You give up. There are hard matchups like merfolk that you can win by getting a good draw and some good sideboard cards, and outplaying your opponent, but matchups like tron are so hard that you basically can concede to save time.

You don’t. You hope to dodge it and use sidebaord hate like stony silence that is meant for other decks (affinity) to make the matchup marginally better.

The matchup is almost hopeless, and dedicating your sideboard to it takes up too many slots.

Um, how do you fight back vs Tron? That’s pretty much the worst matchup and it’s insanely popular atm.

I’m also rather unimpressed with the Shambling Vent’s performance in the deck – I don’t even like Windbrisk Heights that much in this deck because of the importance of hitting Lingering Souls, Spectral Procession, or Timely Reinforcements on curve outweighs the marginal benefits of a manland. I will grant that it gives you some post-sweeper game, but so do planeswalkers and Bitterblossom.

You also made an error when narrating your sideboarding vs. Esper Control – Dismember is -5/-5, but Gideon Jura is a 6/6. Thus, Dismember does not outright kill it, and you need the Path. You ended up keeping the Paths, but you should never have considered siding it out in the first place.

Looking at Gideon, he may seem good for the deck at first, especially if you haven’t played with Sorin for comparison, but let’s consider each of Gideon’s modes. The ultimate is the most obviously synergistic with tokens, but 4 mana for the emblem alone is wildly overcosted for this deck. You get the same effect plus vigilance for 2 mana off Intangible Virtue, and Honor of the Pure is another 2-mana option if you’re looking for more of that effect. Yes, the emblem can’t be removed and Honor doesn’t help BB tokens, and Gideon can be more than his emblem of course, but the deck already has trouble with being slow. Getting that 4 mana emblem for +1/+1 is not solving a problem the deck ever had. Second mode is making 2/2 Knight tokens, which is fine, but it’s slow. The tokens have no evasion and you only make one per turn — this deck really wants to make flying tokens that go wide fast (eg, Lingering Souls for 4 tokens, Spectral for 3). This mode on Gideon is again fine, but it’s like a worse Bitterblossom, something we can get for 2 mana. Finally there’s the plus ability to make Gideon a creature, which directly goes against a main strength of the deck, which is making our opponent’s removal spells really bad. Nobody wants to Path to Exile or Dismember one third of a Spectral Procession. Making Gideon a creature turns on all those removal spells. Even if he doesn’t die, we aren’t interested in fat ground pounders in this deck, and that’s all Gideon’s plus is. (That’s why we’re not playing things like Gurmag Angler when we easily could.) That’s not to say Gideon is a bad card — obviously he can win the game on his own, but he’s not fixing any problems this deck has, and he’s not as synergistic as you might think at first. Whereas he might be an 8/10 in some decks, this deck only sees him as a 6/10 with better options.

With Sorin, instead of having to -4 to get an anthem, you’re instead adding loyalty, and the added lifelink is really, really relevant to the deck. You said it yourself in the wrap-up that the deck is doing powerful things in the mid-to-late game, but it’s slow to get that engine going. Sorin ideally comes down turn 4 when you’ve got a full board and immediately gains 6-9 life, threatening to get out of control really fast. With Intangible Virtue giving an extra boost plus vigilance, you can easily get out of burn range and make your opponent unable to race. His minus makes an evasive token, which is much better than Gideon’s Knight, though it is also rather slow. And the Sorin ultimate is quite realistic in this deck, though of course not something you can count on. I’ve definitely emblemed Sorin a lot more in this deck, when you really want to plus him, than in a deck like Abzan in Standard last season that tended to have just one or two creatures, so they would minus Sorin right away for guaranteed value.

Ok, enough pontificating for now. 😉 Thanks for the videos! I think BW Tokens needs the right metagame to be good (lots of fair, attrition-y decks), but when that metagame shows up, it’s *really* good.

PS – I think the deck deserves 1 Murderous Cut, as Delve is a ridiculous mechanic and we’re not using the graveyard heavily for anything else, so it’s just an unused part of the buffalo. 🙂

I haven’t watched the videos yet, but looked at the list and read the intro, excited to watch when I’m home from school