General Purpose Pitch

This week, I've been going through cards. And came up with a beginning pitch deck. Wanted to be sure to have enough removal / with ways to take care of a multitude of problems. Here's my initial list.

4x Pyrokineses
4x Cave In
4x Blazing Shoa
3x Fury of the Horde

4x Force of Will
3x Misdirection
4x Mental Misstep
3x Commandeer

4x Vine Dryad
4x Noxious Renewal
2x Nourishing Shoal


3x Sickening Shoal
4x Neither Shade*
4x Surgical Extraction

2x Conflux
4x Progenitus
4x Reaper King

So, I've added a few cards that weren't on the list. Namely,
Conflux / Progenitus / Reaper King / Neither Shade

The first three, a simple reason, they are the highest casting cost, WUBRG cards there are, making the deck more flexible because, A. It gives you more cards to pitch to the spells you actually want and B. Keeps you from holding a hand full of cards you cannot play. This has worked nicely during initial playtesting. True, there is no artifact / enchantment removal. However, 8 counterspell, 3 redirects and 3 "snatch" spells (Commandeer) and the ability to burn it out of there game completely with Surgical Extraction, have kept the artifact / enchantment combo locks at bay.

Now to address Neither Shade, the ultimate Comeback king. The best way I found to handle him was to hope / mulligan for him in my opening hand, then allow the opponent to go first permitting me first draw, and the ability to pitch Neither Shade to the graveyard.

Also, don't forget the benefit of Misdireciton when it comes to countering a counterspell. When a counterspell is cast by your opponent, pitch to cast misdirection on it, misdirecting it TO, Misdirection. Misdirection then resolves causing the counterspell to have an "illegal" target, and fizzle.

Over the next week I'm going to playtest this deck some more, and attempt to refine its strategy. Also, I have a 60~80% Pitch CounterBurn deck in development hopefully I can show you soon too!

Any suggestions?