MTG Salvation

Quote from Noctaem »

Now we're not talking about fun and enjoyable stuff, we're talking about the stress/aggression that he vented for no reason. He's acting like I was ordering him to do something and not simply trying to strum up a conversation about it. Cya.

You are projecting super hard. Wtwlf's response read perfectly neutrally to me, a disinterested observer. On the other hand, this seems like a very jerkish thing to say.

On-topic: I personally love Eternal Dragon as well! It's perhaps a bit past its prime for the tightest of lists, but it still has a lot of value even without the original Plains dual lands in my cube. It's also a highly inevitable threat in Control v. Control matchups. Recurring 5/5 flying Dragons are still pretty reasonable, despite the creature power creep of the past ~15 years. And the original art is fantastic

Quote from LucidVision »

I like... will test assuming the translation is 100% accurate. Take away a single ability and I no longer like the card.

It's pretty simple Spanish, can confirm it's 100% accurate

Quote from dschumm »

I’m only playing it because it’s alpha with the casting cost misprint, and we play it as a 2 drop. That said it would probably be a fine cut

OH. Didn't notice the cost change, yeah Artillery seems like it's actually probably pretty good if it's only 1R to cast. Thanks for the clarification, sorry to derail!

On-topic: I'll be starting this guy in the 630 configuration of my cube, probably bumping something low-tier like Ire Shaman.

Quote from LucidVision »

Quote from TheGroglord »

Does anyone else think "cratermaker" makes it sound like it should destroy lands? I guess it would have been a bit clunky to destroy "colourless non-basic land permanent".

is it is less of a flavor fail that this little goblin can single handedly destroy an inter-dimensional maximum-powerful alien tentacle monster the size of an island with time altering abilities??

It's not a flavor fail - he has rockets, you see.

Necro time.

Many people will always hate this card and choose to exclude it based on archetype balance or pure animosity... But now that we have a second Crucible of Worlds in the form of Ramunap Excavator, is Constant Mists worth re-evaluating on power level? Gonna make room for it in my 630 unpowered cube again but I don't have a copy of Excavator yet; I need to prioritize picking one up.

I think pretty much all of this card's value is tied up in the critter discounting effect. If that's not gonna have a big impact in a given deck, I definitely like her less than Phantom Centaur (which, to be fair, is still a combat monster that I run at 630). Could see replacing my other "tier 2" green 4-drop, Woodland Wanderer with the bear though. I do think if this lives to attack once and discount once, it's fairly impressive at that point.

Quote from TheGroglord »

Seems weird they limited it to you opponents creatures, is it just so you don't have to bounce your own guys if they have nothing? A simple may could have done that and made it feel a bit cleaner.

It's a no for me since I'm not running Man-o'-War at the minute and this, for me, is worse.

The targeting restriction is 100% because this guy and Naban, Dean of Iteration would've made for a solid combo in Standard if he could bounce himself.

Quote from Visserdrix »

Having a stupid name, bad artwork on top of needing extra rules to make it remotely cubeable i would never consider these cards.

Hate to sound like an old grumpy Magic player... but this x1000.

Atrocious names. Deeply boring art. Barely playable mechanical effects. Yuck.

Yeah this card is a very solid cube inclusion post-DOM, and given the uniqueness of the effect I think it might be close to pure staple status now. And thanks for the shoutout wtfwlf, I'm pretty sure it was your cube list that initially convinced me to give Firestorm a try, so fitting that it's come full circle

My playgroup started using the new redirection rules ahead of the Dominaria release and actually had a "feel-good interaction" come up on Friday night.

Boros Aggro (with Sword of War and Peace and Memory Jar on board) was facing off against Azorius Control with an active Elspeth, Sun's Champion and Jace, Telepath Unbound. The Boros deck main phase cracked the Jar, played Brimaz, King of Oreskos from the new hand, then hit Firestorm pitching 5 cards to nuke both 'walkers, the opponent's face, and a couple hostile utility critters. The control deck still ended up clutching the victory with a perfectly timed Path to Exile but it was pretty neat to see how much stronger Firestorm is under the new rules.

Still hate them from an aesthetic standpoint but

I wasn't planning to swap at all. I think Mystic Snake is better.

I think this card is worth revisiting - from what I've seen in constructed and limited for GRN, this card is bonkers. I think it's in a weird spot with cube, since spending 4 mana to not affect the board is bad (you're not afforded the same amount of time as regular limited). But you also don't have the same density of cheap burn effects, where Experimental Frenzy is at its best (like in constructed).

That said, I think the card is better than Outpost Siege (and hence better than Vance's Blasting Cannons). Outpost Siege nets you 2 cards per turn - one from your draw step and 1 from the enchantment. Frenzy removes your draw step, so how could it be better than either? Here's I think why:

1. It enables a steady stream of cards -- For you to stop playing cards off the top of your deck, one of two things will happen: either you've run out of mana, or you've run into your second land on top. I wrote a simulation that does the following: assume that we untap on turn n with Experimental Frenzy in play. How many cards can we play off the top of our deck?

I ran a simulation to help me figure this out (for the more technical, a Monte Carlo simulation with 1 million trials). Consider two decks:
A very aggressive aggro deck (16 lands, 8 1 drops, 8 2 drops, 6 3 drops, 2 4 drops)
A typical midrange deck (17 lands, 2 1 drops, 5 2 drops, 6 3 drops, 5 4 drops, 4 5 drops, 2 6 drops)

Produces the following results:


What does this show? It shows that, Experimental Frenzy gets you more than one card on average even if you play it on turn 4, even in a midrange deck. But that's not when you should play Frenzy - you play it when your hand is empty (probably around t6 or t7). At that point, you're getting at least 2 cards off Frenzy. This shows that in terms of raw card advantage, Frenzy is always better in aggro decks than Siege, and usually better in midrange decks.

2. The cards you draw are not lost -- After reading the above, you might say "So what? Frenzy isn't better in terms of card advantage than Siege/Cannons in a midrange deck until turn 7, and it locks me out of access to cards in my hand". But the cards in your hand are not lost. If I don't cast the card revealed off Siege, it's lost forever. I can continue to stockpile cards in my hand with Frenzy, and then pop Frenzy when the cards in my hand are good, regaining access to these cards. There's no real way to quantify this, but there is extra card advantage than what is just shown on the left graph. This is what pushes it above Siege generally imo.

Conclusions
Outpost Siege and Experimental Frenzy are fundamentally different cards. I see Outpost Siege as a big midrange/control card - it's grindy, it's reliable, and it's mediocre (which is why most of us don't cube it). Frenzy is (mostly) unplayable in control; reactive cards, especially counterspells, do not pair well with Frenzy. But in decks that are mostly just pushing their own gameplan, like aggro and many proactive flavors of midrange/ramp, with just removal as reactive cards, I think that Frenzy is quite good (as shown above).

TL;DR - Frenzy is better in many decks than Outpost Siege is in those decks, even if Frenzy is bad in control. I personally think this makes Frenzy the better cube card:

Now, is it cubeable? Maybe not - slots are tight for a 4 cmc red card that does not the turn it hits play. It's a high variance card - the floor is abysmal but can be raised with the right deck. Its ceiling is enormous. I think it deserves more attention than it is getting. I'll be testing it, and I hope that it performs well.

I think we've been waiting on the perfect black 5 drop for so long that it can't exist outside of a card that reads:

Black Wins 4B
Creature - Winner (MR)
You may pay 0 instead of paying the casting cost of this card.
When Black Wins enters the battlefield, you win the game.
Who Cares what the p/t is.

Hyperbole aside....I think this is the best so far. It's an incredibly above-curve creature that even reanimator builds will pick up and it can dig for the other cards you need to win. When you put this next to Abyssal Persecutor you being to appreciate how disgustingly good this is...for 1 more you go from "you can't win and your opponent's can't lose" to the exact same stats and a repeatable ability to pay 2 life to fix your draws. I'm actually glad I still run persecutor because the cut is very easy here.

Quote from THUNDERWANG »

I can vouch for most of the cards on the list posted in the original post.

Quote from LucidVision »

Cards that were slept on , but I feel people are coming around to
Craterhoof behemoth
Gaea's cradle
Massacre wurm
Karakas
Collective brutality
Palace Jailer

- Massacre Wurm: I haven't been very fond of this card. I think I remember killing someone with it once? What makes this so good? I understand that it's great against the go-wide strategies, but is there something else I'm missing? It looks fine in control shells, but entirely ancillary. I suspect this card is less important now that we have Night Incarnate. I think Steve tried this for a while in his cube and wasn't a huge fan and I've only played it that environment. I think he replaced it for the black gearhulk which hasn't been bad. I'll continue to test it though.

What makes massacre wurm good is the sheer quantity of 2 toughness or less creatures that see play in cube across all archetypes... Many planeswalkers produce tokens, monastery mentor is a common control finisher, green has an abundance of elfs to ramp with.. agro decks rely on going wide with 1 mana 2/1's.. Midrange decks run utility creatures like recruiter's , man'o war, mull drifter etc.

It's primary function is to stabilize the battlefield in reanimator. The damage it deals immediately can be so high, that it often either wins the game on the spot, or in 1 attack... It can turn near hopeless games into instant wins. I've had it do 10+ damage on resolution many many times.

I also like it in heavy Black agro if I have a lake of the dead or a dark ritual.. Black lacks sources of reach, so it's not uncommon for 1 drops to get clogged up by blockers... It wins the game a high % of the time immediately on resolution in creature mirrors.

In G/B recurring nightmare it's also excellent... It's hardcastable, the -2/-2 stacks if you manage to recur it twice, and you often have utility creatures that can beat down through the path that the wurm clears.. for lethal.

Occasionally you'll have it in your hand and they happen to be playing a deck with only a few (or zero) ways to produce small creatures ... You'll board it out every few matches or so.. But even a healthy fraction of the matchups you board it out in, it's not a terrible card.. just underwhelming for it's cost.

I think it is way better than the black gearhulk.

Collonade is great, and this conversation is a great example of the pitfalls of small sample size analysis. If I don't activate my tar pit or colonnade in the next ten drafts, those cards aren't suddenly 'bad', it's just how the situations played out in this small subset of games featuring those cards. But these cards aren't universally acclaimed because they're overrated but because--in the grand scheme of things--being a guildgate is less of a detriment than the pros of being a dual and a manland provide.

Man, I wish that 1 wasn't there.

It tells you just how unbelievably awful the flavour of Battlebond is that it irks so many of us. I don't think it is nearly good enough to get a spot, but even if it was I would never play this guy. It's like Barbie and MTG made a crossover franchise.

They're both close enough that I wouldn't feel embarrassed playing them and I love the Partner mechanic here, but I'm not sure I can justify including them in my 720, not because they'd lower the power-level too much, but they'd lower the "cool factor" of cube with their art, names, and flavor. I'm not really looking forward to this set being the "Hearthstone" set, if I wanted that kind of art, I'd play that game.

Quote from billydaman

What benefit have I gained by being white? Before you answer....tell me how much you know about me and how much of that information you are going to use other than skin color to determine what benefits I've gained.

Let's just ignore white privilege for a moment and consider another form of privilege to see if you understand the concept of privilege.

Billydaman, when you go out what precautions do you take to avoid being raped?

If you've never really thought about it, then you are benefiting from male privilege. Women don't enjoy that same privilege and are expected to consider the possibility of being raped and take precautions. If a woman is raped, she is likely to be held accountable because of her dress, or where she chose to go, or the fact that she wasn't under the protection of a boyfriend/husband.

White privilege works along similar lines. The benefit you get as a white male, is that you're considered normal. You're over-represented in all forms of media, so when you turn on the TV you're likely to see people that look like you. You're over-represented in politics, so when you vote you're likely to be voting for a person that looks like you. When you walk around as a white person, you're less likely to perceived as a threat. People are more likely to believe that your arguments come from a balanced and objective position. People will treat you better and make your life easier, because you are not as likely to be perceived as dangerous. That is the privilege you enjoy as a white man.

You might have had a terrible life, I don't know, but you still are enjoying life on easy mode as a white man.

Quote from Retra

It's definitely worth looking at. I like the four-bucket model a lot, but I'm struggling to see anything new it can add.

I've come to this conclusion too.

Quote from Retra

Colors that had aggro-control (aka Tempo) decks didn't have pure aggro decks. So the rock-paper-scissors part of this cycle could easily lump tempo in as part of the aggro theater, and I don't think there's any real penalty to doing so. The biggest reason this is valid, in my opinion, is that there is not enough reliable, efficient discard and effective disruption to create a strong aggro-control field. Thus, your black & blue aggro decks aren't as strong as they could be, and other colors just don't have very good tempo options.

Tempo decks in my cube do feel more like aggro decks with disruption rather than control decks with early threats. Pertly this is because control is often somewhat reliant on board sweepers, which are no good in tempo. My experience recently has been different to yours, though, in that blue and black aggro have been very successful, as they stand up better to midrange decks and also still have game against control. They do tend to lose to faster aggro, though.

Quote from Retra

Combo and Ramp decks overwhelmingly tend to play in mid-range shells, so there is no real advantage to considering them as a separate theater. Ramp is the only consistent combo deck, and it's beat by control and tempo just as easily as any mid-range deck.

In terms of how they play out, I agree that cube combo and ramp fit into midrange more than anything else. In terms of cube construction, however, it used to be thought that aggro and control needed dedicated cards, whereas midrange would sort itself out. From Wtwlf123's cube design article:

well, I can assure you that midrange will find its own way... What I've found, is that ensuring my 3- and 4- drop creatures support either aggro or control will help the backbone of those deck types, and simultaneously supply the cube with the critters needed for mid-range to be successful.

I think this is true up to a point, and indeed the article then goes on to discuss adding archetype support cards. I think this is where the midrange-specific cards come in, as often (but not always) these archetypes will fit in the midrange theatre.

Quote from Retra

The four-bucket model works much better for constructed than it does for limited.

I agree, moreover it works for contemporary constructed. In the olden days we had 'proper' combo and control decks...

Quote from Retra

Whether you want to polarize your cube into strong aggro and strong control, or depolarize it and play accentuated aggressive mid-range or controlling mid-range, you're still going to have to deal with MTG fundamentals like tempo, card advantage, mana cost, and 20 life. You'd have to go quite a bit off-the-wall to make A/M/C completely irrelevant.

I think that this is the route that people who don't want to run hard aggro will have to go down. And it will mean deliberately weakening control to some extent.

Quote from Retra

PS: I'm not trying to be a nay-sayer here. I'm not just being desperate to win the argument, I honestly can't see how one might come up with a better model!

Your posts came across as respectful and thoughtful. To anyone who calls you a nay-sayer I say nay.

Quote from ahadabans

And to be honest, I've spent the last few days trying to figure out how I would retool my thinking to the 4 bucket model, and not only is it proving harder to do, I'm not seeing how it even helps me. So even if it were better, I'm not sure it would be worth it.

So I'm probably going to continue working with the A/M/C breakdown at a high level while trying to focus on balancing the arch types I have./QUOTE]

I agree and this is the approach I'm taking.

[QUOTE=ahadabans;/comments/12712590]If I can't even make that deck work, I know the arch type is not really supportable with what I'm running and I can either choose to try and push it harder or I can abandon it (like GW tokens).

Tokens is the only archetype in my cube that can go across all five colours. It's working out really well as a strategy, and I nicked a lot of my ideas from you. I had Purphorus followed up by Siege-Gang Commander played against me last draft, which was pretty cool.

Quote from Goodking

I agree with wtwlf. I think you need to go full in on supporting aggro in a minimum of three colours. Compared to just having full support in two, you enable exponentially more aggro decks by adding support in an additional colour. The ones best equipped to do that are, by far, white, black and red.

Full aggro support in thes colours works out for us. I think it may depend a little on how many people draft your cube as to how much aggro needs to be supported across colours. I have a small amount of aggro in green, and it is utilised fom time to time. I would run more green 1-drops if better ones were printed. I generally think WotC don't see green as a weenie colour, but then they print something like Experiment One to prove me wrong.