eragon795 Brah, thx for your input but our testing just must have been really different 'cause Ral is the f***ing BOSS in all matchups man, the fact that drawing is ALWAYS relevant and removal is what we want to be doing make it so that I'm NEVER not happy to draw him, in my book that qualifies as an auto-include, and justifies splashing red alone, he's the red Tefferi nothing less!

Niv looks cool but I'm just not running near enough red to even consider him, there are WAY too many B essentials to not have a U/B core, Soot and Vraska alone are absolutely needed in this creature-meta man...

I think that Expansion is really sweet, but I can't justify cutting anything for it atm.

Overall, my testing has been going really well, deck is amazingly fun to play! Thx GRN, no complaints here! :D

EastsideRock

So I'll go over the reasoning for what I said. You don't have to agree with it in the end, but I don't think I really explained much, just said stuff as fact so I want to remedy that.

First I'll go over Niv. My list has a much higher number of Duals, (19 currently, maybe 20) so even though I have a focus on UB more than R, I'm able to play him reliably. I also don't plan on playing him early, I play him late with backup and usually a spell to play, so he has immediate impact. I think he's worth looking at even if you don't feel your mana supports him currently.

Secondly, I'll go over Explosion. That card is absolutely insane. You can copy counters agaisnt control, removal against aggro and a new version of Sphinx's Revelation. You were talking about what you cut. I personally don't think the Creatures you are playing are optimal (although that's just my position) so I would (again, personally) swap out them for 2 Explosion and 3 Nivs. If you don't want to do that, maybe Thought Erasure? It feels like a sideboard card to me, although I could be wrong.

Finally I'll go over my problems with Ral now, because we do seem to have very different opinions on it.

The first thing about him is that his ultimate isn't actually game-winning in my experience. It's good, yes, but either you will deck yourself before you kill with it, or you are too far behind on board for it to matter. I haven't had it ult in any other scenario.

Secondly, when you play him, he costs 5 to either draw a card or remove a guy. I have been finding that too high an investment against the decks I see, as against mono-u they counter him, mono-red they kill you, mono-green is favoured or unfavoured anyway independent of Ral, and other decks have other ways to take advantage of you tapping out for him.

Anyway, those are my experiences. Feel free to ignore them if you want.

eragon795 I respect you sticking out for your picks. However Ral is boss and his ultimate is ultimati-fucking-ly game breaking haha, deal 4 draw 2 at every spell casting: bitch please haha! Just won like 4 matches in a row because of him!

Fair enough. Do you stream or record you matches at all? If so I'd be interested in watching them because we seem to play significantly differently even with the same deck judging by this discussion

I'd love to stream. One day I probably will, but now am working 70-80 hours a week out of the country so not a good time currently.

Update: -1 Thought Erasure, +1 Unmoored Ego. Holy shit that card is bonkers.

doraemon1088 Yeah it's pretty decent against certain matchups! On my side I took out the 4th copies of Soot and Erasure from the side to try 2 copies of The Eldest Reborn since we are doing fine VS all out aggro and control and I wanted to up my % against grindy decks. It all works out so far because against aggro we have a lot of spot removal and 5 sweepers, and against control 3 Mind Erasure + 4 Mission Briefing are already good + adding Eldest against them also works great VS PWs.

EastSideRock - I noticed your post about being out of CONUS working 70-80 hours. Are you a contractor? :) Hope all is well brother. I been smashing Standard events with this build as of late. I topped at least 3rd for over a month straight.

MrKabar Great to hear man! :D Had you made the recent changes to include the 3x Moment and 4x Ritual to deal with all the aggro stuff or do you have the older version slightly slower?

Yeah man I work for a construction company, and I got this big project in Suriname (small country North of Brazil). I have been here for 102 days now!!...Coming back to Canada on Dec 8th for the holidays :D

Awesome East! Hope you had a great Holiday. As of right now I'm using x3 Moment of Craving, x2 Ritual of Soot, x1 Golden Demise. I have found with Golden Demise I can deal with faster/smaller creatures more quickly, plus it deals with Vanguard's.

I'm headed to the Columbus SCG Modern Open this weekend. Playing Grixis Control of course! Wish me luck.

Skarrgan Hellkite is looking really good. Thoughts?

Speaking of RNA Spoilers, Captive Audience and even Rakdos the Showstopper could make some fun, potentially very strong win cons.

Wsup yall! It's been a little while! Here are the cards from RNA that I think will/could make a potential splash in our 75.

Mesmerizing Benthid Although there are many things we can do with 5-mana, I feel like this is a very decent way to somewhat stall the game until we hit those coveted 7-8 lands down.

Cry of the Carnarium To unlcunk the 4CMC slot a little bit that 4x Soot are occupying. Exile clause is good.

Undercity's Embrace I like sac effects a lot, it helps against hexproof stuff and combat tricks. The 4-life gain is also great, reminds me of Foul-Tongue Invocation which I ran for its entire legal-time.

Electrodominance I will absolutely will have to give this INSTANT a try, as I usually do for 2-for-1 value cards like this!...the meta will decide if it sticks or not.

Bedevil This is definitely coming in...DUH! The only question is how many copies. 2-3 feels safe to say.

Macabre Mockery This is the kind of 75th card I would like to try at some point. Could definitely be used against mid-range and other big decks to seal the game out of the blue.

Blood Crypt I'm very confortable with our present manabase but nice to know this is available as well.

All-righty, here is the first RNA change, gonna test that now:

Main
-2 Ritual of Soot +2 Cry of the Carnarium -2 Cast Down +2 Bedevil

Side
-2 Phyrexian Script +2 Undercity's Embrace

Tried this decklist out in Arena with a few tweaks of my own (-1 Moment of Craving, -2 Bedevil, +1 Nezahal, +2 Cast Down) since I still don't have Bedevil. So far, this deck is struggling a bit with Rakdos Aggro especially if you don't manage to obtain any sweepers. If a sweeper is in your opening hand though, especially Carnarium, Rakdos and Golgari matches are relatively quick.

doraemon1088 Yeah, I just added a Carnarium to the side for mainly that purpose. I need more testing against that deck though, but haven't struggled to much on my side, about 50/50 since I was still trying to understanding their deck, some seem to run a lot of the drawing enchants which you absolutely will want to Negate!

Alright, time to get some words of wisdom (Complete utter crap advice) from me.

Something I use in my Dimir deck is the combination of Mission Briefing and Anticipate , specifically looking at the latter card. I run a touch lighter on some removal spells and have about 5-ish boardwipes, and has 7-ish counter spells. (4x Sinister Sabotage , 3x Syncopate )

My engine of Mission Briefing , Anticipate , Chemister's Insight and incidental Surveil allows me to sculpt my hand to suite the deck I’m vs’ing. I could give a link to the deck if you like, however it is a bit different since I steer away from money cards like Vraska's Contempt , and try for a flash-Control deck; so no Doom Whisperer .

Hope I could help, gl, and serve Bolas well! :D

Illuminate21 I have seen esper lists like that, using Chromium, the Mutable with it, making the whole deck instant speed, Settle the Wreckage as a board wipe, Seal Away s, Cast Down s, and Counterspells as the interaction, etc. However Grixis control isn't really in the same boat, with Cry and Ritual as board wipes, being completely instant-speed couldn't do much.

Wuddup wuddup yall, it's been a minute! Just made some changes to the deck, basically I jammed 4 Thought Erasure in the main, they been killing it in this meta!

I created a similar vesrion with Sphinx of Foresight and it is very good.

Consider Captive Audience 1x as second win con.

nutrun Thx for the input!

I have a hard time justifying tapping 4 at sorcery speed to play something that doesn't affect the board right away.

As for Captive Audience, it's a cool card but it's pretty slow...you tap 7, then it takes a whole turn before some cool shit start happening, but it doesn't even really win the game by itself! Path to victory is much faster and certain with Doom, Dream or Ral! :D

You can justify the sphinx for the scry 3 effect that allows you to keep an hand without land. Captive Audience is really powerful but you have to protect it with some discard spells.

I tried a versione of this grixis with theese two spells and work very well.

I can post here my list if you are interested.

What's your best weapon versus Sultai Midrange and Esper Control?

nutrun VS midrange, the goal is to out-tempo them. First you need to control the board, then a well placed 2-for-1 like the The Eldest Reborn or Dream Eater often locks it up.

Esper Control is not an easy matchup, they are usually favored. Bring in all the blue cards. Thought Erasure will really shine. If they only have 1 or 2 win-cons, bring in Unmoored Ego.

(Im DarkAngel367 / MadLuckKing from a long while ago)

Recently started playing MTG Arena, and can play MTG more often again so I thought I'd come back to grixis control.

Wondering what are our best/worst matchups, and what are the key cards to look out for.