.

A singleton Switcheroo seems nice, you could also donate a sculptor in the late game, when his ability is less relevant.

almost all Blue decks want to run Switcheroo. with only one U in its casting cost, there's no worry about splashing it. in DOTP2015's meta, bombs are king. you can make a mill or burn deck, but it's not going to be good, and it definitely won't be creatureless. Switcheroo is not very useful against Spider Spawning or token decks, but even those tend to run several creatures that you would want to grab.