I also love the Kavu. It's simple. It's effective. It's splashable. It's poddable. IDGAF that it's not unique to my Cube.
General Fight Club
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
It depends on your definition of boring. It's not a complicated card, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun to play with. I personally cut it because it's so obviously strong and it wasn't often correct to pass the card in my cube, but I wouldn't call it boring. Boring design, maybe.
I know one of the Riptide design goals is to reduce obvious first-picks, but personally, I like to get drunk while drafting, and therefore I don't want to have to think that hard. Drafting is challenging enough for a scrub like me without having to open P1P1 and not see any bombs/fetches/conspiracies.
Aoret
Developer
I find FTK good but plain. I do still run him, but I find murderous redcap more fun to play with
I just get really tired of red's identity feeling like 50 Shades of Burn. I thing FTK is efficient and all, and he's totally doing some good double-duty, being about a 3-for-1 assuming he ever gets blocked and his ETB kills something other than himself. I just get really tired of all the direct damage in red, and keep actively fighting my red section to do something new other than burn, burn, burn.
"if you want to kill that dude, use this burn spell. it's just like black removal, but more flavourful!" oh, neat, thanks red mage guy.
"here's some card draw... with burn!" uhm.. ok, sure, why not?
"want some.. instant speed burn?!?!" i guess..
"how about... a dude that burns?!" uh, but i already can do that with everything else..
"here's what we call a staple red enchantment for 90% of cube-users. you'll love this!" ...what is it
"it burns ALL THE PLAYERS, EVERY TURN!!!!" ...fine...
"could i interest you in a red-reward artifact to spice things up?" yes please, finally, something new! what's it do?
"after a while, it..." don't you dare
"wait for it..." oh my god
"it burns!!!"
"if you want to kill that dude, use this burn spell. it's just like black removal, but more flavourful!" oh, neat, thanks red mage guy.
"here's some card draw... with burn!" uhm.. ok, sure, why not?
"want some.. instant speed burn?!?!" i guess..
"how about... a dude that burns?!" uh, but i already can do that with everything else..
"here's what we call a staple red enchantment for 90% of cube-users. you'll love this!" ...what is it
"it burns ALL THE PLAYERS, EVERY TURN!!!!" ...fine...
"could i interest you in a red-reward artifact to spice things up?" yes please, finally, something new! what's it do?
"after a while, it..." don't you dare
"wait for it..." oh my god
"it burns!!!"
Some men just want to watch the world have posts like that. Doesn't FTK depend a lot of what else is going on in the cube? I could see where there's so much power and solitaire where it might not really matter as much. In most riptidey cubes it feels very good stuff.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I'm not saying it can't be a good card, just that the odds are seriously stacked against it.
1. Good point, I should not play 1-drops that are outclassed by 2-drops!
2. Good point, I should cube cards that encourage missing your land drops!
3. Good point, Cloudfin Raptor really needs me to statistically have my fifth creature in hand on Turn 3!
4. Good point, I was assuming my four other creatures in hand were all going to be copies of Enclave Cryptologist!
5. Good point, my aggressive 1-drop IS a bad topdeck!
6. Good point, if it gets removed right away it's DEFINITELY relevant whether it was a 0/1 or a 2/1!
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Nah man, I have seen it work on multiple occasions. It's far less unreliable than you make it out to be, though it is, in fact, pretty bad in a mono blue aggro deck, because such a deck doesn't exist unless you custom it up!
The real "hit" came when you put some poor schmuck in a position to draft Phyrexian Negator
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
I like raptor and everything, but it is a lot more sensitive to bad draws then other one drops. If you have to incinerate there threat on turn two on the draw, your Raptor is 0/1. You draw two Raptors and no 2 drop, your swinging for 0 on two and probably only 2 on three. I run double raptor and you can make good decks around it, but its definitely a demanding and swingy card.
Doesn't Riptide dislike uncounterable stuff? It's like "protection" for things on the stack. Randomly great against Intervene but useless against Gods Willing seems like a fault, not a feature.
Maybe there's a difference in how guys are trying to use Raptor which is leading to the large variance here?
I don't know if Raptor goes in hard aggro at all. For two reasons:
1. Blue sucks at hard aggro outside gimmicky stuff like quad delver or something
2. Raptor is better if you have more time to evolve him
I like this card in aggressive midrange strategies. It's a wonderful card in pretty much any green deck because ground stalls are super common in green decks. But each fat ground pounder you drop makes your Raptor bigger and I've won many games by just having a wall of fat on the ground that my opponent couldn't get through and this nasty 4/5 flying raptor they couldn't stop.
As far as my opponent killing it... I hope they waste a removal spell on my one drop. By all means, please do that.
I don't know if Raptor goes in hard aggro at all. For two reasons:
1. Blue sucks at hard aggro outside gimmicky stuff like quad delver or something
2. Raptor is better if you have more time to evolve him
I like this card in aggressive midrange strategies. It's a wonderful card in pretty much any green deck because ground stalls are super common in green decks. But each fat ground pounder you drop makes your Raptor bigger and I've won many games by just having a wall of fat on the ground that my opponent couldn't get through and this nasty 4/5 flying raptor they couldn't stop.
As far as my opponent killing it... I hope they waste a removal spell on my one drop. By all means, please do that.
In my opinion, uncounterable is essentially flavour text in a cube context, and I don't use it to weigh decisions when adding or cutting cards. I've been running Loxodon Smiter for months as a vanilla 4/4, and can't remember a time when either of the clauses came up. Same with Abrupt Decay.
On the scale of "bad things", with protection being a 10, and hexproof being, say, an 8, I would put uncounterable at somewhere around a 2 or 3. It doesn't generate nearly the game-long feel bads that a permanent with protection or hexproof on the board does, nor is it strong enough to warrant including a card that otherwise wasn't good enough.
I'm not saying that I like or dislike uncounterable; rather, that I feel it rarely matters enough to either cut or add a card based on that clause. Someone brought up Hero of Oxid Ridge's third clause basically being flavour text, and I see uncounterable in much the same way; if I lose to Hero because I had two one-power blockers, I don't see that as being some bolted-on text there to get me.
I'm not saying that I like or dislike uncounterable; rather, that I feel it rarely matters enough to either cut or add a card based on that clause. Someone brought up Hero of Oxid Ridge's third clause basically being flavour text, and I see uncounterable in much the same way; if I lose to Hero because I had two one-power blockers, I don't see that as being some bolted-on text there to get me.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Especially on removal or just an efficient threat, can't be countered feels like affair way to make sure something resolves. It's not as if your counterspells are going to be useless against the rest of your opponent's deck, and it's not as if you aren't running any other removal because you thought you could win with just counterspells. Protection can blank a whole deck, can't be countered is not nearly as devastating.
Agreed.
If your players need to be so completely swaddled from every possible boo-boo in the universe that a 3-mana burn 4 that can't be countered is "cheating" and start whining that it's "basically protection", then I think it's probably time to find a new playgroup, because that sounds miserable to deal with and indicative of a far more toxic group than I could tolerate. In the grand scheme of things, the counter-having player gets to counter the vast majority of things in your format, after all, and that isn't much more "fair" than the Exquisite Firecraft player having something that can't be countered be relevant once in a great blue moon.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
- I'm not talking that it loses in combat, I'm talking about that my creature is way worse that I had to take a turn off casting creatures because my opponent actually had threatening cards in their deck. I'll admit Precinct Captain is probably a bad example, because it needs to attack. Young Pyromancer works better for what I was trying to illustrate: Creatures that need to be dealt with quickly or they can generate a lot of value. Something that makes me spend my early turns doom bladeing instead of adding to the board.
- If you stumble with other creatures, they keep doing what they do and Cloudfin Raptor spends another turn being awful. Your first creature probably doesn't have 0 power, but say your turn 3 is another 2 drop, either from missing a land drop or having a tapland (These things happen). There's plenty of blue 2s like Looter Il-Kor that won't help here, and not having another creature is worse.
- 5th might be a bit much. but second? Third? How many hands with this are just down a card because you've only got it, 2 drop and expensive things, or (god forbid) noncreature spells?
- I was laboring under the delusion you were playing blue to some respect, which has a notoriously low quantity of cards who's power/toughness even approaches their mana cost. How long are we waiting before this becomes better than storm crow? How many Wake Thrashers and Chasm Skulkers are in your cube that would probably be good in this deck but suck with raptor?
- Yes, yes it is. It's really bad. Drawing this on an empty board is aether vial levels of bad when you need to draw 2+ creatures before this guy does anything, It's also a really bad topdeck as early as turn 3, where you'll have played out some creatures already and regular 1 drops would be additional threats. T3 Raptor + guy still needs a follow up creature, and T3 Raptor + spell is really really bad.
- I don't even mean immediately, I'm worried about it spending turns as a 1/2 flier, being ignored because Triton Shorestalker isn't a good aggressive card on it's own.
The usual setup cost is play the Raptor, then two other creatures, the second of which has to be at least as big as a 2/1 or 0/3. It's like a half-sized, half-price Errant Ephemeron if you're a creature deck // supporting blue creature decks. If you're not? Jesus christ just shut the hell up and play some other cards in your cube to support whatever other archetype.
If counterspells are overpowered (they certainly are in constructed MTG, not usually the case in cube)... play fewer/worse ones, not random GOTCHA uncounterable cards.
It's not like Smiter/Firecraft are singlehandedly ruining cubes, it's just that "I held up Mana Leak on T4 and he cast a Smiter" seems like something I want to avoid, not encourage, so I'd rather play Firecraft if it had that clause left out entirely. As-is? I'll just stick to the other four damage options (Char, Stoke, etc).
Also, re: "Especially on removal or just an efficient threat, can't be countered feels like affair way to make sure something resolves." -- that's pretty wildly wrong, especially in the context of using Firecraft as removal. Like, how many ways are there to prevent it from successfully killing a creature?
Protection spells/effects (Gods Willing)
Granting Hexproof/Shroud (Vines of Vastwood)
Pump spells (Giant Growth)
Damage prevention (Healing Salve)
Sacrifice outlets (ok this one's a stretch) (Altar's Reap)
Indestructible (Ajani's Presence)
Flickering (Cloudshift)
Regeneration (uh... Regenerate)
Making it come back (Undying Evil, Cauldron Haze)