This card seems extremely good. While I agree that rolling the 3 can sometimes be super awkward, it seems like you’ll almost always have a hit with it. The fact that it’s a card and not permanent means you’ll get nice targets like Bolts and Incinerates. Also 4&5 is sometimes lava axe, but in those situations you’ve smacked them for a large amount while ahead on board and are left with a planeswalker.
The community seems low on this, but it seems a lot better than Goldspan Dragon which is in many Cubes. I get that this is only a “good stuff” card, but it feels like what you want for a top end dragon for a red aggro deck. It never rots in your hand if you don’t get a 5th mana source, and if you flood it can be 6/6+.
We Cubed Wild Growth for 10 years but cut it in the last update. There’s a lot to say about the card, but the general reason we cut it is that (1) mono green ramp benefits heavily from your ramp being creatures. A couple of the strongest cards in the archetype are Gaea’s Cradle and Craterhoof. And (2) “Other” green decks benefit from the ability to color fix.
Our lower tier ramp now includes the following cards over Wild Growth: Utopia Sprawl (5 color), Rift Sower (5 color and creature), and Into the North (5 color and Dark Depths support). I’ll give a nod to Omnath decks which have been doing well for us and benefit more from the aforementioned ramp than from Wild Growth.
I had not considered cutting Brimaz until recently when it seemed like aggro 3-drops are benefitting a lot more from disruption than “gum up the board with good stats.” We also have some human synergies, and Thalia’s 2W cost is great in Mana Crypt / Ancient Tomb aggro.
We had a Cube event over the weekend, and I saw this in action in a couple decks (one of them was mine). It’s very good. Putting 2 planeswalkers and minimum one creature into play for 3 mana is a lot for the opponent to deal with, and with any amount of board presence you can drain a lot. It does help that we run creatures that are good with this like Scrapheap Scrounger, Skyclave Shade, and Tenacious Underdog. I wouldn’t play Ob in a Cube with zero black aggressive support.
You don’t see this card in many lists anymore, but with the upcoming printing of Minsc & Boo to supplement Oko and Grist we will have 3 multicolored green planeswalker bombs worth splashing for in most green decks. Oath of Nissa can dig for these bombs and help splash them. I’m wondering if anyone else has thought about this card with the 3 Gx walkers.
We don’t run Dreadbore at 720 anymore because there are a lot of effects like that in mono black and red respectively. Multi real estate is a nice place for powerful walkers and spells. Seems like new Ob, Daretti, and K Command will be the top 3 standouts of the section. We have up to 6 Rakdos slots and include Valki, Kroxa, and Rakdos’s Return.
I wouldn’t cube this if it cost 2 mana, and if it cost 1 then it would be Cube-able in the same way Pyroblast is. At 3 mana I would not even board this in against mono red.
The Gargaroth/Warchief discussion is interesting. Ignoring for a second that Thragtusk exists and you might not want that redundancy with Warchief, out of all the creatures that cost a lot of mana but don't have an ETB effect or other removal protection, Gargaroth is about the best one. If it is removed you are 1-for-1 and out some tempo, but also, you have to remove it within one turn cycle; you can't attack into it, and you can't allow it to attack since it churns out so much value. It's fun to have some creatures like that which are a bit more higher risk and higher reward rather than every creature having its value strapped to ETB, and something I'm trying to move towards in my cube environment.
This 1000%. I even try to cater my removal suite to be a little worse against top end creatures that don't have built in protection.
I'd rather have a higher density of - sweepers that sweep cheap creatures/tokens, dismember, abrupt decay or portable hole that are cheap, effecient, but have their limitations. OR modal cards like bloodchief's thirst that pay an extra tax.
The available card pool doesn't provide me the luxury to tune my removal suite that much, but it's something I keep in mind on the fringes.
Ideally, i'd like to make sure that the very best 'baneslayer' type cards (high risk v high return) are at least a solid playable in cube.
They'll be rare, but still have a place.
This is spot-on with our perspective on Baneslayers, and you articulated that nicely! I’ve played Cube where everything is ETB value city, and drafts/deckbuilding/games get incestuous (usually in pauper). Powerful Baneslayer-type cards provide excellent balance to Cube decks and are powerful in the right matchups and situations. Elder Gargaroth is a particularly nice Baneslayer variant, as it is tutorable with cards like GSZ.
This would probably see a lot of play if it were red - I might run it. I’d definitely run it if it were a fetchable nonbasic Forest. As it is, it’s a nonbasic green mana source (not a Forest) that interacts poorly with Rofellos and Nissa and gives marginal benefit to your mana elves blocking against aggro 2/2s. There are maybe a dozen nonbasics I’d play before Pendelhaven, but their “Cube slot equity” is too low.
Our lower tier ramp now includes the following cards over Wild Growth: Utopia Sprawl (5 color), Rift Sower (5 color and creature), and Into the North (5 color and Dark Depths support). I’ll give a nod to Omnath decks which have been doing well for us and benefit more from the aforementioned ramp than from Wild Growth.
Another one, if I may…
Thalia, Heretic Cathar vs Brimaz?
I had not considered cutting Brimaz until recently when it seemed like aggro 3-drops are benefitting a lot more from disruption than “gum up the board with good stats.” We also have some human synergies, and Thalia’s 2W cost is great in Mana Crypt / Ancient Tomb aggro.
This is spot-on with our perspective on Baneslayers, and you articulated that nicely! I’ve played Cube where everything is ETB value city, and drafts/deckbuilding/games get incestuous (usually in pauper). Powerful Baneslayer-type cards provide excellent balance to Cube decks and are powerful in the right matchups and situations. Elder Gargaroth is a particularly nice Baneslayer variant, as it is tutorable with cards like GSZ.
This is also what my group voted for.