Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 14:48:06 PDT From: Craig Sivils Subject: Re: Stasis talk I think your missing some important angles on t2 stasis. The most obvious of which is that turbo/squandered stasis are not mutually exclusive decks. If you look at Hovi's SQStasis/Haups deck from worlds, you might notice that he has a despotic scepter in there. My Abeyance Stasis deck had 3 boomerangs in it likewise to provide a turbo emulation option. (Side note: Howling Mine + Stasis with no Squandered = turbo stasis Squandered Resources + Stasis with no mine = turtle stasis). The next newest twist to stasis depends upon a twist I'm seeing in diferent decks but I don't have a good name for. Turbo Xerox, Baby Blue, Impulse Counter Post, Abeyance stasis all make use of massive library manipulation to allow the deck to focus more on the stronger elements without giving up card advantage (aka: Tutors). (That was a poorly worded explaination). Call this poorly explained concept Cantrip Critial Mass (ccm). CCM allows turbo xerox to run a mono-blue deck with less than the "optimal" amount of land. The high amount of single U library manipulation helps to find a second land in the event of a single island mana open. In the case of Baby blue, this means the deck can run 25 counterspells. In the Texas state t2 championship's, I ran a stasis deck with a single tutor (vampiric). To make up for this, I had 11-12 cantrips in the deck. The deck actually performed more consistantly than the tutor version. The ccm number for my stasis deck seemed to be around 12 while the ccm for baby blue seemed to be 8-9. For both of these decks, if you drop below that number of cantrip type spells the deck just freezes up and doesn't run smoothly. Having explained CCM, I beleive that the two most critical spells in the current t2 environment for any combo type deck are: Abeyance and Arcane Denial. Both of these cards can stall an oponent without costing you a card for doing so. In the case of Denial, you are loosing card advantage by the strict definition, but for a combo type deck the added bonus of digging deeper into your library combined with the one turn stall of your oponent make the extra card your opponent draws much less painful. I recently tried throwing both denial and abeyance into a prospbloom deck. I was suprised at how easily it worked into the deck. The final version of the deck ran 4 abeyance, 4 denials, 4 vampirics and 4 impulses as the only library manipulation. The deck ran very well (but alas, still lost to mono-blue, which is getting rarer in the t2 environment these days). If I were to try to make the "optimum" t2 stasis deck for the current environment, I'd probabbly try to make some type of mutant combo between the abeyance stasis deck I ran in the TX t2 finals and Hovi's haups version. I personally like the direction I took abeyance stasis in, which was to cut way down on the "extra" cards and go for a soft lock. With 14-15 counters and 4 abeyances, the deck could go toe to toe with most blue decks and win the counterspell wars. People just don't expect a stasis deck to have that many counters. As for the future of stasis, I'll personally miss arcane denial much more than FOW for my stasis deck. The combination of force spike and the squandered resources allow SQS to counter quite a bit without having to resort to FOW (although turn 1 stuff would once again be a problem). Craig ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com