Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

sigh

sigh

sigh said:
Has anybody had any experience with this:



I also give out free cycling lands. Seems like a neat manland effect in fetchland (and cycle land) formats. Efficient for aggro, and more consistently available in the longer-game decks with more GY interaction. Testable, at least?
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Very testable!
I threw this beauty in before my latest session, and I was very impressed! As I postulated, having the cycling lands in the BLB does increase it's stock some, but besides that, it's an untapped manland that fits into a prominent archetype/structure in my format. It's a very efficient body for the cost, and it even provides a GY thinning duty for later usage of cards like Survive or Memory
 
sigh

sigh

Dom Harvey said:
What changes to your main Cube have you made with the free cycling lands in mind? How has it worked in practice?
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Only very minor alterations and shifts of card selection so far. It's generally much like above, adding a variable to a card's inclusion. It's eased the inclusion of cycling-matters cards like curator of mysteries for instance. I could probably afford to include Drake Haven tbh, but haven't taken the time to see where it would fit. Bouncelands another card that got slightly easier to include.

Beyond that, it also adds an interesting format dichotomy. Low-colored decks generally find themselves with more space for the tapped mono-colored lands. This gives 1.5 or 2 colored decks a slight filtering advantage over greedier 3+ color decks. Not sure exactly what that means yet but I think overall healthy for the cube.
 
inscho

inscho

I like the angel quite a bit. I cut it from my maindeck when I upped the presence of combo....it sits somewhat awkwardly in the curve for what my white decks want to be doing now. I think it's a pretty easy include.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I cut all embalm cards from my cube when I added eternalize cards, because I find the similarity of the mechanics a bit jarring. I like the eternalize cards a lot better as well. I cubed with the Angel, and I'm kinda down on it after seeing it in action. In practice it's just an easy mode value creature. It's never wrong to just slam it, because you're both removing their best card, and adding an evasive threat to the board yourself, and on top of that you can cast it again after they first dealt with it, potentially removing a bigger threat they played in the meantime. It's not a lot of fun to sit across an Angel of Sanction either.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Onderzeeboot said:
I cut all embalm cards from my cube when I added eternalize cards, because I find the similarity of the mechanics a bit jarring. I like the eternalize cards a lot better as well.
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I remember you writing about this previously. Can you tell is a little more about as to why you do not want both mechanics?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
I remember you writing about this previously. Can you tell is a little more about as to why you do not want both mechanics?
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Sure! I like to limit the amount of mechanics in my cube to an extent. It makes the cube feel more, how to put it, cohesive? More like a carefully crafted environment rather than a hodgepodge of favorite cards. There really is only one embalm card that I really like (Vizier of Many Faces), while there's a lot of eternalize cards I like. This means players have to reserve mind space for the one card that doesn't build a 4/4 copy of itself but an actually copy, stats included. Ultimately it doesn't matter that much though, because honestly, if you can keep up with a custom draft format as a player, you can probably keep up with multiple mechanics, but still, it satisfies my "o.c.d." ;)
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I run both, but part of that is an effort on my part to branch out.

I've got a pretty clear aggro bias, so whenever I design a card like this, it'll always have persist or unearth or undying, more short term, less impact immediacy type mechanics, rather than eternalize or enbalm or something like genesis

Spells ended up working the same way: I run a comparitive ton of cards with rebound or very cheap flashbacks and next to no firebolt style cards or buyback or whatever
 
Suicufnoc

Suicufnoc

Onderzeeboot said:
I cut all embalm cards from my cube when I added eternalize cards, because I find the similarity of the mechanics a bit jarring. I like the eternalize cards a lot better as well. I cubed with the Angel, and I'm kinda down on it after seeing it in action. In practice it's just an easy mode value creature. It's never wrong to just slam it, because you're both removing their best card, and adding an evasive threat to the board yourself, and on top of that you can cast it again after they first dealt with it, potentially removing a bigger threat they played in the meantime. It's not a lot of fun to sit across an Angel of Sanction either.
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Wow I didn't even realize they were to separate mechanics. That's actually sad. Running out of ideas much? I mean I understand they do similar mechanics, or fix mechanics later on and stuff, but that's just way too soon.
 
Taamas

Taamas

Suicufnoc said:
Wow I didn't even realize they were to separate mechanics. That's actually sad. Running out of ideas much? I mean I understand they do similar mechanics, or fix mechanics later on and stuff, but that's just way too soon.
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If you mean Wizards running out of ideas, embalm represents regular mummification in Amonkhet set, while eternalize represents the undead that went under the process Nicol Bolas prepared to create a horde of elite zombie blue metallic warriors and thus are enhanced by the process (and become a 4/4). They could be the same mechanic, but lorewise they represent two variations of the same process, and so they do mechanically.

Taamas, Wizard's design fanboy, at your service.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Thanks Onderzeeboot.

Suicufnoc There has been a person each year since Tempest who said “Wow it looks like WotC are running out of ideas.” :)
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I will say it's a touch underutilized mechanically, but they care ALOT about the conservation of design space.

Like, for example, there's no creature with eternalize that:
  • is larger than a 4/4 initially
  • fights
  • ETBs with -1/-1 counters
etc
 
Suicufnoc

Suicufnoc

I'm just way more into mechanics than flavor, and I would rather have seen a new mechanic than basically the same thing again with the flavor tweaked.

Are there any eternalize creatures that start bigger and eternalize small?
 
Taamas

Taamas

My point is that if we didn't get eternalize we would have had embalm again instead of a new mechanic. There are no eternalize creatures that start bigger, as Chris stated, since it wouldn't make much sense lorewise, I guess.
 
Aston

Aston

One thing that is a bit weird about Eternalize is that none of the eternal creatures in the set are 4/4s, and they all (mostly? I didn't check) have Afflict which I don't think any of the Eternalize cards do. So there's kind of two different types of eternal which is slightly jarring.
 
sigh

sigh

There's no way they could have made all cards that represented eternals to be 4/4's, especially in a small set. Just one downside of a flavor-driven mechanic.

I use both embalm and eternalize. They are a very potent and useful pair, so I'm not shorting myself on utilizing them.
 
Suicufnoc

Suicufnoc

Taamas said:
My point is that if we didn't get eternalize we would have had embalm again instead of a new mechanic. There are no eternalize creatures that start bigger, as Chris stated, since it wouldn't make much sense lorewise, I guess.
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I'd be fine with it either way, I just wish they would wait longer to bring back expert set mechanics. Though I don't really have a problem with simple ones like prowess just becoming evergreen
 
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