Hallelujah Blue white miracle block deck:New Jund?

[Razorgore]

Originally Posted by bokchoy

The logic isn't solely based on Alex Hayne's record.

11 people played this archetype. 7 of them had the exact decklist. 1 had a record of 6-4-0 or better (the eventual champ).

Hayne also started 2-3 and had to 6-0 in the draft portion to get to where he did. The rest was history.

If you took the statistics of all decks at the tournament, the Hallelujah deck's stats were pretty underwhelming. This concept might make your little head explode, but sometimes the winning deck isn't necessarily the best deck. Especially in a multi-format tournament.

It was a next-level thing. RW humans and other pure-aggro strategies are too fast for the UW miracle deck to handle, yet the RW humans decks were getting stomped by midrange strategies like reanimator and UGrw geist tempo lists. The miracles deck didn't care about board presence, only life totals, so any deck that ends up being 2-3 turns slower than the aggro lists are going to be prime rib for UW miracle.dec. Miracle.dec preys on the decks that were built to beat the most common deck in the format (RW humans).

[Puddlejumper]

The deck has powerful plays, to be sure, but getting back to the OP's point, it doesn't seem like a very fun deck to play against. It's exactly the opposite of engaging, and frankly, it's a shame that even one iteration of it performed well.

Anyway, the deck is, in every way that matters, a Turbofog variant. The biggest thing it has going for it in terms of long-term viability is that the existence of Cavern of Souls discourages people from playing counterspells, but at best that means that it's the kind of deck that cycles in and out of viability (a la Dredge), and at worst is a deck that requires people to sacrifice a few sideboard slots at tournaments. Turbofog decks don't, as a rule, have the kind of resilience after sideboarding that it takes to be Tier 1. Just because this particular version is extraordinarily hard to play doesn't mean that it's extraordinarily rewarding - it'll perform as well as Turbofog ever does, but not better.

[BonSequitur]

Comparing this to Turbofog is a little silly, since it has basically nothing in common with turbofog other than being a slow control deck. Turbofog wants to invalidate all of the opponent's attack steps until the opponent runs out of cards; Hallelujah wants to buy itself as many draw steps as possible, because something like 20% of those draw steps are completely ridiculous.

In many ways this is very similar to a regular tap-out control deck; the major difference is that the tap-out deck wants to buy itself untap steps (So that it can successively cast spells that trump the opponent's cards, like Day of Judgement and Elesh Norn) and Hallelujah wants to buy itself draw steps so it has as many shots as possible at casting miracles that trump the opponent's spells. I think the deck is sweet, makes for awesome spectator magic, and I'm happy it did well.