Postby LP, of the Fires » Fri Jul 19, 2013 9:24 am
Simple dissertation:
Naya Blitz Vs. Gruul Aggro.
Naya is more powerful, faster, has the best sideboard by far of agro decks, the best game 1 percentages across the board, and more play.
Gruul is more consistent/stable, only about a turn slower, and has flood insurance(you can flood and then cast hellrider).
The real confusion is how inconsistent blitz is. Really, if you mulligan well, it's actually more consistent then gruul in my experience by virtue of your entire deck being synergestic creatures.
The distinction is in the types of mulligans and keeps. With gruul, there a bunch of mediocre hands that you have to keep do to things like multiple 3/4 drops, 3 lands and a pillar. With blitz, 90% of your mull decisions will be predicated on do you have between 2/3 workable sources of mana and if you have 1 or 4, how powerful is your hand if you hit/whiff vs. a mull or how many turns can you go without a land before
hitting and still have a reasonable chance to win.
Say you have 1 land 2 1 drop, burning-tree+the nuts hand. You can reasonably calculate that your about 70ish percent to hit which is a win, but you also can go runner runner champion and/or hit a land on turn 3/4 vs. a mediocre hand and be 20% to win that game which is averaging out to slightly above 50% to win and therefore safe to keep.
With gruul, when you keep sketch hands, you have non-creature spells diluting your odds and overall give you weaker percentages and you're generally running a higher curve with more land.
The one thing I will say about gruul though that keeps it as the best performing agro deck is actually fairly simple: You can reliable blood rush Ghor-Clan rampager all of the time which wins a stupid amount of games. That and people are really bad at not respecting hellrider. There's a player at my store who is pretty good but never beats me in constructed because he always makes a greedy play and gets punished by hellrider.
FWIW, I've never beaten him in the 3ish games of limited we've played against each other.
You gotta understand, I love the beatdown. I really do. I always have.
Beatdown is hard, though.
Patrick chapin