In the list I posted on the previous page, I have made the following changes:

-1 Flesh to Dust
-2 Graveborn Muse
-1 Phyrexian Rager

+4 Tidehallow Strix

My wife and I have both been playing with the deck the past few days. We had in a couple Dead Weights, but they weren't good late game draws (and this deck is very much about the late game). Maybe its just me or the Xbone crowd.. but I'm not seeing much in the way of dangerous 2/2s like Kiln Fiend and Guttersnipe.

Strix has been good at providing early pressure. Side by side with Lilianna's Spectre.. those two represent a serious clock, especially when there's more than 2 of them on the board. In fact.. most of my damage is done through the air since all the demons fly. I didn't design it as an evasive deck but that's what it has become. The early pressure is good at setting up a lethal Suffer the Past.

Also.. my wife and I ordered a black female Labrador and we are naming her Sheoldred. My son loves it

That'sounds awesome!

When your dog starts digging up stuff from your local graveyard, don't come crying to us.

I'll be looking for your shoulder first. I expect a Richard Simmons level of compassion.

I think you should also lawyer up now. Once your dog starts getting your neighbours to sacrifice themselves, it'll only be a matter of time before someone comes knocking at your door.

elk

Eh, gonna be hard keeping her clean though. She loves running through swamps after all.

Lol.. you guys are awesome. It's funny you mention swamps bc I live on a preserve in Florida.. its pretty swampy back there. If she can get the lady who runs the HOA across the street to sacrifice herself.. I'll feed her ribeyes for a week.

you got kids yet, mega? A better dog breed for kids you will not find than a Lab. Black labs are beautiful too. Keep her away from George Zimmerman

Get ready to sweep up dog hair every other day for the next 10-14 years!

Cough...Hypoallergenic...Cough

Edit: Getting back to the Dimir discussion, has anyone come up with a good permission deck in these colors? I saw Hakeem playing against an interesting looking Dimir permission deck in a recent video and was thinking of trying to build one myself.

"Bad Sheoldred, bad Sheoldred! Go and put that shoulder back where it came from!"

This was an old permission based one that worked really well but just wasn't consistent enough at the time due to all the tokens running around. Some changes to this list could be made since the new cards that have come.

Made a small change again along with the latest update. -4 Voyage's End + 4 Peel From Reality

I thought losing the scry and the need to have 1 creature on each side to cast Peel From Reality would be somewhat annoying but the card has been working great and so far it almost feels like a strict upgrade from Voyage's End.

Peel From Reality works great to deal with threats and to redo ETBs at the same time. The synergy with an already played Brain Maggot to exile a creature in play when a bigger threat comes out and also with Liliana's Specter when the opponent has zero cards in hand is awesome.

It also simply works as a nice combat trick, can allow you to save a chump blocker and removing a non-blocked threat at the same time. Along with Frost Lynx this card does a great job keeping my creatures alive and buying time until I can play the bigger stuff.

So far I feel I got the deck pretty much where I want it and it has been working really well since the last DLCs dropped. If you guys have any advice or opinions on this deck I would be glad to hear them.

Peel From Reality and Lilianna's Spectre is a cool find. Good stuff.

Master of Waves is going right into my Dimir Unearth deck, I cut a swamp for it because I want to test the deck at 22 land. The deck only has three four-drops (I don't count Viscera Dragger) so I think I can probably get away with it. The deck is already a beatdown-style deck, so Master fits into that plan and every permanent in the deck adds to blue devotion (again, I don't count Viscera Dragger). I think he's a great pickup for the deck.

Here is the list for anyone interested.

I love the idea behind the combo of a bounce spell plus a discard spell. But in practice, the effectiveness of a discard effect depends greatly on your opponent.

Is your opponent desperately trying to empty their hand ASAP? Then you will get maximum value out of discard. But your opponent can adapt. If they have enough mana, it is easy to hold back on land drops. The full non-mind rot discard suite only totals 10 cards. Honestly I can see that against most opponents that is enough, but I had a game against Felbatista the other day where my discard did nothing because of his cultivates.

Draw is linear. Every card you draw has the same probability of being good as the last one. Discard works better the more you have of it. Stripping an opponent of one card out of their hand is nice, but two cards will always mean they are losing more value.

I will usually drop maggot ASAP and Specter fairly quickly. This is usually long before my opponents empty their hand. I will often wait several turns to get maximum value out of mind rot though. Rotting the last 2 cards out of someone's hand can be brutal.

Personally I don't really see discard as a means to an end. I tried building discard-focused decks notably with Mind Rot inside and I don't think it's really that efficient in this meta... We lack other good (and faster) discard spells to really build a competitive deck around that, and the same problem exists more or less with land destruction. If you focus on destroying your opponent's hand and can't do much else in the meantime you are likely to lose and as you said there are ways to get around discard. This is why I don't really like cards like Mind Rot or Demolish that have no added value besides hand/land destruction.

The Liliana's Specter + Peel from Reality trick is just a cute little combo that may or may not be useful depending on whether or not the opponent has cards left in hand, but it's not really essential. This deck wins mainly through buying time by slowing your opponent's board until you can bring the big threats as well as replaying ETB effects for various purposes when necessary. Discard here just helps supporting that by forcing your opponent to make choices and limit his options, and if you can completely exhaust his hand, then the better but personally I don't always count on that. If the opponent wants to hold on playing lands to get around discarding then discard-focused cards indeed won't do much... But unless we are already in the later game this strategy also slows down his own development which is exactly what I am trying to achieve.

Also Cultivate is most likely the card I will take from someone's hand if I have a Brain Maggot not only for the reason you stated but also because most decks running it kind of depend on it to get their game going and I still have other ways to deal with big threats later.

That actually seems interesting. how did the peel from reality work out for you? i always think of it as a bad combat trick but a cool card to save my threats

I don't think the card itself is that great, but in this deck at least it works perfectly.

Since all the creatures in the deck bar one have an ETB effect, you can use it offensively without any remorse. So you can get rid of an annoying threat and at the same time reuse an ETB effect for later. Or conversely you can save a creature and bounce back a threat at the same time. It's like having 8 bounce spells in the deck in just 4 cards. Before with Voyage's End I had to choose whether to use my bounce spells offensively or to save creatures/reuse ETB effects, now I don't have to anymore.

I also didn't want to put too many bounce spells in this deck so I don't miss out on the other stuff but at the same time still felt like it would be great to have more somehow, so Peel from Reality is the perfect answer to this dilemma.

The little tricks with Liliana's Specter and Brain Maggot I mentioned above are just gravy, but what really makes the card great in this deck is simply just that double sided effect which works very well with the ETB theme.

The downside of this card is that the need for 2 targets is sometimes a pain. It sucks when your opponent plays a deck low on creatures since you need a target on their side, but at least you can hold on to it for until they play their bombs. Besides this rare case it works pretty great in this deck; since it has quite a lot of creatures, the case when you don't have a target on your side is at least very rare.

Thanks for the inside Dream Maker! I always wanted to build a good Dimir deck but afaik every duels installment failed to do a good job. now with 2015 on board we can build our own dimir deck, but even then i think it lacks so many good cards (Recoil, Gitaxian Probe, Daze anyone?). I actually want to do a discard version for U/B but i always failed

btw i am aware that the cards i mentioned would be somewhat too strong for a duels game

I like the look of Peel from Reality in that deck, seems good. I may put this on my short list of decks to fiddle around with.