General CBS

Laz

Developer
How fast is the environment?

Treasures are obviously awesome in a fast environment, Clues excel in a slower one (unless you can benefit highly from the discard outlet of Blood Tokens). Absent explicit synergies (i.e. not caring about generic artifacts), Food sits somewhere behind these.

So um... really fast environment:

Treasure > Blood > Clue/Food

Really slow environment:

Clue > Blood/Food > Treasure?

I think Food tokens have the cutest synergies though...
 
@Laz
Thank you for taking the time. Like you I am also a little bit all over the place with these. I find Food to be cutest but also often the worst. When it is good, it is game-winning (can hinder a game loss) but very often useless.

I like your logic about fast and alle environment.

The environment in my cube is slow at first and the fast later. So kind of both actually. There is also a middle where some decks are fast and some are slow because we have quite a lot of variety.

I am mostly asking about each of your opinions in a vakuum when you haven’t been told any premise. There are no wrong answers.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
If you abstract them to be just some spell (treasure token is 1/3rd black lotus, clue is 2 mana draw 1, etc.), then I would say:

Treasure, Clue/Blood, Food?

I don't know. I guess nobody would include a 2-mana cantrip in their decks. I don't think analyzing them in a vacuum is that useful.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Really slow environment:

Clue > Blood/Food > Treasure?
I think Treasures are still really good in a slow environment, because mana is exactly the thing you are starved for in a slower environment. Getting that finisher out one or two turns earlier, or being able to cast two spells in a single turn instead of one is huge.

Edit: If it helps, imagine Thraben Inspector variants that each produce one of the four tokens. How would you rank those? Thraben Prospector (who creates a Treasure token, obviously) would certainly be top of my list, regardless of environment, and the Lunch Meat Collector (Food token, duh) would be at the bottom. Thraben Injector (Blood token) and Inspector (Clue) vary in ranking, as drawing a card is better than looting, but the Blood token is cheaper and offers potential synergy with stuff like Drake Haven and Reanimate.
 
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Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I think Treasures are still really good in a slow environment, because mana is exactly the thing you are starved for in a slower environment. Getting that finisher out one or two turns earlier, or being able to cast two spells in a single turn instead of one is huge.

Edit: If it helps, imagine Thraben Inspector variants that each produce one of the four tokens. How would you rank those? Thraben Prospector (who creates a Treasure token, obviously) would certainly be top of my list, regardless of environment, and the Lunch Meat Collector (Food token, duh) would be at the bottom. Thraben Injector (Blood token) and Inspector (Clue) vary in ranking, as drawing a card is better than looting, but the Blood token is cheaper and offers potential synergy with stuff like Drake Haven and Reanimate.
If it helps, imagine Tireless Tracker with Treasure Tokens.
 
Green can be bloody outside of vampires and I think and hope it could get blood tokens mechanically. Each color is allowed to discard as a cost and green is better at card draw than red or white, and if remember correctly on par with black.
 
I'd go with Treasure > Clue > Blood > Food. I just think ramp and card advantage are just so powerful in a vacuum compared to the filtering of Blood or lifegain from Food. If you have additional synergies with cards that care about tokens things can definitely change, but I'd say that I'm almost always going to have a use for a Lotus Petal or a way to bin an artifact for an additional card without timing restrictions.
 
The power level of the trinket tokens is very contextual. If you are comparing four different cards that produce one token, I would go with Clue > Treasure > Blood >= Food, but if the cards are a repeatable source or produce a lot of them at once (Like Smothering Tithe or Brass' Bounty), then my evaluation for Clue tokens and Treasure tokens shift, because the diminishing returns of Clues are way higher. For a card that can modally produce one of the four different tokens, Food and Blood are going to swap places, because Lifegain is a very niche utility, but also very valuable when you do need it. And like how Food is contextual to what your opponent is doing, Blood varies a lot in power with regards to what you are doing, there are decks that could very well prioritize it above all the others. There's also an argument to be made that Treasures are a lot more valuable on cheap cards, while the other three are more suited for more expensive cards when spending excess mana on stabilizing or getting access to new resources is more important.

tl;dr: it's complicated
 
Thanks @Mown

Damn @ravnic I was hoping no one would bring up Toggo :p

I guess Rock fits the criteria. Maybe these do too

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It’s just.. Blood, Clue, Food and Treasure was a core mechanic of their sets and they had many cards producing that specific token. I don’t view Rock and friends in that same group. But Rock is interesting I guess.

Join me in the custom thread
 
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