I'd need some decent Heroic creatures to run this. Not even Inspired, really, because like bateluer said, it doesn't pump the creature, so it can only let you kill creatures you probably could've killed without it anyway... unless you've got some of the Green creatures that get more than one +1/+1 counter from their Heroic triggers. I'd run it in G/U Heroic mainly because on a Green Hero, it most often IS a Savage Surge.
At the midnight prerelease I watched another player Bestow Nylea's Emissary on this and ride it all the way to victory.
It doesn't really matter if this is the base of the Voltron or the top layer-- it's just about impossible to deal with in combat. If you can combo it with Trample, even if you need to run Satyr Rambler, you have an "answer or die" combination.
Round One I get paired against the same guy I ALWAYS get paired against Round One-- he's a regular, and I can never seem to beat him. He hadn't been around for a few months or so, but whenever he and I enter the same tournament, I ALWAYS face him round one and lose. I don't know if there's something about his and my DCI numbers or what.
Lost round two as well, despite getting double Sea Gods both games I just didn't have a finisher. Rounds three and four my opponents are no-shows. I look again at my pool and realize there's good White cards, but it's all good Heroic stuff and I don't really have enough Heroic/Aggro in any other color. Realizing B/U isn't working for me, I build a W/r Heroic deck (I had three Red Heroes, but no Red enablers besides a single Fall of the Hammer) A practice game against someone else whose opponent no-showed makes me think this was the deck I should've built.
Round Five I face a guy who went 0-4... and lost to him. I had a ton of Heroes but barely any spells to trigger them, and he had turn one Hopeful Eidolon all three games. Also I misread Acolyte's Reward and forgot my devotion to white was only 2 at the time-- not that it mattered, since he had a counter-trick anyway.
I should also mention that I didn't pull a single God in any color, so I think I can do better tomorrow. I'll probably pick Blue or White and hope for a Heroic deck I can actually work with.
If I'm behind, the Gorgon will give me a single blocker right away, and possibly a single kill effect later, while the Whip will give me a source of life gain to help me claw my way back, if I can get a creature into combat. It'll also give me creatures back from my graveyard, but it's best when I already have something on the board. I'd call it a wash between them-- Gorgon is more reliable but Whip can generate more advanatage.
If the board is fairly even, the Whip will tilt the balance heavily in my favor, as I can attack with near-impunity and not care about his attackers getting through. The Gorgon is one more creature for me, and later one less creature for them, but it's not a very offensive creature and it'll take time to make a big impact. Effectively, the Gorgon favors a "stall" kind of balance while the Whip encourages its controller to race. Point goes to Whip.
If I'm ahead on the board, I'd rather see the Whip since I'm attacking and the lifelink will give me a better advantage immediately, whereas the Gorgon is basically just a piece of insurance in case my opponent produces a creature that can stabilize.
That would be true if this were a game of perfect information. But it's not, so it isn't.
Oracle of Bones is a good example of this. Which choice is better depends on what is in your hand, which your opponent generally doesn't know. So you will get the better option sometimes.
Oracle of Bones is probably the best of the Tribute cards BECAUSE the choice involves hidden information. Thunder Brute, by contrast, doesn't really give the opponent as much room for error. The ramifications of his choice are much more clear-cut. Nessian Demolok is probably middle-ground; your opponent doesn't know what you'll destroy if he doesn't pay the tribute, but he can probably make an educated guess.
I'd only do it if he seemed like he really needed the Presence(s) in Game 1-- a strained mana base, lots of cards with heavy color requirements, and at least two or three Presences. And even then, I'd feel like a jackal as I did it. Pulling the rug out from under your opponent's mana base and watching him flounder isn't fun for me.
If I see one Presence, I'm likely not to even remember he played it, since it has that little impact on the board. It would take at least two just for it to stand out as a thing my opponent did, and three might convince me to do something about it.
There's also the "tilt" value to consider, though it's much harder to quantify.
Your opponent looks at his opening hand, sees three lands, a two-drop, a three-drop, and two utility spells (cantrip Auras, maybe, or combat tricks) and decides to keep his hand. Then you 'seize him on turn one and make him pitch his two-drop. Now what does he do? His plan doesn't work any more-- he has only one creature and nothing of consequence to do until turn three.
Granted this works best if Thoughtseize is in your opening hand, but denying your opponent a spell he was counting on using can disrupt his plans and force him to rethink on the fly. Any discard spell can do this to an extent, but Thoughtseize is cheap enough that it doesn't slow down your own development.
Seriously, I agree that a larger set size is a good thing for Limited. The more cards there are, the longer it takes to "solve" a format, and thus the longer the format remains entertaining.
There's no real way to determine which of the uncommons in M15 were the 20 "extra" ones. I suppose the most sensible way is that they're the 20 that would be least likely to be chosen over the others for printing if there hadn't been extra slots, but how do you look at the finished product and say which ones wouldn't have made the cut? Are they the 20 worst? The 20 best? The 20 most likely to form a degenerate combo? The 20 that raise the most rules questions? The 20 vanilla-est? The 20 weirdest?
I'm guessing this doesn't affect how many cards total will be in the set? If not, are we losing rare slots or common slots?
If it's common slots, that means 20 cards that would've been common are now uncommon, and we end up with less of them taking up space in our commons shoeboxes. If it's rare slots, that means 20 cards that would have been rare are now uncommon, and thus easier to obtain for the people who want them. Right?
The Giant's best role is as a decently-sized creature that goes late enough in the pack that you're likely to get one. That way when you get to Pack Three and realize you've mostly been taking bounce spells and Aqueous Forms and forgot about having actual threats, you can snag a Giant or two.
The guy maindecking Giants probably isn't going to win the draft, but "not enough creatures/nothing but small utility creatures" is a deceptively easy mistake to make, especially in blue, so I can see why someone would be grateful to see this going around the table.
Not to mention that one-time large scry effects take longer to do than, say, Prognostic Sphinx, because of the lack of expectation that you'll get to keep doing it. A single instance of Scry 5, considering all the information it would present and the amount of planning it would require, might take upwards of three or four minutes to reasonably resolve.
Possibly, but that didn't stop them from reprinting Foresee in M13. I agree that we're unlikely to see it at common, but my earlier suggestion of a Sphinx would undoubtedly be rare or mythic, simply because it's a Sphinx.
As far as "three or four minutes" goes, I think you're exaggerating a bit. You can't predict what your opponent is doing to do for the next five turns or what you're going to need to respond to it, so anything past the top two or three cards of your deck is just too much baseless conjecture to spend any more than a few seconds on. Either the card you want in the next turn or so is in your top five, or it isn't.
I'm not why monstrous as is couldn't support multiple activations. It would just have a line where "if this creature is already monstrous, do something else." You can activate monstrous as many times as you want, it just doesn't make the creature monstrous a second time and therefore the triggered abilities we have so far don't retrigger. The rules text even specifies "if this creature isn't monstrous..." for the counters.
For example, a monstrous hydra could have something like:
2G: Monstrous 3. If this creature is already monstrous, put 3 counters on it.
At that point, why have it become monstrous at all? It's basically just got Jenara's ability with some numbers changed. The whole point of Monstrous is that the creature has two states of being, and can "upgrade" from one to the other.
That said, it would be nice to have a creature where it matters more that the creature is monstrous. How about a Sphinx with:
3UUU: Monstrosity 3, Scry 3.
You can activate the ability whenever you have the mana, but you only get counters the first time. After that, it's a massive creature with a repeatable but massively overcosted scry ability.
It'd also be nice if there were a way to make monstrous creatures no longer monstrous, so you can get double the counters and triggers.
ACTUALLY, now that I think of it, a Flicker effect like Cloudshift would be a great idea for this set! Used offensively, it makes Bestowed creatures shake off their Auras and Monsters and Heroes lose their +1/+1 counters. Used defensively, it triggers Heroic and resets your Monsters to trigger their abilities again! And that's BEFORE you get into its usefulness as a combat trick!
The problem with having card like Cure, Strike, and Voyage's End as the cards that answer voltrons is that they're all high picks. There's little that you can do to draft a deck that's specifically good against the strategy, nor anything you can side in. You just have to take high picks highly, and hope.
If a strategy is good and relatively easy to draft, then any card that deals with it will be a high pick. If Born reprints Claustrophobia and Pacifism, will they be picked any less highly than Cure, Strike, or End? Of course not.
Magic: the Gathering has been trying to make stacking Auras on your own creatures a viable strategy ever since 1993, but the card disadvantage has always stymied them. Now it finally is, and people want a silver bullet tailor made for stopping it?
I said in my first post on this thread that I wanted some Walls, so that people had a chance of answering Prowler's Helm. If said Walls have a toughness high enough to block a creature wearing a few Nymphs, then that could "answer" the Voltron strategy without discouraging people from playing Auras. I suspect that's part of the reason Guardians of Meletis and Pheres-Band Centaurs were printed-- so it would be fairly easy to find creatures that can hold off a Nymph-wearing Bear.
To all of you who are saying there needs to be something to deal with Voltrons: I'd like to point out that Pharika's Cure and Lightning Strike are both common, and most creatures that get Bestowed have no more than 2 or 3 toughness. I wouldn't mind a Claustrphobia either, but I've had attempts at Voltronning fall flat already-- I'm not convinced we need that many more answers.
Since we've only seen one out of three sets in the block, I'm confident that we will be seeing more devotion cards, and by the time Journey into Nyx is out all five colors will have convincing reasons to devote yourself to it. I just hope we don't have to wait too long for them!
I'd like to see a repeatable Scry effect that isn't as bad as Witches' Eye and isn't rare. Maybe that's too much to ask-- I know Crystal Ball slows games down quite a bit-- but darn it, Scry's one of my favorites! Maybe a sorcery that scries X, then puts itself back in your library X cards from the top?
It doesn't really matter if this is the base of the Voltron or the top layer-- it's just about impossible to deal with in combat. If you can combo it with Trample, even if you need to run Satyr Rambler, you have an "answer or die" combination.
Round One I get paired against the same guy I ALWAYS get paired against Round One-- he's a regular, and I can never seem to beat him. He hadn't been around for a few months or so, but whenever he and I enter the same tournament, I ALWAYS face him round one and lose. I don't know if there's something about his and my DCI numbers or what.
Lost round two as well, despite getting double Sea Gods both games I just didn't have a finisher. Rounds three and four my opponents are no-shows. I look again at my pool and realize there's good White cards, but it's all good Heroic stuff and I don't really have enough Heroic/Aggro in any other color. Realizing B/U isn't working for me, I build a W/r Heroic deck (I had three Red Heroes, but no Red enablers besides a single Fall of the Hammer) A practice game against someone else whose opponent no-showed makes me think this was the deck I should've built.
Round Five I face a guy who went 0-4... and lost to him. I had a ton of Heroes but barely any spells to trigger them, and he had turn one Hopeful Eidolon all three games. Also I misread Acolyte's Reward and forgot my devotion to white was only 2 at the time-- not that it mattered, since he had a counter-trick anyway.
I should also mention that I didn't pull a single God in any color, so I think I can do better tomorrow. I'll probably pick Blue or White and hope for a Heroic deck I can actually work with.
If the board is fairly even, the Whip will tilt the balance heavily in my favor, as I can attack with near-impunity and not care about his attackers getting through. The Gorgon is one more creature for me, and later one less creature for them, but it's not a very offensive creature and it'll take time to make a big impact. Effectively, the Gorgon favors a "stall" kind of balance while the Whip encourages its controller to race. Point goes to Whip.
If I'm ahead on the board, I'd rather see the Whip since I'm attacking and the lifelink will give me a better advantage immediately, whereas the Gorgon is basically just a piece of insurance in case my opponent produces a creature that can stabilize.
Oracle of Bones is probably the best of the Tribute cards BECAUSE the choice involves hidden information. Thunder Brute, by contrast, doesn't really give the opponent as much room for error. The ramifications of his choice are much more clear-cut. Nessian Demolok is probably middle-ground; your opponent doesn't know what you'll destroy if he doesn't pay the tribute, but he can probably make an educated guess.
If I see one Presence, I'm likely not to even remember he played it, since it has that little impact on the board. It would take at least two just for it to stand out as a thing my opponent did, and three might convince me to do something about it.
Your opponent looks at his opening hand, sees three lands, a two-drop, a three-drop, and two utility spells (cantrip Auras, maybe, or combat tricks) and decides to keep his hand. Then you 'seize him on turn one and make him pitch his two-drop. Now what does he do? His plan doesn't work any more-- he has only one creature and nothing of consequence to do until turn three.
Granted this works best if Thoughtseize is in your opening hand, but denying your opponent a spell he was counting on using can disrupt his plans and force him to rethink on the fly. Any discard spell can do this to an extent, but Thoughtseize is cheap enough that it doesn't slow down your own development.
Oh boy, another cardboard rectangle!
Seriously, I agree that a larger set size is a good thing for Limited. The more cards there are, the longer it takes to "solve" a format, and thus the longer the format remains entertaining.
There's no real way to determine which of the uncommons in M15 were the 20 "extra" ones. I suppose the most sensible way is that they're the 20 that would be least likely to be chosen over the others for printing if there hadn't been extra slots, but how do you look at the finished product and say which ones wouldn't have made the cut? Are they the 20 worst? The 20 best? The 20 most likely to form a degenerate combo? The 20 that raise the most rules questions? The 20 vanilla-est? The 20 weirdest?
If it's common slots, that means 20 cards that would've been common are now uncommon, and we end up with less of them taking up space in our commons shoeboxes. If it's rare slots, that means 20 cards that would have been rare are now uncommon, and thus easier to obtain for the people who want them. Right?
The guy maindecking Giants probably isn't going to win the draft, but "not enough creatures/nothing but small utility creatures" is a deceptively easy mistake to make, especially in blue, so I can see why someone would be grateful to see this going around the table.
Given that most people are likely going to pick RTR or GTC, I agree that mana fixing/accel will be valuable. Don't be afraid to splash!
Possibly, but that didn't stop them from reprinting Foresee in M13. I agree that we're unlikely to see it at common, but my earlier suggestion of a Sphinx would undoubtedly be rare or mythic, simply because it's a Sphinx.
As far as "three or four minutes" goes, I think you're exaggerating a bit. You can't predict what your opponent is doing to do for the next five turns or what you're going to need to respond to it, so anything past the top two or three cards of your deck is just too much baseless conjecture to spend any more than a few seconds on. Either the card you want in the next turn or so is in your top five, or it isn't.
At that point, why have it become monstrous at all? It's basically just got Jenara's ability with some numbers changed. The whole point of Monstrous is that the creature has two states of being, and can "upgrade" from one to the other.
That said, it would be nice to have a creature where it matters more that the creature is monstrous. How about a Sphinx with:
3UUU: Monstrosity 3, Scry 3.
You can activate the ability whenever you have the mana, but you only get counters the first time. After that, it's a massive creature with a repeatable but massively overcosted scry ability.
It'd also be nice if there were a way to make monstrous creatures no longer monstrous, so you can get double the counters and triggers.
ACTUALLY, now that I think of it, a Flicker effect like Cloudshift would be a great idea for this set! Used offensively, it makes Bestowed creatures shake off their Auras and Monsters and Heroes lose their +1/+1 counters. Used defensively, it triggers Heroic and resets your Monsters to trigger their abilities again! And that's BEFORE you get into its usefulness as a combat trick!
If a strategy is good and relatively easy to draft, then any card that deals with it will be a high pick. If Born reprints Claustrophobia and Pacifism, will they be picked any less highly than Cure, Strike, or End? Of course not.
Magic: the Gathering has been trying to make stacking Auras on your own creatures a viable strategy ever since 1993, but the card disadvantage has always stymied them. Now it finally is, and people want a silver bullet tailor made for stopping it?
I said in my first post on this thread that I wanted some Walls, so that people had a chance of answering Prowler's Helm. If said Walls have a toughness high enough to block a creature wearing a few Nymphs, then that could "answer" the Voltron strategy without discouraging people from playing Auras. I suspect that's part of the reason Guardians of Meletis and Pheres-Band Centaurs were printed-- so it would be fairly easy to find creatures that can hold off a Nymph-wearing Bear.
Since we've only seen one out of three sets in the block, I'm confident that we will be seeing more devotion cards, and by the time Journey into Nyx is out all five colors will have convincing reasons to devote yourself to it. I just hope we don't have to wait too long for them!
I'd like to see a repeatable Scry effect that isn't as bad as Witches' Eye and isn't rare. Maybe that's too much to ask-- I know Crystal Ball slows games down quite a bit-- but darn it, Scry's one of my favorites! Maybe a sorcery that scries X, then puts itself back in your library X cards from the top?