Removal is one of the most influential factors for the feel of a limited format. Strong removal like Swords to Plowshares and Doom Blade represent a tempo swing and card advantage match against threats that don’t have built-in mechanisms to mitigate removal, such as Grave Titan or Thragtusk. This escalation of threats that happened in the 2010s is responsible for making Magic more creature oriented: at a given point it’s necessary to scale back on removal and instead playing threats of your own to match your opponents’.
High-power removal, high-power threats
For a while, I chose to power down the threats and the removal to achieve a game speed and play patterns farther from contemporary Magic and closer to the 2000-2010 era: longer games with back and forth, rather than a quick escalation over who snowballs more quickly. I wrote Why I’m going Low Power back in 2016 and still abide by that philosophy, and at first I kept high power removal like the above against low power threats. Predictably, it made the removal feel oppressive and the threats not really worth playing. I then dialed back removal speed dramatically, running cards like Blessed Light, Contract Killing and Goblin Barrage, and with that change, strategies that relied on synergies between creatures became good, allowing synergistic decks to flourish.
Low-power removal, synergistic and low-power threats
That introduced a new problem to the format: the lack of interaction. Removal like Contract Killing is just not worth playing, and at the point, it’s best to just play your own threats and try to snowball before your opponent does.
Recently, I’ve added back some high power removal (Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, Doom Blade), and aimed for a wider power band of removal this time around. The above mentioned are the premium removal, but then there’s Walk the Plank and Galvanic Blast at a mid-power level, and Sheer Drop, Savage Stomp, and Bake into a Pie at a low-power level (though not ultra-low lick Lich’s Caress).
Mixed removal, synergistic and low-power threats
This wider power band is beneficial to the draft portion. The high-power removal, particularly, makes drafters latch on to certain colors and functions as signaling – 5th pick Lightning Bolt is a sign you should be in red. The low-power removal spells are nods to certain archetypes, like tappers, counters and lifegain for the above, respectively, and are likely to end in the right deck, as that deck values it way above the others.
Low-powered removal needs to derive its excitement not from the act of getting rid of a threat, which will usually be at best an even exchange, but from the added benefit thrown in.
Bake into a Pie is low-power removal. It does not work out favorably in tempo a lot of the time, though being instant speed it has potential for blowouts and good placement, and works reasonably well when played alongside counterspells. Creating a Food token is quite flavorful and adds to the density of lifegain.
What I worry about
The one thing I worry about is that the Food token also signals a black artifacts deck that is not well supported. Together with Cranial Plating’s BB activated ability, Vault Skirge’s “alternate” casting cost of 1B, and Scrapheap Scrounger’s 1B recursion ability, it looks like black is a color in the artifacts deck, and it can actually half function as one, but it wasn’t supposed to be.
It is possible the best course of action for me is to reintroduce artifacts to black by making a couple of swaps. The artifact cards I removed from black when I went UB artifacts to WUR artifacts were Dire Fleet Hoarder, Contract Killing, Battle at the Bridge, Marionette Master and Weaponcraft Enthusiast. I likes the last two only, and maybe them plus another 2 new cards would push black against into a viable artifacts color for a tetra WUBR archetype.
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Original (by myself): https://desolatelighthouse.wordpress.com/2020/12/17/bake-into-a-pie-one-card-a-day/
This is part of One Card a Day, a series in which I talk about each card in my cube in alphabetical order (until I run out of patience) going on tangents, hence why I seem to obsess over Bake into a Pie.
