I personally would keep the shocks for that added early protection. Chasm skulker is a bad card in my opinion but more so in this deck! You can't protect it with cloudshift becuase it loses its counters. It is easily shocked to death. And finally there isn't the card draw to support it (even then I always feel it really isn't worth it.)

The skulkers have actually worked out really well for what i intend them to do. They are cheap monsters to bait removal spells since people tend to fear skulkers getting big. They might ignore a lesser creature but skulkers and/or rabblemasters are 3 CC creatures that tend to attract immediate attention. If they do last, they have the packleaders to buff them. I already have the ground assaults for early defense and the rhox and thoctars hit turn 3. If the skulkers start failing me, ill reconsider but as of right now I am 6-1 with this deck. and the one loss is because of severe mana flood

Other cards are better quicker and bait removal equally. I would encourage you to ask yourself if the skulker is REALLY worth the spot. From my personal experiences, it was mostly not.

Skulker is just so slow and easy to disrupt. One of the **** rares in the game.

I'm open to suggestions.

If you are speaking in regards to the Warden Surge deck I posted then I have to say I really do think the Shocks are worth it.

The deck is already packed full of significant threats so I don't believe we need to go out of our way to swap out removal for threats.

Shock by itself is a very significant card, it hits a lot of high value targets which make it pretty good already as just general spot removal. Having instant speed removal also helps a ton in certain matchups (Aura decks), and the fact is is cheap helps a lot against the faster aggro decks that can potentially kill you (or get you most of the way there) before you get a chance to set up.

Beyond this, it works particularly well in this shell for a number of reasons. The deck already focuses on burn quite a bit (with Warstorm Surge, Banefire, Ground Assault, and Inferno Titan) so Shocks also help significantly to provide reach to burn people out, or in combination with other spells/activations to burn out tougher creatures (Thoctar with Surge on the table+ Shock = dead Sheoldred or whatever).

The deck also runs the full number of Warden as well, so the deck is often able to recycle them if/when needed, which can also be very helpful in certain matchups.

I tried the shocks and they have been working quite well. Sorry I doubted you.

This is the (mostly) final evolution of the Triumph of Ferocity deck.

It's pretty simple.. do what Triumph of Ferocity wants you to do.. have the biggest/best creatures on the board and beat face.

I found some sorta decent synergy with Triumph, Reprisal and the creatures in this deck. The early creatures in this deck are all 3/4, 5/4 or (a single) 3/3 (Rafiq). Anything big enough to kill your creatures, is in Reprisal range. Anything out of Reprisal range.. your creatures can favorably block/attack into usually. This makes keeping Triumph of Ferocity active pretty consistent. You also have 3x Ground Assault for whatever Reprisal can't hit.. Anger for chumps and Planar Cleansing in case it all goes to hell. Post Cleansing.. you can drop a 3 drop creature and Triumph to start drawing/recovering right away. All the creatures in this deck survive Anger except Rafiq and Wrecking Ogre (who isn't a creature we're going to be hardcasting.. he's just there for the Bloodrush ability).

There are lots of ways to close the game out with this deck. Wrecking Ogre on a lot of your creatures is a devastating blow, but especially with Terra Stomper (22 damage). Stormbreath, Inferno Titan and Baneslayer can each take over the game, Rafiq is sick with a lot of these creatures. Craterhoof solves the stalled board if all else fails.

Garruk's Packleader and Triumph together is a ton of draw. You can cut one copy of Triumph for one copy of Hunter's Prowess if you like.. it works good here with pretty much all the creatures.

Traveler's Amulet and 12 taplands is how we get away with this greedy ass manabase. I don't want Cultivate here bc at turn 3 mana I want to play a creature.. I need to mana fix before turn 3. Armillary Sphere can't do that. If I can play a 3 drop on curve.. I can then slam another or I can play Triumph on turn 4. The deck only needs to get to 6 mana.. there are no 7 drops, and Craterhoof isn't likely going to be played on curve.

Anyway.. check it out, play it.. let me know what you think. Big thanks to HenWen for suggesting Traveler's Amulet.. it was a great call.

I remade your deck into something like this and it runs really smooth, I especially like Wrecking Ogre as a surprise ;-)



Great idea with Bant + Red. I love fatz!

You're a brave man going in without those Traveler's Amulets.. those things did work for me, allowing Brimaz/Thoctar/War Monk to come out on turn 3. I really liked them better than Cultivate. I had a few Pelakkas in earlier versions.. but I really didn't feel the deck needed another expensive trampler. Honestly.. Terra Stomper hasn't performed that well either.. and Craterhoof is there just as an out to stalled boards.

Let me know how Angelic Edict performs over Reprisal.. and if you ever wish you had a Planar Cleansing.

Amulets have a very niche application and cultivate is better in 90% of the decks where you can cast it. I have built 30-50 decks in this game and I think amulet is only good in three of them. Nonetheless, when it works it is awesome. The "installment payment" casting cost (1 to cast 1 to crack) works well for decks that want to play a lot of taplands but still have a reasonable curve starting at 3. I am glad I can consider you a "convert" mega - ok perhaps not an amulet convert in a general sense, but at least it works here for casting 3 drop bombs on time.

I will take some time to look at your new list. I guess with craterhoof the fact that it adds trample makes up for the lower creature count? I know craterhoof is awesome, but in general I am not a fan of overrun effects since they do not help if you are behind.

Craterhoof is there mainly as an answer to Spider Spawning.. where you'll draw a zillion cards, have a ton of creatures that can't get through. The only other answer to that scenario is Terra Stomper with the double strike options. Other than that.. Hoof serves as another way to close out the game. The deck could get by without it.. but what would you put in instead of it? Pelakka Wurm? If anything I'd like the curve to go down some. I liked topping out at 6 mana. The manabase could support Soul of Ravnica.. and the draw option would be viable in this color combo.

There's also Tectonic Rift for stall situations :-)

So here is something I put together last night and was playing.

Testing has gone extremely well honestly. I didn't keep track of my W/L ratio last night, but I know I was at least in the positive.



Basically it is a Turbo-Fog deck that sort of lacks the "Turbo" aspect.

The deck was created as a way to make Burning Inquiry actually do something, but after a bit of testing they ended up getting replaced with Thassa's Bounty. Burning Inquiry actually worked pretty well in this shell because of the redundancy in spell effects, so dumping something you need wasn't the end of the world because there was a very good chance you either had another sitting in your hand, a Warden/Archaeomancer to get it back, or enough draw to cycle into another one. The biggest reason I ended up replacing it honestly was because of how terrible it is being cast when you have an empty hand. Thassa's Bounty does the same thing Burning Inquiry did, but isn't terrible with 0 cards in hand and doesn't have the chance to dump stuff we need.

Anyways, the deck performs surprisingly well considering the fact it has almost no actual win-cons.

The capability of the deck to stall games is absolutely stupid. We have a total of 10 Fog type effects, which doesn't seem like a lot for something like this. Consider also though that the deck runs 3x Warden and 3x Archaeomancer to continually reuse those Fog effects. We also have Elixir of Immortality, which not only reshuffles our Fog effects, but also any Warden/Archaeomancer that ends up in the yard. Add in the draw effects (Wall of Omens/Think Twice/Thassa's Bounty) to draw into them as quickly and often as possible.

In practice, at least thus far, the deck has been able to have a Fog effect at the ready almost every turn.

In the few scenarios where we don't have a Fog effect, the creatures in the deck do a decent job of blocking/chumping, and having them sent to the GY isn't terrible because Elixir allows us to shuffle them back in and reuse them again.

The deck is also able to take a relatively large amount of punishment in those scenarios where it has to just eat an attack. Resolute Archangel is stupid good here, because we can do silly things like taking damage until we get really low on life, then proceed to Fog forever until you hit an Angel. Incidental life gain from Elixir certainly helps in this aspect as well.

Traumatic Visions is here because having hard counters in decks like these tend to be very helpful. I originally started with Dissolve simply due to the mana cost, and may eventually make the switch back. The main reason I made the swap to Traumatic Visions was because of the land cycling effect. The deck seems to rarely need a lot of fixing early on, but having it when you DO need it is nice, and tossing the card into the GY isn't a big deal at all because we have Warden/Archaeomancer and Elixir to make sure we can still use them as a Counterspell even after we have cycled them.

Thassa's Bounty is pretty obvious, keeps our hand full of Fog effects and helps us to mill. Think Twice and Wall of Omens are the same, helping to keep the Fogs rolling.

Planar Cleansing is pretty obvious, helping to reset the board. Warden/Archaeomancer allows us to reuse them multiple times, and the same with Elixir. Elixir allows us to nuke our own creatures without fear because they can always be reshuffled.

Chill of Foreboding is probably the strangest card in the deck, and likely the card that sticks out to most people when they look over the deck as a whole.

This is a card that I hated for the longest time because it is generally just bad (look at the mana economy between Chill of Foreboding and Tome Scour for example, let alone something like Hedron Crab).

When I first put the deck together though I decided to try out a single copy and after playing for a bit I ended up adding a second copy because of how good it actually functioned in the deck.

The card does a whole lot more for the deck than it would seem. The main function of the deck is to just Fog every turn until the opponent is milled out. Doing so off of nothing but your opponents draws and Thassa's Bounty takes a LONG time, but actually IS possible. Chill of Forebording helps to speed this up somewhat, in that each copy represents a total of 10 cards milled after Flashed back. The card can also be cycled with Elixir if you don't flash it back to mill for an additional 5 when you draw into it later. It can also be grabbed with Warden/Archaeomancer for the same effect (and the deck CAN survive up to the point of getting enough mana to do stupid stuff like Warden getting back Chill>Chill>Flash back Chill to mill for 10 on the spot to potentially finish out a game).

Now the other mill choices in most cases are generally better (like I mentioned Crab earlier), but Chill of Foreboding opens up a lot of different options for us.

It mills the opponent, but also mills US. Meaning it helps us push through our mill plan, but it also mills cards into our GY for Warden/Archaeomancer, and milling our self isn't hugely terrible because we have Elixir to reshuffle the cards we mill if needed. Due to the nature of the deck, we very often get up to enough mana to be able to Flash it back (and often still have enough mana left over to cast a Fog the same turn), so the card not only represents a total of 10 cards milled from your opponent, but also 10 cards milled into your own deck. This is particularly helpful with Warden/Archaeomancer for getting the cards we need when we need them, helping to make sure we always have a Fog when we need it, or helping to sift through the deck to pick out the few copies of Planar Cleansing when we need them.

Hitting Think Twice off of them isn't terrible either, as they can be Flashed back to sift even further, and once we have them Exiled they thin out the deck even more (which is also true for Chill once it is Flashed back), which makes a considerable difference in the late game by lowering the amount of non-Fog cards you draw into (since the real end game here is just casting Fog all day until your opponent dies of boredom). Once you get a decent amount of your mana on the table and flash back a few of these cards, you get to the point where almost everything in your library is either a Fog effect, a card that gets a Fog effect back, or a card that draws into a Fog effect. Add Elixir to continually cycle them and you literally DO get to the point where you can Fog out an entire persons library.

People will probably hate you if you play this deck online though. It functions almost identically to the more traditional Turbo-Fog style decks, in that it wins by Fogging every turn until you mill people out, but because we lack good options to push both draw AND mill at the same time (like Howling Mine, Rites of Flourishing, etc) it takes FOREVER to do so.

Before anyone mentions it, yes, this deck really does hate Banefire lmao!

Eon there is a lot to like about this list. I tried a fog build when the game came out and didn't have much luck with it, but that was before some of the recent updates.

I have no problem with stall out decks, that said I find mill win conditions kinda puzzling in this meta. If you swapped chill of foreboding with satyr wayfinder you would have 4/5 the self mill for 2/3 of the cost, and get a body and a land in the process. Obelisk of Alara is a perfectly good win condition that is much faster than self mill and provides an answer to banefire. The eye wardens can also get it back from your GY if need be.

I am also curious if you tested species gorger at 1 or 2 copies.

If you are really dedicated to the mill plan, then two things come to mind. One is laboratory maniac, which can take the slots occupied by Elixir and provides you an answer to kozilek. The other is suffer the past, which provides an answer to Kozilek and significant lifegain at instant speed - the angel is better against aggro, but the lifegain from suffer is better against banefire IMO.

Last but not least, I like having a singleton copy of that 1U bounce spell that works on one of your creatures and an opponent's creatures. It can be used on warden/mancer for endless bounces, or it can just provide a way to re-use warden / mancer. You can keep two creatures permanently locked down this way (block one creature with mancer, bounce the mancer and the unblocked creature during combat).

This is a fair assessment. I mostly decided to try the mill route because the original idea for the deck was based around trying to make Burning Inquiry work somewhere, which was later replaced by Thassa's Bounty, both basically functioning as gimp versions of the more traditional draw+mill spells that Turbo-Fog decks usually run. Chill of Foreboding was just something I wanted to mess around with but proved to be good enough to actually want to run.

For reference, comparing Chill of Foreboding to Satyr Wayfinder. Wayfinder has the advantage of giving you a creature and a land in addition to the self mill, along with being cheaper.

Chill on the other hand allows us the mill the opponent at the same time, self-mills for more (both before and after Flashback), has potential synergy with Warden/Archaeomancer, helps to thin the deck in the late game (by being Exiled by Flashback), and doesn't require us to run more Green sources to be able to facilitate being able to cast them early on.

If we moved away from the whole Mill plan the deck would probably be more solid to be honest. Doing so would likely mean swapping out Thassa's Bounty for Inspiration, and Chill of Foreboding for some other non-mill based Win-Con.

Obelisk of Alara as you pointed out would be very good here, as would Sphinx-Bone Wand (which is something I had been considering myself).

The deck survives plenty long enough to get the mana up to run Kozi ourselves if we really wanted.

Charmbreaker Devils could be an interesting option as well. Getting back spells from the yard while also beating face. I could see some silly stuff happening with a Charmbreaker bringing back Safe Passage every turn lol.



I have not, didn't even consider it to be honest. Something to consider for sure.



I don't feel we are dedicated enough to the self-mill plan to try and win using Laboratory Maniac.

Kozilek is certainly a potential problem. I honestly considered running hate to deal with Kozi, but decided against it mostly due to the fact that Kozi seems to be very uncommon in the 360 meta, at least in my experiences. The two cards I considered were Angelic Edict and Suffer the Past, both of which are pretty good with the Warden/Archaeomancer plan.

Angelic Edict would answer Kozi and give us another out to certain annoying Enchantments, but is another slow and expensive card.

Suffer the Past can answer Kozi and Snipe some other annoying GY targets while adding a bit more Life gain to the deck to combat more aggressive decks and stall for longer. Suffer would require adding in the fifth color (Black) which is certainly do-able but would require reworking the mana and potentially cause some slight consistency issues.

On an off note, this deck isn't a big fan of opponents casting Suffer the Past either, Life loss =/= damage, and it snipes our Fog effects out of the GY.




Ha, I actually considered this, and for awhile ran a single copy of Cloudshift, which is the same basic principle.

I kinda forgot you were running red. Charmbreakers is slightly more vulnerable than species gorger and random, but the mana savings are very significant.

All of my suggestions taken together would require changing like half of your deck. I will try to test it as you posted it first, mainly wanted your thoughts on a few things. I do play on steam though and Kozi is in a good 15% of decklists.

I feel like regardless of if we are going mill or not, the base of the deck is pretty much locked at something like this.



This leaves us with 14 cards left to swap in and out.

My personal suggestion would be to run at least 8-10 of those cards as some sort of draw effects. How we go about that is up for debate. Wall of Omens, Elvish Visionary, Think Twice, Courier's Capsule and Inspiration are all potential options. I feel like Thassa's Bounty is actually decent here as well. Compared to Inspiration it looks meh, being Sorcery speed and costing 2 more, but it draws us 1 more cards and mills 3 cards into our own yard for Warden/Archaeomancer, Inspiration is still probably better though.


Which leaves 4-6 slots left for Win-Cons and/or assorted utility. There are a lot of options here as well.

Charmbreaker Devils and Species Gorger are Win-Cons that also facilitate the Fog plan, but tend to be the least resilient of the options. Charmbreaker has the advantage in mana economy, but Gorger is a more reliable beater.

Sphinx-Bone Wand and Obelisk of Alara are more resilient Win-Cons but don't work as well to facilitate the Fog plan. Bone Wand probably gets the job done faster in this shell. Obelisk gives a ton of other useful utility options though (The Blue and White modes helping to progress the Fog/stall plan, and the Black mode being a potentially good reason to splash Black for some added removal when needed).

Suffer the Past (if you want to splash Black) and Banefire are both good options as well even in the non-mill plan, since the deck stalls out to stupidly high mana totals and they both work with Warden/Archaeomancer. Suffer having the added utility from the Life gain and Exile effects, with Banefire being more consistent due to not needing cards in the GY to activate and its potential to bypass Counterspells (both bypass Damage Prevention effects so that is sort of a moot point).

Counterspells are always nice in Fog decks like this. Dissolve and Traumatic Visions both work well enough, especially with Warden/Archaeomancer support.

There are probably a few other niche ways you could take a non-mill build. Talrand, Sky Summoner and Guttersnipe being such options. The deck could potentially even have the old Infinite Time Warp combo thrown into the mix. There is potentially room to mess with some other effects as well, like Cloudshift or Peel from Reality like you mentioned before.

I had time to do a little testing mainly against the AI, which generally gets stellar draws but plays like a novice in terms of overcommitting to the board. I ran your stock list.

I was mostly playing against my own decks which are probably not representative of your Xbawks meta or my steam meta. I just forfeited games against warp world and dimir control.

Against the other decks things generally felt pretty solid. Once this deck gets going with planar cleansing in GY you can recur it at will and it is pretty tough for most decks to recover.

I lost games against "standard" decks for two main reasons:
1. Not hitting my land drops. I always had enough fog effects, I didn't have many mana color issues, but if you can't reach 6 mana on time you are doomed.
2. Not getting planar cleansing. I have been able to successfully stall the game long enough to draw half of my deck, but sooner or later your opponent will have stuff on the board that you need to deal with. If you have access to fog and cleansing in your GY the deck performs very consistently.

My #1 suggestion would be to include Satyr Wayfinder at 4 copies. Just a stellar utility card, and the 1/1 body is quite relevant when you are spamming safe passage.
Another suggestion would be time warp. It fulfills the same function as fog... and more. It costs a lot but with all the 'mancers/wardens you can recur it a lot.
I have not been happy with Elixir here. It is a bit of a nonbo with warden/mancer. You can delay the shuffle but it can be really hard to use it for lifegain in the early game.

The previous were suggestions that I think would improve the list your posting. I also came up with my own version:


It is working pretty well. I don't have much experience working with fog decks and I just sort of assumed it wouldn't work here due to the absence of cheap draw effects. The curve is a little heavy on 6 drops but I think fog effects make it pretty easy to get to 6 mana.

Obelisk is something that needs to stick for a few turns, so it requires a bit of planning on when to use it vs cleansing. Mainly it is intended to serve as a cleansing substitute for when you cannot draw into it.

I still want to resolve the Kozilek issue before I take it online. Obelisk can burn someone down eventually, a 7 turn clock is entirely reasonable for this deck. I played against the AI piloting Danno's cloudshift deck and the game lasted forever, I wiped the board 6 times and killed his Kozilek 5 times, I only drew into mine once. Unfortunately the AI was also wiping my board so obelisk didn't stick long enough to kill it.
I guess I see the options as:
Angelic edict - probably the most flexible and best overall.
Suffer the past - I don't think we need help vs spider spawning, although the potential lifegain + nuke is nice. Good against banefire
Time warp combo - casting the full combo in one turn is at least 14 mana, but we should usually have 'mancer/warden sitting around so it can be done for 10.

Edict is the most practical but I think this deck might be one of the best setups for the infinite combo yet.

I reworked the build into a non-mill version and took it online last night.

I have to admit that overall, I did pretty terrible with the deck, but I feel like that had more to do with the decks I kept running up against. Lost 2 games directly to Banefire, and a couple of other games to people having multiple counterspells in a row (getting 2 Fog effects canceled on the same turn feels terrible). Ran into a few Control decks, and even ran into someone else playing a Fog list.

Throughout the night I made a bunch of small changes here and there to try and shore things up.

I started with this




By the end of the night the list looked more like this



The mana may be a little off, since I don't have the game open at the moment, so I rebuilt the mana base off of memory.

Anyways, these changes were a result of the multitude of matches I played online last night.

The two biggest changes IMO are.

The inclusion of Counterspells. Having an answer to annoying non-combat damage threats like Obelisk and Guttersnipe is very useful. Since the deck relies heavily on Planar Cleansing to answer these sorts of things. It is also another answer for burn spells aimed directly our face, where we normally have to rely on having Safe Passage, or a nice large life buffer to deal with. Having them around makes Skullcrack seem much less threatening.

The biggest use IMO though is in protecting our own game plan. Having a Fog effect get countered can be particularly devastating if you don't have a second one to cast to cover yourself. Having Counterspells around helps to make sure that our Fogs get through when we really need them to.

The same is true of Planar Cleansing. The deck often relies on being able to use (and reuse) Planar Cleansing to reset things and keep the board clear to supplement the Fog effects. Having PC get countered can be particularly bad, so having some protection for the effect around seems to be worthwhile.


The second change was slipping in the Banefire/Suffer. This was a result of realizing the vulnerability of our own Win-Cons here. Relying on a couple copies of Obelisk/Bone-Wand as our Win-Cons was causing some issues.

Having Obelisk/Bone-Wand either eat removal or a counterspell can be very annoying, as can having to cast Planar Cleansing when you have them on the table.

Of course we have Warden around, so having them blown up isn't a HUGE issue, because we can get them back relatively easily. The problem is the slowdown that this tends to produce. Spending 6-7 mana on a win-con then having it blown up, then having to spend another 5 mana to get it back, and another 6-7 mana after that to replay the win-con can be very slow and cumbersome, especially if you are trying to keep mana up for Fog effects to stay alive, or for Draw spells to grab Fog effects to stay alive. Even more so when you consider how slow of a clock Obelisk/Bone-Wand actually is (Bone-Wand can of course potentially be very fast, but requires multiple Instant/Sorcery casts to do so, and gets reset if it gets blown up and then later replayed).

Which is why I am now going to work on testing out some of these non-permanent based win-cons, which are less likely to get blown up (both by our opponents and by our own PC), and also happen to work well with Warden/Archaeomancer as well. To be honest with you, I think this was part of the advantage that the original Mill version of the deck had, in that is really didn't care at all about opponents having removal/counterspells in regards to killing the opponent, and didn't have the issue of having to potentially destroy our own win-cons with PC.