General Fight Club

Erik Twice

Erik Twice

It does stonewall aggro, I remember a couple games in draft I faced it and would have lost if my opponent had been a little more proactive with it. The ability to stop one creature and kill more with its ability is strong. That said, I'm less worried about the effect it has on aggro as I am with how playable each card is if you are not into the Lands.dec archetype.
 
sigh

sigh

Definitely the twister. The lands deck is usually a long-game deck that really benefits from the blocking capability, and the card is much more generically useful as a creature even outside of that deck.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I've been playing against myself a bit with Twister and it does Stonewall aggro pretty hard. However, it's not an issue if the aggressive deck has disruption and he's not strong enough so as to be oppressive. Having to pay 1R to use him is a pretty steep cost. The activation cost on Molten Vortex is already pretty noticiable, after all.

My impression is that he hurts linear aggro the most, but won't affect the stronger archetypes like BR, hatebears or aristocrats. I'm ok with that loss, though I need to keep it in mind and try to support that aggro instead of "turning Svannah Lions sideways: the deck"

I'll note something very nice about the card: Like Trade Routes, it bridges the recursion of Crucible of Worlds with its discard effects.

I wish Trade Routes were white, though.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Yeah.

Can be Red and/or Green in 2019.

15 years ago it could have been White IF the lands it could interact with was exclusive to Plains.
 
Velrun

Velrun

I would go with Cloudstone for two reasons.

1. It makes better sense to me that you only bounce your own things. I would like Erratic Portal a lot more if it could only bounce Enemy creatures OR your own creatures. As it is printed it can lead to two situations. The first one is asking Enemy if they wish to pay one generic mana or let their creature gets bounced (very intuitive). This creates an interactive mini-game. The other situation is the awkward one. You are asking yourself if you wish to pay one generic mana or let your creature gets bounced. That is just plain dumb since you already know the answer to the question before you ask.

Erratic Portal Errataed
Cost: 4
Type: Artifact
“1, T: Return target creature you don’t control to its owner’s hand unless its controller pays 1.
2, T: Return target creature you control to its owner’s hand.”
+ flavor text

2. Cloudstone can interact with more than just creatures. It is simply more interesting and useful in this way if you wish to have a cube where your cards can interact with each other.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
MaRo on Twitter said:
Mentor of the Meek is a very controversial card on the Council of Colors. We allow white card draw in very narrow niches where the deck can't be full of answers for white to draw. We make enough small creature answers though that it's a bad subset.
Click to expand...
link

So, basically, because white has a lot of low-power creatures that answer stuff (e.g. Banisher Priest and Wispmare, to name a few old ones, there aren't actually that many mono-white ones in standard right now), Mentor of the Meek is looking at the wrong thing to trigger card draw. It's not outside of white's color pie per se.

There's an interesting tidbit in this article about card drawing in white. I'll quote the relevant bit.

MaRo on card draw in white said:
I often talk about how Magic is in many ways multiple games that share a rules system. Some people open booster packs to play the game of Standard, some Modern, some Booster Draft, some Commander, and so on and so on. Each format has different needs, so there are pressures pulling the game in various directions. The problem is that we have to make a singular game. Our cards don't get to vary based on the format in which they're played.

One of the places this has proven most problematic over the last few years is in the color pie in red and white. Commander tends to have games that go longer (partially due to the higher life total and partially due to the nature of multiplayer politics). Red and white, for different reasons, don't naturally fit into the play style of Commander, which has resulted in a lot of pressure from Commander players to stretch the colors and make them more Commander friendly.

The goal of the Council of Colors (and R&D as a whole) has been to find ways to allow red and white to do more Commander-friendly things while staying true to their essences. Dawn of Hope is a good example of us struggling to do this. White is the color of answers. As the most defensive color, there are few problems that white doesn't have some kind of answer for. To keep this from making white too strong, we did two things. One, the answers are spread out on many different cards; we don't tend to give white singular cards that solve too many threats. The idea being that white is great at stopping you if it knows what threat is coming, but it can put its stock in the wrong answers if you surprise it. Lack of flexibility is one of white's weaknesses.

Second, to ensure that white doesn't draw all its answers, we made white the worst at card drawing. It gets cantrips (a "draw a card" rider) like any color, but it doesn't get card drawing that gives it card advantage. This drawback has proven to be a big problem for white in Commander because longer games require ways to restock one's hand.

One of the answers we've experimented with is allowing white access to card drawing but in a way that requires a dedication to a specific strategy. For example, Mentor of the Meek, from Innistrad, lets you draw cards for playing small creatures. To capitalize on this, you need to have a deck full of small creatures, which means you don't get a lot of answer cards.

Dawn of Hope is a very contentious card because it's starting to stretch the boundaries of what being forced to dedicate to a theme means. Yes, you have to have life gain cards in your deck, but we use life gain often enough as a rider, that it might be too little of a barrier. The fact that it also has a built-in way to gain life even undercuts how much space in your deck you have to dedicate to the theme. I'll be honest, as a color pie person, this is the card in the set that scares me the most. I hope my fears end up unfounded.
Click to expand...

I guess he came around real quick (the article predates the tweet by about two months) to his theory that white doesn't get a lot of answer cards on small creatures. I wonder what happened in the meantime?

Anyway, they do realize it's a problem if white is too starved for card draw, but when they adress that problem, they do so in highly specialized ways.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

VS.
Which one of these two cards do you think better signals a "Grixis Discard/Graveyard" theme and why?

I'm leaning towards Sedris right now, but thats mainly because I don't have a very large spells theme in my cube. Kess seems like she could be exceedingly sweet though.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

Basically, I don't think discarding cards and filling up the graveyard is at all necessary for Kess. You can simply play your bolts, duresses and cantrips and then, when she hits the table, replay them. And I believe having plenty of spells will be the main deckbuilding limitation.

In other words, Kess doesn't signal the "fill the graveyard" because she doesn't need the graveyard to be full.

---

As for Sedris, he costs 6 mana and has a reanimator ability. My first instict is to fill the graveyard, reanimate him and then make him reanimate everything else. He's not green so you are not ramping into it with creatures. Personally, he doesn't seem very playable but I'm not great at evaluating cards.
 
Nanonox

Nanonox

I would go with Kess, Dissident Mage for a few reasons.
  1. It's cheaper
  2. It can work a couple ways: a payoff for a spell heavy deck or a payoff for a self-mill deck
  3. 3 color cards are narrow enough that having them work without jumping through hoops seems important
I have one and I don't know what to do: there are too many options.

My current setup is having 3 or 4 cards per guild depending on the card quality and how interesting the cards are.

Selesnya. I'm trying to support +1/+1 counters, go wide and value aggressive decks. I currently run



Now, I really like the first two, but after that I'm more flexible. Here are the cards I'm considering:



I'm currently leaning towards adding the Pridemage as a 4th card since it's a great 2 drop (which GW needs to curve out and plays nicely with Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants).
Renegade Rallier is great value, but my list is already full of 3 drops everywhere.
Lastly there is Ajani which signals +1/+1 counters better but would be a second 4 mana planeswalker for the deck which feels excessive.

I could also ship Shalai in white since it's playable even without the activated ability and add both Pridemage and Rallier.

I'd love any and all input, thanks!
 
Velrun

Velrun



Pridemage has four things going for it. It is a Cat for any Regal Caracal deck, it is a Wizard for any Riptide Laboratory deck and it can alter power/toughness for any Dreadhorde Arcanist deck. Finally it has a Naturalize attached if you are willing to sacrifice which can be semi useful in a Blood Artist deck.

Also there can be some feelings associated with the card like nostalgia and some love for the art.

Personally I feel like answers should be in monocolors or colorless. I am talking about stuff like Disenchant or Remorseful Cleric because I wouldn’t want a cube where Artifacts, Enchantments or Graveyard strategies run rampant simply because a certain combinations of colors weren’t being played at that tournament.

Therefore I suggest running something else on your gold slot.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
Personally I feel like answers should be in monocolors or colorless. I am talking about stuff like Disenchant or Remorseful Cleric because I wouldn’t want a cube where Artifacts, Enchantments or Graveyard strategies run rampant simply because a certain combinations of colors weren’t being played at that tournament.

Therefore I suggest running something else on your gold slot.
Click to expand...

Unless you run an environment like mine, with a heavy emphasis on multicolor decks, I agree that you don't want to run straight up Disenchants in your gold section. I do think Qasali Pridemage is much more than a straight up disenchant, and it's actually a viable inclusion I think, because it brings so much to the table. However, given that you run only 3 or 4 cards per guild, and you're already running Knight of Autumn, I would definitely look for other includes. Running two disenchant effects in your precious few Selesnya slots seems like overkill.
 
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