Lands:
1 Breeding Pool
3 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Steam Vents
4 Urza's Mine
4 Urza's Power Plant
4 Urza's Tower
3 Island
Creatures:
2 Sundering Titan
3 Aeon Chronicler
Other Spells:
4 Izzet Signet
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Sensei's Divining Top
3 Counterbalance
4 Condescend
4 Fire / Ice
4 Remand
4 Thirst For Knowledge
Sideboard:
3 Engineered Explosives
3 Detritivore
3 Threads Of Disloyalty
2 Mindslaver
2 Venser, Shaper Savant
2 Academy Ruins |
  Counterbalance
Tron.
Description of deck by it's author
(quoted):
The second curiosity was "Counterbalance-Tron"...
an attempt to weld two disparate things together, the Counterbalance/Top
lockdown engine and the big-mana Blue-based Tron strategy. Generally
it’s considered that there isn’t quite enough Blue mana to support the
double-Blue Counterbalance, and I was curious whether any of that could
be played around with enough to find a new Tron concept.
This is another bit of an odd one... and unlike the
prior deck, there’s an actual bit of reason or logic behind why you have
the one odd random dual to search for. Not actually any use for it
besides getting Engineered Explosives up to 3, but if you flash a
Breeding Pool and a Steam Vents in the control mirror they might expect
to see Ancient Grudge after sideboarding... especially when you present
no other main-deck, obvious use for the Green mana. Conceptually it’s
early-game board control with card-draw or Scry fitted onto it, drawing
cards to complete the Tron... or the Top/Counterbalance combo.
As a pure board-control deck it leaves something to be
desired. Oblivion Stone is a fair bit slower than Wrath of God,
requiring two turns to use unless you have the Tron active. That said,
it’s another controlling answer to a Gaddock Teeg, who seems to be
popping his little head up in the strangest of places nowadays in
Extended as an honest concern to be addressed. Main-deck, Teeg shuts
down exactly one spell (Condescend), and thus can basically be ignored
while the deck goes about its business of locking the board, wiping it,
or just dropping a fast Sundering Titan to close the game.
The deck clearly felt powerful... but as a first pass
through the concept, surely some of the choices and plans still need
work. While I can feel reasonably confident in the quality of the "final
work" for the Domain Zoo list, that’s because it is a known quantity and
a beatdown deck, which are far easier to design to follow a game-plan
with confidence that your choices are either correct or, at the very
least, reasonable. In a deck that can spend a lot more mana, and
potentially argue for several different colors of splash instead of the
light hint of Red for Fire, it’s nearly impossible to figure out an
acceptable configuration without bashing into other decks first.
From my playing so far, at least, one matchup seems
quite positive enough to warrant further attention... as I didn’t meet a
Rock deck I couldn’t knock over. Against an opponent who’s not doing
things especially fast, the deck does pull together a significant
locking mechanism, limiting the opponent in just what they can get past
the counter-wall, bleeding the cards out of their hand if they want to
actually resolve anything and then bleeding their mana-base with
Sundering Titan. One thing at least lent me towards favoring the Red
splash in general, there... Detritivore is a vicious, vicious beating in
a Tron deck, or at least so I’ve believed since they printed it, and
here we are in a format where the average opponent has fewer basic lands
than you can count on one hand.
NOTE: This deck was built for Extended, published
12/21/07. |
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