Here's a silly idea I had for threads in this forum. The concept is a little goofy, but it seems like it could have some merit to it. I call them "Chicken and Egg" threads, mocking the old riddle "Which came first? The chicken or the egg?" The idea is to examine whether a card is good enough to warrant the inclusin of other cards, or if other cards are good enough to warrant the inclusion of a card. Let's start with a very good example: Noxious Revival.
I've heard horror stories of Hymn to Tourach followed by Noxious Revival followed by Hymn to Tourach. Obviously, Hymn to Tourach is a cubeworthy card, but I think Noxious Revival is still at or around "rogue" status. The purpose of this thread is to determine whether there are so many cards in a "typical cube" that are backbreaking in duplicates enough to warrant Noxious Revival and a -1.
If there are, we then switch perspectives and see if Noxious Revival is justification enough to include more cards that pair with it very well.
Thoughts?
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(spoiler=Off-topic in brackets is how I got a title for my spoiler. You can terminate it with a typical /spoiler block.)
I'll go ahead and say the good other cards were first. Noxious Revival is a lot less powerful in peasant cubes, and I probably wouldn't use it in pauper cubes. Actually, I think it's the great variety in cards that makes this good: At some point, it's a tutor. Want a removal, a critter, card draw, a planeswalker, ...? Draw it the following turn. And I don't think putting other cards in because of synergies with Revival is a good idea, since it's the only cubable card of its kind. BBE is in already; and even there the synergy is questionable.
Specialities about the cube: U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
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I'm not sure I understand. Can you explain the concept more, or give us an example post?
Like NewbornMuse said, Noxious Revival definitely came to the cube after other cards.
Obviously, some cards existed before others, so the literal implications of this sort of thread can only go so far. The theoretical implications are a little different, though. Noxious Revival, like I said, is a pretty "rogue" card at this point.
The purpose of this thread, however, is to examine whether other cubeworthy cards become more powerful when you're playing Noxious Revival (see Hymn to Tourach). After that, if we agree that Noxious Revival is a good addition to the cube, we examine if Noxious Revival could be the harbinger of other cards, whether it's redundant cards like Reclaim or if it's other cards that get more powerful with Noxious Revival like Miracles. Both of the examples I'm giving there are a little hyperbolic, but they're still in line with the sort of discussion I'd hope to cultivate.
My thoughts? Noxious Revival is good, and could warrant the inclusion of backbreaking and/or value cards that are a little too borderline otherwise. Any card that nets you card advantage is worth considering when you've got a Noxious Revival among your picks. Hell, make your Avalanche Rider come back for round 2 and really punish that control deck.
Gifts Ungiven got a nice friend in Noxious Revival, as did non-temporal mastery miracles, and all back breaking spells (Recall, Time Walk, etc). On the flip side, reanimator strategies have a card to fear.
Overall, I think Noxious revival is a good cube card because a free spell that can go in every deck has a lot of potential. This potential is only as powerful as what you can do with it. Fortunately, not only do a lot of cards make Noxious Revival good, but it also makes some older cube gems better.
The smaller and the more powerful your cube is the better this card becomes. I like it best in a deck with Time Walk and ways to recur Time Walk .
Time Walk, Noxious Revival, Time Walk, Eternal Witness on Time Walk,... You get the idea.
That being said it does gets worse the bigger your cube becomes. SO I would not add cards for Noxious Revival, but maybe add it if you cut enough cards for your power to be easily recurrable.
Is Noxious Revival a paradox card? It is only good enough to include if your cube is small, and if your cube is small it's not good enough to make it in.
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I run it at 495 and have no plans to cut it anytime soon but I don't think this one card is an excuse to add other cards in just because you would get the chance to play them a second time. The cube is full of cards I'd like to cast twice so I doubt I'd add any new cards just for this reason.
Is Noxious Revival a paradox card? It is only good enough to include if your cube is small, and if your cube is small it's not good enough to make it in.
I currently run it at 545 and it has been solid so far. It is what I call a scalpel card. Much like Stifle, it often doesn't blow you away with its power. This thread appears to be dedicated to the cards that make it a blowout, but it really only plays that way occasionally.
Spending a card and two life to redraw a Disenchant or Swords or land, or make the opponent whiff on a reanimate, or make him draw a blank when he needs an out, may seem ho-hum on paper. In practice, when that is the card you need to win or not to lose, it is worth all your cards, all you mana, and all your life minus 1. Revival trades raw power for a great combination of versatility and speed, getting you out of jams you never expected to be in, and didn't prepare for at all.
How many times has your opponent tapped out to play a card and you realized you cannot win if they untap with it? Or the reverse, how many times have you played a card that you know will win you the game if you untap with it, only to see it blown up immediately?
Revival may not wow you with power level, but it is a "free", "colorless" spell that turns losses into wins. So far, we've been impressed.
Imo most of what you are discussing here belongs in the official Noxious Revival thread.
@Zovc: What other cards fall into this C+E category? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a thread for this general question instead?
You might be right. This is less divergent than I thought it would be. Other "Chicken and Egg" cards that come to mind:
Wtwlf had good examples with Pox/Stax and the recent recursive dudes. Ranger of Eos and and utility one-drops like Weathered Wayfarer.
Cards that reinforce other cube cards so much that they might encourage certain designers to go deeper. To the point that it might seem like the reinforcing card (Noxious Revival in this thread's case) was the card that "came first." Like Guttersnipe and the spoiled Young Pyromancer. Or trying to support token strategies in red.
I always wondered why regrowth is a staple but Recollect is played nowhere ever. Yes it is strictly worse, but I think it could provide some nice redundancy for decks that thrive on recursion.
Noxious Revival is a card that I have always wanted to try out too.
I always wondered why regrowth is a staple but Recollect is played nowhere ever. Yes it is strictly worse, but I think it could provide some nice redundancy for decks that thrive on recursion.
Noxious Revival is a card that I have always wanted to try out too.
I have wondered about this too. Thing is a mana difference can be huge. Often it is a turn difference in casting the spell you took back.
Cards like Dread Return have a similar problem. One mana too much.
the one mana difference determines whether a card is playable or not
I don't think it is as simple as that. For some cards, like threats and answers, it matters a lot more. Utility cards that play to a more niche strategy like graveyard recursion dont have the same restrictions placed on them. No one is "curving out" into a regrowth. I'm not trying to argue that recollect is awesome, but rather that it's not possible to correctly state that a regrowth that costs one mana more us "unplayable", even for cube.
eternal witness is what recollect should be. 3 mana makes it hard to return and cast spells in the same turn if the spell is of a decent size like 3 and above.
I used to run Recollect back when I didn't have a regrowth or witness and while it wasn't terrible it was lame when you cast that and couldn't cast the thing you were bringing back.
I think Noxious Revival is cube unplayable. It's a do-nothing card too much of the time.
In the correct deck it's ok at best.
This seems a very strange thing to say. We all know the power of this effect, and there are already cards in cube that return cards to hand or top of library, or tutor effects, so if you want to dismiss the card, "do nothing" seems like a terrible argument.
Noxious Revival is really versatile. I've run it on and off for a while and it's a great free effect to have access to - just having a fetch and a burn spell in your GY gives you a bunch of EoT options. I'm not running it currently in my 360 but it wouldn't be badly out of place there. It has good synergy with the denser fetches and Lotus etc. anyway.
I've heard horror stories of Hymn to Tourach followed by Noxious Revival followed by Hymn to Tourach. Obviously, Hymn to Tourach is a cubeworthy card, but I think Noxious Revival is still at or around "rogue" status. The purpose of this thread is to determine whether there are so many cards in a "typical cube" that are backbreaking in duplicates enough to warrant Noxious Revival and a -1.
If there are, we then switch perspectives and see if Noxious Revival is justification enough to include more cards that pair with it very well.
Thoughts?
(spoiler=Off-topic in brackets is how I got a title for my spoiler. You can terminate it with a typical /spoiler block.)
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I'll go ahead and say the good other cards were first. Noxious Revival is a lot less powerful in peasant cubes, and I probably wouldn't use it in pauper cubes. Actually, I think it's the great variety in cards that makes this good: At some point, it's a tutor. Want a removal, a critter, card draw, a planeswalker, ...? Draw it the following turn. And I don't think putting other cards in because of synergies with Revival is a good idea, since it's the only cubable card of its kind. BBE is in already; and even there the synergy is questionable.
450, Peasant*, unpowered**
Specialities about the cube:
U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
Like NewbornMuse said, Noxious Revival definitely came to the cube after other cards.
Obviously, some cards existed before others, so the literal implications of this sort of thread can only go so far. The theoretical implications are a little different, though. Noxious Revival, like I said, is a pretty "rogue" card at this point.
The purpose of this thread, however, is to examine whether other cubeworthy cards become more powerful when you're playing Noxious Revival (see Hymn to Tourach). After that, if we agree that Noxious Revival is a good addition to the cube, we examine if Noxious Revival could be the harbinger of other cards, whether it's redundant cards like Reclaim or if it's other cards that get more powerful with Noxious Revival like Miracles. Both of the examples I'm giving there are a little hyperbolic, but they're still in line with the sort of discussion I'd hope to cultivate.
My thoughts? Noxious Revival is good, and could warrant the inclusion of backbreaking and/or value cards that are a little too borderline otherwise. Any card that nets you card advantage is worth considering when you've got a Noxious Revival among your picks. Hell, make your Avalanche Rider come back for round 2 and really punish that control deck.
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Overall, I think Noxious revival is a good cube card because a free spell that can go in every deck has a lot of potential. This potential is only as powerful as what you can do with it. Fortunately, not only do a lot of cards make Noxious Revival good, but it also makes some older cube gems better.
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Time Walk, Noxious Revival, Time Walk, Eternal Witness on Time Walk,... You get the idea.
That being said it does gets worse the bigger your cube becomes. SO I would not add cards for Noxious Revival, but maybe add it if you cut enough cards for your power to be easily recurrable.
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I currently run it at 545 and it has been solid so far. It is what I call a scalpel card. Much like Stifle, it often doesn't blow you away with its power. This thread appears to be dedicated to the cards that make it a blowout, but it really only plays that way occasionally.
Spending a card and two life to redraw a Disenchant or Swords or land, or make the opponent whiff on a reanimate, or make him draw a blank when he needs an out, may seem ho-hum on paper. In practice, when that is the card you need to win or not to lose, it is worth all your cards, all you mana, and all your life minus 1. Revival trades raw power for a great combination of versatility and speed, getting you out of jams you never expected to be in, and didn't prepare for at all.
How many times has your opponent tapped out to play a card and you realized you cannot win if they untap with it? Or the reverse, how many times have you played a card that you know will win you the game if you untap with it, only to see it blown up immediately?
Revival may not wow you with power level, but it is a "free", "colorless" spell that turns losses into wins. So far, we've been impressed.
I imagine cards like Natural Order, a card which definitely came around before the cards that were worth Natural Order'ing out.
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That's an example that jumps to mind.
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You might be right. This is less divergent than I thought it would be. Other "Chicken and Egg" cards that come to mind:
Wtwlf had good examples with Pox/Stax and the recent recursive dudes.
Ranger of Eos and and utility one-drops like Weathered Wayfarer.
Cards that reinforce other cube cards so much that they might encourage certain designers to go deeper. To the point that it might seem like the reinforcing card (Noxious Revival in this thread's case) was the card that "came first." Like Guttersnipe and the spoiled Young Pyromancer. Or trying to support token strategies in red.
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In the correct deck it's ok at best.
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Noxious Revival is a card that I have always wanted to try out too.
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I have wondered about this too. Thing is a mana difference can be huge. Often it is a turn difference in casting the spell you took back.
Cards like Dread Return have a similar problem. One mana too much.
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I loved it in peasant. Until Down / Dirty came in.
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I don't think it is as simple as that. For some cards, like threats and answers, it matters a lot more. Utility cards that play to a more niche strategy like graveyard recursion dont have the same restrictions placed on them. No one is "curving out" into a regrowth. I'm not trying to argue that recollect is awesome, but rather that it's not possible to correctly state that a regrowth that costs one mana more us "unplayable", even for cube.
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This seems a very strange thing to say. We all know the power of this effect, and there are already cards in cube that return cards to hand or top of library, or tutor effects, so if you want to dismiss the card, "do nothing" seems like a terrible argument.
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