MTG Salvation

Quote from eidolon232

How else are you going to decide whether or not to keep a hand, what dual to search for, what land/spell to play early where the color requirements are very relevant, what cause of action gives you the most outs,...

Most do it by vague intuition and experience which in the end often is a pretty good replacement for math for most (good)players.

I don't calculate much while playing Magic, but do tons of calculations when playing poker. Probably because I know more shortcuts for the poker calculations. That and Magic math is easier to guestimate.

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It is a four drop which can kill in 1-2 turns. For a four drop this is pretty impressive. The card puts tons of pressure on the opponent. Instant removal exists but sorcery speed solutions are a lot more prevalent. More often then not your opponent will just die if he doesn't remove it in his turn. You have to believe in the killing potential and dare to go for the knock out, even if once in a while it will backfire. If you do not believe in your cards, you are better of not playing them at all.

It does have the serious disadvantage of being an artifact creature. This makes it vulnerable to a lot more removal. On itself not that big a deal, but add in the built in life loss (to cast it and to boost it) and this disadvantage becomes a big risk in certain match-ups.

I would play at around 500-550. We played it at 450 and it was decent, but the competition for red four drops is pretty steep nowadays.

While definetely good if it is online, I don't think most decks need this. If you have a Walker key is to protect it and then you will win most of the time. Is this card better then a good creature or some removal in your deck?
Problem is that it costs 5 mana, which means that most likely your opponent will be halfway in killing you. This card often does very little at the moment you play it (unless you have a walker in play allready).

Only for big cubes or slow playing cubes.

Necro alert!

With a lot of cubes now running token as well as ramp and pox archetypes, has this card gone up in value?

Quote from ahadabans

Again, I think a lot of the heated argument here - and why we keep going round and round - is because there are a lot of dismissive attitudes in this thread. No one wants their ideas to be completely dismissed, and so people are going to continue to argue their points until they feel like they've been acknowledged (or they rage quit and/or get banned).

It isn't about having to agree with each other. It's feeling like your opinions are respected and you aren't just talking to a wall. Not being able to see the other side of the argument is a real roadblock when it comes to the exchange of ideas.

You're absolutely right, but a real roadblock to exchanging ideas is being articulate and constructing finely-tuned arguments, which is actually very hard to do.

Quote from ahadabans

For my part, I have repeatedly given credit to the general idea of A/M/C from a balancing standpoint (more about the CMC portion of it - I don't completely subscribe to aggro as it's own theatre). And I certainly agree that it is possible to balance a cube with this paradigm as a guide. With that said, I fail to see how some of you can insist this is literally the only way to do it. Frankly, it's an absurd idea.

I don't mean to resurrect arguments made by Gubbe, but he had a point with the packrat.cube rant. If your cube had nothing but pack rats in it, you would not have A/M/C at all. It would cease to exist completely.

Can you see how someone would disagree with this? Your cube wouldn't be balanced at all, since you'd only have one winning deck. At this point, you're playing chess with mulligans, and you could say that A/M/C structure arises entirely within your opening hands and the decision of how many lands to play. (Not that you'd want to do this.)

Sure, you don't have A/M/C structure, but that's because you're not even playing MTG anymore. When you have a diverse selection of cards, A/M/C structure arises naturally out of CMC differences, relative value of tempo, and resource allocation.

Quote from ahadabans

You may still be able to shove every deck that gets built into a general A/M/C bucket, but it's irrelevant from a balancing standpoint. Show me how you make aggro 1/3 of your meta in Pauper. It's impossible because you don't even have the tools to do it. There aren't enough common cards to enable it as a theatre without those decks just getting run over by all the midrange that will inevitably exist.

It seems like you're forgetting that you have to take out midrange tools to support aggro. In order for Aggro to be 1/3 of the meta, you need to take away midrange cards and give them to control and aggro. In this way, A/M/C exists along a polarized/non-polarized scale, not as three individual knobs. But the problem with a non-polarized cube is that it is too easy to make strong control and midrange decks, so even if you try to build a balanced non-polarized cube, you'll have to actively cripple control to do so, and there are few easy or appealing way to do this. The alternative is to support aggro and polarization.

Granted, it could be done in theory, but you've got to do things like cut lots of powerful answers for powerful threats, but that results in a less dynamic game, which most people don't want to do in their cubes.

Great post Humpty. And thanks for that link. It was a really good read.

Here is an excerpt from that article which summarizes Wizard's stance on things. And it's thought provoking.

"Unlike the "Aggro/Control/Combo" model, the sequence of the decks listed above isn't simply a declaration of what beats what—though it is partially that. Rather, each bucket represents a shift in how the deck intends to interact with the deck in the previous bucket, largely by focusing on a different zone. The Midrange deck exploits the aggro deck's lower mana curve—and the limitation of being developmentally constrained by mana—to produce superior threats on the battlefield. The Ramp and Combo decks exploit the midrange deck's lack of pressure to spend time setting up what amount to trump cards. The Control/Disruptive aggro decks exploit the Ramp/Combo decks' focus on one particular threat by targeting that threat and leaving those decks unable to function. Finally, the Aggro deck exploits the Control deck's ponderous mana-costs and the Disruptive Aggro deck's lower density of battlefield advantage to deploy its strategy before it's capable of being successfully disrupted."

The question that Humpty raised and that I'm also raising, is how would this look in cube? What cards would you have to remove/add to create this? I'm certainly interested in trying to do this because on the surface it feels a bit more dynamic.

I like to look at my meta from a basic standpoint of what does the ideal mono colored deck look like in a perfect draft? And what would each perfectly drafted two color deck look like? That gives me 15 unique decks, each that tend to want to be one specific type of deck (though clearly cube is dynamic enough to have more than one deck in each of these combinations). For me, it looks a bit like this.

Blue - Artifact heavy controlish/combo with tinker
Red - Something very aggro
Black - Stax/Pox
Green - Ramp/Natural Order
White - WW
UW - Traditional Control (though tempo is another viable option)
UG - Tempo (though I'd like to see some kind of combo here - Maybe Upheaval if I can make that work I don't know. perfect world would be brain freeze storm deck but that's a pipe dream with 4 drafters)
UR - Counterburn (could also be upheaval/wildfire - something else I want to play with)
UB - I wanted to push tempo, but this is begging to be reanimator
WR - Almost always BDW but I'd love to push some form of Boros control. I always loved firemane angel.
WG - I tried to push tokens, but it never went that way (in fact, no one every really played this combination without a third color). I was playing around with a resource denial strategy recently and it was working pretty well, but this color combination doesn't really encourage that type of deck so I don't see it getting drafted except by me.
WB - Could go midrange or control. Usually control because of Desolation Angel which is just awesome.
RG - Was LD/Wildfire.dec but I'm trying to move it more aggressive
RB - Pretty aggressive usually, but sometimes is comboish (sneak attack nastiness then living death combo)
BG - Rock usually

Assuming 25% for each of the 4 theaters above (aggro/midrange/ramp-combo/control-disruptive aggro), that leaves you with 3-4 decks out of the 15 perfect world combinations. Thoughts?

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We're testing out Master of Waves in Dungeon Geist's slot.

Testing results:

Unexpectedly Absent: it's quite versatile and it's been maindecked since its inclusion. Outlook good.
True-Name Nemesis: very good but not broken.
Ophiomancer: better than expected, and I was optimistic to begin with. Love this card.
Toxic Deluge: a great sweeper.
Whip of Erebos: hasn't seen much table time but it was feared everytime it came up. Still not sure if we really want/need this in the cube.
Massacre Wurm: didn't do much so far, the casting cost is pretty tough.

Some more THS update feedback:

Xenagos is a very good 'walker, especially for midrange decks.
Steam Augury was maindecked a couple times, but I haven't seen it actually resolve yet.
Manamorphose has seen quite a bit of play mostly for its fixing & deck thinning qualities, which bodes well for its longer term inclusion.

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TNN is difficult to interact with, but I found that made it more interesting to play against. I had to trick my opponent into killing a creature to allow my Balance to wipe my opponent's board. Another drafter dealt with TNN by using LD to keep his opponent off double blue ("Why do you keep destroying my Islands?" "Because Islands are broken and you don't even have to draft them.").

Maybe it would be uninteractive in a cube like Justin Parnell's which is "combat oriented", but I prefer games that battle on multiple fronts: card advantage, hand destruction, mana denial, countermagic, tempo... TNN can be beaten in many ways in my cube, as can many of the other powerful cards. Maybe I would not want to run it in a cube where "racing is the only answer", but I'd want to try adding an "in-Cube solution" or two first.

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Quote from JeffDerek

I played Decree of Justice for a long time and never cycled it. I then cut it, because it wasn't very good. Then people on this forum convinced me to treat it as a cycling spell with the main mana cost as a "hey you might do this in a rare situation" kind of thing, and OMG the card is way better.

In other words: You should cycle it. Try it, you'll like it. Mikey likes it.

Its definitely much better cycled. I didnt even realized that players played the card for its mana cost lol.

I played Decree of Justice for a long time and never cycled it. I then cut it, because it wasn't very good. Then people on this forum convinced me to treat it as a cycling spell with the main mana cost as a "hey you might do this in a rare situation" kind of thing, and OMG the card is way better.

In other words: You should cycle it. Try it, you'll like it. Mikey likes it.