Aryel, Knight of Wingrace ideas
Standard Deck Help forum
Posted on Oct. 30, 2018, 9:56 a.m. by AxeOfHades
Hey all
i have Aryel, Knight of Windgrace in my file and she is itching to get out but im struggling on a strong idea. All i can see working is perhaps a Boros type for the knight production with the mentoring. Is it a good idea? Any suggestions will be appreciated
Legendary_penguin_of_death says... #3
I think Aryel, Knight of Windgrace could be cool in a control shell with Vona, Butcher of Magan
October 30, 2018 1:06 p.m.
AxeOfHades says... #4
Oh my!
Legendary_penguin_of_death I like how you think
October 30, 2018 2:18 p.m.
Vona, Butcher of Magan is straight up better than Aryel, Knight of Windgrace, as 7 life is way easier to come by than the 6 creatures you would need to tap to kill...say, a Doom Whisperer. the way Aryel, Knight of Windgrace works also leaves you vulnerable unless you have lots of creatures on the field that can block even if you tap half your creatures to kill something. 2for1 cards like History of Benalia, Assure / Assemble, Call the Cavalry, Gallant Cavalry and other cards that create more than 1 knight would help if your idea behind this card is to use both abilities. since you are doing a black/white knight theme Knight of Grace and Knight of Malice are a must since they are probably the strongest 2 mana creatures out there if you play these colors. the name of the game is lots of creatures. you can also play a few copies of something like Rallying Roar, which allows you to use one of his abilities again. if you do stick with 2 colors Josu Vess, Lich Knight might be interesting. you can play non-knight creatures too if you really want, but then you may want to add something that can make them knights like Sigiled Sword of Valeron or Dub.
The other way you can go is to add red or green, as is splash-able, so you can go 3 colors. in green you get lots of tokens and stuff like Knight of Autumn, which is probably my favorite card in the set. in red you get mentor. i havent played around with mentor too much so i wouldnt know anything about that. red is by far my least favorite color, so i tend to only keep enough knowledge to beat them, not to play them.
the thing is though, Aryel, Knight of Windgrace is only good if you build your entire deck around it, and im not convinced he is good enough to do that.
October 30, 2018 6:34 p.m.
Are you going for Orzhov or 3-color for you deck like Abzan? If you go Abzan you can do Aryel, Knight of Windgrace then make tokens. Thallid Omnivore then sacrifice tokens, gain life and make it bigger on your turn. Poison-Tip Archer as soon as you sacrifice those creatures your opponent take damage then use the health you gained on Vona, Butcher of Magan and make her a removal piece.
October 30, 2018 7:18 p.m.
I take what I said back. That combo idea is terrible since I forgot Aryel don't make Saprolings.
October 30, 2018 7:20 p.m.
October 30, 2018 7:39 p.m.
Too many things going on there Caran_Lyg. Going half into one strategy and half in another rarely works out
October 31, 2018 12:06 a.m.
xhuggels what's so hard to understand? You drop Wildgrowth down then Path of Discovery then everytime a creature like Aryel, Vona or Tokens drop they explore and when that happens Wildgrowth gets counters and you gain life that you can use for Vona's activated ability. That's way too many? Does that combo make no sense to you?
October 31, 2018 1:05 a.m.
it does make sense, but you need too many pieces, half of which are not good by themselves. unless you go fully into explore, you wont make use of Wildgrowth Walker. not through Path of Discovery alone. you would have to build an explore deck as its main-focus, and then splash for those knights. you could also just explore even more for a stronger deck. combo decks work, and i do love them, but with my experience with combo decks requiring more than 2 cards dont really work, much less 4.
October 31, 2018 1:39 a.m.
AxeOfHades says... #13
Question: In theory how would i build a good combo deck, ive played some but it was my friends and it was a while ago
October 31, 2018 3:06 a.m.
stensiagamekeeper says... #14
Aryel is actually better than some people are giving her credit for. is a lot for a vigilant 4/4 or a 2/2 generator with removal potential buuut she is both. She's resilient to a surprising amount of removal and is a reasonable top end as she keeps generating value as long as she survives and keeps the pressure on if you're curving out.
The most obvious home for her is obviously knight tribal. Trial of Solidarity was playable even in some competitive white weenie decks not so long ago and History of Benalia does that on top of being a staple in almost every white deck at this point. If the 100US for a play set isn't where you wanna be you could make knight tribal work at an fnm level with Aryel, Knight of Windgrace, Valiant Knight and Midnight Reaper as payoffs and Knight of Grace, Knight of Malice, Cavalry Drillmaster etc as the backbone.
Something else I don't think anyone else has mentioned is the combo potential with Divine Visitation. Yes Leonin Warleader is a lot better there but maybe you want more than 4. or Visitation seems doable and two standard legal sets so far have featured 2/2 knight token generators. If enough of your token generators made knights aryel could even have a chance at being a removal spell more often than not.
October 31, 2018 8:22 a.m.
Legendary_penguin_of_death says... #15
AxeOfHades what type of combo deck are you talking about? There are three types that I have noticed (there might be more). I might be able to give a few pointers.
1 the infinite combo that tends to require a minimum of 3 pieces in standard.
2 the combo that tries to pull off a strong synergy that doesn’t let you win the turn you get. An example is Divine Visitation and Leonin Warleader as mentioned above.
3 the last catagory of combo decks is the type that plays a lot of spells trying to abuse some mechanic or card to net mana until you can eventually win. This type of combo deck ha the potential to fizzle. Modern storm or from the past standard season New Perspectives.
I’m no grand master of comboes but I have built a few reasonably competitive combo decks.
October 31, 2018 10:19 a.m.
So when it comes to combo decks, often times combos work in such a way that if you put 2-3 cards together, they do something amazing that wins the game the tirn it is played, or at the latest the turn right after that(this is suboptimal however since you are giving your opponent the chance to stop you) The problem combo decks tend to face however is that the individial cards are weak by themselves, and the chance to draw all the cards you need for the combo are slim. You also need to build your entire deck to do the combo, find the pieces and protect the combo, which means that if for some reason you fail in one of these areas you lose the game.
Combo decks that put 3 random cards together to create something amazing are weak combo decks. When building a strong combo deck, what you want is consistancy. This means that the combo pieces shuld work towards your goal in some extent by themselves, and each piece you add should make the effects you already have even stronger. An example of a combo deck i ran pre-totation would be Torment of treasures(Infinite combo). In this deck my combo pieces are Ruthless Knave, Anointed Procession and Pitiless Plunderer. The idea is to get lots of treasures to play things like Torment of Hailfire, Josu Vess, Lich Knight and i played around with Marionette Master too. The rest of the deck were things 2for1 token cards, which double with Anointed Procession, added more bodies to sack for Ruthless Knave, and added more bodies that can die and give us treasures through Pitiless Plunderer. Notice how Josu Vess, Lich Knight and Marionette Master can even help the combp if you cant win through them for some reason. In this example, each piece works towards the goal by themselves, and if you have 2 pieces you can sometimes start the combo without the third piece. Multiple copies of a piece only makes the combo stronger, and the entire deck is built to help the combo in some way, shape or form. This makes the combo incredibly consistant, with it going off in more than half my games. Even if the infonite card/treasure generating combo never goes off, i still have lots of treasures and can still win the game, and have done so.
October 31, 2018 12:38 p.m.
xhuggels common sense bro, of course it's not gonna work with just path alone, you'll have to put some other explore cards there. I'm not gonna give the full build to someone that just needs an idea.
October 31, 2018 2:07 p.m.
See the problem is that without Wildgrowth Walker explore wont do anything for your combo with Vona, Butcher of Magan. If you dont have Wildgrowth Walker AND Vona, Butcher of Magan out your combo not only doesnt work, but the rest of the deck doesnt have a goal to work towards. You would do better to just have tons of direct lifegain cards and forget about explore all together. That way you get tons of life so you can last longer, and when you find Vona, Butcher of Magan you can use that life to kill opponent creatures. Your gain life+vona idea is awesome! Its just the way you want to go about it that is very inconsistant. Not only are you running 3 colors when you could do the same with 2, but you are also relying on finding 1 of 4 cards in a 60 card deck in order to have 1 of 4 other cards do what it does best.without those two cards your explore has nowhere to go, and nothing to work towards. You can add other win-cons, but they would be going in a completely different direction alltogheter. In order to make the deck work you need to focus on many things which makes your deck less consistant. Consistancy is a key recipe for competativeness. It almost doesnt matter what your deck does, if it does the same thing every game you have something to work with. The deck you are sugfesting will explore some games for no reason, other games itll gain a bunch of life without finding anything to do with it, other games you will have killpotencial with no gas to continue it, and sure, some games you will gain lost of life and use it to kill everything your opponent has, but it can work out too many different ways, which makes it incredibly inconsistant.
October 31, 2018 2:27 p.m.
Legendary_penguin_of_death says... #19
I agree with you xhuggels that the deck Caran_Lyg suggested isn’t what I or many other people would deem competitive. It’s not going to win any Grand Prixs but I think it is better than you are making it out to be. I am going to make a quick list of cards that could make up this deck and then defend why it actually is servicable. Don’t judge this list to harshly because I just threw it together in like 5-10 minutes
Creatures
2x vona
2x aryel
4x jadelight
4x Merfolk Branchwalker
4x Wildgrowth Walker
4x knight of autumn
2x Ravenous Chupacabra
2x Trostani
1x Izoni
4x llanowar
Non creatures
3x trophy
3x path of disc
Lands
I don’t feel like making a mana base for a fake deck
So now for why this deck doesn’t suck.
- It plays good cards. Some deck try to force playing bad cards because they have high synergy with another card. Path of discovery is probably the “worst” card but even it gives plenty of value after 3 creatures have entered the bf.
You were saying what are you going to do if you haven’t gained life and you have vona out. Well it has lifelink so you can attack and tap it and pay 7 life to kill something that might block it unfavorably then let it hit for four and gain some life back. Net you -3 life to kill a scary permanent that would otherwise probably do more than 3 life’s worth of damage to you.
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Exploring for no reason isn’t a legitimate argument. Exploring is inherently good without any payoff that says “you gain 3 life and put a +1/+1 counter on this creature”. Jadelight Ranger and Merfolk Branchwalker are played in tier decks that don’t play any explore payoffs. Explore is good because it adds consistency.
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playing three colors isn’t hard when you are playing explore effects because it helps finds lands if needed.
October 31, 2018 6:48 p.m.
Let's be honest here, why would you go to tappedout and ask people if you're building a competitive deck? People that are planning to compete in Grand Prix have complete understanding on how cards work and they most likely know how to read them so they'll know how they work. He said ideas, I gave mine but it don't mean he has to follow it.
October 31, 2018 11:34 p.m.
And look, the deck legendary threw in 5 - 10 mins. is similar to what I was thinking if I did build one. It has Aryel, Vona, walker and path.
October 31, 2018 11:40 p.m.
AxeOfHades says... #22
Hey guys thank you for all the ideas and opinions. Whether it will work or not it's an a idea and for all I know I could roll with the idea in a different way Caran_Lyg suggested. But thank you again
AxeOfHades says... #2
xhuggels any suggestions?
October 30, 2018 10 a.m.