yeah, but are those really a part of the known meta if they roll over and die to Flames?

Manlands pack Leyline of Sanctity

Chancellor of the Forge?

Chancellor's iffy 'cause unlike 3cm you aren't guaranteed on in hand.

You are if you play 60

guaranteed 7 1/1 hasty goblins on turn 1. 3 turns to victory.

possibly beats leyline, although depends on leyline's win con. if it's factory I think chancellor wins, but if leyline just runs a bunch of memnites they'll be able to stop the flow quickly enough.

Nourishing Shoal/Vine Dryad trivially beats black Chancellors on anything but the all-creature opener, and red Chancellors on pretty much the opposite--you'd need to be locked out of any creatures in the top 11 cards to lose to that. Surging Flame is almost an unwinnable match, though--even if they fizzle, or deliberately let off the gas early at some point from 20 to 30 damage, Vine Dryad is a slow enough clock that Flames get to have several additional turns and take more shots.

The point about stopping early is actually quite relevant, because a deck like theirs wants to be built to aim for 4 Spirit Guides in the opener, or maybe 5, and in fact they should mulligan any 7-card hand that's distributed any other way (unless they're trying to bluff the opponent, a definite factor in a match like this). This way, they can approach the mirror match by putting out a preemptive strike where they rack up 10 Flames and intentionally stop, and still have a castable Flame in hand to respond over the top of interference...as long as they left enough fuel in the deck so that the second one can actually ripple into something lethal. If both players have a hand with two usable Flames then it's still a game of chicken and whoever shoots first loses, but if you have the double and catch your opponent on a mere single then you just win.

Blue Chancellors normally beat Vine Dryad by reducing the starting library to something too small to get a successful clock going in time. The only way to beat this is by mulliganing to 3 or less and drawing almost perfectly with at least one new Dryad every two turns, but mulligans are done before you know what the opponent is playing, and doing this is normally suicide. Of course, there are several matchups like a Force/Extraction mirror where, if decks are known before the start of the game, the correct move is to mulligan to 0 and choose to be on the play if possible. Vine Dryad just loses to the counter wall, with no real recourse.

Some "no-limit" formats allow strategies to develop around Leyline of Anticipation to do a more diverse set of actions in the first upkeep (I rather like this build), but in this one, the low upper limit on the number of distinct card names in the deck prevents that design space from giving rise to anything.

for the record, the ideal set-up to get that starter as often as possible is 39 SSGs, leaving you with only 21 Flames for 42 damage total. if you have the 4-3 open, then you can only do exactly 20 twice.

but anyway, given the assumption that SM is correct, anything that can gain 23 life at instant speed, preferably in chunks, will beat the optimal Flame deck.



PS: nourishing shoal-progenitus will beat Flames a fair amount of the time. (about 58% before mulliganing) and beats black chancellor almost every time. (about 99% before mulliganing) probably loses to leyline-memnite, although really that deck only really needs to run 6 memnites, and you might be able to deck that. but they can just rebuild to beat it by running more memnites.

PPS: worldspine wurm is a little better because only two is enough to beat the optimal Flames build if they get a 4-3 open. (or any fewer SSGs). and it's strictly better so why not. they can try to mulligan to put as many Flames in their deck as possible but they're not guaranteed to make that work. if they get a stranded flames, you have about a 90% chance, although you then have to have a plan for them to Flames you one last time once they draw more SSGs, which is a calculation I don't really want to do. but it should happen on average.

PPPS: then again 39 SSGs starts to look dangerous in terms of actually hitting your flames. the odds are still in your favor (1 in 3 cards will be a flames, which means that you should get a double Flame hit fairly soon, and once you do you're pretty safe, but you can get unlucky and miss immediately.

If you're running Nourishing Shoal though, you really need your other card to be castable by itself. Otherwise you have no win con. Skyshroud Cutter and Elvish Spirit Guide are the only alternatives to Vine Dryad that I can think of.

Cutter's not an alternative--you can't alt-cast it without a Forest.

nope. worldspine wurm mills them out.

Man lands still work, they just are a lot riskier because you can only pitch shoals to themselves.

Even if the Flame deck goes through all its Flames, every card remaining in the deck is an SSG, and they'll be able to add a 2/2 to the board every 4 turns. I've pictured the deck having a 32/28 split in favor of Guides, in which case it's capable of dealing 224 damage between a full ripple and attacking into an empty board. That's also enough Flames that even triple-Progenitus won't survive the full ripple, so it'd take triple Worldspine Wurm for lifegain, and at least 11 more Wurms drawn (and for Shoals, they won't get to see their bottom 25 cards, so the Wurm density needs to be that much higher).

you can't even beat that on a full ripple even if you get triple wurm. they need to have two stranded Flames. but that deck is worse against other Flames decks, since it's less likely to be able to Flame twice. plus Shoal wins more often than Flames against Chancellor anyway: Flames needs two SSGs and one flame, while Shoal just needs one of each, and can't get wrecked by bad reveal luck.

also, every wurm they draw has to be paired with a Shoal, so the split should be 30-30.



PS: actually wait, I just realized my list is probably stronger against wurmshoal than yours, since the major deciding factor is how many cards you draw. in fact you may not even want to play the flames at all just to add a buffer so you spend more turns swinging with larger armies.

30 ivory towers, 30 reliquary towers.

Towers: The Gathering

all you need to win is life