Dime a Dozen #19: The Arena – Elves vs. Delver

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Jason Moore

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  1. I haven’t watched the vids yet, but look forward to doing so. I just wanted to point out that I thought it was funny that you use a list with arbor elves after pointing out, correctly, that they’re strictly worse than fyndhorn elves :). I guess people didn’t get the message…

  2. PB – Oh, that’s a typo. I cited his original list (which had Arbor Elf), but you’ll see in the games that I played with Fyndhorn.

    ATTENTION EVERYONE — HERE ARE SOME NOTES FROM NEWPLAN:

    “Thoughts on the matchup:

    1) It’s tough for delver – delver thrives on dropping a cheap threat and protecting it by disrupting an opponent’s plays while the opponent is limited on mana. Delver’s answers are well suited to answering one spell per turn – counters and single target removal (either bounce or piracy charm). Delver’s creatures aren’t well suited for creature combat. Except for spire golems they simply lose to the creatures in every other deck.

    Elves breaks this in at least 3 ways: a) they break the mana curve with mana elves – which enables them to drop more threats than delver can answer in one turn and (b) they have a deck full of cheap redundant threats that delver can’t deal with except by trading and (c) they have too many “must counter” spells – distant melody is a must counter, birchlore ranger is a must counter, rancor is a must counter, llanowar sentinel is a must counter, timberwatch elf is a must counter and wellwisher is a must counter.

    2) Sideboard decisions – 3x coral net went in every time. Some number of serrated arrows depending on if I was on the draw or play. Out was daze, deprive, some number of ninjas and I would shave some cantrips (ponder, preordain). I went back and forth on siding out phantasmal bears – they’re good to trade with a 2/2 but they’re awful vs quirion ranger which can kill them for the price of bouncing a land.”

  3. Yeah Ive played elves in several dailies and mono u is basically a bye, its the best reason to play the deck. Elves is actually pretty well positioned in the meta game right now, cloud post iterations are basically the only bad mu for the deck.

  4. Another thing Ive realized playing elves is that distant melody is one of the worst cards in the deck and is the first thing I side out most of the time. It’s really only there for the mid-range decks which are few and far between. Kavu primarch is also underwhelming. I moved 2 wellwishers to the main since they are so good against 60+ percent of the meta, and its proved to be a good change.

  8. I definitely like the focus on a single matchup; there are a fair number of “run this deck through a daily” articles out there, but not a lot like this. I don’t know that you necessarily need to do 4 3-game matches, though; might be nice to do 2 matchups in the next one (two 3-game matches each against two decks with a single deck).

  9. Jason, I think the arena was very well thought out. I learned things about both decks and listening to the video commentary gave insight on the thought put into each play. I would like to see more top decks broke down and battled out in your arena articles. But, I am an article junkie sometimes. I think I read more than I play. I follow you on twitter and pretty much read anything you put out. Magic is a game I love learning about and the way you cover the game makes for informative and entertaining reads. Keep up the good work.

  10. Tom the Scud – I will consider your suggestions, though that may be a little tough to pull off for me. Would definitely like to hear what others think about that idea.

    psybear – That means a lot! Please continue to support my work.

  12. very informative Dime always a pleasure to read your work. While im always looking for a way to make a deck more aggro, and thinking what would annoy me the most playing againt it, i wonder about the versitility of incorporating glistening elf to this deck. To either cheaply draw out a removal spell or just threaten a reduced clock with infect.

  13. PlanetWalls – I’m really glad that you like it!

    KP4life – Thanks for the support. Personally I think Glistener would skew the deck’s focus a little too much. Infect will be featured in my next Blackborder article, however. KP shall never die!

  14. This is very refreshing.

    I’ve lost count the number of times a casual player online will say, “…OMG, I have this 4 color rebel deck that is beating everyone!” only to see a pile of junk that is only beating even sillier decks…worse even is an article about it.

    One article like this however, vs. a master pilot – is worth a hundred speculative ones. More please!

  15. Deluxeicoff said what I would’ve said. Really looking forward to more from this series. And refreshing to see elves get some respect as an incredibly intricate and skill intensive (or at least math intensive) deck.

    Great job Jason!