So there's been a lot of talk lately about my old friend experiment two
And a few people have been asking about what the average case for this card is, as I spent most of the stream discussing the worst case of this seemly innocuous card. Sorry if this turns into a bit of a puff piece about the challenges of getting people to understand custom cards in general
So as per the stream, here's what I've mentioned so far:
Pros
- Splashable (Har har har it's a 2 drop)
- Helps +1/+1 counters decks, token decks if said tokens are big enough (Lingering Souls no, Garruk Relentless maybe, Garruk Wildspeaker yes!)
- Best case is a bear with an additional glorious anthem at no extra cost, but the card is well balanced enough that drafters have never complained it's overpowered
- Design is (At least on the surface) clean and elegant. This is the card I've received the most comments of "Feels like it could be a real card"
- Contrary to Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, this triggers on tokens, which lets it play better with the various Garruks and Call of the Herd type cards.
Cons
- If you play a 2/1 and Giant Growth it, it won't evolve. If you play a 2/1 with Spear of Heliod in play, it will.
- Reverent hunter evolves it like a 1/1 does, but cytoplast root-kin evolves it like a 4/4 does. (Don't even get me started on clones)
- Boon Satyr doesn't give a counter when you bestow it onto a creature (Most people get this, but it has been confused before. Don't ask me if you can negate him in that circumstance though.)
- Nylea, God of the Hunt gives a counter if your devotion to green is 7 when she enters the battlefield, but doesn't if your devotion to green is 2.
- Since it's printed power and toughness is 0/0, it takes some reading to glean the actual value of the card. (Again, usually not a huge issue, but since people can be opening up boosters with 8 customs in them or opening up sealed pools with dozens, I like to help people shortcut where I can.)
- No matter how you stack your triggers, a fresh Experiment One is not evolving when you play a 2/2. This is the biggest issue, and comes from the fact that evolve checks twice: first when another creature enters, long before anything goes on the stack (which is why point 1 works the way it does) and again once the trigger resolves. So even if you move a counter from Experiment Two to the creature that just came in, evolve already decided it wasn't doing anything.
- Green has a distinct lack of creatures with power or toughness greater than their CMC. While this can come down to individual card choices, look at your green section. Fauna Shaman, Scavenging Ooze, Nest Invader, Sakura Tribe Elder, Beastbreaker of Bala Ged, Eternal Witness, Reclamation Sage, Yavimaya Elder, Managorger Hydra, Acidic Slime, the list goes on. There are a few creatures which can help reliably evolve Experiment Two, but the most readily available ones are walls, like wall of blossoms or wall of roots, which typically don't fit into the game plan experiment two is suggesting. This generally leads our drafters to turning to other colors to get more consistent triggers (Since Gore-House Chainwalker works fine), but green is not generally a terrific splash color, especially since experiment two is an early creature.
So in terms of the severity of the (Now more daunting looking) cons, only 6 and 7 are real concrete issues, with 5 being something for me as a designer to keep an eye on. The amount of actual frustration seen at the hands of this card is basically 100% on point 7, which has been a longstanding problem for green for years now (Seriously, compare
Brimaz, King of Oreskos to any green 3 drop. It's been like this for ages, just like when we were side by siding
Hypnotic Specter to
Uktabi Orangutan. You know, when the dinosaurs were young.)
It's a fine card, but it's mostly just that: fine. It's not powerful in the way
Dark Confidant or
Snapcaster mage is, it doesn't synergize with basically every theme imaginable like
nest invader does, and it's a green card intended for an aggro deck, which turns a lot of people off from the get go (Seriously pick an MTGS threat at random where green aggro is even mentioned, and the results are basically universal: it's a trap. Granted that perspective is limited, but it's also common)
The reason I bring up all these side cases of rules interaction above is mostly because if you're including custom cards in your cube, you need to be the judge for ALL of those cards. Even though this card uses existing mechanics and any L1 worth their salt can probably answer the questions I've mentioned, YOU are going to be the first person asked, and it tends to lead to mistrust when you don't have the answer. And I know that sounds unfair, but it's definitely the reality unless you're cubing with people that already trust you.
- Your cube is going to be weird when people realize you aren't conforming to their conceptions of what cube is (For eg, copying the modo cube exactly, or copying Wtwlf's list, etc)
- Your cube is going to be weird when people realize you break singleton (Though this is becoming less and less the case)
- Your cube is going to be weird when people realize you've got custom cards in there, even if they're tiny differences from existing cards (Addle but instead of for example)
- and lastly, your cube is going to be weird when those custom cards aren't understood -in full- immediately. People love to categorize things, and magic players especially. Playable, not playable, removal spell, bomb, etc. If your card confuses people, unless they think that it's so broken they can't afford to pass it (Batterskull style), they're likely to just ignore it, take what they know, and feel off about the whole thing.
For the most part, the thing I dislike most about Experiment Two is that it tricks my players. Basically everyone sees that card and goes "Oh cool, I understand this" but then they play with it and uncover some of the corner cases, or have to make some unfortunately complicated sequencing decisions, and have to change their mind. People often change their mind about how they understand individual cards work, but they aren't usually so trusting to begin with, and that trust is normally with WotC, rather than me, which tends to carry a lot more weight, what with the usual year of testing that goes into sets and so forth
Experiment Two will probably be a net positive to your environment, but that comes with costs I don't want people ignoring. One of the other guys who runs a cube in my area runs a Modern Legal cube, and while I'm sure it plays fine, the most telling moment I've ever heard about it was that he scrambled to find something to swap in for
splinter twin when that card got banned, since he was running a draft that night.
I'm firmly of the belief that Twin shouldn't be anywhere near a limited environment in that capacity (Anything that punishes a player that hard for not keeping up specifically instant speed removal is way too far in my opinion), but don't cut that card because WotC wanted to make the pro tour interesting, cut it because you think it's the right thing to make your cube more fun.
That cube has 12 people sign up to draft it, and regularly fires more than once a week. My cube does not
Customs come with a cost, and if experiment two was the only custom card in my list, I don't think it would be worth it.
