Sideboarding is one of the trickiest things about Counter-Cat! Be sure to check out my articles on the deck here by clicking on the tag at the bottom of this article, as well as the thread I run on MTGSalvation. A lot of good info has been published already.

Thanks for sharing, Jeremy. At the end of the day, Magic is a game, and for most, games exist to have fun! So whether you opt for the safer, winninger deck or the more thrilling rogue pile, make sure you’re enjoying your hours spent playing.

Another aspect I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is learning, something I love to do re: Magic and get to do a lot of when I do lose. Free-win games handed to me by a fast Chalice of course offer less introspection and growth. So that might be something to consider, too!

Jeremy that is very similar to my experience with Modern (different decks but same concept). I play good decks and win but don’t enjoy it, I play bad decks and lose and don’t enjoy it. Why am I playing this game again? My “sweet spot” is probably playing bad decks that win, which is just not going to happen consistently – but every so often I go on a string of wins with some tier 3 pile and think “maybe this is it”, go on a run for a couple weeks and then start getting disillusioned again when the losses start piling up.

I keep thinking I’m no the next humans or next hollow one or next mardu pyromancer, but mostly I’m just on the next allies.

Currently trying to get proficient with blue tron

When I went back to MTG in 2013 after a 8 years break, I chose to focus almost exclusively on Modern. I remember, I was looking at what was performing at the time and one deck caught my eyes. Jund! It had everything I thought I liked in the game: a huge beater, answers, card draw with bob, planewalkers, etc. Took me a couple years of playing brews, Affinity sometimes before I was finally able to gather everything up and when I did… Something didn’t clicked. I somewhat improved my win-rate sure but I wasn’t having fun. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, considering how excited I was and it took me a while to figure out the issue (a mixed bag of not liking: discard spells, the slowness, being in topdeck mode).

And that’s about when something really cool happened… You posted your very first article here on Monkey Grow! Gave it a try for a change and just fell in love with it. There’s one word that sums it up, I think you use it regularly in your articles. It’s *thrilling* to play. But my win rate crashed.

Since then, it’s been a roller coaster, made worse by the fact that I can only practice a few hours in a month for the game. Play midrange without any real motivation? Or tempo (Monkey Grow and Counter-Cat have been my main weapons of choice, with some Eternal Command mixed in) but struggle to win? I still haven’t found an answer. I thought I had when I got murdered at a GP in February and thought to myself “never anything below T1 again!” but it’s never that simple, right? 😉

That updated Counter-Cat build looks cool though and maybe you’re right, maybe the “bar of competitiveness” isn’t as high as people think and I should focus on what I love.
Keep up the great work and thanks for reading my not so exciting story, cheers! 🙂

Yeah it is interaction light but it’s interaction is very potent. Eternal cryptic locks are the cleanest answer to creatures. It’s clock is also much much faster than it looks because the arbor elf utopia sprawl puts me so far ahead on Mana (also oracle for semi ramp) that alot of the time I kill them around turn 6-7. It only really struggles with aggro where blocking is not an option. Infect, affinity elves , and Merfolk are the only truly bad matchups, and are nearly unwinnable. Meanwhile burn, zoo, taxes and humans are hard to lose.

As of yet I haven’t found a very clean solution. Dismember will almost definitely be replacing one sideboard slot before Vegas.

But yeah. Goofy value is super fun. I’d say give it a few plays but it’s definitely not the playstyle you’re into haha.

Ha, that’s so fun! It does look interaction-light to me for how slow the clock is, but if you’re winning, you’re winning. Dismember/Gut Shot are options for Pyromancer and friends, even in the sideboard.

Before Modern was announced, I was buying up foil playsets of singles in UG that tickled me to build casual decks with… Familiar’s Ruse, Ninja of the Deep Hours, Kitchen Finks, Spellstutter Sprite, Coiling Oracle all among them. So I can relate to loving goofy value plays in UG!

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/eternal-clone/

You’re gonna have to trust me when I say it plays much better than it looks. Midrange and control are 80-20 matchups (except mardu which is more like 50-50, pyromancer is hard to deal with), combo is like 60-40. Humans I’m still sitting at 100% win rate with a 4-0 so far without dropping a single game.

Basically the deck finds what’s good in the matchup, then doubles, triples, quadruples that aspect of the deck.

Need lifegain? Fink’s, bellower a Fink’s, clone a finished, bring it back with witness.

Same thing with witness for grindy

Plus the Ewitness cackling counterpart combo is nuttttssss.

I know it looks goofy on paper but in practice it’s really formidable. Turn 2 cryptic command is no joke.

My friend and I read through your post slowly and tried to guess what deck you were on (we succeeded)! Thanks for the comment.

Proactive: I knew I wanted to be the one trying to end the game, not the one trying to stabilize.

Metagame-resistant: I didn’t want a deck that thrived off of tuning for a specific metagame, I wanted a deck that would be 80% at full strength no matter what metagame I went into (outside of a metagame filled with decks hostile to mine).

Redundant/Consistent: I knew I wanted a pile of four-ofs, not a deck where I was hedging my bets and hoping I could select the cards I needed through draw/filtering.

Hard to ban out: I didn’t want my whole deck to rest on a single card, so that if it got too strong it would be easily banned from the format by Wizards.

A tight 60/75: I wanted a deck that was already at optimal capacity, and that few future cards could be printed that would be auto-includes in the deck.

Consistently tier one or two: I wanted a deck that was always decently powerful, something where it would rarely be a bad idea to play it.

Fair or “fair” and ideally not blue-based: I really don’t care for combo decks, and wanted to feel like I was playing traditional Magic. I also just prefer not to play blue. My favorite way of playing Magic is to be the police force against decks trying to do ridiculous things.

All of these requirements together put me on Burn, the deck I’ve played pretty much solely ever since I got into the format. No regrets.

The quotation is from this SCG article, where he does go into more detail about why he thinks Jund currently isn’t good and Mardu is: http://www.starcitygames.com/articles/37114_Beating-Humans-At-SCG-Louisville.html

Well, it doesn’t belong there anymore! But before Gerry brought the deck to the big stage, selfiesk was the one dude playing it, and who went through enough tuning iterations to find the functioning shell that resembled the final product. I posit there are many such decks in Modern, and it takes passionate players to carve them out of the woodwork. For instance, I wouldn’t be surprised if UR Prowess has a higher win rate than its metagame shares currently speak to, especially in the hands of an expert.

That’s a funny quote from Collins btw. While overall I think I agree with his sentiment, it’s a shame he used such vague language.

Mardu Pyromancer doesn’t belong in the “fringe deck that one person does well with” category. I’m pretty sure it’s been putting up more results than Jund recently. Collins Mullen, the man who put the Humans deck on the map, recently described it as “like Jund except it’s actually good”.

Who knows if they care, but I do! Want to share a list with us?

I remember you playing each of those decks, and used to describe you to people as “The Tezz Guy” and then “The Blue Artifacts Guy” and then “The Hatebears Guy…” glad you finally found something that really resonates with you. Now, you get to enjoy the benefits of intimate knowledge and expert tuning!

I agree with you. Like I said in the article, if I cared about winning more than I do now, I’d alternate between Eldrazi and Affinity depending on the metagame, and possibly add Traverse Shadow to the roster. But it’s more important to me to get more enjoyment out of my decks.

That said, I do think your “bar of competitiveness” is a lot lower than what many players give it credit for. There are plenty of examples of Modern players who stick with a relatively fringe deck and experience constant success, especially (or, more readily accessibly) online—shocktroopa with Blue Tron; selfiesk with Mardu Pyromancer; h0lydiver with UR Prowess; etc.

IMO if a deck experiences large-scale Modern success at least once and then stays relevant through the occasional 5-0, it’s a fine deck to pick up and master regardless of its overall share in the metagame (tier).

But I love complex decks that can dance circles around their opponent while ideally almost never blocking or being blocked. I love bouncing, flash, tapping, remanding, and shenanigans.

I hate playing stat monsters like eldrazi and I hate playing planeswalkers.

I love reversibility, flash, and open ended gameplay lines.

It’s fun to think about

I’ve managed to master UG clones (a deck of my.own design) through sheer love of it and years of tuning to be at the top tables week after week in. Very spikey meta. It’s really true that if you dedicate to truly mastering an archetype you can find a way

It took me a while before finding my ideal decks. Tezzeret prison was among the first decks i tried in the format. I played the deck only because i loved tezzeret, agent of bolas and artifacts in general. I eventually realized that while i enjoyed putting pressure on my opponent with 5/5s or the threat of ulting tezz, playing the waiting game behind a bridge was really boring to me.

On the other hand, i had tons of fun with blue steel (long before it came to light), satisfying my taste of being aggressive and play with synergistic pieces. I then tried various hatebears decks when i got my playset of aether vials, and enjoyed the synergistic aspects of the deck, but i hated that my little bears were powerless in combat.

Then shadows over innistrad and eldritch moon happened and u/w spirits became my favorite deck. In addition to being a mix of synergy and tempo, It also felt kind of like hatebears in some ways, but everything flyes and has flash! Apparently my ideal deck did not exist before that.

And now, after spending most of modern’s early years brewing janky stuff (i tried a lot of other things in that period), i now have a hard time experimenting with other things than my u/w vial spirit deck and my blue steel deck (which got miles better with kaladesh block). since i enjoy playing them so much!

There was a period where I thought tooth was only bad vs hatebears, and esper only bad vs tron, and tezz only bad in games two and three but the more I played the more I lost with each deck in succession. Perhaps that was just meta shifts getting hostile to my favourites or unusual good luck early on before crashing into reality, but putting more reps into these decks didnt seem to be making me better with them.

So perhaps theres a missing component here – play what you love and master it, but if its not already tier one you’re still likely going to lose more than you win. Technically you can beat lots of things and thus spike an event, but on the whole tier decks are tier decks for a reason, and if you play something else you’re handicapping yourself no matter how much you love the deck.

If winning some games is good enough, great. But if you want to win/compete consistently your deck has to pass some bar of competitiveness (tier two?) to really get there.

I also cast my share of lotus cobra, bring to light, and glittering wish but no amount of game one fracturing gust or slaughter games or turn three sigardas could put me over 50 percent with the deck. So just saying theres something else in this modern stew than just master what you love and roll in the success.