"owling mine" [mtg-standard]

[palingensia]

kinda casual standard-legal deck made in the vein of the old school owling mine deck. the tools aren't quite there for it to be as good but hopefully they will come.

creatures (6):
[4] psychosis crawler
[2] snapcaster mage

other spells (30):
[1] blue sun's zenith
[2] devastation tide
[4] disperse
[2] into the void
[4] ponder
[2] reforge the soul
[1] sword of war and peace
[4] think twice
[4] tibalt, the fiend-blooded
[2] unsummon
[4] vapor snag

land (24):
[1] buried ruin
[2] desolate lighthouse
[3] evolving wilds
[1] hinterland harbor
[7] island
[7] mountain
[1] rootbound crag
[4] sulfur falls

sideboard (15):
[2] ancient grudge
[2] devastation tide
[2] into the void
[1] karn liberated
[4] mana leak
[3] phantasmal image
[1] tamiyo, the moon sage

psychosis crawler is the kill, sadly he is a creature so he dies easily. :c tibalt is actually incredibly good here, as he can -4 for a ton of damage and also draws for psychosis crawler's trigger. think twice and ponder help move me towards psychosis crawler and are still good when i've got one down already. reforge the soul is p sweet and seems like a game-ender, same goes for bsz although it doesn't fuel tibalt. the bounce trio are basically my removal sadly, but they do buy me some time and smack tempo in the face with a large trout. devastation tide is an amazing card and it's even incredibly useful when it's refreshing tibalt. i have not actually used otherworld atlas but it seems far too slow to be relevant, i might swap them out for mana leak or merfolk looter or something. devastation tide seems so important for creature-based decks (which a hell of a lot of them are) that i might go to 3-4 quite soon.


things i am considering:
merfolk looter

[Kamotz]

The problem I see is that you have a lot of high-cost "make opponents get a large hand" spells. They're at least 5 mana (more to make blue Sun's Zenith any useful). Your mana curve seems pretty high What's your early-game strategy?

And then there are some return-to-hand cards that do the same things to you, and at the end of everyone's turn they discard down to seven anyway, so you'll end up loading your graveyard. In that case you might want to consider shoving a Runechanter's Pike in there somewhere to take advantage of the instant and sorcery cards you discard. Or a Sword of War and Peace, which only adds to the "cards in hand" damage.

I'm not a huge Tibalt fan. Love the art, but not so much everything else. But it seems you've found a niche for him...I dunno. It looks interesting. Have you played anyone with this? I'm curious to see how it fares.

[palingensia]

early game i'm bouncing to kill their tempo, pondering, charging up tibalt, and casting think twice basically. it's plenty to do really, but i do think mana leak may be good. i have never had to discard after playing devastation tide because at most i have tibalt+psychosis crawler in play; this is a very nonland permanent light deck as you can tell. also i don't think pike/swords are good since, yanno, i have four creatures.

i played delver with this but i don't remember how it went other than i lost. tibalt is quite good here and i am able to protect him reasonably well.

maybe some snapcasters would be good here...

[Kamotz]

I think delvers would rock, especially with the sword which does what tibalt does but better

[palingensia]

eh but then if i add delver and swords i may as well just play ur delver, which isn't what i'm going for. i suppose having a single sowap would be useful, and having one on psychosis crawler means i don't need to worry as much about dumping my hand.

edit; updated the list and added a sideboard. i am not playing more than a single sword i think, since 6 creatures is kinda bad for equipment. not being able to treasure mage for psychosis crawler is really annoying but oh well. a few tweaks here and there, with a couple of into the void main and the rest of the playset of devastation tide in the sb. i am not really so sure about reforge the soul but being able to pop 7 damage out of nowhere just seems so good. it and bsz are both next on the chopping block i think.

also i am not sure why i'm not playing faithless looting and i need to correct this huge oversight asap.