Chris Taylor
Contributor
Yes, but you can kill two nonattacking creatures for 7. The 4 mana mode isn't actually that great, though fling will occasionally kill people
General Fight Club
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Yes, but you can kill two nonattacking creatures for 7. The 4 mana mode isn't actually that great, though fling will occasionally kill people
I just wanna say, that I gave this guy a run - despite losing the Fight here - because I had the card laying around. And I have to say he was great in last night's draft. He turned Threatens into double kills, kept the board empty and was usually big enough to matter in combat for the whole game. I like him much more than Lyzolda.
New Zombies:
vs
Is giving all zombie tokens death touch worth an extra point of mana and one less toughness? Is a potentially repeatable 1/1 deathtouch too annoying to fight through? Is 1B for a 1/1 and a 1/2 too low impact?
This is on the assumption there's no amass in the rest of the cube, by the way, although there is some +1/+1 counter support.
E: Just noticed Vizier is a wizard, for the Riptide Laboratory synergy...
vs Is giving all zombie tokens death touch worth an extra point of mana and one less toughness? Is a potentially repeatable 1/1 deathtouch too annoying to fight through? Is 1B for a 1/1 and a 1/2 too low impact?
This is on the assumption there's no amass in the rest of the cube, by the way, although there is some +1/+1 counter support.
E: Just noticed Vizier is a wizard, for the Riptide Laboratory synergy...
Only Xathrid Necromancer and I guess Lili the Last Hope, but I wouldn't count her.
New Zombies:
Is giving all zombie tokens death touch worth an extra point of mana and one less toughness? Is a potentially repeatable 1/1 deathtouch too annoying to fight through? Is 1B for a 1/1 and a 1/2 too low impact?
This is on the assumption there's no amass in the rest of the cube, by the way, although there is some +1/+1 counter support.
E: Just noticed Vizier is a wizard, for the Riptide Laboratory synergy...
Lazotep Reaver is just a generally better card. It costs less mana for more stats on board, and it is a good enabler for an aristocrats strategy. In addition, it is quite good with Proliferate cards or other +1/+1 counter synergy pieces. For example, the zombie token the Reaver makes upon ETB is actually a 2/2 when combined with Hardened Scales or Winding Constrictor.
Vizier of the Scorpion is just an all around worse card. In my experience, the Deathtouch it provides to zombie tokens is more often than not Trinket Text in the vast majority of matches. It's floor is 2 1/1s for three mana, which is just bad. Remember, the token doesn't always have death touch. Unless you have a lot of other zombie token creators, it's just not that good.
Both of these cards require a little bit of synergy from the surrounding environment to be good. Lazotep Reaver can draw from more sources of synergy, requires much less synergy to make the cut in a deck, has a better base rate, and is a generally better card.
Thoughts?
Oversold Cemetery
The requirement is harder but the design feels cleaner if you ask me. It is much more of a 21’st century design compared to the five Oaths.
The requirement is harder but the design feels cleaner if you ask me. It is much more of a 21’st century design compared to the five Oaths.
I like Jace better. I'm of the philosophy that cards should be able to stand on their own, but let you do crazy things if you come at them sideways. Lab Man's fail case as a Grey Ogre just isn't anywhere close to good enough.
I like Lab Man's extra recursion potential. If I'm running a UG Lab Man deck, I want to be able to mill my deck without fear and be able to recur it with Pulse of Murasa or a gravepulse. Additionally, this allows you to play it early if necessary to trade with some 3/2 and recover it later, or let it eat removal once in the late game. Say you have a green recursion piece in your hand but no counterspell. This allows for pseudo-protection as you can play the Lab Man now, they kill it with fire, then recur it and play it again before winning next turn, now that they're out of removal. This is a bit more feasible against decks in Gruul colors which will point any removal at your face in the form of burn. Decks with white or black removal, however, may be forced to keep creature removal stockpiled in their hand, as you are probably a control deck with few creatures, so it is unlikely to run them out.
If you're facing a fast aggro deck, having a roadblock in the form of a Grey Ogre might actually help you more than a slow 4cmc card that is sort of hard to actually cast on turn 4. Jace generates card advantage slowly while being a pinata that the opponent may or may not choose to swing at. If you're on the back foot, aggro will not waste time by attacking a Planeswalker with no effect on the board. Lab Man decks are already the epitome of a long game deck. They have some reprogrammable tendencies that allow them to grind an opponent down with CA to the point that you can kill them with anything, even a few tokens. Basically, their best-case scenario is being a control deck with an extra win-con as a safety net. They can win tight games, however, by stalling with counters, bounce, tokens, walls etc just long enough to set up an engine, mill the deck, and slap a Lab Man into play with a fail-safe or two in hand. In this case, Jace is less useful than Lab Man, because you're often frantically trying to survive and living or dying based off your ability to chain answers, as per usual with control. Jace doesn't protect himself or you, in any way. If you can afford to take a turn off in the mid-game, you are already winning. Finally, Lab Man is more splashable, has less card text, and is the OG of his kind, so more people are familiar with him, reducing players' comprehension time. Don't support the Jacetice League; keep our mad scientist buddy in business!
I'd lean towards the Cemetery as well. I like that it's reliable independent of your opponent's deck.
I have one myself
The reason I'm hesitating is that one is "only"a payoff, but a much better CC, while the other is a payoff and enabler, but ouch. Triple blue.
Just play both. That's what I'm doing
.
Thoughts?
Funnily enough, I asked this exact question last year. Here's the discussion: https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/fight-club.560/page-122#post-75295
I've been using Oversold Cemetery and have been happy with it. It does threaten to overwhelm your opponent in some matchups, particularly with creatures that can kill themselves whilst gaining card advantage - Shriekmaw and Walking Ballista being the main culprits - but it does bring some deckbuilding restrictions with it and it is slow.
Personally, I think Jace drawing one card per turn overshadows him as a funky win condition.
Emphasis mine. That is not as important if it is your win condition, you should be able to cast it by the time you are about to deck yourself.
THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE
VS. VS.
... 5-drop with a landfall trigger in my cube. In addition to Zendikar's Roil, I mean ...
VS. VS. ... 5-drop with a landfall trigger in my cube. In addition to Zendikar's Roil, I mean ...
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Embodiment of Insight has the best base body. If a 4/4 vigilance for five mana is good in your cube, you could consider it, but all three of those are a bit lackluster.
THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE
... 5-drop with a landfall trigger in my cube. In addition to Zendikar's Roil, I mean ...
I think you're starting to fall into the "trying to make something janky work" category. For years I tried to make a really large Orzhov enchantments theme work, until I eventually just cut a lot of the support for the deck. I was able to keep the theme, and I would even argue it's better now that I made it smaller, but I wasn't able to jam a ton of support in my list. The reason for this was simple: there weren't enough good enablers at the power level I was trying to build toward.
Landfall is an extremely difficult deck to make work since some of the enablers are pretty great while others are inherently terrible. I think the cards you're running right now make pretty good sense. Zendikar's Roil, as an example, is a type of board advantage engine that isn't backbreaking. It's a good place for a payoff to be. However, that doesn't mean you should be jamming in more random 5s with landfall just for the sake of having more 5s with landfall. Zendikar's Roil is just a good card, while the other options are fairly mediocre.
If you really want another 5-drop with landfall for U/G decks, I would recommend Guardian of Tazeem. It's pretty powerful, but not really above the rest of your list.
If you're looking for green 5s, then I would just recommend picking something that is good with having lots of lands. As an example, consider:
Heroes' Bane is really good in a deck that's playing a bunch of lands and is presumably ramping in the process. However, it doesn't need to be in a dedicated lands deck to be good. It's better in a specific deck, but playable elsewhere, much like Zendikar's Roil. The same cannot be said for something like Sporemound.
Trials is more generically useful in a handful of different archetypes, but Blackblade is a sweet card for W/x aggressive strategies that can be cashed it to remove a roadblock later in the game.
I swapped to Blackblade because it ends games quicker. My format's main problem is 40 minute game 1s if neither player is on an aggro deck, and Blackblade helps to alleviate that by making indestructible attackers to punch through stalls and, as you said, minusing to remove a problematic blocker.