M
Mars
Guest
Here is an interesting U/R CounterHammer deck by Sean McKeown as posted at Neutral Ground Online recently. Anyone care to comment, tune, or provide a sideboard?
Sean's deck and comments:
2x Nether Spirit
3x Tsabo’s Web
3x Earthquake
3x Hammer of Bogardan
4x Scorching Lava
4x Fact or Fiction
4x Counterspell
4x Foil
4x Prohibit
2x Daze
2x Misdirection
10x Mountains
15x Islands
Both Tsabo’s Web and Earthquake aid against beatdown decks by eliminating mana-control elements and providing a “Wrath of God”-like effect to give a portion of the edge that the U/W design has against creature decks to the Counter-Hammer deck. Unlike the Blue-White design, however, the creature control elements (Scorching Lava, Hammer of Bogardan, Earthquake) are still reasonable choices in the control-on-control matchup, especially the Hammer (which is most of the kill mechanism) and Scorching Lava, which is able to remove Nether Spirits and Pyre Zombies and all sorts of nasty threats from the game, with the ability to make Earthquake a must-counter spell as the Red deck has the ability to gain the advantage over the life totals. A deck bearing both Nether Spirit as a time-gaining perpetual chumpblocker and Earthquake as a board clearer has the advantage over a plain Nether-Go deck against aggressive decks, and with a better kill mechanism in the “mirror” matchup and almost no truly wasted spells, Counter-Hammer has the definite advantage over Nether-Go as a control-on-control strategy, not to mention it has the ability to do kooky things and sideboard uncounterable spells like Urza’s Rage for the kill.
Sean's deck and comments:
2x Nether Spirit
3x Tsabo’s Web
3x Earthquake
3x Hammer of Bogardan
4x Scorching Lava
4x Fact or Fiction
4x Counterspell
4x Foil
4x Prohibit
2x Daze
2x Misdirection
10x Mountains
15x Islands
Both Tsabo’s Web and Earthquake aid against beatdown decks by eliminating mana-control elements and providing a “Wrath of God”-like effect to give a portion of the edge that the U/W design has against creature decks to the Counter-Hammer deck. Unlike the Blue-White design, however, the creature control elements (Scorching Lava, Hammer of Bogardan, Earthquake) are still reasonable choices in the control-on-control matchup, especially the Hammer (which is most of the kill mechanism) and Scorching Lava, which is able to remove Nether Spirits and Pyre Zombies and all sorts of nasty threats from the game, with the ability to make Earthquake a must-counter spell as the Red deck has the ability to gain the advantage over the life totals. A deck bearing both Nether Spirit as a time-gaining perpetual chumpblocker and Earthquake as a board clearer has the advantage over a plain Nether-Go deck against aggressive decks, and with a better kill mechanism in the “mirror” matchup and almost no truly wasted spells, Counter-Hammer has the definite advantage over Nether-Go as a control-on-control strategy, not to mention it has the ability to do kooky things and sideboard uncounterable spells like Urza’s Rage for the kill.