General Fight Club
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
I think adding an extra payoff to the 2-MV slot in the core module seems like a good idea. Almost all of the artifact support in your core module are also just generically good cards, so they don't really point towards the artifact deck specifically outside of being decent playables in those sorts of decks.
Consider:
.If you don't like that idea, I also realized no one has mentioned:
Which is just a really funny card that also goes with artifact stuff and has the added benefit of not dying to it's own ability if you have a way to pump it (like an equipment or brute force effect). It's very fun to play with.
I've tested this card in the past, and it's not really all that great unless you have specifically built around it. The ability to Entomb an artifact is cool, but can be hard to leverage. I think it might be a cool card for Japahn's occasionals section, but I think it's a little too wierd for the core cube. The other cards I mentioned go well in any deck with a bunch of random artifacts or artifact token producers, this card requires a little extra work to set up.No love for
Engineer is one of the stronger grindy artifact synergy cards and it along with Emry, Lurker of the Loch and Goblin Welder are capable of setting up some fairly strong repeatable value engines. They do have some deckbuilding cost though but if you're willing to devote slots to stuff like guild globe and similar cards I think all three of these creatures are worth considering.
I agree Engineer can be really powerful in the correct deck. However, it requires a lot of baubles in the Cube to be a truly great value engine. It has all of the right ingredients to be good, but it needs some amount of space dedicated to cards that work with it in order to function optimally. Goblin Engineer is not a card someone can just throw into a Cube with an artifact deck just because it has the word "artifact" written in it's text box- it requires playing a very specific subset of artifacts in order to be at it's best.
Luckily, those artifacts are generally pretty good cards, so it's not like someone has to play a bunch of trash in order to make Goblin Engineer do it's thing. Goblin Engineer+Chromatic Star might be the literal dream in some formats.
yeah, like all synergy cards you need to play the cards they synergize with in order to be good lol
I assumed since there is an artifact synergy deck that the enablers for the archetype would be in consideration as well as payoff cards like engineer and co.
I think Centaur Garden is the more fun card because I think mana entering the battlefield tapped makes for undesirable play patterns where you are incapable of playing on curve, which can be a frustrating way to lose as you stare at cards in your hand that could otherwise get you into the game that your etb tapped land prevents you from being able to play. I like lands that maximize players' ability to actually play the game and tapped lands impede this and have awkward sequencing when drawn past the first turn. From the opponent's perspective I would much rather see my opponent play a tapped land though as it means they are spending their mana less efficiently and are therefore more likely to lose and in gameplay I always hope my opponent loses.
I've never played with Centaur Garden, but my armchair impression (based on experience with Barbarian Ring) is that it looks a bit too painful for any decks that aren't hyper aggressive. I say this because hyper aggro doesn't have to tap it too often, is never on the control side, and can benefit most from a combat trick without threat of a blow out.
I have played a lot with Treetop Village, and the option you get every turn of spending "3" mana to get a temporary 3/3 trample is very context dependant. In fast environments, it's clunky because you've already lost tempo with etb tapped as Funch said. In very slow environments, the card shines, since it's immune to sorcery speed interaction. It synergizes with and matches up well against board wipes, like all creature lands. I like the card a lot.
I have played a lot with Treetop Village, and the option you get every turn of spending "3" mana to get a temporary 3/3 trample is very context dependant. In fast environments, it's clunky because you've already lost tempo with etb tapped as Funch said. In very slow environments, the card shines, since it's immune to sorcery speed interaction. It synergizes with and matches up well against board wipes, like all creature lands. I like the card a lot.
What's the purpose of the slot? I'm not thrilled about monocolored lands with drawbacks. Something like Castle Garenbrig could be a cool green land. The two color manlands are great because the cost of coming in tapped gets you some fixing, as well.
Not super hot on either, but Treetop does seem more solid, especially in a slower format.
Not super hot on either, but Treetop does seem more solid, especially in a slower format.
I love treetop village, and I especially enjoy it with the land recursion effects. In turn a 2 Aggro context it’s a reasonable threat in its own right. I always try to include it and mishra’s factory in my cubes.
I’ve never found garden worth the pain outside of its use in standard madness back in the day. Your Aggro archetypes need to be ratcheted up in power for it to be worth considering imo and at that level I feel like you’d still be better served with other options.
I’ve never found garden worth the pain outside of its use in standard madness back in the day. Your Aggro archetypes need to be ratcheted up in power for it to be worth considering imo and at that level I feel like you’d still be better served with other options.
I want a ci=g land, that is useful with land recursion like LftL and World Shaper but also a solid card in any green deck, while just occupying one of the 17 land slots. In addition to Tranquil Thicket that is.
All in all I think my cube is slow enough to have some EtB lands, and your responses as a whole made me want to test the village first. Thanks, guys!
Mister Funch, if my opponent plays treetop I am much more afraid than the pain land. The curve thing is a fallacy. In my experience it happens much more often that you draw a normal land while you rather had drawn a village. Furthermore, perfectly curving out is even in constructed a rarity (unless you only play one drops which is also not that great since you will run out of cards and hence fail to use all the mana.)
I don't want to know which of these cards is stronger, I want to know which one is more fun. Especially, which one is less frustrating for your opponent?
Garden is probably less frustrating for the opponent, but mostly because I'd be all for the opposition pinging themselves for mana. Makes it easier for me to get there if you're hurting yourself for minimal gain. Unless you have a lot of guys with keywords that can take advantage of that potential Giant Growth later in the game, I don't think Garden is really worth running in a deck. I'd probably just be playing a basic Forest most of the time. With Treetop Village I'm willing to take the ETB tapped hit for a turn if it means that I have access to an extra 3/3 later in the game when things have slowed down a bit.
Mana advantages are how many games of magic are decided. Obviously, not all games are decided by who is able to spend their mana the most efficiently, some games come down to card count and cards like Treetop Village which can increase mitigate flood and increase threat quantity are going to be contextually stronger than cards like Centaur Garden which, while also mitigating flood, do so for shorter periods of time and only increase threat quality. The higher in power level formats get, the great the impact is of being inefficient in the early turns. A single turn spend playing a tap land can and absolutely cost players entire games. Sometimes you're on the draw and starting down an aggressive 1 drop with a hand that's only green source is Tree Top Village and you won't be able to develop your Llanowar Elves until turn 2, this singular turn of lost development will not only give your opponent a round of free damage with their creature, but also your turn 3 play is delayed a full round and your opponent also has an extra draw step to find an answer to your mana dork to further constrain your mana development. Extremely small suboptimal sequencing can cascade very easily into later inefficient lines which inevitably lead to literal game losses. The faster and more efficient decks are, the more pressure there is to ensure your early game plays come through for you as the power level of modern era cards are so high and snowballing advantages so difficult to get out from underneath, that you simply cannot afford to reliably give up mana development, especially for decks with proactive gameplans which are under the gun to kill their opponent before insurmountable value engines can take over the game.
When it comes to constructed we see this trend reflected in the manabases of decks the older the formats get. You used to fairly frequently see modern UW control decks running Celestial Colonnade. According to MTGtop8.com a website which tracks top 8 appearances of decks in various major constructed events in multiple formats you can see that 2124 players brought colonnade in their UWx decks in 2016, which drops to 1791 in 2017, to 1374 in 2018, 791 in 2019 and in 2020 was down to only 140 (although this number is of course impacted by covid19 having very few paper events for modern). You can check for yourself and go back as far as you'd like but the trend line is quite clear; the decks that were putting up results shifted away from etb tapped lands. Sure, some of this in more recent years is due to printings of other high quality untapped utility lands such as Fiery Islet, Sunbaked Canyon, Castle Ardenvale/Vantress and Blast Zone, but I think that also speaks more still to just how strong having access to your mana immediately is that players are willing to give up having a 4 power evasive blocker and clocker and instead run lands that hurt them, only produce a single color or not even a color at all instead. They do this, because the untapped lands are simply that much better. And it's not just control doing this, it's faster archetypes as well. Boomer favorite, Jund, was famous for grinding people out and then winning with Raging Ravine but what flood insurance lands to they play now? Nurturing Peatland if anything and their mana curve only goes up to 2 (obviously Lurrus is a massively busted card and helps here), but other fair decks that don't have a companion to crutch on like Mardu Stoneblade don't play similar lands either, you simply can't afford to take turns off when decks like Prowess, Burn, Death's Shadow, Tron and Omnath punish you so hard for ever stumbling and taking inefficient turns and as a result decks play extremely few taplands in 2021, often a single triome or two that they hope to never draw and only fetch up on a turn when they can afford to and mana curves continue to get leaner as well with Jund Shadow, a midrange deck, typically playing 4 zeros and 26 1 drop spells! And this is without even touching Legacy where the same trends have been going on for a long long time.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Hashep Oasis is a generally stronger and less painful/conditional version of Centaur Garden if you want that effect
Oasis is definitely a reasonable option for sure, card can put in good work. It is more mana intensive to use though and the ability itself cannot be used at instant speed which means it’s harder to reliably get all of the damage it adds through a potential chump blocker, so there’s definitely pros and cons to both.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
The most awkward thing about Treetop Village is that it's green - a typical green section that has a ton of Llanowar Elves variants and wants to use them to jump up the curve (a 3-drop on Turn 2, 4-drop on Turn 3 etc) can't afford to take the first turn off and has a harder time fitting that tapland in elsewhere. Standard across the years offer good examples for how easy/hard it is to integrate taplands - there have been Standards where aggro decks in certain colour combinations is off-limits despite good spell quality because you didn't have untapped fixing on Turn 1, whereas the shard/wedge decks in other formats had to fit tapped fixing to cast their spells but could justify that because you wanted your curve to start at 2 anyway and your gold 2s/3s+ were so good that it was worth it
Two small things:
1. Can you please check for me how many UWx decks that were uploaded each year? So we can get the % running Celestial Colonnade.
2. Do you think you could do us the favor of tagging each card you write in the future? You can learn about how to do tags and other public services here:
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/how-to-card-tooltips-card-images-and-decklists.273/
Thank you very much <3
When comparing cube with constructed one immediately assumes that you can perfectly curve out in cube. This is a very strong assumption which I do not agree on.
When taplands are bad is when one:
1) can most of the time curve out
2) wastelandmania exist
3) one cheats on lands, I.e., plays relatively few lands compared to non lands cards.
4) playing many colors (tapland your only source of that color does hurt, just like having your only green source be cradle and a hand full of mana elves...)
5) is not fetchable (if applicable)
Cubing is more akin to draft than constructed, which means that curving out is unlikely (not impossible, but very unlikely).
Maybe it is that my cube is urza block and one gets a free mulligan, but the manlands are all highly coveted and I have not seen a deck without 2 cycling lands...
When taplands are bad is when one:
1) can most of the time curve out
2) wastelandmania exist
3) one cheats on lands, I.e., plays relatively few lands compared to non lands cards.
4) playing many colors (tapland your only source of that color does hurt, just like having your only green source be cradle and a hand full of mana elves...)
5) is not fetchable (if applicable)
Cubing is more akin to draft than constructed, which means that curving out is unlikely (not impossible, but very unlikely).
Maybe it is that my cube is urza block and one gets a free mulligan, but the manlands are all highly coveted and I have not seen a deck without 2 cycling lands...
Good idea, I should find time to put it into cube cobra (or is another website better?).
It is a tad slow due to the power level of creatures, but certainly not busted. Most of the busted cards in urza block are actually not busted in this cube. Which cards do you expect to be busted?
Dom Harvey
Contributor
In a general Cube, your usual Sneak Attack/Opposition/Grim Monolith etc. In this Cube... Pestilence?