Card/Deck Low Power Card Spotlight

Erik Twice

Erik Twice

Magus of the Wheel is great. A 3/3 that refills your hand is not bad. Since you can active it at the end of turn, it's easier to break the symmetry on it. It's a great include of most lists. The main problem with the card is that it's yet another 3-drop.

Magus of the Will is a much weaker because Yawmoth's Will is a much worse card in cube that Wheel of Fortune is. It's mostly a value card in non-powered cubes and the decks that like the card the most don't tend to be too interested in a 3/3.
 
NimbusToad

NimbusToad

All good points. Maybe my dream of those two cards coming together would work better in a casual constructed deck with rituals and aggro dorks. I kind of like how the incentives to dump your hand fast with the Magus of the Wheel in the short term might make the pay-off of the Magus of the Wheel more explosive.

Thanks
 
ravnic

ravnic



Could this guy be a legit representative of our holy halls in a lower powered environment (with a morph theme to boot)? He'll trade with x/2 and can draw you 1-3 cards before doing so if you can make him survive a little bit. He's a survivor after all.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

ravnic said:


Could this guy be a legit representative of our holy halls in a lower powered environment (with a morph theme to boot)? He'll trade with x/2 and can draw you 1-3 cards before doing so if you can make him survive a little bit. He's a survivor after all.
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I don't know, Morph is pretty bad in cube these days. If your other morphs play well I'm sure Riptide Survivor can, but I'm dubious as to wether or not it's actually good.
 
jerichoalar

jerichoalar

I’ll take a shot at this.

a lot, and I mean *a lot* of modernish magic limited is benchmarked around 3 mana 3/2 commons with upside. bronze sable has been more or less consistently underwhelming (excepting maybe in ZNR where it’s secretly always relevant tribally), and the last time a colorless 2/2 was actually good In retail, it basically cost 1 mana.

Ten years ago, creatures were just worse, so the gap between a non-morph and a morph was smaller. If morph was getting printed for the first time today, I’d expect them to be 2 mana 2/2 when face down. (Someone has a cube like this which seems pretty cool btw).

But, if most of your cards are from 3 mana 3/2 with upside formats, your typical morph is just very far behind. It’s less powerful when you play it and it needs to live until you can flip it, which often costs more mana. There aren’t many morphs this good.

And, the fewer morphs in a given list, the less valuable they tend to be because part of the value of say, willbender is that he *might* just be scornful egotist instead, and if villain knows he’s always willbender then he doesn’t work as well as he could.

I don’t think this means you can’t make morph work in cube - ultimately it works in several retail limited environments so it can work in a cube too. I think that in order to make it work in a cube though, you need to make the cube *about* morph, at least a little bit, which means one off morph creatures will almost never be worth it by themselves.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Last time I checked, a 2/2 still trades with a 3/2. I think a common baseline of 3 mana 2/3s would be more problematic for morphs. That being said, I am careful with high stats on creatures anyway and my cube is in fact about morph - at least a little bit. I run Vesuvan Shapeshifter, Ixidron, Deathmist Raptor and Scroll of Fate who care about morphs. Also, I have a whopping 24 creatures that have morph or megamorph themselves. Some are common suspects (Den Protector, Bane of the Living), others are more secrets gems (Skirk Marauder, Fathom Seer), but at least 20 of those 24 have proven their worth and see a lot of play in different decks.

So, I guess, the argument that morph is just bad because of bad base stats doesn't really count too much :D
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

jerichoalar said:
I’ll take a shot at this.

A lot, and I mean *a lot* of modernish magic limited is benchmarked around 3 mana 3/2 commons with upside. bronze sable has been more or less consistently underwhelming (excepting maybe in ZNR where it’s secretly always relevant tribally), and the last time a colorless 2/2 was actually good In retail, it basically cost 1 mana.

Ten years ago, creatures were just worse, so the gap between a non-morph and a morph was smaller. If morph was getting printed for the first time today, I’d expect them to be 2 mana 2/2 when face down. (Someone has a cube like this which seems pretty cool btw).

But, if most of your cards are from 3 mana 3/2 with upside formats, your typical morph is just very far behind. It’s less powerful when you play it and it needs to live until you can flip it, which often costs more mana. There aren’t many morphs this good.

And, the fewer morphs in a given list, the less valuable they tend to be because part of the value of say, willbender is that he *might* just be scornful egotist instead, and if villain knows he’s always willbender then he doesn’t work as well as he could.

I don’t think this means you can’t make morph work in cube - ultimately it works in several retail limited environments so it can work in a cube too. I think that in order to make it work in a cube though, you need to make the cube *about* morph, at least a little bit, which means one off morph creatures will almost never be worth it by themselves.
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Yep, that's the reason. Ravnic has 37 fairly efficient 2-drop creatures which make the majority of morph cards look pretty bad. While I think cards like Den Protector, Vesuvan Shapeshifter, and Deathmist Raptor are reasonable inclusions given their stats decent as creatures without morph and the amount of value turning them face up provides, I don't think Riptide Survivor meets these criteria. It's nowhere near the power level of Ravnic's other 3 drops, and it just seems like a poor inclusion as a whole.

I didn't mean to insinuate that morph can't work in a cube, Tbo's awesome morph cube shows that it can work in an environment built around the *mechanic. It's just that looking at general trends in cube design in the riptide community leads me to believe that morph is too clunky for the majority of our cubes to actually warrant inclusion.

*Tbo uses some custom rules changes to make morph a little bit more efficient, but the entire point of the cube is still to do cool stuff with Morph.
 
jerichoalar

jerichoalar

ravnic said:
Last time I checked, a 2/2 still trades with a 3/2.
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sure, but your average non morph 2/2 creature is two of: less mana to cast Than the 3/2, Wins that fight outright (I.e. first strike, regenerate, protection etc), or did something that was already worth a card when it entered or died.

and your average 3 mana creature is also two of: beats 2/2s in fights, did something already worth a card, or ‘upside’ is actually something like being a 4/3 instead of a 3/2.

If morphs had a ceiling of colorless 2/2 we would never talk about them, but stonework puma is a *really* low floor in modernish limited. For morphs to be worth it they have to flip, and that’s usually a pretty big tempo cost (And usually further mana!) for something that is (often, although not always) not actually worth the full investment.

there are morphs that are worth that investment, but they’re exceptional in ways that survivor isn’t.

morphs get *way* more interesting if they represent hidden information, but that takes a full environment, so I’d probably never recommend one as a generic piece unless the environment is so low power that a 3 mana 2/2 is on curve.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist

I think there's a conflation between "should you run morphs in an arbitrary environment" with "can you have an environment that support morphs". Triple Khans of Tarkir was one of the best retail limited environments ever, so I think the answer to the latter question is a yes, but of course the former is probably "it depends, probably not".
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Has anyone considered using Morph to support a Colorless Matters archetype?



I don't really think there are enough cards to really get that to work, though.

EDIT: If you're willing to run custom cards, changing "artifact" to "colorless" on a bunch of cards could be interesting:

 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

Rasmus Källqvist said:
I think there's a conflation between "should you run morphs in an arbitrary environment" with "can you have an environment that support morphs". Triple Khans of Tarkir was one of the best retail limited environments ever, so I think the answer to the latter question is a yes, but of course the former is probably "it depends, probably not".
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That is true. The larger point I was trying to make was that the vast majority of Morph cards are not going to be that good in the majority of cubes in 2020 on account of how a morph body stacks up against a normal creature's body. When morph was first printed in Onslaught back in 2002, the only colors that were allowed grizzly bears were white and green. The number of 2-powered 2-drops that could trade with morphs were significantly lower than in more recent sets. But over time, creature size creep means that playing Gray Ogres with no immediate upside or win the game text is a lot sketchier. Every color has access to a lot of good 2-power 2-drops, many of which provide immediate value when coming into play. Morphs just don't stack up well against that. Even Ravnic's cube, which is fairly low power and light on low cost ETB effects, has a glut of things that make the floor of a morph look pretty bad.

This isn't to say that morphs aren't playable. Especially in low power environments, morphs can be good. However, I think both the normal casting cost needs to be reasonable and reward for turning the creature face up needs to be pretty huge in order for most morphs to be good outside of dedicated environments. Deathmist Raptor, Sagu Mauler, Vesuvan Shapeshifter, and the DTK Rare Piker Cycle are all fine inclusions in mid power cubes because both the base rate and potential upsides of the cards are fine. But I think confusing Deathmist Raptor being a playable card with morph being a playable mechanic is incorrect. Riptide Survivor is definitely not good in any of it's base modes, and while it does provide some value in it's absolute best case scenario, I just can't see it being particularly powerful.

I wasn't trying to make a blanket statement about the usability of a mechanic in all cubes, but rather just point out that the base rate of morph is not something which most environments can really stomach these days. The card has to bring more to the table than the best case "cast a gray ogre and also turn it face up" scenario to be worth the investment outside of environments specifically tailored to making the gray ogre body something every deck is willing to play in my opinion.
 
T

tbo

LadyMapi said:
Has anyone considered using Morph to support a Colorless Matters archetype?



I don't really think there are enough cards to really get that to work, though.
Click to expand...


Me! I do that! There's some WIP editing going on but my morph cube runs colorless matters stuff. Two of my favorites:



Trainmaster linked my cube blog above if you want to check it out
 
ravnic

ravnic

I found a card that is certainly playable, but I don't really know where.




I really like cards like that, which shake up the rules of the game symmetrically for everyone. I can imagine this one being fun (which is rare for an old red card, those were mostly direct damage and bad creatures). I am just not sure how you could utilize this card optimally.

You will always have the advantage of attacking first which is huge, dince tapped creatures can't be forced to block. You also pretty clearly want to be a deck that plays quite a few creatures and is willing to attack which can be both, aggro and midrange. Also, haste should be good, since your creatures can attack before they are forced to block. And maybe you'd prefer big creatures over many small ones, do you can eat some blockers?

I somehow have a hard time wraping my head around this effect. Can you come up with any other cards/abilities that could break Invasion Plans symmetry?
 
japahn

japahn

ravnic said:
I found a card that is certainly playable, but I don't really know where.




I really like cards like that, which shake up the rules of the game symmetrically for everyone. I can imagine this one being fun (which is rare for an old red card, those were mostly direct damage and bad creatures). I am just not sure how you could utilize this card optimally.

You will always have the advantage of attacking first which is huge, dince tapped creatures can't be forced to block. You also pretty clearly want to be a deck that plays quite a few creatures and is willing to attack which can be both, aggro and midrange. Also, haste should be good, since your creatures can attack before they are forced to block. And maybe you'd prefer big creatures over many small ones, do you can eat some blockers?

I somehow have a hard time wraping my head around this effect. Can you come up with any other cards/abilities that could break Invasion Plans symmetry?
Click to expand...


The problem with this is that even if you make it playable (I imagine having a bunch of 2-drops that like to be blocked like Porcelain Legionnaire would help a lot), it's a low-agency card. When you're behind it's bad, when you're ahead it removes agency from your opponent. It wants a hyper-aggressive deck that alpha strikes every turn, which also tends to be low-agency.
 
sigh

sigh

@LadyMapi, can you please use the "card image" method for attaching pictures? I'm just seeing broken links on your posts with pictures half the time and have to reload the page and like load the image in a separate tab. the little "CI" button in the text editor works, or just
Code: 
[ci]your-cardname-here[/ci]
 
[ci]first-cardname
second-cardname
third cardname[/ci]
 
[ci]providence[/ci]
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

How good do these look? Assume that they're squadroned together or something:



If you didn't squadron them together, how low power would the cube have to be for these to be pickable by themselves?

EDIT: The same questions for these sets as well:


 
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