I'm just not convinced that devotion is "there" yet. I know nobody wants to hear it but it might make more sense to wait until the block is finished and then assess what devotion cards are playable and if devotion is even worth designing around; but for now I just haven't seen any convincing reason why devotion in cube is even a good idea in the first place.
General Color matters / devotion
- Thread starter CML
- Start date
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
I sort of agree with you. I wouldn't suggest attempting to make devotion "a thing". However, I think that:
1) Some of these devotion of cards just good and interesting, period.
2) And as CML Sarcastically suggested, the cards that enable this strategy are good stuff we want to include anyway and hybrids have intrinsic advantages that make them desirable inclusions.
1) Some of these devotion of cards just good and interesting, period.
2) And as CML Sarcastically suggested, the cards that enable this strategy are good stuff we want to include anyway and hybrids have intrinsic advantages that make them desirable inclusions.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
what bugs me is that all the devotion cards are essentially the same design.
The acolyte I could see playing, since that's a powerful effect, but Nykthos seems less likely to be good at all in a format that has more than 10 removals spells ever.
Nylea's Disciple is just another in the long line of dudes who hose aggro, which we're all aware we should be cutting down on.
Disciple of Phaenax just seems mediocre even in a draft context, and Mogis's Marauder is alright, but only if black aggro is a thing.
Am I the only one disappointed by this?
- All the gods are essentially the same card, with small variance on what their noncreature form does.
- Evangel of Heliod, Master of Waves, Abhorrent Overlord and Reverent Hunter are all just variants on "Dudes from devotion"
- Grey Merchant and Fanatic of Mogis are just "Damage from devotion"
The acolyte I could see playing, since that's a powerful effect, but Nykthos seems less likely to be good at all in a format that has more than 10 removals spells ever.
Nylea's Disciple is just another in the long line of dudes who hose aggro, which we're all aware we should be cutting down on.
Disciple of Phaenax just seems mediocre even in a draft context, and Mogis's Marauder is alright, but only if black aggro is a thing.
Am I the only one disappointed by this?
I think people are mostly just excited to play with their new toys.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Yeah, it's disappointing that there's not much depth there (particularly in green/white) but keep in mind that we're only one set in; there's a lot of design space there to explore. Some ideas:
- When _ ETB, you draw X cards (/and lose X life), where X is your devotion to blue/black
- (Flash) When _ ETB, counter target spell with CMC X or less, where X is your devotion to blue
- When _ ETB, return target creature card with CMC X or less from your graveyard to the battlefield, where X is your devotion to black
- When _ ETB, destroy target noncreature permanent with CMC X or less, where X is your devotion to green
- When _ ETB, creatures you control get +X/+X until EOT, where X is your devotion to white.
- When _ ETB, you draw X cards (/and lose X life), where X is your devotion to blue/black
- (Flash) When _ ETB, counter target spell with CMC X or less, where X is your devotion to blue
- When _ ETB, return target creature card with CMC X or less from your graveyard to the battlefield, where X is your devotion to black
- When _ ETB, destroy target noncreature permanent with CMC X or less, where X is your devotion to green
- When _ ETB, creatures you control get +X/+X until EOT, where X is your devotion to white.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
See, there's something. Initial thoughts:
1) Good lord this is a million cards. Can we safely give someone a 7-9 for 1 at any playable mana cost?
2) I like it. Hopefully a similar cost/benefit to spellstutter sprite, but more generalizable. It'll probably cost 4 though, since mystic snake is the parallel.
3) This is my favorite of the bunch. No idea about size/cost, but he seems sweet
4) Interesting. I wonder what this would cost, since at the moment the alternative is.... brutalizaer exarch?
5) No. Not for 7 mana, not for 11 mana, no. What's the last thing you cast fanatic of mogis for? How would you like to cast a full Fanatic for EACH CREATURE YOU CONTROL?
The other problem is that devotion scales in a really weird way. Simetimes Grey merchant gains you 0 life, but sometimes he's draining people for 11+ points. What other cards have that level of variance, and how on earth do you balance these without just disregarding the higher end of that register?
1) Good lord this is a million cards. Can we safely give someone a 7-9 for 1 at any playable mana cost?
2) I like it. Hopefully a similar cost/benefit to spellstutter sprite, but more generalizable. It'll probably cost 4 though, since mystic snake is the parallel.
3) This is my favorite of the bunch. No idea about size/cost, but he seems sweet
4) Interesting. I wonder what this would cost, since at the moment the alternative is.... brutalizaer exarch?
5) No. Not for 7 mana, not for 11 mana, no. What's the last thing you cast fanatic of mogis for? How would you like to cast a full Fanatic for EACH CREATURE YOU CONTROL?
The other problem is that devotion scales in a really weird way. Simetimes Grey merchant gains you 0 life, but sometimes he's draining people for 11+ points. What other cards have that level of variance, and how on earth do you balance these without just disregarding the higher end of that register?
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
When does Grey Merchant gain you zero life?
Dom Harvey
Contributor
When it gets killed in response to the trigger.
So far, devotion is only on permanents. There's plenty of space we haven't got to yet.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
That's the point, kinda. Putting it on permanents means they contribute to their own trigger.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I get that idea, but making cards with devotion cost more based on the effect you're getting defeats the point.
Traditionally effects that scaled like this (Molimo, for Eg) couldn't reasonably go beyond what one would call reasonable numbers without some sort of shenanigans like infinite mana combos.
Look at Wandering Stream. When they designed it, they knew reasonably that it was never gaining you more than 10 life. If things they couldn't predict happened, they were okay if it somehow gained you 12 or 14, since that would present some challanges for the player (presumably). Bountiful Harvest varies a bit more, but the number of lands a player has over the course of a game is usually less than 7, and doesn't vary but that that much, maybe 4-5 at most. 12 life for 5 mana might be a bit above the curve, but it's not breaking anything.
Devotion doesn't have the problem. Due to the wild fluctuations in colored mana symbols in permanents (The difference between Phantasmal Bear and Invoke Prejudice is staggering with this mechanic in mind), a reasonable prediction of a random player's devotion count in a constructed format varies WILDLY more than other previous countables (like lands).
The ammount of effort for Wandering Stream to double it's intended effect is...currently not possible. The ammount of effort for Bountiful Harvest to double it's intended effect is reasonable, but hard. The ammount of effort required to get Nylea's Disciple to gain double the life people expect from say, a random 4 drop is not only hard to calculate, but as we've seen from standard from the last season, incredibly easy.
This is why I'm not so hot on devotion as a mechanic. None of the cards with devotion (with the possible exception of the gods) really excite me. Even if everything goes right, Fanatic of Mogis isn't enough better or more interesting than something like Hellrider for me to want to add it. Reverent Hunter doesn't add anything that something like a static 4/4 for
would, in my eyes.Master of Waves might be the exception, since he's basically a fucking green or white card, but that's not something I want to do right now because making blue more like white or green doesn't interest me.
CML
Contributor
quick hits!
-i don't think NWO design would smile upon devotion on an instant when the entire mechanic is based around dumping shit into play, the constructed decks play "bad" cards like Judge's Familiar and Frostburn Weird and Underworld Connections for this reason, and most of the gripes about the few choices in deckbuilding are well-justified, though i've seen a lot of variation in the Black decks and a little in the Red decks and none in the Blue deck. The Blue deck is the exact same thing as "curve-out aggro" Rakdos or RDW from last season, the only difference is that you're doing it with Nightveil Specter into Master of Waves instead of Pyreheart Wolf into Hellrider, so your card quality is worse but things "snowball" more absurdly. this makes for bad games in addition to bad deckbuilding (and though a lot of bad games may be inevitable in NWO standard, bad deckbuilding has not been much of a problem since Caw-Blade)
-after cubing again yesterday, i'm more sure than ever that devotion is the 'carrot' i needed to give my Cube incentive to be heavily in a single color, it works great with hybrid, it has a nice 'dynamic tension' thing going on with the gold / fixing themes, it leads to thought-provoking game states, etc. i love devotion in theory, and i love what it's done to the G and R and especially B sections. i like that it's powerful and punishes drafters for durdling and not interacting; the nut Bant JTMS / Tusk / Resto deck crushed everything else last night, but could not withstand podding from Erebos into Merch for 17.
however, dom and dream et al. have, in my opinion, correctly identified two big problems with devotion in practice:
1. i have no idea what to do with it for Blue, it seems like it doesn't work at all (is very poison-principley in contrast to the G/R/B sections both here and in Standard) so with that and Delver being failures I'm kinda back at square one for that color.
2. it needs more interesting cards (i also hate that there isn't a huge diversity of effects, and that the gods are quite bad when turned off. hello, nylea -- interest you in a gruul guildmage?)
i hope these are both fixed in Born of the Gods with MC deities, but i wouldn't be too surprised if that designed skewed too heavily towards "4c goodstuff" or "lol monocolor lots of symbols," which i strongly agree are exactly what the mechanic ought to be trying to present a contrast to.
-i don't think NWO design would smile upon devotion on an instant when the entire mechanic is based around dumping shit into play, the constructed decks play "bad" cards like Judge's Familiar and Frostburn Weird and Underworld Connections for this reason, and most of the gripes about the few choices in deckbuilding are well-justified, though i've seen a lot of variation in the Black decks and a little in the Red decks and none in the Blue deck. The Blue deck is the exact same thing as "curve-out aggro" Rakdos or RDW from last season, the only difference is that you're doing it with Nightveil Specter into Master of Waves instead of Pyreheart Wolf into Hellrider, so your card quality is worse but things "snowball" more absurdly. this makes for bad games in addition to bad deckbuilding (and though a lot of bad games may be inevitable in NWO standard, bad deckbuilding has not been much of a problem since Caw-Blade)
-after cubing again yesterday, i'm more sure than ever that devotion is the 'carrot' i needed to give my Cube incentive to be heavily in a single color, it works great with hybrid, it has a nice 'dynamic tension' thing going on with the gold / fixing themes, it leads to thought-provoking game states, etc. i love devotion in theory, and i love what it's done to the G and R and especially B sections. i like that it's powerful and punishes drafters for durdling and not interacting; the nut Bant JTMS / Tusk / Resto deck crushed everything else last night, but could not withstand podding from Erebos into Merch for 17.
however, dom and dream et al. have, in my opinion, correctly identified two big problems with devotion in practice:
1. i have no idea what to do with it for Blue, it seems like it doesn't work at all (is very poison-principley in contrast to the G/R/B sections both here and in Standard) so with that and Delver being failures I'm kinda back at square one for that color.
2. it needs more interesting cards (i also hate that there isn't a huge diversity of effects, and that the gods are quite bad when turned off. hello, nylea -- interest you in a gruul guildmage?)
i hope these are both fixed in Born of the Gods with MC deities, but i wouldn't be too surprised if that designed skewed too heavily towards "4c goodstuff" or "lol monocolor lots of symbols," which i strongly agree are exactly what the mechanic ought to be trying to present a contrast to.
I feel like we deserve an article on this topic. There's been a lot of good discussion here. I'll see if I can whip something up.
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
I'm starting to think Thasa just isn't good at all.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Well, she's slow
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Thassa is great. If only Heliod were in the same league...
Chris Taylor
Contributor
He really does make the lamest tokens ever doesn't he
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
I feel like you could remove the nonsense about being a creature and just have a 3CMC enchantment with scry 1 on upkeep and make a dude unblockable and it's fine. The unblockable ability is the nutters if you have anything worth connecting with.
make a dude unblockable and it's fine. The unblockable ability is the nutters if you have anything worth connecting with.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I feel like you could remove the nonsense about being a creature and just have a 3CMC enchantment with scry 1 on upkeep and
I dunno, that might be pretty loose. Nobody's diving after zephyr charge, even in a format plagued with groundstalls.
The scry 1 on upkeep is kinda like a looter, except you can't ditch flashback cards or vengevine.
I think it needs the creature mode to be playable.
to those that have played with the gods in the cubes:
do they ever just take over games without a good answer? being indestructible it can be very hard to do much to stop them depending on the environment. i havent had the chance to see them in a cube and honestly i didn't play an exceeding large amount of this standard after the first 2 weeks because i saw where it was going and got sick of it
but the gods seem like they can be fun as long as they dont just crush games w/o being able to answer them
do they ever just take over games without a good answer? being indestructible it can be very hard to do much to stop them depending on the environment. i havent had the chance to see them in a cube and honestly i didn't play an exceeding large amount of this standard after the first 2 weeks because i saw where it was going and got sick of it
but the gods seem like they can be fun as long as they dont just crush games w/o being able to answer them
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
The creature part of the gods don't need to be directly answered: you can kill the other permanents to lower devotion.
The non-creature effects of the gods are all things you can play around and don't really require removal EXCEPT for perhaps Purphuros who can just generate obscene amounts of damage in a dedicated deck in a way you can't really interact with.
Disclaimer: I haven't played with Heliod.
The non-creature effects of the gods are all things you can play around and don't really require removal EXCEPT for perhaps Purphuros who can just generate obscene amounts of damage in a dedicated deck in a way you can't really interact with.
Disclaimer: I haven't played with Heliod.