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Unlocking the Vault #5: Green-White Hate Primer
Posted on August 16, 2011 by enderfall
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Good read Ender.
I have seen my fill of GWh8 recently and the deck is tough to beat. I ran into 2 pilots in DL’s PRE last w/e and lost to both while playing Oath.
I personally find the vial versions the toughest (with oath) to beat as I have no ability to counter their many threats.
The arbiter is my worst nightmare. He just completely screws with your tutor / fetch land package so bad that I find he is tough to beat once resolved. Late game this isn’t a problem but an early arbiter is bad.
I am not sold on Null Rod main. My experience shows it to be too situational, thus I would prefer to have another threat on board main. SB forsure.
As for next article I wouldn’t mind ‘dredge’ (It did take GenCon after all !).
FYI Steven Menendian has a free Gush primer (themanadrain) that I found pretty good. Take a gander if you havent read it.
Keep up the good work Scott.
Funny . . . now that Tarmogoyf is skyrocketing in price (dependent of course upon its playability in Modern), an Aggro Shop deck might be more “budget” than GW Hate.
Having played against this deck a lot, as a Shop player, it doesn’t scare me. Bant (or 4c) Fish decks, on the other hand, scare me. Whereas GW Hate has the 2cc slot clogged (so that a Chalice for 2 is crippling), Bant Fish decks often have a turn 1 Birds of Paradise or Hierarch, which facilitates a turn two Trygon Predator. Rough. Also, the use of mana dorks forces Shop players to choose between choking resources or naming Pridemage with Revoker. All around, GW Hate is, in my humble opinion, not a good choice.
@Montolio, I agree, Arbiter is a beating in the early turns. Turning off fetch lands and tutors is a major setback if as an Oath player you don’t nut draw into Orhcard and Oath. As for Null Rod, it’s better in a meta that is geared towards Vault-Key which is on the decline, I feel, with all these fish decks running around at the moment.
@MMogg, Strange that Workshop might be budget, huh! But the run-up on Modern prices appears to be doing that. This article was written before the Modern announcement so it’s only been exasperated since I wrote it. As someone that has also played a lot of shops, you have the tools to beat G/W, but without a draw engine, you could be just shooting yourself in the foot trying to mull for a Chalice if you aren’t fortunate enough to find one. And if you aren’t sure if they are on the Aether Vial plan or not, unless you scout them out ahead of time, then you might miss the boat guessing one or the other.
I played with G/W Hate for several weeks and came to many of the same conclusions about its weaknesses I’ve seen here though I do have some other thoughts. Tarmogoyf has always been underwhelming 90% of the time that you play it. It does nothing to help your plan of delaying any deck and usually doesn’t speed up the clock any more than another bear would. As such his place has been taken over by scavenging ooze. While like you said it’s slow against dredge it can randomly steal game one, which dredge is never supposed to lose, and can be strong enough to shut them down if you have a strip effect for their bazaar.
I’ve never had any problems playing against shop decks and have an extremely good record against them. A chalice at 2 is indeed scary but when complimented with aether vial/nature’s claim it isn’t that hard to get around. A chalice on 1 turn 1 and 2 on turn 2 is virtually unbeatable though it doesn’t happen often enough to truly worry about.
For matchups against the mirror you do want to have an edge and while ooze makes up a big slot of that I’ve found Knight of the Reliquary to be tremendously effective and also serves as a larger function of being able to slow down your opponents strategy. Once active he turns off Emrakul with the ability to find karakus. Finds waste effects against the mana light opponent. And can find maze of ith to turn off blightsteel as well as the mirrors and provides himself more functionality being able to untap after damage to keep the searching up. His main problem is that he loses you the ability to run Leonin Arbiter as it cuts you off of too much to be able to use as you’ll also want fetchlands to compliment him.
By and far the biggest problem I’ve had playing with this deck is that it runs out of steam quickly. If your opponent has a game plan to deal with your guys you then go down to a topdecking war and other classic decks have much better abilities to do so than you do. The best answer I found when looking was to add some repeatable card draw effect. The best one that compliments the strategy is Bob aka Dark Confidant. Adding black to the deck also allows access to another amazing hate bear in Tidehollow sculler, as well as providing access to multiple cheap and extremely efficient tutors allowing you to better search out the silver bullets that you need to fight specific strategies.