But seriously, there's a saying about biking: The best way to not get into a motorcycle crash is to not ride them, OR; it's not if, but when.
Thankfully LA has a safety law, but the number of people I know who have been hurt or died on bikes is larger than I thought it would be at this point in my life, and that's in a state with helmet laws.
I've also seen a couple fatal crashes, and it wasn't like other motor operators being irresponsible themselves, or even the bikers: it was bikes doing bike things, and then crashing and death.
Don't mean to debbie downer here, but for as fun as they can be they're also incredibly dangerous. You're 37 times more likely to die on a bike than in a car, according to the internet; take every precaution not to be a stat.
5 loyalty and then going up to 6 with a blocker is protecting himself pretty well. Karn has shown that high loyalty can be as good as a defense as anything else. Also helps that the +1 enables the 0, which shouldn't be hard to maximize as is and is really good as a 5 mana loyalty draw 2 machine.
It's a good card...that's blue and costs 5. I'll prob test it at 540, but like with the Leonin Warleader I don't really need this and could sit behind better options.
I'm really interested in drafting this cube. Do you maybe have a way that I can use your amazing alters?
Before answering, remember that these forums will suspend you for discussing how to produce proxies, even if it's something silly and obvious. MTGSalvation has a no-tolerance policy regarding proxy discussion.
A worse hero of bladehold, but still great. Obviously a good card, is there space for it? I like it more than a number of options but I get other cards support other archetypes. But man, this card is sweet.
Ballista is incredible. Not an understatement, it goes in every deck. Maybe there's some weird combo cube where it wouldn't work for some reason, but I've yet to find a deck where Ballista isn't played. EDIT: I wouldn't play it in Oath, that's a real spot where it's bad.
Collonade is great, and this conversation is a great example of the pitfalls of small sample size analysis. If I don't activate my tar pit or colonnade in the next ten drafts, those cards aren't suddenly 'bad', it's just how the situations played out in this small subset of games featuring those cards. But these cards aren't universally acclaimed because they're overrated but because--in the grand scheme of things--being a guildgate is less of a detriment than the pros of being a dual and a manland provide.
I don't know how long you've been cubing for or how often you cube, but I can assure this is definitely not a sample size issue for me. I've had this cube for almost 2 years now and I cube with the people I know that play MTG probably on average every other week (sometimes more, sometimes less). I was also not exaggerating when I said that Colonnade has failed to impact a game more than a gainland in months. We each play 3 rounds, each of those being a best of 3, so a single draft is a sample size of at least 6 games. I try my best to not make ignorant assumptions about things, and that includes the quality of cards that I haven't extensively tested, as I'll only cut cards that are either blatantly outclassed by new ones or that fail to impress anybody in my playgroup. Some manlands might be good, but as a whole they are absolutely overrated, and while there is no problem whatsoever with including cards because they are a blast to play, overstating their power relative to other more consistent cards imo does more harm than good. Not to say that the card is too weak for small cubes, because the power is certainly there, but I think a lot more people need to pay closer attention to how Colonnade really preforms compared to a cycle/filter/fast land, because there is no way that I'm the only person in this whole forum who hasn't had Colonnade do anything but do a mediocre job at fixing mana for such an enormous period of time.
Hope that clears up any information and nuances from my previous posts that I failed to get across.
I've been cubing for a while myself, but frankly that's irrelevant to this discussion. I could cube twice as much or half as much as you, and both of our sample sizes are still small.
When a card is new, then that's the best we have so we have to make leaps based on even smaller sample sizes and sometimes weeks/months/years later cards get re-visited and gems are found. But when we have about a decade's worth of cube experience and Collonnade has been around pretty much this entire time, a poster telling me there's no way the card could be performing how it is isn't just going to change my experiences, because like with you I have conviction on the card's power level based on its performance.
I think the thing you need to take away from this is that clearly we've had a ton of experience with these cards, right? So as much as I appreciate finding niches and doing things differently and etc., maybe it's time to realize that your experience doesn't reflect ours and that's OK because in comparison to the pooled games, it's technically a small sample. It's not a pot shot to say that--small sample sizes are parts of games where variance is involved--but we aren't lying about its performance here lol
It seems alright, but also incredibly bad when you have a set of creatures that aren't expendable.
Sure, but that's true of any sac outlet. It's still a grizzly bear, and it can still sac itself on death. I like this card more the more I think about it.
Not really, as I'm not guaranteed the actual outcome. If I sac a creature to Bombardment, I always get that 1 damage; with this, you have all the caveats that come with casting spells, which means the 1 activation cost isn't trivial for the types of decks that prob want this.
But seriously, there's a saying about biking: The best way to not get into a motorcycle crash is to not ride them, OR; it's not if, but when.
Thankfully LA has a safety law, but the number of people I know who have been hurt or died on bikes is larger than I thought it would be at this point in my life, and that's in a state with helmet laws.
I've also seen a couple fatal crashes, and it wasn't like other motor operators being irresponsible themselves, or even the bikers: it was bikes doing bike things, and then crashing and death.
Don't mean to debbie downer here, but for as fun as they can be they're also incredibly dangerous. You're 37 times more likely to die on a bike than in a car, according to the internet; take every precaution not to be a stat.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!?! It's a cat leader on the prowl! Lion'in Purrleader!
Before answering, remember that these forums will suspend you for discussing how to produce proxies, even if it's something silly and obvious. MTGSalvation has a no-tolerance policy regarding proxy discussion.
Yes, it's definitely not because I've come from the future to kill John Connor but in the mean time talk about cube cards...*definitely* not that...
A worse hero of bladehold, but still great. Obviously a good card, is there space for it? I like it more than a number of options but I get other cards support other archetypes. But man, this card is sweet.
I've been cubing for a while myself, but frankly that's irrelevant to this discussion. I could cube twice as much or half as much as you, and both of our sample sizes are still small.
When a card is new, then that's the best we have so we have to make leaps based on even smaller sample sizes and sometimes weeks/months/years later cards get re-visited and gems are found. But when we have about a decade's worth of cube experience and Collonnade has been around pretty much this entire time, a poster telling me there's no way the card could be performing how it is isn't just going to change my experiences, because like with you I have conviction on the card's power level based on its performance.
I think the thing you need to take away from this is that clearly we've had a ton of experience with these cards, right? So as much as I appreciate finding niches and doing things differently and etc., maybe it's time to realize that your experience doesn't reflect ours and that's OK because in comparison to the pooled games, it's technically a small sample. It's not a pot shot to say that--small sample sizes are parts of games where variance is involved--but we aren't lying about its performance here lol
Not really, as I'm not guaranteed the actual outcome. If I sac a creature to Bombardment, I always get that 1 damage; with this, you have all the caveats that come with casting spells, which means the 1 activation cost isn't trivial for the types of decks that prob want this.