Using a blue card to grant flying (Something blue can do) to a creature then using a green card to kill it (Something green can do) isn't really 'trolling to color pie' any more than the fact that Red/White have access to Essence Drain.
As for green in general.. Green seems fairly strong in M14. It's far from the weakest colour and it has quality cards at all rarities. Particularly, green's commons are fairly deep; there's no green common that's utterly unplayable (Though Fog and Verdant Haven come close) whereas at the same time the high end of strong green commons is very deep (Predatory sliver, rootwalla, rumbling baloth, deadly recluse, elvish mystic).
Green was also a very strong colour in Innistrad limited and DKR-INN-INN draft. It's really odd to me saying that green is always weakest in draft - there's usually a weak colour but it rotates.
Funny thing is, I like Verdant Haven. It's exactly what a lifegain card should be: The lifegain is gravy. You might be thinking of Bountiful Harvest?
Interesting that you should say Innistrad, since Kessig Recluse is symptomatic of this issue. At 2GG, wouldn't 1/4 or 1/5 fit better? Mostly, though, I found building a good green deck in ISD required way too many rares and mythics. Spider Spawning was only playable with Essence of the Wild. Alternately, you could use Kessig Cagebreakers, which at least "feels" rare. The focus on self-mill hurt green in Innistrad too, since limited (again) has only 40 cards in a library, and there was a lot of mill going on in blue.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Funny thing is, I like Verdant Haven. It's exactly what a lifegain card should be: The lifegain is gravy. You might be thinking of Bountiful Harvest?
Interesting that you should say Innistrad, since Kessig Recluse is symptomatic of this issue. At 2GG, wouldn't 1/4 or 1/5 fit better? Mostly, though, I found building a good green deck in ISD required way too many rares and mythics. Spider Spawning was only playable with Essence of the Wild. Alternately, you could use Kessig Cagebreakers, which at least "feels" rare. The focus on self-mill hurt green in Innistrad too, since limited (again) has only 40 cards in a library, and there was a lot of mill going on in blue.
Emrakul warped the RoE limited environment? What, does he break his way out of booster boxes to influence the vast majority of drafts that don't have one?
Green was good in Innistrad. Spider Spawning was an archetype unto itself and it was heavily successful around halfway through the format's life, or more generally in tables where it wasn't overdrafted. Green-white was a very dominant colour combination in DKA-INN-INN limited. At common, green was full of amazing cards (Prey Upon, Ambush Viper, Hunger of the Howlpack, Darkthicket Wolf, Wild Hunger). Yes Kessig Recluse would have been better as a 1/4, but as it turns out not every card can be as good as it could be. Blue is the likely best colour in M14 but it still has Thought Scour and Merfolk Spy in it. Green in Dark Ascension was defined by Wild Hunger and Hunger of the Howlpack.
The spider spawning deck was runic repetition + memory's journey + spider spawning, because no one wanted the first 2 in draft unless they had spawning already which was an uncommon so only 1 or 2 guys at the table got to go for it. Essence of the wild never came into the equation. If you didn't get your hands on a spawning the idea was to go green/white travel preparations where bears like darkthicket wolf and midnight haunting were the highlight so you could go 2 drop, land, 2 or 3 drop, land, cast and flashback travel preps. A couple sudden pumpable 4/4s or flying 3/3s was not easy to deal with. Blue was as self mill as green to fill its yard so it could cast its real threats makeshift mauler and stitched drake, normally paired with black for zombie synergies and better removal. Blue mill was barely a thing, always a plan c in drafting blue at best.
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I think this has historically been true, but reversed in recent years. Green has been one if the best, if not the best colours in m13, m14,rtr and the entire innistrad block
Green will always be playable. A lot of draft decks play those big beefy creatures as a wincon. I would say it does not always appear as the best color, mostly because it usual lacks removal.
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Funny thing is, I like Verdant Haven. It's exactly what a lifegain card should be: The lifegain is gravy. You might be thinking of Bountiful Harvest?
Interesting that you should say Innistrad, since Kessig Recluse is symptomatic of this issue. At 2GG, wouldn't 1/4 or 1/5 fit better? Mostly, though, I found building a good green deck in ISD required way too many rares and mythics. Spider Spawning was only playable with Essence of the Wild. Alternately, you could use Kessig Cagebreakers, which at least "feels" rare. The focus on self-mill hurt green in Innistrad too, since limited (again) has only 40 cards in a library, and there was a lot of mill going on in blue.
There's so much wrong with this and some of your previous comments that I felt compelled to go through some of it.
1. Emrakul was barely playable in RoE, as in maybe once every 10 drafts in which he's opened, someone has the kind of ramp deck necessary to cast him before turn 17. It hardly warped anything, and even still, while green had Ondu Giant and Growth Spasm, red and black had access to ramp as well, and Dreamstone Hedron was a card as well, which didn't give green the ramp monopoly it normally has.
2. Kessig Recluse would be overpowered as a 1/4 or 1/5 with deathtouch. Period. They made it a 2/3 so that it wasn't a complete brick in the already existing W/G aggro archetype, and this way it still dies in combat enough to mitigate the fact that it kills basically everything in combat.
3. Green was amazing in Innistrad, as it had two divergent options that both excelled comparitively to other color options along the same paths. Green aggro was very good in DII, be it G/R with Wild Hunger as the key spell or G/W with Travel Preparations. These decks almost never relied on rares to win, as they had all of their tools available at common. This aggressive potential significantly mitigated green's lack of interactivity, as it allowed for these decks to put so much early pressure on the opponent that interactivity wasn't ever necessary on your part.
As for the other path, the Spider Spawning deck was dominant, as it fought on a plane few other decks could match or combat. Gnaw to the Bone was nigh unbeatable by many of the aggressive or more basic midrange decks in the format, as it gave the Spawning deck time to set up incredibly powerful plays and even a decking endgame with Runic Repetition and Memory's Journey. These decks often ran multiple colors, often including blue for the potential endgame combo and for cards like Armored Skaab and Forbidden Alchemy, and they were very strong. These "green" decks fought the interactivity problem by going underneath it, purporting a gameplan that other decks simply could not interrupt.
4. Spider Spawning didn't need Essence of the Wild. Hell, Essence was unplayable in Spawning decks in the first place due to the GGG in its cost. Even if you were heavy green (which almost never happened in such decks), it wasn't really that good in the deck anyway, given that you're doing most of your work putting cards into and playing cards from your bin to worry about trying to draw and cast a 6-drop with an awkward cost.
5. The 40 cards argument is a silly one for the same reason that milling your opponent is generally a poor strategy in limited. 40 cards is easily substantial enough to get some really powerful things going in a limited game with the Spawning deck, and if you never saw this happen, then either your draft group was pretty narrow and never tried it or you never watched coverage of big events in which many pros played it and spoke very highly of it.
6. There was no "mill the opponent" deck in DII. Increasing Confusion was not a card that made a mill deck; it was a singular win condition via mill, like a less powerful Jace, Memory Adept.
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Well, if you noticed, there's a whole bunch of equipment in the SOM block. Removing a Viridian Claw or Bladed Pinions at instant speed is a nice combat trick.
Especially dangerous, and needing instant-speed removal, is Infiltration Lens, which is basically "This is a punisher: Let me draw two cards, or lose the game to infect fairly quickly." (Which, BTW, is why I was surprised someone listed Cystbearer when I could argue your case better than you.) Oh, and casting it and equipping it costs only total.
At least we're in agreement that Sylvok Replica is either sorcery-speed removal for :4mana::symg: or gives your opponent too many ways to bluff it out.
But my point remains. My bigger issue is that Plummet is a troll card. On top of green's already present troll cards. (Green already gets a lifegain card and an overcosted spider at common in every set, on top of "every color gets some troll card or another".) And the funny thing is, if you splash any other color, you wouldn't want Plummet in any Core Set before M13 anyway. And from M13 on, we have fight, which fits green's flavor, and has resonance, something Plummet never had.
7. Neither of those equipment ever demanded instant-speed answers, and the Lens was marginal even in the Infect deck. If either was good given any given board state, sorcery speed removal did a perfectly acceptable job dealing with the problem. Hell, Instant speed removal doesn't even have a dramatic effect on the Lens, as ramming creatures for no board value was a poor play in that format anyway. You were always much better off with either power-boosting equipment or spells that make blocking choices difficult. As for the Claw, using sorcery speed removal on it maybe allowed them to hurt you in combat with it once. Never a catastrophe. Hell, neither card was as good as you seem to think they were anyway.
8. Cystbearer was just about as strong as Rot Wolf. That extra point of toughness was very relevant in the format.
9. How does blowing up something with Sylvok Replica ever cost 5 total mana, be it at instant or sorcery speed?
10. Green has always been able to handle flying creatures without actually having them, and this is hardly "trolling the color pie." Flavor-wise, the idea of elves, spiders, or whatever using the canopy as a spot from which to pick off flyers has worked for decades, and Plummet hardly changes that. Green generally has a hard time playing an interactive game, but when they do, it's normally through narrow avenues such as fighting and attacking opposing air forces. It's the mitigating factor that still gives green some way of interacting with the opponent; every color has to be able to, but green tends to be the worst at doing so, as its options are more limited in scope.
11. The effectiveness of a removal spell in limited is always a function of the card's speed, casting cost, and universality. Even if I'm somehow 3+ colors, if my opponent has a number of good targets for a Plummet, it ends up being a premium removal spell regardless of what colors you're playing and the power of their alternative options, as it's cheap and fast. Implying that you should never consider Plummet or that it's bad if you have, say, a bunch of copies of Liturgy of Blood in your pile is ludicrous.
12. That blue has ways of giving creatures flying is just as acceptable an effect as green's attacking flyers, and that the two interact isn't an issue either. All color combinations offer neat interactions that allow them to extend the options their color pie slice tends to offer, and suggesting that this is broken in some way is just silly.
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In all, my original point stands. Green has trouble interacting with the opponent in the universal ways that colors like black, red, and blue tend to have available, and it usually makes up for this deficiency through creature size and ramp. Green is at its best when it can mitigate its lack of interactivity by either outpacing the opponent, outclassing the opponent, or simply competing on a different plane that negates some of their interactive options, such as the Spider Spawning deck in Innistrad. When it can interact, it's often to a limiting extent, and sometimes those limits disappear, as in matchups in M14 in which Plummet is basically Doom Blade. Those times are the ones when green decks exceed expectations.
Signalling is like farting: it's a natural thing that helps people avoid being where you are, and if you try to do it deliberately, things turn to crap fast.
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How good green is depends on how much instant speed removal exists in the other colors and how much evasion green has. Instant speed removal dictates how effective combat tricks and enchantments are for green. With out evasion, an endless stream of blockers can be generated, making it hard to push damage through.
Each colour is "worst" at some point. If anyone wants to somehow calculate the average, he is insane.
Off the top of my head: White was worst in ody and ody-torment, blue was worst in onslaught block, black was worst in time spiral block, red was worst in m11, green was worst in... umm... Lor x3 maybe? I cannot really remember when green was definitely the worst colour in any format.
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I've found green to be extremely powerful in this format. It's also one of the few colors that can reliably splash for another color in this format with Ley of the Land and Verdant Haven.
Green has a powerful aggressive common curve, with Ley of the Land, Elvish Mystic, Predatory Sliver, Rootwalla, Advocate of the Beast & Rumbling Baloth which can get even better when uncommon cards are added.
White is clearly the worst, and Blue clearly the best.
Green is actually middle of the road, and as can be seen, it is highly variable and depends greatly on which colors you associate with it.
White is SCARILY bad in this format, apparently.
I've had some success with white. Mostly because people force me into it at my LGS and I have to make the best of white, or run a subpar deck in other colors where all the best stuff is being taken.
1. Emrakul was barely playable in RoE, as in maybe once every 10 drafts in which he's opened, someone has the kind of ramp deck necessary to cast him before turn 17. It hardly warped anything, and even still, while green had Ondu Giant and Growth Spasm, red and black had access to ramp as well, and Dreamstone Hedron was a card as well, which didn't give green the ramp monopoly it normally has.
Ever hear of synechdoche? Emmy's entire creature type was a major theme in ROE, and its whole schtick is "expensive colorless bombs that only have to attack to gain card advantage".
2. Kessig Recluse would be overpowered as a 1/4 or 1/5 with deathtouch. Period. They made it a 2/3 so that it wasn't a complete brick in the already existing W/G aggro archetype, and this way it still dies in combat enough to mitigate the fact that it kills basically everything in combat.
Then make it cost 1GG. It's still far worse than some of the other cards other colors get, but it's not unplayable. In fact, come to think of it...
3. Green was amazing in Innistrad, as it had two divergent options that both excelled comparitively to other color options along the same paths. Green aggro was very good in DII, be it G/R with Wild Hunger as the key spell or G/W with Travel Preparations. These decks almost never relied on rares to win, as they had all of their tools available at common. This aggressive potential significantly mitigated green's lack of interactivity, as it allowed for these decks to put so much early pressure on the opponent that interactivity wasn't ever necessary on your part.
Those are good, but yet, my history with every other color combination is better. And not just mine; everyone I played with during that season.
Admittedly, Prey Upon made green something other than complete crap.
As for the other path, the Spider Spawning deck was dominant, as it fought on a plane few other decks could match or combat. Gnaw to the Bone was nigh unbeatable by many of the aggressive or more basic midrange decks in the format, as it gave the Spawning deck time to set up incredibly powerful plays and even a decking endgame with Runic Repetition and Memory's Journey. These decks often ran multiple colors, often including blue for the potential endgame combo and for cards like Armored Skaab and Forbidden Alchemy, and they were very strong. These "green" decks fought the interactivity problem by going underneath it, purporting a gameplan that other decks simply could not interrupt.
Yeah, a lifegain card was nigh-unbeatable. *snicker* And you're relying on a three-card combo, in three colors? Really?
Your entire argument is that the deck depends heavily on blue-black, including flashing back a card that costs seven mana to do so and then Repetition?
10. Green has always been able to handle flying creatures without actually having them, and this is hardly "trolling the color pie." Flavor-wise, the idea of elves, spiders, or whatever using the canopy as a spot from which to pick off flyers has worked for decades, and Plummet hardly changes that.
My problem with it is mechanical. It has been relevant exactly never.
So yeah. Green has way too many irrelevant cards. Per MaRo's own ideas about what "a good design" is, he should've never approved Plummet. Seriously.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong and Plummet's like, the next Memory Jar.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Or you could splash white, black, or red and get real removal. You know, something that doesn't depend on your opponent playing flying? In real limited, Plummet = Great Wall.
I would say, no. In the last four years, the only times it felt "obvious best color" were AVR and ROE. But "obvious worst" was evey other set in the past four years.
Seriously, how exactly are you going to win limited without any removal? Or evasion. (If you say trample is evasion, you're also saying Shock is Lightning Bolt.)
Also, ad hominem. Is it just me, or everyone I draft with? Because only in those two sets has someone I draft with ever come in the top 3 with green. You'll note that one set had virtually no removal (Human Frailty suffers from the same issues as Plummet.), and the other was all about common colorless bombs. And in neither were flying hate cards playable.
As I said, they're worthless and add nothing to the game. R&D should just ax them. (And that would be flavorful for green: Natural selection!)
I think this is why you find yourself in such disagreement with everyone else in the thread. To put it bluntly, on average the group you draft with is not very good. That doesn't mean you're not; you could be an excellent drafter. But if you are, you're a big fish in a small pond, and it's limiting your growth where archetype evaluation is concerned.
That may sound presumptuous, but you're saying that in every draft of every set except AVR and ROE you've done in the last four years, you've never seen a green deck make the finals. Assuming you draft even once or twice a month, this would imply that green has not only been the worst color in all those sets, it's been so by an impossibly huge margin unprecedented in modern Magic. Check ars arcanum posts, check Pro Tour results, poll the Limited forum, read articles on the major Magic websites. You'll find a range of opinions, but none anywhere near your experience.
There are 2 possible explanations. Either:
A) everyone else is wrong and only your play group has had the perspicacity to realize green is unplayable, or
B) the competition at your drafts is really weak and the better players (such as yourself, I'm going to presume) consciously avoid green like the plague.
I don't think A is plausible. And I'm seeing a lot of evidence for B, such as your not recognizing that Fangren Marauder or Viridian Corrupter were extremely strong Limited cards, and not understanding how the Spider Spawning deck worked (based on your last post).
Again, I'm not casting aspersion on your skills. You may be an overall superior drafter to me... it wouldn't be that hard. But something really weird is going on in your draft group, and it's seriously affecting your evaluations.
Dire Wombat, I must really commend you on your posting style. I would have thought that any proper reply would have been required to start with "Ever heard of sounding like a douche?" You, somehow, avoided the easy trap and used a more congenial introduction. Bravo! On a related note, I thought it certain that there would be a C option, but you wisely chose to withold it. Obviously, you've mastered the community-building posting style. I, certainly, still need to work on it.
Lemur, if you really want to make points such as that Sylvok Replica costs G1 to activate (oh, and you tagged it in your post, for crap's sake) and that Gnaw to the Bone was anything short of backbreaking in the graveyard deck in Innistrad block, then this whole argument is completely pointless. You apparently play in the most insular, blind-to-the-competitive-world play group on the planet. Even as microcosmic examples of the lunacy in your arguments, those two aren't even remotely debatable, especially the RTFC issue with the Replica.
Oh, and as for your newest gem, that Vampire Nighthawk is an example of why Kessig Recluse could cost GG1, I think you need to take a moment to learn more about rarity differences and that "color pie" thing you don't seem to understand.
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Signalling is like farting: it's a natural thing that helps people avoid being where you are, and if you try to do it deliberately, things turn to crap fast.
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I would have thought that any proper reply would have been required to start with "Ever heard of sounding like a douche?"
In the time it took to quote this, trim it, and add it to my sig, I still haven't stopped laughing.
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Lemur, if you really want to make points such as that Sylvok Replica costs G1 to activate (oh, and you tagged it in your post, for crap's sake) and that Gnaw to the Bone was anything short of backbreaking in the graveyard deck in Innistrad block, then this whole argument is completely pointless. You apparently play in the most insular, blind-to-the-competitive-world play group on the planet. Even as microcosmic examples of the lunacy in your arguments, those two aren't even remotely debatable, especially the RTFC issue with the Replica.
Oh, and as for your newest gem, that Vampire Nighthawk is an example of why Kessig Recluse could cost GG1, I think you need to take a moment to learn more about rarity differences and that "color pie" thing you don't seem to understand.
I'd just like to cite Umezawa's Jitte as an example of a card that is PROOF that they could have made Kessig Recluse cost 1G or even just G.
Gnaw to the Bone was ridiculous. You could easily gain 20 life by spending one card. At that rate, lifegain actually becomes good as a control strategy, essentially forcing the aggressive deck to win the game twice... and that card was an archetype-specific common that nobody else wanted, meaning the Spider Spawning/Simic player often had more than one. The goal was to give yourself as many draw steps as possible to mill yourself and make land drops so you could cast the biggest Spider Spawning possible, and a sufficiently big Spider Spawning could beat any board state. Because the spiders are 1/2 reach - a really, really great body to get on a mass of tokens. It's hard to appreciate unless you've actually seen Spider Spawning cast for six and what it did to board states; one 1/2 token trades with any creature with less than 4 power, instantly bricking every creature in the opponent's side of the table.
Gnaw to the Bone was ridiculous. You could easily gain 20 life by spending one card.
And even that wasn't the best case: gaining 10+ life whilst spending no cards.
I'm struck by the fact that a lot of the discussion on the last page or two reads as though we're talking about mono Green. We're not, though, are we? As such, I think it's much more important what a colour's strengths are than its weaknesses. Green lacks removal, you say? Well sure, which is why in a lot of historical formats G/W was really bad (back before White had as much removal). So pair it with Black or Red, which solves the problem.
(Of course, I'd much rather draft G/U given a format which supports it... but then my all-time favourite Limited card is Wildsize, which should tell you everything you need to know!)
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It's not always the weakest, but the format must be significantly warped to make it good.
Funny thing is, I like Verdant Haven. It's exactly what a lifegain card should be: The lifegain is gravy. You might be thinking of Bountiful Harvest?
Interesting that you should say Innistrad, since Kessig Recluse is symptomatic of this issue. At 2GG, wouldn't 1/4 or 1/5 fit better? Mostly, though, I found building a good green deck in ISD required way too many rares and mythics. Spider Spawning was only playable with Essence of the Wild. Alternately, you could use Kessig Cagebreakers, which at least "feels" rare. The focus on self-mill hurt green in Innistrad too, since limited (again) has only 40 cards in a library, and there was a lot of mill going on in blue.
On phasing:
You must be remembering a different Innistrad from me.
Emrakul warped the RoE limited environment? What, does he break his way out of booster boxes to influence the vast majority of drafts that don't have one?
Green was good in Innistrad. Spider Spawning was an archetype unto itself and it was heavily successful around halfway through the format's life, or more generally in tables where it wasn't overdrafted. Green-white was a very dominant colour combination in DKA-INN-INN limited. At common, green was full of amazing cards (Prey Upon, Ambush Viper, Hunger of the Howlpack, Darkthicket Wolf, Wild Hunger). Yes Kessig Recluse would have been better as a 1/4, but as it turns out not every card can be as good as it could be. Blue is the likely best colour in M14 but it still has Thought Scour and Merfolk Spy in it. Green in Dark Ascension was defined by Wild Hunger and Hunger of the Howlpack.
Draft it on Cubetutor!
There's so much wrong with this and some of your previous comments that I felt compelled to go through some of it.
1. Emrakul was barely playable in RoE, as in maybe once every 10 drafts in which he's opened, someone has the kind of ramp deck necessary to cast him before turn 17. It hardly warped anything, and even still, while green had Ondu Giant and Growth Spasm, red and black had access to ramp as well, and Dreamstone Hedron was a card as well, which didn't give green the ramp monopoly it normally has.
2. Kessig Recluse would be overpowered as a 1/4 or 1/5 with deathtouch. Period. They made it a 2/3 so that it wasn't a complete brick in the already existing W/G aggro archetype, and this way it still dies in combat enough to mitigate the fact that it kills basically everything in combat.
3. Green was amazing in Innistrad, as it had two divergent options that both excelled comparitively to other color options along the same paths. Green aggro was very good in DII, be it G/R with Wild Hunger as the key spell or G/W with Travel Preparations. These decks almost never relied on rares to win, as they had all of their tools available at common. This aggressive potential significantly mitigated green's lack of interactivity, as it allowed for these decks to put so much early pressure on the opponent that interactivity wasn't ever necessary on your part.
As for the other path, the Spider Spawning deck was dominant, as it fought on a plane few other decks could match or combat. Gnaw to the Bone was nigh unbeatable by many of the aggressive or more basic midrange decks in the format, as it gave the Spawning deck time to set up incredibly powerful plays and even a decking endgame with Runic Repetition and Memory's Journey. These decks often ran multiple colors, often including blue for the potential endgame combo and for cards like Armored Skaab and Forbidden Alchemy, and they were very strong. These "green" decks fought the interactivity problem by going underneath it, purporting a gameplan that other decks simply could not interrupt.
4. Spider Spawning didn't need Essence of the Wild. Hell, Essence was unplayable in Spawning decks in the first place due to the GGG in its cost. Even if you were heavy green (which almost never happened in such decks), it wasn't really that good in the deck anyway, given that you're doing most of your work putting cards into and playing cards from your bin to worry about trying to draw and cast a 6-drop with an awkward cost.
5. The 40 cards argument is a silly one for the same reason that milling your opponent is generally a poor strategy in limited. 40 cards is easily substantial enough to get some really powerful things going in a limited game with the Spawning deck, and if you never saw this happen, then either your draft group was pretty narrow and never tried it or you never watched coverage of big events in which many pros played it and spoke very highly of it.
6. There was no "mill the opponent" deck in DII. Increasing Confusion was not a card that made a mill deck; it was a singular win condition via mill, like a less powerful Jace, Memory Adept.
7. Neither of those equipment ever demanded instant-speed answers, and the Lens was marginal even in the Infect deck. If either was good given any given board state, sorcery speed removal did a perfectly acceptable job dealing with the problem. Hell, Instant speed removal doesn't even have a dramatic effect on the Lens, as ramming creatures for no board value was a poor play in that format anyway. You were always much better off with either power-boosting equipment or spells that make blocking choices difficult. As for the Claw, using sorcery speed removal on it maybe allowed them to hurt you in combat with it once. Never a catastrophe. Hell, neither card was as good as you seem to think they were anyway.
8. Cystbearer was just about as strong as Rot Wolf. That extra point of toughness was very relevant in the format.
9. How does blowing up something with Sylvok Replica ever cost 5 total mana, be it at instant or sorcery speed?
10. Green has always been able to handle flying creatures without actually having them, and this is hardly "trolling the color pie." Flavor-wise, the idea of elves, spiders, or whatever using the canopy as a spot from which to pick off flyers has worked for decades, and Plummet hardly changes that. Green generally has a hard time playing an interactive game, but when they do, it's normally through narrow avenues such as fighting and attacking opposing air forces. It's the mitigating factor that still gives green some way of interacting with the opponent; every color has to be able to, but green tends to be the worst at doing so, as its options are more limited in scope.
11. The effectiveness of a removal spell in limited is always a function of the card's speed, casting cost, and universality. Even if I'm somehow 3+ colors, if my opponent has a number of good targets for a Plummet, it ends up being a premium removal spell regardless of what colors you're playing and the power of their alternative options, as it's cheap and fast. Implying that you should never consider Plummet or that it's bad if you have, say, a bunch of copies of Liturgy of Blood in your pile is ludicrous.
12. That blue has ways of giving creatures flying is just as acceptable an effect as green's attacking flyers, and that the two interact isn't an issue either. All color combinations offer neat interactions that allow them to extend the options their color pie slice tends to offer, and suggesting that this is broken in some way is just silly.
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In all, my original point stands. Green has trouble interacting with the opponent in the universal ways that colors like black, red, and blue tend to have available, and it usually makes up for this deficiency through creature size and ramp. Green is at its best when it can mitigate its lack of interactivity by either outpacing the opponent, outclassing the opponent, or simply competing on a different plane that negates some of their interactive options, such as the Spider Spawning deck in Innistrad. When it can interact, it's often to a limiting extent, and sometimes those limits disappear, as in matchups in M14 in which Plummet is basically Doom Blade. Those times are the ones when green decks exceed expectations.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
Off the top of my head: White was worst in ody and ody-torment, blue was worst in onslaught block, black was worst in time spiral block, red was worst in m11, green was worst in... umm... Lor x3 maybe? I cannot really remember when green was definitely the worst colour in any format.
Possibly, but at least there was a good monowhite deck (the one with Cenn's Heir, Kinsbaile Balloonist, Surge of Thoughtweft and hopefully Wizened Cenn in it).
(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
5CB PotM - June 2005, November 2005, February 2006, April 2008, May 2008, Feb 2009
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<Limited Clan>
Green has a powerful aggressive common curve, with Ley of the Land, Elvish Mystic, Predatory Sliver, Rootwalla, Advocate of the Beast & Rumbling Baloth which can get even better when uncommon cards are added.
Bombs for a fair cost, fixing, and life gain.
That last is usually attached to a beast as well :).
I have found green quite powerful in m14, and the statistics seem to show that to be true:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-m14-draft-overview
The most interesting bit is win rate by deck type:
Give each color a rank score based on the chart (e.g., Simic gives rank 1 to both Green and Blue).
The ratings would therefore be:
White: 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 30
Blue: 15
Black: 18
Red: 23
Green: 19
White is clearly the worst, and Blue clearly the best.
Green is actually middle of the road, and as can be seen, it is highly variable and depends greatly on which colors you associate with it.
White is SCARILY bad in this format, apparently.
I've had some success with white. Mostly because people force me into it at my LGS and I have to make the best of white, or run a subpar deck in other colors where all the best stuff is being taken.
3 Soulmender
2 Capshen Knight
3 Master of Diversion
3 Griffin Sentinel
1 Seraph of the Sword
1 Serra Angel
2 Dawnstrike Paladin
1 Celestial Flare
2 Show of Valor
2 Fortify
1 Ratcher Bomb
1 Door of Destinies
1 Haunter Plate Mail
17 Plains
How you should approach every game of Magic.
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My Flawless Score MCC Card | My Other One | # Three!
Ever hear of synechdoche? Emmy's entire creature type was a major theme in ROE, and its whole schtick is "expensive colorless bombs that only have to attack to gain card advantage".
And that was what I was referring to.
Then make it cost 1GG. It's still far worse than some of the other cards other colors get, but it's not unplayable. In fact, come to think of it...
Those are good, but yet, my history with every other color combination is better. And not just mine; everyone I played with during that season.
Admittedly, Prey Upon made green something other than complete crap.
Yeah, a lifegain card was nigh-unbeatable. *snicker* And you're relying on a three-card combo, in three colors? Really?
Your entire argument is that the deck depends heavily on blue-black, including flashing back a card that costs seven mana to do so and then Repetition?
3 to cast, 1G to activate. You fail math forever.
My problem with it is mechanical. It has been relevant exactly never.
So yeah. Green has way too many irrelevant cards. Per MaRo's own ideas about what "a good design" is, he should've never approved Plummet. Seriously.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong and Plummet's like, the next Memory Jar.
On phasing:
I think this is why you find yourself in such disagreement with everyone else in the thread. To put it bluntly, on average the group you draft with is not very good. That doesn't mean you're not; you could be an excellent drafter. But if you are, you're a big fish in a small pond, and it's limiting your growth where archetype evaluation is concerned.
That may sound presumptuous, but you're saying that in every draft of every set except AVR and ROE you've done in the last four years, you've never seen a green deck make the finals. Assuming you draft even once or twice a month, this would imply that green has not only been the worst color in all those sets, it's been so by an impossibly huge margin unprecedented in modern Magic. Check ars arcanum posts, check Pro Tour results, poll the Limited forum, read articles on the major Magic websites. You'll find a range of opinions, but none anywhere near your experience.
There are 2 possible explanations. Either:
A) everyone else is wrong and only your play group has had the perspicacity to realize green is unplayable, or
B) the competition at your drafts is really weak and the better players (such as yourself, I'm going to presume) consciously avoid green like the plague.
I don't think A is plausible. And I'm seeing a lot of evidence for B, such as your not recognizing that Fangren Marauder or Viridian Corrupter were extremely strong Limited cards, and not understanding how the Spider Spawning deck worked (based on your last post).
Again, I'm not casting aspersion on your skills. You may be an overall superior drafter to me... it wouldn't be that hard. But something really weird is going on in your draft group, and it's seriously affecting your evaluations.
Oh, and as for your newest gem, that Vampire Nighthawk is an example of why Kessig Recluse could cost GG1, I think you need to take a moment to learn more about rarity differences and that "color pie" thing you don't seem to understand.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
In the time it took to quote this, trim it, and add it to my sig, I still haven't stopped laughing.
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
I'd just like to cite Umezawa's Jitte as an example of a card that is PROOF that they could have made Kessig Recluse cost 1G or even just G.
It was also good in original RGD. And MD5. It was weak in Time Spiral, but black was worse.
Ha ha ha ha ha. True gems coming out of this thread. Loving it.
And even that wasn't the best case: gaining 10+ life whilst spending no cards.
I'm struck by the fact that a lot of the discussion on the last page or two reads as though we're talking about mono Green. We're not, though, are we? As such, I think it's much more important what a colour's strengths are than its weaknesses. Green lacks removal, you say? Well sure, which is why in a lot of historical formats G/W was really bad (back before White had as much removal). So pair it with Black or Red, which solves the problem.
(Of course, I'd much rather draft G/U given a format which supports it... but then my all-time favourite Limited card is Wildsize, which should tell you everything you need to know!)
(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
5CB PotM - June 2005, November 2005, February 2006, April 2008, May 2008, Feb 2009
MTGSalvation Articles: 1-20, plus guest appearance on MTGCast #86!
<Limited Clan>