Wytefang said:

Toughness is invariably moot since on the fatal turn I will use Gifts on their attack for a bunch of resources, then cast Flames to bounce all the dwarves at the beginning of my turn.

If the Thrower deck can't find a Flames to bounce the units then that is an real problem since now the opponent effectively has +X HP on their capital, where X is the total HP of their units, even before you start worrying about toughness. I have lost before to having 2 Flames right on the bottom of my deck.

@Wytefang: I'm not seeing what is confusing about this. The card specifically says that each player with at least X developments can discard his hand and draw X cards. In our examples, 3 is not at least 5 so you don't have to option to draw. Not sure why that's confusing.

Again, with the Bolt Thrower, if you let the scenario play out that far to when they activate the bolt thrower, and you respond with Long Winter, they can simply respond to your Long Winter by zapping you a bunch. Which is what Clamatius was saying. The stack resolves last in, first out, so your bolt thrower damage will resolve 1 by 1 before the Long Winter resolves on the stack. Having a magic background will help you understand it better, but I think we're doing a good job here.

To answer another one of your questions, you simply can't pay 10 to do 10 damage in 1 packet to your opponent with Bolt Thrower. If you had 10 developments in your battlefield, then sure, you could do that. Because you just have 1 development, you cna only do 1 damage X amount of times and it will only do 1 damage each time. Therefore, a simple thing such as Toughness of 1 can completely shut you down. You either need to bounce the toughness guys (via Flames, Pilgrimage, etc) or have a 2nd development in your battlefield for packets of 2 damage.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: I reread Reap and it even says X OR MORE developments so it should be even more clear that if you have 3 Developments to my 5 that you can't draw cards.

-SF

This has turned out to be a very informative thread for anyone planning to play at World's and who does not completely grasp the timing/stacking rules of this game.

Unfortunately I can still foresee several opponents completely flipping out when they make timing misplays against this deck and a judge is called to explain why they're still going to lose.

I remember being so disheartened when I played my first sanctioned magic tournament, proceeded to reduce my first opponent's life total to zero, have him tell me he would not die from that until the end of the phase, and then spend the next 15 minutes going through his Tolarian Academy shenanigans before making me draw 60 cards.

Hey! Maybe that's why I've loved combo decks ever since! I want to be on THAT side of the table when that **** goes down! :-)

LOL. Nice story.

This thread for sure makes me want to "forget" all my other decks at home except for BT because it appears ppl don't know stacking rules and I'll get free wins because of it! lol

I'll play pickup games Thursday and Friday with the deck and then decide that evening on what to play i guess. I'll have to take some time to play in Call of Cthulhu worlds though. haha

- SF

f7eleven said:

I've played my fair share of combo decks in M:tG, tbh. I prefer control though.

Yeah re: stacking rules... pretty much the only way thrower loses to dwarves is if you make a bunch of timing mistakes on the thrower side of the table and your opponent is familiar enough with the matchup to exploit them. Since dwarves have gotten so many shinies lately, I expect a lot more people to be familiar with them now than they were a few weeks ago, and that dwarves will be much more played right now than other strong archetypes, particularly skaven.

Seeing as Skaven is thrower's only "bad" matchup (and by "bad" I mean "less than 80% winrate", it still is probably in the 60-70% win range if Skaven doesnt play Mob Up!), thrower seems exceptionally well positioned right now. Not to say people will actually play it because it is mind numbingly awful to test, but in the hands of a competent pilot it seems like the deck to beat.

I know I'd pack 1-2 High Elf's Disdains in my dwarf deck or 1-2 Mob Up! in Skaven if I were playing a major tournament right now and didnt wan't to play thrower for whatever reason.

As for HE board vs. dwarf board, well... maybe HE is the way to go. I'm not sure, honestly, I'd have to test it more. And I don't want to do that right now 'cos I don't have to.

ddm5182 said:

Interesting numbers you are getting, not that I don't agree with it being a top tier deck, just that I know a few other decks it has bad matchups against.

I'm kind of hoping that it does get some facetime at gencon, if only to show the designer (I assume Hata will be there) and others first hand its potency granted I'd also assume it is a greyish mark on the state of the game, as you say not many people like to play it or against it and its relative strength is not necessarily a good thing for the meta in many player's opinions.

And thanks, as others have pointed out, this thread is a great read/primer regarding action and response resolution and just general rules of this game.

- dut

I'm curious as to what you think are also bad matchups for Bolt Thrower. I'll be the first to admit that Orc/Skaven isn't the best matchup but unless they get the "burn a zone turn 2" draw it gets significantly harder. The 6 Scout deck can be problematic too, but you can hide any relevant cards and get them back via Abandoned Mine to ease that pain. Also, you can Order in Chaos cards back which is also pretty good.

Anyway, I'm not saying everything is a great matchup, just curious is all.

- SF

I think you can build decks that are a bad matchup for Thrower, it's just that they are bad against the rest of the field. Orc/Skaven is pretty much the only deck that "naturally" has a non-horrible matchup as far as I can tell. I agree with ddm that it's probably still less than 50% though.

From the thrower perspective, here's what I'm worried about:

1) Rush decks that burn a zone on turn 2 or 3.

2) Grimgor.

3) Mob Up!

4) High Elf's Disdain backed up with significant damage.

5) Heavy scouts backed up with support removal.

Most decks, e.g. Empire with Wilhelm / Volley Gun, Spite Dwarves or anti-unit DE, don't have any of the 5. Just to be clear, just because they have one of the 5 doesn't mean they will win, it just means that they might have more than 10-15% win rate or so.

Clamatius said:

Ah, ok. But it is again something not explained why and not integreated in the rules or faq. Why can they make the official faq longer and extend rules?

Could you please stop collecting things and force them to do it right?

It's just missed out on this FAQ iteration. Noone asked James to add that to the FAQ and I'm sure he missed it along with the rest of us.

With this one, it works the same way as Magic - I actually asked the Magic rules manager to confirm that a few months ago. The reason why it works that way is that the X is fixed at declaration time - you need to know the X to pay the cost. Compare with Innovation, where you don't need to know the variable - Innovation looks at the X at resolution time.

I'd expect curiosity, and maybe it is just that my meta has moved to 'needing' to build decks in a way that can compete against thrower which has caused me to see a number of different things that are 'relatively' sucessful against it.

The standard argument is that tech against thrower undermines the ability to win against other decks, namely rush which is second most or on par strength with the thrower archtype. The truth is there are a lot of cards that hate on thrower that are generally useful against most/all decks, just that the incorporation of them into your deck that wouldn't normally run them involves growing as a player and making more strategic in game choices. Cards like demolition/pillage/Burn it Down are seeing a lot more play, and smart use of them to target resource generators or the abandoned mines themselves are hurting throwers.

I do agree that thrower is a very strong, if not one of the strongest decks, I just think decks are evolving to counter it in subtle ways and saying there is only 'one' decktype that is throwers 'bad' matchup is an ambitious statement. At the same time I don't think the thrower testing is necessarily being played out against these evolved decks and hence the really big numbers that I don't necessarily agree with. Then there's the 'but people won't play it' followup that waters down the argument that it is a clear best...

Like I said, I hope we see more people playing it to substantiate or undermine the general forum consensus that it is 'the very best' (and yes, I know a destruction thrower has won a regional, great match to watch on youtube, the guys running/playing did a marvelous job), and obviously if I felt that way I would run it myself.

- dut

dutpotd said:

Clamatius said:

You posted in their tourney thread Clamatius, thought you would have watched it

- dut

Actually, I missed the video link. That's why I didn't know what you were talking about, along with the fact that that is a totally different deck. You know that, right? The winner in Prague was an Orc board Destro thrower deck, which is a similar archetype but has very important differences (and I think it's a lot worse than the Order version).

dutpotd said:

Yep, I know it is totally different, hence why I called it the destruction thrower. It is just that it is the only thrower that has won anything that I have seen. Are there others?

- dut

IIRC the only other time I've seen an order thrower list in a tournament report was in a small British tournament months ago, run by a newer player who had the deck given to him by a friend. They won anyway if memory serves correctly.

I think destro thrower has showed up more - again if I'm remembering right crowdedmind beat one at the last Sheffield tournament.

Skipping through part 5 of that video, I am not surprised that the destro thrower deck won. The Orc rush deck was light on supports so Vomit totally clears the board. Basically his only chance is to burn a zone and get enough damage on another that incidental damage wins it. As you can tell from the decklists I post, that's not the way our group builds the orc lists. I think we are mentally scarred by Chaos control dominance back when there were no BPs.

As an aside to anyone planning on playing rush at GenCon: if you are still building Orc lists without a bunch of supports (alliances, pretty much), you are in for a world of hurt vs. Master Rune of Spite.

Clamatius said:

Wytefang, come in.

Hmm, Deathmaster needs the information at stacking but it is not locked. But generally it is a good rule for the thrower.

You do not pay a cost for Deathmaster's ability except corrupting him. That's the difference. If he read "Action: Corrupt Deathmaster Sniktch and pay X to destroy target unit, where X is the hitpoints of target unit. X may not exceed the number of Skaven cards in play" then the X would be fixed at declaration time. The way it is worded on the actual card is as a targeting restriction, much like Blood for the Blood God has a targeting restriction that the target must be in the battlefield.

Clamatius said:

Fixed.

Seriously though, destruction thrower attacks the format on the same axis that Chaos control used to. Same lesson to be learned in terms of deck construction, and just as laughably beatable by tuned versions of the top archetypes. Destruction thrower is not a real deck. Clamatius got 1 game off of me playing Skaven because I was being an idiot, and once I started paying attention we had no more games vs. Skaven or Dwarves that were anything resembling close.

I still remain unconvinced by all these Order in Chaos shenanigans btw. Generally speaking just drawing more cards is going to be a more reliable, less easily disrupted means of finding your damage prevention spells, and overall reduces the variance of your deck by leveraging more multi-role cards (as in, supports that can be played in kingdom or quest, depending on what you need). Considering the primary source of losses for the thrower deck right now is variance in shuffling, support-heavy seems like a better way to build the deck to me, even if it does give up a few percentage points in its best draws.

More testing.

I agree that Master Rune of Spite > the singleton Verena. The fact that you can play it during your opponent's attack means that it can act like an extra Fog against the Orcs (who are one of the only things you are actually afraid of). Maybe 2x, even.

Dwarf board vs. HE board still seems like a tossup. I'd lean towards the Dwarf board just because your turn 1 is often so ridiculous.

Grimgor is a really big problem and I don't think there's anything you can realistically do about him other than Disdain their Innovation when they have a lot of resources up. I think a decent Orc/Skaven with a couple of Grimgors has a good chance of beating Thrower - you really have to hope that the Dwarves kill them off for you so you don't have to play against them (and there's a good chance of that as far as I can tell).

Grimgor is indeed a big problem, though I'd need to see an Orc list that beats dwarves before I get really concerned... Here's a theoretical take on a new, (untested) thrower list:

Dwarf board

Supports (27)

• 3 Warpstone Excavation
• 3 Contested Village
• 3 Mining Tunnels
• 3 Ancestral Tomb
• 3 Dwarf/High Elf Alliance
• 3 Empire/High Elf Alliance
• 3 Treasure Vaults
• 3 Contested Stronghold
• 2 Repeater Bolt Thrower
• 1 Abandoned Mine

Tactics (23)

• 3 Innovation
• 3 Master Rune of Valaya
• 3 Gifts of Aeneron
• 3 Demolition
• 3 Master Rune of Spite
• 2 Long Winter
• 2 Flames of the Phoenix
• 2 Judgment of Verena
• 2 High Elf's Disdain

Adds a lot more interaction with the opponent, and decent way to get an edge in the mirror via the Verena/Demolition plan. Reap What's Sown is not really doing it for me anymore - its just too slow. Long Winter/Abandoned Mine split is a nod to Verena. As Clamatius mentions above, you basically auto-win vs. dwarves, so your only real concern is Skaven w/ Grimgor. The Master Runes, Verena, and Demolition in combination together probably gives you a reasonable shot to win there... oh boy, more thrower testing...

I like this list! I'm glad you guys caught up and included Spite and Long Winter and cut Mines and Reaps.

I really like the 6 HE Alliances too. So you're running this list on a Dwarf board, yes?

I'm liking OiC's more and more though. Returning Innovations over and over is fun. Plus it backs up the only 2x Bolt Thrower.

Yeah, that's on a Dwarf board.

I see OiC more as a way of recurring Fogs than getting back the Thrower - we hardly ever even play the Thrower till the turn where they lose.

I'll have to play the version without Reap. Mining Tunnels does compensate a lot for drawing power, but I wonder whether you have issues on drawing enough Fogs in the midgame (and thus you need OiC). It needs more testing.