Love your deck, Garren. Well, I feel like a douchebag for playing elves, but I love winning.

Edit. But how do you feel about Thornbow Archer?
Edit2: Realized you answered that in the previous page.. ^.^

Golgari Control/Ramp is legit. I messed around with the archetype tonight and I'm pretty impressed. Evolutionary Leap and Liliana is sick, Liliana+Nissa on the field together works great, Gaea's Revenge trumps so much, Erobos Titan does too but to a lesser extent, Kothophed too. All that good black removal, a bunch of early trash to use Bone Splinters on/sac to Evolutionary Leap. I'm gonna post my deck soon.

One thing I noticed is that, when you sac a creature to Evolutionary Leap, their death doesn't trigger Kothophed's Ping-You-Now-Draw-1 ability.

Kothophed only triggers on opponents creatures.

I too think Golgari evolutionary leap is one off the stronger decks. I plan on building a control deck in these colours.

I could see splashing red for flame conjuring too.

Monk Covertblue has been playing at the top ranks in ipad for like a month now. He discusses his experience in his duels diaries. He says that Golgari and Rakdos slow, grindy decks are dominant in this meta.

You could join them of course, I prefer to circumvent it and try going creatureless (with a heavy dose of enchant removal), but I haven't unlocked all the cards yet.

I think Covertblue's "diaries" are a great resource for understanding the meta.

This.

I mean the guy is logging literally hundreds of games using different decks and noticing what he's playing against, and what is working. It's such an insane piece of intelligence that I'm surprised Edward Snowden hsn't shared it with the entire world.

I'm with you Hen, I don't think that a deck that is "dominant in this meta" is necessarily the one to be playing, just because it's popular. In fact, quite the reverse, the deck you should be playing is the one that counters the dominant deck. I've built a crappy version of your Jeskai and am having fun with it.

When Blue says that Golgari and Radkos grind are dominant in this meta, he means they're everywhere or that they're winning the most, or both?

Got a link? I did a search for "covertblue diaries" but it didn't bring anything up.

Lockhammer and I brewed up a pretty stout Golgari Control/Ramp list. I'm pretty satisfied with it. Feedback is welcome.

4x Bone Splinters

4x Perilous Myr
4x Gatecreeper Vine
4x Elvish Visionary
2x Evolutionary Leap
4x Reave Soul

1x Liliana, Heretical Healer
1x Nissa, Vastwood Seer
4x Nissa's Pilgrimage

1x Erebos's Titan
2x Languish

2x Outland Colossus

2x Kothophed, Soul Hoarder

2x Gaea's Revenge

8x Swamps
8x Forests
6x Taplands
1x Rogue's Passage

The deck just clobbers people. There's nice little synergies all over the place. Both Planeswalkers are super easy to flip. There's plenty of nice closers too. It really holds early aggro down.well. The late game is superb.

Only change I have on this list is replacing one Evolutionary Leap one Kothophed, Soul Hoarder with two Necromantic Summons. Also running 5 B, 7 G, 6 Taplands, 1 Rogue's Passage, and 4 Evolving Wilds.

^
Awesome deck.

I'm pretty surprised not to see a Gilt Leaf Winnower in a black control list. There's a target for it is pretty much every deck.

The deck looks like it might flood out a bit if you don't draw Leap or if Leap gets removed. There isn't any actual card draw so if your opponent is able to go one for one with your threats you might just run out of gas. Have you had any problems with that?

I could see Necromantic Summons being good.. but I'm not making those.particular cuts for.it. I really like Kothophed.. and Evolutionary Leap is so good it's practically a win condition.

Card draw:
Nissa
Kothophed
Elvish Visionary
Evolutionary Leap
Gatecreeper Vine
Nissa's Pilgrimage

The deck actually rips through itself pretty quick.

Does the fact that kotophed's ability reads creatures OWNED mean that if you steal a creature then sac it, the ability still triggers?
If so I might have to move over to the rakdos thread for a bit :3.

Only if it dies in the other player's possession.

Yeah, usually 10-20 cards ahead of most other players. You ramp quickly through.

I don't really count cyclers like visionaries as card draw, the only advantage it gains you without Leap is a 1/1 token. It's a fantastic draw spell if you have Leap in play, but without Leap it will be drawing you land or or land fetcher over 1/3 of the time. Same to cards like pilgrimage and Gatecreeper. Nissa and Kothophed do a better job, but it seems like if the opponent has spells that read "destroy target creature" at instant speed the best you can ever do is go 1 for 1 and then draw a lot of land. Gaea's Revenge might get you a 2 for 1, but most decks can get 5 power on the board by turn 7 so they can block it. Without Leap there just isn't reliable draw.

I'm probably a bit biased since my tendency is to run control decks that include enchantment destruction. For instance, Conclave Naturalists or Reclamation Sage is pretty much an auto include for me in lists like the one you posted. I suppose the current meta and my preferences are different, so your deck might be well positioned for online play. I'll test it out once I open Leap.

I can see why you wouldn't count a lot of those cards as "draw" since we're not just pulling cards off the top of the library. The deck does what it's supposed to.. get lands early while holding down the fort with cards that replace themselves or remove attackers.. then play some of the few super powerful bombs in the game. All that "draw" thins the deck very quickly, so our actual draws are better. Very easy to activate Spell Mastery and get 3 lands with Pilgrimage.

Yeah this deck looks like it ramps up to 10+ mana every game but doesn't include X-spells, a lot of top end, or any way to chain draws and play a lot of cards per turn without Evolutionary Leap. Something like a Genesis Hydra would be ideal here, but the pool is what it is.

Anyway, Now that I think about it I haven't actually seen anyone besides me running a lot of artifact/enchantment hate, so relying on Leap a bit should be fine. I wouldn't ever drop the second Leap in a deck like this though. Drawing a ton of land also makes Liliana better, since you always have extra cards to discard and tick her up. Normally I don't really care whether Pilgrimage draws me 2 or 3 lands if my top end is 2 seven drops, but getting an extra card and then forcing mutual discard seems great.

It's all about the deck thinning. Lockhammer is running max copies of Evolving Wilds in his list for even more thinning.. I'm probably gonna test it, as it amplifies a part of the deck that's already a strength. I think my worst matchup here would be Mill..