General Favorite Playest Cards?

MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Normally I'm not one to let price dissuade me from running a card, but the weirdly high prices on some of the Playtest Cards from the Convention-Exclusive Mystery Boosters made me unwilling to test many of them out. With the reprints tanking prices this week, I think it's a great time to revisit the topic!

I currently run:

*
*just arrived in the mail last week and looking for a good cut for

and I previously ran



before Black 2-drop creatures became my most competitive slot in cube (Tibalt took its slot, RIP frog PVDDR buddy).

According to CubeCobra, the most popular Playtest cards are, in order:



I had been eying Impatient Iguana for about a year, considering it a fairer (and funnier) Power Play, and Unicycle had always been on my radar. However, now that these cards don't start at $20 for cards that don't even have a legal place to play them if they ever rotate out of my list, I've been paying a lot more attention to them, and with many reaching just a few bucks a piece, I'm interested in this slate of cards that are pretty much everything I wanted silver bordered cards to be.

What playtest cards do you run? And, if anyone's run any of these in fairmaxish cubes, has anyone had good experiences with these somewhat marginal/op inclusions?



EDIT: I looked for an old thread for these but didn't find any, please feel free to merge this thread with an older discussion thread if one does exist!
 
Last edited:
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Sheltem said:
My favorite one is
I love the combat tricks this enables.
Click to expand...
This one is spicy. Seems like a rules nightmare for newer players, who do understand the stack but certainly didn't play in a pre-M10 environment. How has it been for your typical drafter? Has there been much conversation ahead of time necessary?

blacksmithy said:
i run Bombardment and Innocuous Insect currently but have only been able to cast the Insect, it’s been quite good so far. I plan to test Zyym too as i’ve heard nothing but good things about him
Click to expand...

I was interested in the Insect until Cloudkin Seer was printed like, one month after these. And it's one less {U} in the mana cost! How often have you/do you think you'll be buying it back?

--

It's honestly bizarre that these have been around for two years to me, they still feel so new. I guess that's what a global pandemic does to you

Also lol @ despite repeated edits, I can't get Waste Land to show properly.
 
B

blacksmithy

insect has flash which is a huge upgrade for a blue creature, and still gives you the card if it’s countered- which basically means it will never be countered.
the buyback is not a common thing but it’s nice to have the option lategame
 
Sheltem

Sheltem

MilesOfficial said:
This one is spicy. Seems like a rules nightmare for newer players, who do understand the stack but certainly didn't play in a pre-M10 environment. How has it been for your typical drafter? Has there been much conversation ahead of time necessary?
Click to expand...
Actually there wasn’t much discussion necessary. My playgroup consists of 6 players who started the game before 2000. So that‘s actually how we played during our active tournament time.
MilesOfficial said:
I was interested in the Insect until Cloudkin Seer was printed like, one month after these. And it's one less {U} in the mana cost! How often have you/do you think you'll be buying it back?
Click to expand...
Isn’t the insect just a whispers of the muse with a body?

MilesOfficial said:
It's honestly bizarre that these have been around for two years to me, they still feel so new. I guess that's what a global pandemic does to you
Click to expand...
Don’t blame the pandemic on this. That‘s their release schedule. 7 Sets, 15 Commander decks and Lord knows how many Secret Lairs this year alone…
 
alvoi

alvoi

Oh, I love these but I was never able to buy them since they're too pricy! Also, almost nobody in the cube community plays them so I didn't know which were playable in a cube, maybe here I can steal some ideas!

One that I love is Form of the Mulldrifter, I tried it in other forfun formats and it's lovely
 
shamizy

shamizy

Honestly, I've ignored pretty much all of these since printing because they just look so ugly to me. I'm sure there are some good designs here and there but man as soon as I see that placeholder sticker I just gloss right over it. We already have so many Magic cards being printed every year that these basically ended up in the same category as Un-cards for me where I'll see them once or twice and then forget about them completely.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I think there are some really cool designs here. In fact, some of them have been released as real cards now. I can imagine a few will make it as digital-only cards or with slight changes. I like:

 
Velrun

Velrun

Okay, up to the top with you

I am dividing this comment into three sections
1. Cards I have played and want to share my experiences with.
2. Cards I do not want to test and my reasonings why.
3. Cards I want to test. Please help me decide if I should test them or not.


————


1. I have played the following


You’re In Command was for my Coliseum cube back when I ran that in 2017 -> 2020. It was very good and super interesting because you could turn any creature into a grind engine. The Coliseum had the players gain experience when they won games and could use that experience to level up through various skill trees. One of the skills was to become a War General who had access to this white spell. This format was a lot of fun but it was also very complex to play as soon as we were more than 3 players. My favorite 2-player or 3-player format.



We tried it and it didn’t work. This was also for Coliseum in which a Time Traveler player had access to Do-Over and Time Machine.



Was not worth the card slot. It always felt pretty bad. I think it was a combination of the flash that made it feel a little unfair and the late game grindyness. For me it was both boring and repetitive…and sleightly unfair.



What an awesome card. Everyone should include this into their cube!



A very, very good card. But it only lasts one game so picking this in a draft equals you can only include it into your deck in one game. I had 12 copies lying around because I wanted my players to always get a fresh one when each new draft began.


————


2. Cards I find very interesting but that I do NOT want to run:



I have tried custom cards like these. We had one that said players drew from the bottom of their library instead of top. It would cost one mana in hybrid {R}/{U} and have en etb draw a card. Just like this one. And people never see a good reason to include them in their decks. Same result with a {G}/{W} etc draw a card and creatures assign combat damage with their toughness instead of their power. I don’t expect Stack of Paperwork to do anything either even though it would be fun to have combat stack every now and then. Had it been a 0 mana card with draw, then people would include it.



If I was hosting cube tournaments where we would play matches that was best of three games, I would want to test it.



So cool with the artwork but absolutely useless since it doesn’t draw a card, rebounds or something.



Straight out of Squid Game, this is like a Sower of Temptation and Mind Flayer but with bigger stats and an expensive way for the opponent to get their creature back. Not worth the card art though.



The Ultimate miracle. Mega high ups, super low lows. This is tempting but I fear it might be devastatingly broken if in the starting hand.



No need for this after we got Elite Spellbinder.



We already have Power Play and I like how clean that card is. This is a matter of taste.



Until Wizards make an Uncovered Cavern plot booster, this card will remain a mystery. Having text like that on a card is both trinket text (like we see on Daretti, Scrap Savant) and begs the question what else the card can do like tribal support card that supports a creature type that isn’t in the cube.



Pure upside abilities. It’s too texty and too punishing for my taste with the first strike and the counter attack. It seem super, super strong.



I’m on the verge of wanting to test this one. I don’t like the logistics. Had my cube been on Magic Arena, it would have been fine.



I finally have a use for all my altered Basic lands… naaaaaaah ;) It would have been sweet but I don’t think the card is worth it.


————


2. I want to test the following cards. Please talk me out of it:



I like when aggro creatures have some late game value so that’s a plus for Frontier Explorer.



There is something appealing about having all your creatures become card anvantage. And Mulldrifter always felt good to hard cast. Even evoke if you were out of lands or had no other play.



I want to include Bone Rattler in my starter set. It seem expensive but I think it would go really well with the themes in the set. We have Aristocrats, self mill, Delirium (and others like Spell Mastery, Threshold) and flashback (and others like eternalize and disturb)



Ogre could be interesting for all sorts of graveyard themes including reanimator and Delirium.



What a lengthy name. It creates three bodies for Aristocrats. It has a built-in sacrifice for two of your creatures. This I find very interesting for the long run. I have never noticed the card before and it surprises me.



We already use Blasted Landscape for when we ban cards between rounds. The loser of a game chooses a card from the winner’s deck to get banned from the tournament. The winner get’s a Blasted Landscape as a replacement which is an obvious downside because it’s neither a good land nor a good spell. It does however cycle. That winner cannot get rid of the card until the player loses a game. Now I am tempted by Gunk Slog because it does kind of the same but a bit more extreme at the cost of only affecting the current game.



What an interesting burn spell. I feel like the name is a joke because there is (currently) no such card named Lazy Goblin.



Obviously has the downside of being multicolored which means it will compete for a very few spots. It looks like a very fun card to resolve though.



I find this mechanic very interesting! I want to test it out. Someone stop me :p
 
Last edited:
B

blacksmithy

Explorer, Zyym, and Goblin are all sweet cards!

there is an Arena-only version of Bone Rattler and honestly it’s kind of irritating play patterns so i’d avoid.

the others are kinda whatever, run them if they make you happy.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Okay I think I’ll test these three cards at first:



I also wish to encourage everyone to test the following card that is a favorite of mine:

 
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Now that it's not like $30 (I actually can't find a price history of this card before the Mystery Booster reprints) I'm definitely going to try it out, as I've always loved Raging River and this is a playable version of the effect for sure.
 
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

New playtest cards! Some funny cards, some not well-tuned, but a delight all-in-all. I desperately wish they had the slap-dash artwork of previous editions, but I guess they're being treated as exclusive to Magic Fests, which are dramatically less frequent than the events that had Mystery Boosters in previous years. Will we be able to get these then? Not for any amount I'm even vaguely interested in paying for, so maybe I'll just make my first "proxies" on these...because I really want Incubob.

Isamaru and Yoshimaru is a Ragavan-level card. Very delighted to have both 1-drop matters and legendary matters on the same card, even if it's too aggressively statted than I'd typically like. Not sure how I feel about having one of the best 1-drops in my cube be a custom card like this, but hey, it's funny.

Screen Shot 2023-05-11 at 10.25.44 AM.pngScreen Shot 2023-05-11 at 10.25.59 AM.pngScreen Shot 2023-05-11 at 10.26.10 AM.pngScreen Shot 2023-05-11 at 10.29.13 AM.pngScreen Shot 2023-05-11 at 10.31.07 AM.png
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Huge Truck's cool. I also really liked:

sKzgj97.png
7xBa943.png
NXnj5bS.png


Everything else felt less like a cute showcase of a scrapped (or stupid) mechanic and more... un-set-y. And not in a good way?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top