Anything But: Tron-a-Thon

Posted on September 26, 2013 by JustSin

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  2. Wow, super thorough and very well reasoned. I think Ub is the way to go, basically the same deck you ended up with after converting but adding teachings to fetch flicker or capsize. I have been experimenting with Errant Ephemeron in there, too.

  3. I have been absent from pauper for at least 6 months, but this banning has me stoked to pick up the format again. Amazing work here on possible Urzatron builds. I don’t think any will survive against either dedicated aggro and control lists, but they should easily beat midrange. Very curious to see how the format will really pan out!

  6. glad you guys all enjoyed it, there is so much more to be explored when it comes to Tron and I hope this at least provides people with a good starting point to do so!

  7. I was the altered Reality Acid deck in the last video. Sorry for not playing something more competitive. I was messing around with different alters when I saw you in the queue for a game and I jumped in without thinking about what deck I had up :P

  8. First of all, good job on exploring all the different possibilities. I think Dimir and Izzet are good colours for Tron, Rebels probably not so much because most of their cards are good when dropped early and uncastable off “just” Tron.

    In the green lists, I probably wouldn’t even play Mvonvuli Acid Moss since it searches for Forests only and requires 2 green in play already. That seems really poor. Maybe the land destruction is okay in the mirror, so that makes it a sideboard card I guess.
    .
    To be fair, I find the future sight of Tron matchups extremely grueling. It’s a very boring deck in Modern to play with or against and I expect this to be no different in Pauper. “Hope they don’t draw their Tron” is just the stupidest thing ever and Pauper lacks the tools to beat it.

  9. @ hyper: hope I wasn’t too harsh in that assessment, I always love seeing people try new things and probably shouldn’t be so critical when they do and it doesn’t work out

    @blood: I think I agree with you on the acid moss, it is kind of nice to have the extra search, but there are probably better things to do with those card slots… as for tron’s future I love the deck and hope something at least rogue comes of it, I think Pauper does have ways to deal with it in simple LD and speed because I think this proved that while viable, the deck is much weaker with tron over 8-post

  13. A very nice and thorough article about how the tron engine can replace cloudpost engine. However, I feel that your cloudpost to tron conversions were trying to keep the decks as similar as possible after the mana engine change while refraining from asking the simple question: are these tron decks better than their non tron variants? With 8-post it was obvious that those decks were better, with tron I feel they simply aren’t, because losing the health of glimmerpost, requiring 12 colorless lands rather than 8 and shrinking the amount of colorless mana generated are simply too harsh penalties to still give the tron decks any advantages over non tron variants of the same concepts.

    For example, lets take a look at the mono blue tron deck. The mono blue 8-post control deck had some distinct advantages over its non 8-post variant: MUC, having more resilience to aggro with the Glimmerposts as well as superior finishers in Ulamog’s Crusher and the red burn spells while not making sacrifices to the control aspect of the deck. The mono blue tron deck already loses 1 of those advantages, and while the better finishers are still there, you are making sacrifices to the control aspect with. It just feels that the tron version doesn’t offer enough advantages to use that instead of MUC.

    Likewise with the Izzet and Dimir conversions. Izzet control never really had non 8-post versions so it was certainly worth the testing, though I feel that Izzet tron lost just enough speed and control to make it a weak control deck compared to the alternatives. Dimir control on the other hand already had non post alternatives as you’ve shown in a previous article of yours with Dimir Trinket, Teaching Control and another version that I forgot its name. Those non 8-post alternatives were competitive in the 8-post+fissure era, albeit not top dogs, so they’ll obviously still be competitive now, and even stronger since they all had bad fissure matchups. 1 idea I have is perhaps to mimic the thought process behind the original Dimir Post deck, which was to take the Izzet Post deck and replace the red cards with black ones, and do it now for Dimir Trinket and Teaching Control, removing the black cards and replacing them with red ones and see if these decks can function as Izzet decks rather than Dimir.

    Rebel post was never truly competitive to begin with, but didn’t really have a non 8-post alternative either, so the tron experiment here was at least warranted, though the deck couldn’t get better without 8-post, only slightly worse, which for an already questionable deck from a competitive viewpoint means that the deck is pretty much dead in the water.

    Which leaves us with Green Post. This deck too didn’t really have a non 8-post alternative, so the experiment here was very warranted and the results relatively satisfying. However, there is an alternative that wasn’t really used until now, which I think is somewhere in the middle between the 8-post engine and the tron engine, and that’s the Elves engine. Rather than use extreme number of Elves to win with the likes of Lys Alana Huntmaster and Timberwatch Elf you can use Elves to ramp into the usual Ulamog’s Crushers and Fangren Marauders, replacing Aurochs Herd with Llanowar Sentinels for some more Elves and enjoying that Fierce Empaths were already Elves as well. So in essence this Elves Ramp deck, for no better name for now, replaces the walls with mana Elves and the 8-post engine with normal green mana and Priests of Titania to generate multiple mana in the same way that cloudpost did. Not sure whether this variant will be better than the old 8-post version, but I think it should be better than any tron conversion.