Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

[Grillo_Parlante]

I haven't played him, so not saying this is wrong. But what is he hating against exactly? Removal.dec? Counterspell.dec?

Aggro can run him, so it can't be that. Midrange should love this guy. Is control really foiled by this thing? What am I missing?

i.m.o hexproof can be unhealthy in an environment where it leads to games that feel unfairly non-interactive. It can be healthy where it’s a beatable incentive for slow durdle decks to remember they need to develop their board, or where it is conditional. The key thing is that I don't want players to feel like they are being punished for drafting an otherwise reasonable deck.

In lieu with that, I like my hexproof guys to have at least some sort of stat deficiency. This is for a couple reasons: 1) the big difference between shroud and hexproof is supposed to be the ability to buff the creature, so it just feels weird to me to have hexproof creatures that come on an already serviceable body; 2) the easiest solution to hexproof creatures is to develop your board. If your hexproof guy has no stat deficiency, he can just pound his way past whatever, and then it’s as if I’m punishing the player for choosing a perfectly reasonable route.

Outside of the fact that thrun makes you hugely advantaged against slower decks that want to control the board via spells, he also has the naturally stats and regeneration to pound past most defensive creatures those decks would run as an alternative. I feel like I am putting those drafters in a position where it’s unduly difficult if not impossible for them to win, because of this one card.

Troll ascetic, on the other hand, would get stopped by a defensive player’s wall of omens, which the aggressive player could than in turn trump with a grafted wargear. I can encourage an interactive arms race between the aggressive and defensive players, which would be otherwise impossible to do with thrun. And outside of having an effect like that on my cube, I am not sure why I would want him.

 

[GenericZero]

I would rather run troll ascetic as a non-conditional hexproof creature than thrun. Ascetic's two toughness makes having regeneration mana up a real issue, the three power provides a meaningful incentive to combine him with creature buffs, and his place on the mana curve is perfect for creating a non-oppressive incentive for slow decks to maintain some kind of board presence.

I don't really like how Thrun is positioned to impact a cube environment: he is too much a hate card i.m.o

This 110% forever.

 

[Eric Chan]

Fantastic post, Grillo. Really excellent.

I don't think Troll Ascetic does much of anything at the power level most of us operate at, but when I get around to creating a lower powered environment, I'm going to keep this post of yours in mind.

 

[GenericZero]

Fantastic post, Grillo. Really excellent.

I don't think Troll Ascetic does much of anything at the power level most of us operate at, but when I get around to creating a lower powered environment, I'm going to keep this post of yours in mind.

I keep hearing about these high power levels and I'm thinking to myself. "Is all that power really necessary?" Probably because I believe a lower powered environment makes it a lot easier to build around more off-the-wall, interesting ideas...

Oh, and since this is single card spotlight and all, I wanted to take a moment to shine some light on this guy:

 

[Jason Waddell]

I keep hearing about these high power levels and I'm thinking to myself. "Is all that power really necessary?" Probably because I believe a lower powered environment makes it a lot easier to build around more off-the-wall, interesting ideas...

It's mostly that users here predominantly started with power-max-ish cubes, thought to themselves "I need to change some aspects of this" and ended up with "Riplabby" cubes, which still share ~70% cards with your standard issue 360 power-max. The 30% makes it play substantially differently, but if I wanted to have an environment where you didn't need Thrun-levels of power, I'd have to build a new one from scratch.

 

[GenericZero]

It's mostly that users here predominantly started with power-max-ish cubes, thought to themselves "I need to change some aspects of this" and ended up with "Riplabby" cubes, which still share ~70% cards with your standard issue 360 power-max. The 30% makes it play substantially differently, but if I wanted to have an environment where you didn't need Thrun-levels of power, I'd have to build a new one from scratch.

I still think Troll Ascetic is fine. I used to have a powermax cube that me and some friends pooled cards together to make. After reading your articles I would make suggestions to them and they just wouldn't have like half of it. Eventually we decided to tear the cube apart cuz reasons...and thus I built my own cube based around a Heroic Theme cuz it just seemed natural since I was making sure that the ONLY doom blade effect my cube would have was a sorcery speed Shriekmaw. I'll post it when I can but I'm lazy. Sucks I don't gt to play it more than like once each fucking season of the year.

Dumb question. How do I post a link thingy to a card without using the card's name? Like instead of saying Shriekmaw, what if I just wanted to say "this guy". How is that done? How do I go mlg at teh keyboard skillz?

 

[FlowerSunRain]

(c=shriekmaw)this guy(/c)

Replace () with [].

 

[ahadabans]

Outside of the fact that thrun makes you hugely advantaged against slower decks that want to control the board via spells, he also has the naturally stats and regeneration to pound past most defensive creatures those decks would run as an alternative. I feel like I am putting those drafters in a position where it’s unduly difficult if not impossible for them to win, because of this one card.

I hear what you're saying, but at the same time I think the color requirements make this an acceptable card (if it were in white, I would not play it). This feels similar to Opposition to me - a super broken card that is made slightly less broken because of the color it's in. Different scenario, but similar idea.

I keep coming back to green as a color. It really only does two things well - ramp and creatures. It has basically nothing for removal, minimal card draw options, no discard/counter/bounce, no late game reach (like burn in red -although I guess you can count stuff like overrun). As a color, it's very specialized. So throwing green a few bones in the form of really strong creatures, it sort of feels like an acceptable route to take. Green SHOULD be dropping really scary hard to deal with dudes. That's what I want it doing actually.

Again, maybe I'm wrong here. But what GGx deck is owning U/W/Bx control decks with a single copy of Thrun? (especially for those of us still using the old legend rule where Thrun just dies to clones?) I just don't see how control decks are losing to this card single handedly. I agree as a control play you don't want to see this guy and be burning a wrath to kill him. But not every play you make can be a 3 for 1 versus midrange. Why would you want that to happen anyway? All it does is reinforce the roshambo model (where midrange rolls over to control). I WANT my midrange decks to have answers to control, especially because aggro is under supported in my meta. I want no part of Roshambo. Otherwise, control is just going to dominate and the meta breaks down.

I don't see this as a huge hate card. At least not anymore than scavaging ooze and deathrite are hate cards for graveyard strategies. I think it's healthy to have "foils" for certain strategies. Recurring threats from the graveyard are insanely powerful engines when they get going. You need answers for them otherwise those strategies won't lose. The same is true for Ux counterremoval.dec. I think Thrun is a really cool creature that can go in a lot of decks and be an answer for a specific arch type that tends to shit all over midrange anyway. I think this is a big reason I love Genesis so much - it's such a powerful card against control because of the insane CA it can generate (and it feels so damn green - I will never cut Genesis from my cube unless Wizard's prints a strict upgrade to it... but I digress).

Long story short. These types of cards I think are healthy for the meta. Every strategy and every card in the cube should have a solid answer card or two for it. Otherwise, strategy "X" becomes dominate and the meta gets stale.

 

[Dom Harvey]

It disappoints me that this card isn't good any more:

 

[Tom]

Kind of on topic, I like this guy:

I'm very careful with protection but I think since he's only a 2/2 and it's only pro one color, and he's actually playable (in my cube at least) when you aren't vs blue he's a good option. And a grizzly bear with 4 abilities is just cool.

 

[GenericZero]

(c=shriekmaw)this guy(/c)

Replace () with [].

You're always there when I need you to be.

 

[anotak]

I think the stuff you're saying about green would've maybe been applicable 5 or more years ago, but green has made much progress in recent times

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

All it does is reinforce the roshambo model (where midrange rolls over to control). I WANT my midrange decks to have answers to control, especially because aggro is under supported in my meta. I want no part of Roshambo. Otherwise, control is just going to dominate and the meta breaks down.

I guess the way that I look at it, is that if you view thrun through the spectrum as a midrange "check" on control strategies, you end up in the whole roshambo system of checks and balances anyways. I like to look at it more through the spectrum of there being an arms race between answers and threats. From that point of view, thrun, as a threat, bricks most of the potential answers, and throws the arms race off. If I were pushing edict effects as an answer, for example, he would be a threat I would be excited to include.

Even in the roshambo system though, I'm not sure how desirable or effective of a check he really is. I don't think a single thrun can really keep oppressive control decks from being oppressive; and if that is the basis for running him, he almost seems like a concession to those decks continued existence. On top of that, the traditional problem I’ve always had hasn't been oppressive control decks, it’s been oppressive midrange decks. And I’m not sure what an aggro deck does against a 4/4 hexproof regenerator that can be brought out turn 3 off of an elf.

I keep coming back to green as a color. It really only does two things well - ramp and creatures. It has basically nothing for removal, minimal card draw options, no discard/counter/bounce, no late game reach (like burn in red -although I guess you can count stuff like overrun). As a color, it's very specialized. So throwing green a few bones in the form of really strong creatures, it sort of feels like an acceptable route to take. Green SHOULD be dropping really scary hard to deal with dudes. That's what I want it doing actually.

That hits home with me. Green has always been a terrible color for me to design for, and I’ve kind of had an easy out with this new cube because innistrad green is really unique and dynamic. Even with this super low power cube I have been toying with, I just stopped at circa 30 cards with green because I could not think of other cards to run: like you said, the color feels super narrow.

One of the things that I did with the new cube, was I sat down and wrote out the ten guilds and tried to come up with a unique theme and sub theme for each color combination. If I do the same thing with my old cube, over its history, the green color pairings were basically nothing but midrange and ramp decks down the line (the only real exception was U/G and kind of B/G at one point) and the thing I hated the most about that cube was the dominance of midrange and ramp strategies--something I had apparently built in with the best of intentions. Because I wasn't thinking of green holistically interacting with the other colors, but rather in terms of its own individual color identity, I had doomed every green deck in that cube to being essentially the same with only a few build around quirks (scryb ranger and pod).

I realize that I am not being particularly helpful here, and maybe this warrants its own thread about green identity and color combinations, but it does factor into how I look at thrun. I tend to see just another generic green beater for midrange and ramp decks that sometimes just wreaks the slow answer based decks. If I were to rework the old cube, I would do the same color pairing list I did with the new cube, and let that guide my design rather than a concern over green identity. If I felt that thrun fit into a color pairing, or was beneficial to some other sort of interaction (e.g. encouraging edit effects), than and only than would I run him.

Really enjoying the discussion btw.

 

[ahadabans]

I think the stuff you're saying about green would've maybe been applicable 5 or more years ago, but green has made much progress in recent times

What's changed? I'm not implying green sucks - far from it. It's just specialized. Green still has few CA engines, pretty much no removal. What new dynamic have they gotten in the last 5 years? I just see more ramp options and bigger dudes.

 

[ahadabans]

Even in the roshambo system though, I'm not sure how desirable or effective of a check he really is. I don't think a single thrun can really keep oppressive control decks from being oppressive; and if that is the basis for running him, he almost seems like a concession to those decks continued existence. On top of that, the traditional problem I’ve always had hasn't been oppressive control decks, it’s been oppressive midrange decks. And I’m not sure what an aggro deck does against a 4/4 hexproof regenerator that can be brought out turn 3 off of an elf.

That's a fair point actually. And I won't lie. I think I've accepted that some form of roshambo is unavoidable. And I arrived at that conclusion because of how the game IMO works. Card advantage is an often overused term, but it truly is the whole game of Magic. Every deck that wins does so via some avenue of card advantage. Now this can be actual CA (drawing more cards), card quality (my cards are better than yours), or tempo (I play more cards faster than you). And different strategies naturally favor different forms of CA and by extension are stronger at different stages of the game (roshambo at it's core). The obvious one here for illustrative purposes is tempo (synonymous with aggro in this example) loses all it's CA advantage if the game doesn't end fast (since this form of CA is entirely virtual and time based).

The ideal scenario is obviously not giving silver bullet answers that throw off the CA calculation (by this I mean one card is so broken or otherwise game warping that it undoes all the game development), but rather making it so strategies can morph during the game. In other words, your tempo deck has more than one way to generate CA in a game (tempo might be the preferred choice, but it can generate card draw or card quality at later stages, etc). This is half a deck building exercise and half a design problem with the game of Magic itself (not all strategies can support more than one CA path). I'm not sure there is a solution or a real way to achieve this ultimate scenario though.

One of the things that I did with the new cube, was I sat down and wrote out the ten guilds and tried to come up with a unique theme and sub theme for each color combination. If I do the same thing with my old cube, over its history, the green color pairings were basically nothing but midrange and ramp decks down the line (the only real exception was U/G and kind of B/G at one point) and the thing I hated the most about that cube was the dominance of midrange and ramp strategies--something I had apparently built in with the best of intentions. Because I wasn't thinking of green holistically interacting with the other colors, but rather in terms of its own individual color identity, I had doomed every green deck in that cube to being essentially the same with only a few build around quirks (scryb ranger and pod).

I realize that I am not being particularly helpful here, and maybe this warrants its own thread about green identity and color combinations, but it does factor into how I look at thrun. I tend to see just another generic green beater for midrange and ramp decks that sometimes just wreaks the slow answer based decks. If I were to rework the old cube, I would do the same color pairing list I did with the new cube, and let that guide my design rather than a concern over green identity. If I felt that thrun fit into a color pairing, or was beneficial to some other sort of interaction (e.g. encouraging edit effects), than and only than would I run him.

Another great point. And I've struggled with this myself. I've tried it both ways - just running things that each color is good at and letting the meta be organic; and trying to steer or craft specific strategies by color combination. The problem with the first scenario is exactly what you said - midrange is very dominate and your meta can be uncreative (effectively stale since everything is goodstuff.dec).

Problem I found with the second option though is you get a similar scenario. Not so much that midrange is dominate. That doesn't happen if you steered to a more diverse distribution (talking aggro/mid/control) but you still have the stale/uncreative situation (and IMO it can be worse than option 1 in some ways). Now your GB decks only do one thing (or maybe two things) instead of just turning into whatever (don't want to call it goodstuff.dec, but that's really what it is). What I disliked about option 2 is you end up with "GB rock", "UB reanimator", "UR counterburn", etc. That's all fine and good, but guys go into auto draft mode and make the same decks because they work so well. Guys are no longer incentivized into making something weird because your default arch types are too well tuned and can't be beaten by off-kilter stuff.

This is where we get into the discussion about how do you want your meta to play? More like limited (where it's heavy midrange/creature strategies) or more like constructed (where you have defined and very efficient arch types)? I don't think there is a right answer - each group will have a different preference. For me, I want something more limited but with a bit more diversity. I definitely don't want constructed level decks in cube. Half of the fun for me and several other guys is putting cards together and discovering synergies. That experimentation by it's nature more often than not creates less than ideal decks - at least in comparison to a well tuned arch type style deck (terminology here is probably not good - I simply mean a deck that has been pushed in the meta like the gravecrawler deck or pod or the life gain deck or whatever else the cube is trying really hard to make happen).

Really enjoying the discussion btw.

Ditto. This probably belongs in a new thread. But that's not how we tend to roll here. LOL

 

[MCMcEmcee]

What's changed? I'm not implying green sucks - far from it. It's just specialized. Green still has few CA engines, pretty much no removal. What new dynamic have they gotten in the last 5 years? I just see more ramp options and bigger dudes.

CA and virtual CA engines like Sylvan Library, Survival of the Fittest, Birthing Pod, Primeval Titan, pretty much every Garruk, all the gold green walkers, Loam, Glimpse of Nature, Regal Force, etc. Also enchantresses, and while we're talking lower power level, Garruk's Packleader, Soul of the Harvest, Primordial Sage, Wall of Mulch.
Also all the best cascade cards are green.

As for removal, in just the past few years, Master of the Wild Hunt, Prey Upon, Garruk Relentless, Daybreak Ranger, Ulvenwald Tracker, Domri Rade, Polukranos and Setessan Tactics have been printed. Selesnya Charm, Clan Defiance, Savage Twister, Fiery Justice, Jund Charm, Naya Charm, Bant Charm, Firespout if you look at gold cards more.
Huntmaster of the Fells and Master of the Wild Hunt are CA engines AND removal!
-edit- forgot Abrupt Decay aka a green removal spell that sees or has seen heavy play in Standard, Modern, Legacy and Vintage.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Problem I found with the second option though is you get a similar scenario. Not so much that midrange is dominate. That doesn't happen if you steered to a more diverse distribution (talking aggro/mid/control) but you still have the stale/uncreative situation (and IMO it can be worse than option 1 in some ways). Now your GB decks only do one thing (or maybe two things) instead of just turning into whatever (don't want to call it goodstuff.dec, but that's really what it is). What I disliked about option 2 is you end up with "GB rock", "UB reanimator", "UR counterburn", etc. That's all fine and good, but guys go into auto draft mode and make the same decks because they work so well. Guys are no longer incentivized into making something weird because your default arch types are too well tuned and can't be beaten by off-kilter stuff.

Yeah, I think the lower power level of my format may have gotten around that. It tends to be more about synergistic board states so it naturally encourages experimentation. Also, when you have really low power removal that helps a lot: players don't have to worry about their creativity being suddenly swept or bolted away.

For example, last week, I had one player draft a laboratory maniac deck--which was, yes, every bit as awesome as it sounds--something that would be impossible with a lot of cubes' removal suites. As long as I don't punish the players for exploring the game space, they should be willing to explore, rather than retracting defensively down a handful of tried and true paths. Hopefully, this will result in a dynamic and evolving metagame, which is ultimately what I would like.

 

[ahadabans]

Yeah, I think the lower power level of my format may have gotten around that. It tends to be more about synergistic board states so it naturally encourages experimentation. Also, when you have really low power removal that helps a lot: players don't have to worry about their creativity being suddenly swept or bolted away.

For example, last week, I had one player draft a laboratory maniac deck--which was, yes, every bit as awesome as it sounds--something that would be impossible with a lot of cubes' removal suites. As long as I don't punish the players for exploring the game space, they should be willing to explore, rather than retracting defensively down a handful of tried and true paths. Hopefully, this will result in a dynamic and evolving metagame, which is ultimately what I would like.

I've found in limited at least that lack of removal (or bad removal) really has a negative impact on the game. So I've always applied the idea that having good removal in cube would be the same net positive on the meta. But maybe that isn't black and white.

I agree that having things like lightning bolt and other super cheap removal (instant in particular) nullifies and/or unnecessarily punishes certain strategies (especially fringier ones). But answers are so important to the core game, I really don't to take those away. It's back to the Thrun scenario. If he has no answers, he's bad for the meta right? Isn't this true of pretty much everything though? Even if a laboratory maniac deck (which does sound fucking sweet BTW - I'd love to see that deck list) is much more interesting than a ramp into Thrun deck, is either scenario desirable if they both can't be answered?

This almost feels a little like the power vs unpowered argument in cube. I played powered for awhile and while it's fun initially to see turn 2 Griselbrand with force of will backup why don't you just scoop now moments (and you get high fives for awhile because that's just ridiculous). But then it stopped being fun because guys build a board state and then auto lose the game to some broken card or card combination (taking a lot of the skill away from the game IMO). But if you neuter removal enough, how do you interrupt anything in development? Without removal, it becomes a solitaire game and boils down to who executes first (or more likely who has the better long game). This also feels like a bad place to me.

I'm oversimplifying of course, but I'm just no convinced that getting rid of removal is the solution. I certainly agree pushing synergy is part of the solution though. That I'm fully on board with.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Because the format is based on innistrad, it necessarily has bad removal:

The third key to the format was the lack of quality removal. While there were more removal spells in the set than an average set, they had difficult restrictions, and they were spread out over all the colors. It was difficult for any deck to have answers to everything played by another deck. This meant that you often needed to focus more on picking up the best threats and synergy, instead of just picking all the best removal spells.

So I have cards like this for answers:



If you take a synergistic approach to your deck, they can become incredibly powerful as removal pieces, with cards such as the below:



I actually had it occur in a game with the laboratory maniac player where I act of treasoned the maniac and saced it to pod. He than saced his shambling shell, on his draw dredged it, hit dread return, played the shell, and then saced two gravecrawlers and the shambling shell to get the maniac back in play.

We were still able to win (this is free-for-all multiplayer remember, his deck was that resilient) because of a combined assault on him before he could flashback dream twist on his last three cards and win on his draw step. However, the only reason we won was because he thought gnaw to the bonewas a sorcery (this is the first time any of us had drafted this deck), and had tapped his shell mana wrong, cutting himself off of the green for the flashback.

I don't remember the deck list, there was a lot of discussion about it though after the game. He had altar of dementia in there, which he wanted to use with the crawlers, but for some reason didn't include the memory's journey/runic repetition infinity loop. I'm guessing that was because I had taken spider spawning, which I was running in my pod deck (all value, all the time).

I am quite content with my terrible removal

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I'm thinking about adding this guy



I like monstrous as an ability and he can gum the ground up pretty good, plus ties into the +1/+1 counter theme.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

If you are looking for a guy to stall the board, he is a great choice, and fits nicely on the curve.

 

[miles]

hey yall, been lurking for a while now and figured i should actually sign up eventually. currently i'm trying to lower the power of my cube a little bit to enable some double strike, enchantment-based voltron strategies. i was wondering if anyone's cubed with the ordeals? seems pretty good on a fencing ace or hero of iroas or even something like a carion feeder.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I run all 5 ordeals. I had initially only really had much hope in Thassa and its probably the best one, but all of them have been pretty good. Ordeal of Nylea is a bit of a split personality (you want to be aggro to use the size, but it gives you ramp), though if you figure out a deck that uses both halves its pretty nutty. Ordeal of heliod's trigger can be absolutely amazing or completely useless, but its in the best color for the effect so its ok.

The main lures for these cards are creatures that can activate them faster (Hero of Iroas, Favored Hoplite, Fabled Hero, Bloodcrazed Hoplite of course, but also other stuff like mortician bettle, cytoplast root kin, spike weaver, lotleth troll work, rakdos cackler, curse of predation too) and cards that can use the counters (ion storm, rage forger, volt charge, give // take, cytoplast root kin again).

The main drawbacks of these cards is that they are massively dependent on the removal of the environment. Even if you tone down the instant speed blowout removal, these cards are still a bad value against sorcery speed removal, so you really need to limit the supply (so that you can feasibly try to guess what removal the opponent might have) and include anti-removal tech (spellskite, emerge unscathed, daze, whathaveyou).

I don't think I've seen a game lost where Ordeal of Thassa or Erebos has triggered.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

At the intersection of team swarmyard, team ion storm and team youneedmoreonedrops lives this card. Does it do anything?

 

[Dom Harvey]