[AFR] Tasha's Hideous Laughter
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So I have not really done the research, but I feel like there are decks in the format that do not have more than 20 CMC in the entire build. Likewise there are decks that have key cards like PO that have high CMC and then a bunch of free stuff where this would function more like a psudeo kicked sadistic sacrament than just a mill card.
This may all change in the new evoke heavy world but this seems like it could be a 1 shot concede sideboard card for some matchups.
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Gush, Dig, Cruise, FoW
Bolas, FoW, PO
Golas, Ravager, Sphere, Tangle Wire
Vengevine, Hollow One, FoW, FoV
Dark Petition, Tedrils, Desire, Bolas
Idk I think it misses every major deck in the format
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@lienielsen There have most absolutely been decks this would be good against in the past that can resurface. There have been shops variants that basically only used 2 drops, ad nauseum, etc.
Like I mentioned though, the thing this is good at is potentially grabbing large chunks of a deck and then because it cares about mana value being pretty assured it will hit key targets.
Mill as a value engine has never worked because just discarding 5 off the top with tombscour or whatever will never assure you that you hit gas and not just 5 lands and moxen, where as this always removes those without it counting against your total in effect, plus it exiles which is obviously important if you don't want to fuel your opponents yard. While it is basically useless against dredge and current shops, I can imagine a world where you bring this in out of the board against a doomsday list or whatever and roll the dice knowing that this is probably going to exile 15ish cards and that some of them may have been critical.
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I gave this a bit of thought and if this is played with Extract or Bitter Ordeal then you could set up a one shot to take out someone's deck. The issue is that the set up is too slow.
The best set up would be Extract and Unmoored Ego, maybe Lost Legacy. But this is making a bunch of assumptions about how you get these spells to resolve and live long enough to win.
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If I were to try this out in a list it would have to be some Mana Denial strategy with strips/wastes, maybe spheres of some form or another. The idea being that this will continue to mill (exile) all Moxen/Lands it hit's until it hits the CMC requirement. No you may not hit that key combo card, but you are likely to hit 5+ mana sources. Throw in spheres/Thalia's, wastelands, Revokers, Null Rods, Ouphes, etc etc, you can easily mana screw any current list. Just my thought on it.
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@serracollector Your post reminds me a famous logic problem:
I will reveal cards from the top of a 52-card deck of playing cards one at a time. At some point before I reveal the last card, you must tell me to stop. Then, we will reveal the next card on top. If it is black, you win. If it is red, you lose. What strategy gives you the best chance of winning?
A common attempt is to do something like, "once you've revealed more red cards than black, cards, stop". Unfortunately, such a strategy doesn't work - any strategy you come up with always succeed with probability 50%.
There is a very elegant proof of this fact: it is obvious that once you stop, revealing the bottom card will give you the same odds of winning as revealing the top card, so we can change the rules of the game to do that. Once we do that, it is obvious that all your strategizing on when to stop revealing from the top will be irrelevant. If we play this game repeatedly, 50% of those games will have a black card on the bottom, and so your strategy will win 50% of those games, regardless of your strategy.
It is easy to see that this proof can be applied to show that your mana denial strategy is misguided. Your chances of drawing a mana source from the bottom of your deck is unaffected by the milling of cards from the top of your deck.
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@dshin to play devil's advocate, actual manabases are not entirely fungible. if there are 4 lands in my deck, 2 fetches and 2 fetchable, and you exile 2 of them at random when you exile half my deck, there is a 1/6 chance that i now have effectively no lands in my deck (if you hit both duals the fetches are dead draws). if on the other hand you hit both fetches i have the prior proportion of lands, not a higher one. I don't think that this effect is truly worth considering in a mana denial role, it's less effective than stuff like needling a 4x fetch, but it is a nonzero effect.
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@blindtherapy Yes that’s a fair point. Should be a minor factor though as you point out.
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I'm pretty sure some sites include the average mana cost of cards in each decklist. It would be a good starting point to see on average how many cards this will hit for each deck.
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I’m having trouble finding a single deck from recent results that this card would be effective against. What is the average mana value of a deck this would be good against?
Even if we have a deck with average cost of 1, which is much lower than all of the decks that see the tournament results page, you’re only exiling 20 cards. Aren’t there some cards that do this already?
This card would only be good against a deck that has an average mana value of 0. This deck doesn’t exist.
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Is there a deck this shuts down? Maybe Oath? Pre oath you can hit oath targets, post oath you can mill the rest of their deck (if they milled alot to hit a creature).
Seems ok with dauthi voidwalker maybe? -
@john-cox I don't think this interacts with dauthi voidwalker.
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It seems fine as a sideboard consideration at least. I mean, it's usually hard to Doomsday with half of your deck exiled (lots of key cards). If this is the best thing to do with a 3 mana sideboard slot is a different and probably very personal argument
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This won’t come close to exiling half of anyone’s deck.
There’s 9 five drops in doomsday, 1 at 8 mana, 7 at 3 mana, 6 at 2 mana, 19 at 1 mana, with the rest at 0.
Average CC = (45+8+21+12+19)/60 = 1.75
Tasha’s Hideous Laughter will exile only 11 cards on average from Doomsday. As far as hitting key cards, there’s only 2. You’d have to hit both Thassa’s to disrupt the combo.
You could exile more cards with Ashiok Dream Render if you really wanted that effect
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I'm not sure if this card is my jam ... but just to mention ... this card works in multiples in a way that an all-or-nothing [[Telemin Performance]] can't. If two of these consistently killed someone, finding 2 of 4 and paying 1UU each would be a very reasonable kill, same total mana cost as Painter/Grindstone, fewer dead cards, and no vulnerability to Null Rod or removal. Sometimes the first will win the game by exiling key cards, or just exiling relevant enough cards to give you time to find the second. But as people have pointed out already, I don't know if two of these is a consistent kill against a lot of decks.
Milling/exiling cards isn't an inherently bad strategy, it's just that mill cards are balanced such that you'll almost always find better ways to win with damage. If they keep pushing mill (and I think this is pushed mill), eventually this card becomes a reasonable Lava Axe. I don't really think we're there yet, though.
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Against the entire meta this card will exile 12.7 cards on avg.
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@brass-man said in [AFR] Tasha's Hideous Laughter:
no vulnerability to Null Rod or removal.
trading null rod/removal for flusterstorm/pyroblast/force of negation (with the printing of urza's saga grindstone can often be uncounterable) is not necessarily getting ahead on the trade. if 2 castings of this was actually a kill, which it probably isn't against all major decks.
@vroman just dividing total cmc by 20 doesn't actually get you the average number of cards exiled, because it keeps going until the total is at least 20; ie if the total is currently 15 it might take multiple small cards to stop or it might stop on a single force of will. also if you expect to on average hit N more cards and hit a zero, your new expectation is not N-1, it's slightly less than N. I think i'll use the numbers you've used as indicative of the decklists and run the actual math.
A grave is the safest place to store ill-gotten treasures.
NYSE 3 winner, vintage champs 2015 top 4, vintage champs mox emerald 2021 top 4.
Unban Shahrazad.
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here's the output of running 100,000 tests of each distribution in python
they are a bit over half a card, on average, more than merely summing the deck's CMC would predict. hatebears is the lowest discrepancy.
code:import random DEBUG = False num_iterations = 10 ** 5 total_card_count = 0 decklist = { '0': 22, '1': 12, '2': 12, '3': 6, '4': 1, '5': 5, '6': 0, '7': 0, '8': 2, } for iteration in range(num_iterations): if(iteration % 10000 == 0 and iteration>0): print ("Iteration number "+str(iteration)+". Current average: "+ str(round(total_card_count / iteration,2))) cards_in_hand = { '0': 0, '1': 0, '2': 0, '3': 0, '4': 0, '5': 0, '6': 0, '7': 0, '8': 0, } deck = [] for card in decklist.keys(): deck += [card] * decklist[card] random.shuffle(deck) this_casting_card_count = 0 this_casting_cmc_count = 0 while this_casting_cmc_count < 20: cards_in_hand[deck.pop(0)] += 1 this_casting_card_count += 1 this_casting_cmc_count = 0 for cmc in cards_in_hand.keys(): this_casting_cmc_count += (int(cmc) * cards_in_hand[cmc]) total_card_count += this_casting_card_count print('average number of cards exiled: ' + str(round(total_card_count / num_iterations,2))) -
Where are you getting your lists? I haven't seen much Hermit druid out there.
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@john-cox I am just using vroman's numbers, no idea where he got them.
