[Brewing on the League] Part 3 - HieroFUN

[mika@piefed.ca]

Heya. I’m currently playing my brews on the league - playing competitive weird decks is my jam.

I’ll be going with 1 brew each week until the end of the league - and if I get a chance, will take a strongest deck into top8 finals.

Yeh, yeh I know, tron. Tron is probably one of the most explored archetypes - and it's hard to add a meaningful input on it on top of what people already established previously.

Since you have huge amount of mana from the tron itself and all of it is colorless, you need to somehow deal with this problem - either by playing big creatures that don't require color (monster tron), or playing artifacts (artifact tron), or by converting mana to the color of any source to then have big amount of mana of any color - and to play value cards to outvalue your opponents while regaining tempo from your tron manabase (flicker-control).

This deck is based on a Flicker Tron. The issue with a Flicker Tron is that it's a very slow control deck that beats the opponents either with the Mulldrifters (yeah, that slow), or Dinrova variant locks the opponent, outcontrols and then beats it, or Roiling Thunder variant that burns the opponent down. Or you have a very very late game combo with 3 [[Urza's Tower]] 2 [[Mnemonic Wall]] [[Unwind]] [[Ghostly Flicker]] [[Weather the Storm]] [[Energy Refractor]]... yeah.

So I've invented another faster combo - I tried to search the web and it doesn't look like anyone else knows this card: [[Stone-Seeder Hierophant]] (requires to survive a turn to get rid of summoning sickness) + [[Ghostly Flicker]] that targets [[Mnemonic Wall]] & [[Urza's Tower]]. The tower returns to the board in the untapped state and untaps Hierophant. Tap tower, Hierophant untaps tower, tap tower = 6 mana, it costs 4 (with Refractor) to cast the flicker again. OR flicker an island and untap the tower with Hierophant -- it doesn't require the refractor.

The combo above gives infinite mana, if you have any ETB card draw permanent on the board - infinite draw. The only missing piece is to kill the opponent. So 2x Lush Oasis - land with ETB 1 damage.

Games

2-1 vs Monster Tron: I've lost a game where I failed to assemble a tron. Otherwise the gameplan to turbofog them just works as intended -- the piece they had against it is an Eldrazi with annihilator, but it doesn't annihilate if they have no combat, which is what happened game 3. Hit the timelimit (5 turns limit), but comboed into win.

0-1 vs Golgari Gardens: first game lasted pretty much almost the timelimit. They repeatedly nuked me with multiples of Nihil Spellbomb from the maindeck. Neither Hierophant, nor Mulldrifters survived on the board, and were later exiled. Flickering was complicated as it was answered with instant speed removals in response. Mnemonic Walls ended up getting nothing. Died to X damage on the rats after they've healed up with the x2 campfires, but it's not like it mattered, I didn't have any wincon in my last ~7 cards in the deck and I was about to deck myself faster.

The matchup would go so much different if I had Roiling Thunder. Even the Dinrova would stand a better chances. Shows why my brew is a brew and why people play different stuff competitively :)

1-1 vs Jeskai Ephemerate Skred: I've comboed into win the first game, lost the second (got denied the Refractor & ended up without colors), didn't finish the third to timelimit. The odds were fair for us both, I had the OG flicker tron combo, he had several Mulldrifters on the board - chances are I would be locked out again. Turn 4 of timelimit I tried to spin the combo but didn't have enough mana to finish it.

Overall: I think I had bad luck on the matchups. Turbofog is tuned to play vs aggro/midrange and not full blown controls.

Overall feelings

The deck is still a slugfest. A new combo speeds it up a bit but the core of spending early game to build the tron, find the ways to generate colours, and then gradual stabilization - all the while the CMC/colors math is complex and makes you think more than you should (skill issue, but other tron variants definitely have it easier).

The problem that the deck is vulnerable to so many hate options makes it just sad.

• Artifact removal, countering the artifacts -- no colours, dead.
• Wildfires - no tron, no bitches.
• Graveyard hate - the most popular pauper hate locks you out of infinite value loops, locks you out of comboes.
• Removal - still works against you.

Possible future changes

I think I will pivot the deck into multiples of Roiling Thunder while preserving some of the Hierofuns, cutting other removal / control pieces, maybe teachings & pulses of murasa.