How do people feel using galvanic arc as a replacement for guard gomozoa? I am going to test it tonight and still keep 3 etherium sculptor and double obelisk

I would say that your deck starts looking less like a warp deck, and more like an Alara arty deck. You have so many permanents that really suck when they hit the board: Sculptor, Sphere, Elixir(not sure if you are still running this), Capsule. I need to see how much the sculptor helps you get through your deck.

Gomazoa isn't great on the warp, but hes nice for your opening hand selection. If you are gonna dump the guard, i think you are gonna need 4 arcs to maximize your opening hand removal.

In my tests, arc has been really nice. It takes care of the small annoying crap, while Guard supplements that with stall and devotion for Master.

I would strongly recommend removing the elixir. The other stuff I am not so sure.

edit: The sculptors do play nice with the artifact curve from 2-3. Its nice to crack that land on turn 3. Makes me hate spheres much less. Devotion for master also works in place of guard. IF you get a warden and tutor, with mana to recast warp, you can grab a reduced cost artifact to increase perm count too.

I was a bit skeptical on Gomozoa at first but he has grown on me. I wouldn't cut any.

As far as Galvanic Arc, it is good tech but I think you need to look at it in the context of the other cards we are running.

For killing small creatures, we have meteorites, inferno titan, and obelisk(s). That is 5-6 cards. Obviously it would be nice to have more removal, but that would require more cuts. I think this deck has just enough removal to stall the game long enough to get to Warp.

Pike you listed a lot of permanents that "suck" post warp but I think sphere / capsule are great for 2 reasons. One they are a permanent instead of a spell, so even if you don't want to use them they will improve your next warp. Second they can both help you recover from a bad warp. If you get too few lands you can draw into more.

A warp deck running 4 cultivates and 2 warps is 90% permanents. If you add even two more spells, you will go down to 87%. This makes warp less reliable. You can add captain of the watch / raised by wolves etc. to compensate but there are only a few of these cards in any deck and you are not guaranteed to flip into them. Having good EtB effects is nice but the basic goal of Monk's deck is repeating warp again and again, and a high permanent ratio is key.

Elixir - this is in my list right now, my testing is limited but it hasn't impressed me.

Sculptor - 1/3 of the time I draw this guy after I already cast most of my artifacts and he isn't helpful. 1/3 of the time he makes artifacts cheaper but I am unable to do much with the extra mana. 1/3 of the time he is completely **** awesome and I dump a ton of artifact mana acceleration... although sometimes I run out of gas when this happens.

If we could run 4 ingots and 4 meteorites I probably would and sculptor would be an MVP. As it stands, it can be difficult to utilize the mana savings on the cheaper artifacts and there are only a handful of expensive artifacts. Although my testing is still limited I don't think sculptor is consistently good enough to be worth it.

I might try Ior Ruin Expedition a try - not a great card but it should help improve consistency, post warp it is better than courier's capsule as it is essentially free, if you are on 7 mana with warp in hand saccing expedition will give you a good chance to warp that turn.

Ior Ruin Expedition is a card with very serious limitations, nonetheless I think it may deserve 2-3 slots in this deck. It is card draw, with a drawback. Hurr.

The reason this card rarely shows up in any good decklists is because it is worthless if you cannot hit 3 land triggers. This is the main drawback.

And, contrary to what I thought, expedition does not get landfall triggers if it is warped into play. This is not a good thing.

On the plus side, this deck already has a significant draw / land fetch suite. Capsule and sphere work together to make Expedition easier to trigger.

At the end of the day it isn't an exciting pick but it gives this deck very strong card advantage and consistency. Expedition is an inferior card to capsule, but I think the extra draw is worth it. Getting an expedition in your opening hand might be slightly better than capsule. Later in the game it requires a few turns to work but this deck is already geared towards generating stalls.

I tried expedition and wasn't that impressed. It was too slow when you played it and after we warp I don't care about cards in hand.

I may try hedron crab as a 1 of. Seems like that is all you would need to combo mill someone. Then we can lower the curve by cutting dinrova horror? I am only brainstorming but if we can make the deck consistent when we don't find warp we might be in a good place

For some perspective on the Hedron Crab plan.

I am not entirely sure it will be enough as a 1-of, but then again, if you are only looking to include a single one as an alternate method of attack so to speak it may still work.

In the testing I have done with the Mill centric build, I usually get at least 5-10 triggers off of Crab per WW cast, but keep in mind that is also including the Kor Cartographers in the deck, which I usually hit at least 1-2 of per WW. This is also assuming I just hit 1 as well. I have had a few games now where I hit 2 Crabs off WW and literally milled someone for like 40-50 cards right on the spot.

I will say that even running all 3 Hedron Crabs there have been more than a few times I have completely bricked and didn't hit any of them off of WW. Obviously this will occur even more often if you are only running Crab as a 1-of.

This may still be worth it though, since you are not as mill centric as my build (less crabs and no cartographers) since you have more room for actual cards. Meaning you are less reliant off of hitting that single crab to win a game because you have other more direct options to rely on (such as Horror and the like).

It is the sheer amount of these cards that "suck" that makes a single cast of warp suck. The only way for this deck to perform well is for it to survive when you have to cast warp at a low perm count and pass the turn. This deck, and every other version I've built (I've done them all with Monk) will always win once the warp goes infinite. However, for same turn purposes, these suck cards to me are nearly as bad as non perms. You are correct that they certainly help rebuild after an unsuccessful warp, but the weakness in this deck is the lack of desirable warp flip win conditions if you can't keep recasting.

In the end it's all about probabilities. The best warp decks gets thru the deck as fast as possible and has a chance for desirable post warp with a lower perm count. It must be able to hit warp with a higher perm count than the opponent consistently. Cards like arc and sparkmage are nice because you can combine them with the other burn to hit undesirable flips.

Capsule and sphere also are normally cracked which reduces your perm count as well. These small counts matter when the opponent is pressing hard and you have to cast warp early. As I said, this deck will always win once you get the count high enough on a warp, but against decent opponents you dont have time to mana fix for two turns . Even a turn casting alara normally means another turn off.

Having to start on the draw is an even bigger hill to climb.

i just think waiting on Titan , alara, dinrova or meteorite for you first chance to interact with the opponent isn't going to work out as consistently as we would want any of our decks to be. For me it's all about keeping board clean until the big stuff hits.

I know this deck isn't supposed to play out like a green version, so maybe I'm just to biased with how I think it is best to curve out. I just seem to encounter turns doing nothing a lot with it.

Usually when I start warping I go infinite and eventually warp my whole deck so 1 crab plus 23 land is a win. It would allow me to cut the top end cards that plan on burning the opponent out like titan and obelisk for captain of the watch to keep the permanent count high.

Have you considered Pestermite/Frost Lynx at all?

If you are having issues surviving the early game they could be effective, and they aren't completely terrible with WW. Pestermite could be fun with Obelisk also.

Mercurial Pretender may be worth messing around with as well. There is a good chance you are going to at least have SOMETHING in terms of creatures on the table post WW, at which point you get an extra copy of whatever creature you hit off WW that will benefit you the most in the current situation. They are nice in those situations where you just manage to ramp into a fat creature early, dropping an early Inferno Titan and then cloning it is often GG. Cloning stuff like Captain/Master/Barrier for the permanents could be nice, and even just cloning a Gomazoa could be useful in a pinch. Not to mention expensive combos with stuff like Dinrova Horror.

Just something to think about.

Edit: So after playing a game with Mercurial Pretender I have come to realize it doesn't work with WW, herp derp. Should have known, since all the creatures enter at the same time.

This got me looking through the deck editor and came upon Goblin Electromancer. Has anyone messed with this guy in a WW shell at all? He doesn't do a whole lot by himself, since WW is likely the only Instant/Sorcery we are running for it to effect.

That said, it is still a 2/2 creature we can potentially play early, and since we are so heavy in red and blue already I don't think the mana would be too terrible to be able to get them out early. It helps us ramp into WW sooner, and has the potential of making chaining WW easier due to the cost reduction. It is also another symbol for Master.

Thoughts?

Electromancer is not the worst and like you said makes chaining warps easier. I may try it in the etherium sculptor slot.

Our 3 drop slot is already full, frost lynx and pestermite are worse than our other options

I don't like pestermite or lynx either.

Electromancer might be useful if we could run 4 WW. Slotting electromancer into the deck just because of the slim probability that you will draw into WW that quickly doesn't seem worth it to me. As it stands, I find it is very rare that I would want to warp on 7 mana anyway.

I am starting to lose interest in ior ruin expedition as well. It and etherium sculptor basically do what I want cards in those slots to do - speed up the deck so that it can get to warp mana faster. The problem is that neither card is really performing well enough.

I think I am going to try more galvanic arcs and arrests next. I don't like that they are both 3 mana but I am moving there via process of elimination. Arrest functions in a similar way to gomozoa, except that it can't be targeted by removal. There are not many early threats in this list so gomozoa tends to have a lot of removal targeted at it.

Here is a lower curve version of the Hedron build I posted. Played a few games with it last night and it seemed to do alright.

Lowering the curve has seemed to make it a bit more consistent in terms of devoting a ton of permanents to the board before we WW, and the deck is packed full of stuff to get us up to WW mana as quickly as possible.

With a little luck, the deck can start chaining WW as soon as T5.

T1: Island, Hedron Crab
T2: Mountain, Goblin Electromancer
T3: Mountain, Darksteel Ingot
T4: Plains, Kor Cartographer OR Meteorite
T5: Any land, WW

Not super common, but still pretty awesome when it happens.

On a slightly different note, I have been considering mucking around with Laboratory Maniac in this shell. The mill plan most certainly works, WWing into a metric ton of mill from Hedron Crab. As Babassoonist mentioned before, Kozi and Colossus are a huge pain in the neck if we are going all in on the mill plan, and Laboratory Maniac is equally annoying even though we have Meteorite to get rid of it (which works sometimes, but other times they just use instant speed draw in response and you still lose).

Which makes me wonder if we would just be better off running Laboratory Maniac ourselves to WW into and then just mill the crap out of ourselves with Crab instead. Would allow us to ignore those annoying mill-hate cards running around. Although I feel I would need to shift the deck around a bit more to include Couriers Capsule, to give US a means of drawing at instant speed to finish out games.

I may mess around with this sometime in the near future. The only thing that bothers me is that milling ourselves has the potential to hit lands and make our WW chains less consistent. Assuming we only mill ourselves when we know for sure we have enough to get the entire job done and a Maniac on the table though, it may actually work. *shrug*

I can see your point about Electromancer, but I feel like it is still worth testing out. It helps us ramp into WW, which is nice, but as you said is inconsistent with only 2 of WW. I feel the real advantage though is what else it provides for you. It is a 2/2 creature you can play on T2 to not only start upping your permanent count ASAP, but can also attack and block/chump if really needed. It also provides some more leeway post WW, since the cost reduction for every one you hit is going to make casting that next WW easier. It is another permanent with for Master as well for that devotion count.

Not saying it is great, but I feel like it is at least worth messing around with.

Eon I am not trying to put down your idea of electromancer. Test it by all means. I certainly would like more 2 drops in this deck.

Actually looking at your build makes me want to try some cartographers, although maybe not 4. Post WW they do add a permanent, but it is a tapped land.

Mana ratio is very important for WW. I think Monk's most recent list has 9 mountains, 3 ingots, and 3 meteorites in order to make immediately warping easier.

I wanted to mention one tactic I have used in order to make multiple warps easier. The turn that you warp, instead of playing a land, hold back a mountain. This slightly lowers your permanent count but it gives you a bit of a safety in warping. It can potentially require you to delay one turn before casting warp, but I think on a low permanent count having an extra red source is very handy post warp.

Normally when I do this I have a high enough permanent count anyway that I can count on getting enough mountains. And I am not suggesting you slow down a warp until you can topdeck a mountain just in order to do this.

I just wonder A) how often other people do this and B) if it has any impact on deckbuilding. If your target is 2 untapped red sources it makes multiple warps a whole lot more reliable. I am thinking of cutting an island and mountain for 2 more plains so I can slot in cartographer.

I like cartographer so far at 2 copies.

I do occasionally miss the reshuffle from elixir, but I wanted something higher impact. I am going to test Kozilek. His primary purpose will be flood insurance, I just had a game where both WW and both RSD were in my bottom 20 cards. He is a 10 mana I win button that does not have any real synergy with WW but with all of the ramp in the deck I think he should fit in.

Going infinite and killing my opponent via meteorites etc. does not work in multiplayer since you run out of time, usually I only have enough time for 3 warps. If needed Kozilek can function like an Elixir - just target him with a Dinrova -or- obelisk blue mode, and you have your shuffle. This is not as reliable as Elixir but the shuffle is not necessary unless you have already made it most of the way through your library.

I have been happy with Cartographer in my builds. He counts for 2 permanents, pre or post WW which really helps you get moving along. He also helps us ramp our way to being able to cast that first WW, since 8 isn't exactly cheap.

I could certainly see not wanting to run all 4 of them though. I only do because I am working the mill plan with Hedron Crab, where they provide even more value (since I usually hit at least 1-2 per WW cast, which is another 1-2 activations per Crab).

I think they fit well in the WW shell, especially with all of the other ramp we have available. Going T3 Ingot > T4 Cartographer or T4 Cartographer > T5 Meteorite will net you most of the mana you need to cast WW, which I have found to be a big deal against some decks where we rely on WW as pseudo removal. Without any hard removal the deck can fold hard to big resolved threats like Pelakka Wurm and its ilk. In those situations a lot of times the only option the deck has is to hit WW and either A.) replace the threat with something less threatening. B.) hit crab from WW and mill them out to win right on the spot or otherwise chain WW until you do, C.) hit a Gomazoa or something like Master to buy you time until you can Warp again.

It also gives us a creature on the table, mind you, not a very good one, but unlike the other ramp we are using (Ingot/Meteorite) it actually gives us some board presence. I personally think this is part of the appeal of Goblin Electromancer also.

So here is where I am currently



Part of the reason I am at only 2 cartographers is that I don't feel I can go above 3 plains. With 2 cartographers and 3 plains I feel like I will reliably get benefit, I am not so comfortable with 4 cartographers trying to find the same 3 plains.

Coral barrier is decent against aggro but I just feel like cartographer is better overall, providing a permanent boost and ramp for only one more mana. So barrier is down to 2.

I now have more early game white cards which may backfire with limited white sources, but arrest scales so well and cartographer is the only other real source of ramp we have access to. 3 plains, 3 ingots, 3 armillary spheres + 3 meteorites later on is decent.

With cartographer I think you can cut inferno titan and obelisk for captain of the watch.

I have pretty much nailed down the mill build to this. The only thing I am iffy about still is Goblin Electromancer but it has been working well in practice. Having a creature to play on T2 is nice, it serves decently to block/attack, helps us flood the board with cheap permanents pre-WW, helps to ramp into the first WW, and makes chaining WW easier after that first cast.

I have found them to be a huge removal magnet as well, which has worked out quite well for the deck. For whatever reason, when people see Electromancer they think diabolical things are going to come about from it sitting there on the table, and as such they seem to eat removal pretty often. Normally I wouldn't be too happy about this, but every removal spell they eat is one that isn't being aimed at a Gomazoa which you often really really need to survive, or combo pieces you don't want in your GY to increase the chances they will be hit off of WW later (Crab, Warden, etc).

Have run into Colossus and Kozi a few more times with this mill build since my last post, and I now feel they are a little less of a concern than I originally thought. We have enough mill power to deck people multiple times easily so a Kozi reshuffle isn't the end of the world, and in most of the games I have encountered them, I was able to chain WW until they land on the table, at which point they don't do anything to help them survive. Doing so actually isn't very difficult either since we can mill in conjunction with WW, and the fewer cards the opponent has in their library pre-WW the more likely we are to hit Kozi/Colossus off of WW.

I was able to play maybe 5 games last night, which isn't a huge sample size yet but things went pretty well overall.

Monk it is true that cartographer makes it somewhat easier to cast captain. But if I dropped my control elements at the 6 slot I would want to substitute coral barrier for something else.

In any event the cost wasn't the main reason for me not to run captain. I now have 5 permanent boosters with 2 barriers and 2 cartographers, in practice this has been enough for me. I feel like the marginal benefit of adding captain is too small. After I spend a few turns ramping and drawing I want more of an ability to stabilize / answer my opponent, and titan + obelisk do the job for me.

My build is performing the way I wanted it to. I mean just looking at Eon's build of course it is going to do much better during a warp in terms of boosting permanent count. But my focus has been consistency and a build that works well when I don't immediately draw into WW. Kozilek is actually amazing as a draw spell - in terms of net card advantage he is worth all 4 courier's capsules. If he wins me the game that is fine, if not he will draw me into warp. Warp adds huge inevitability but I do not want to spend every turn playing + permanent count cards that do little outside of warp.

I will also note that non-permanent boosting control elements make it easier to delay casting warp. I don't have to immediately warp when I see something nasty on the table. I can spend a few more turns building up permanents and use warp as more of a win condition than an all purpose answer.

Eon I usually see electromancers in land destruction builds, which is terrifying. If I can delay the LD for a turn maybe I can get something on the board to stick until I can survive the LD onslaught. Your build is pretty polished and I can see you doing very well off of a turn 6 warp with electromancer + ramp.