General Fight Club

Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Man I would love priest so hard if it got +1/+0 if your opponent had no creatures in play. Love the effect, but it's so dead against a control deck.
Feels like blood artist some time
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Thanks Chris. My cube is heavily creature based, so I feel like the priest will be good more often than it will be bad. So I think I'm going to test it.
 
shamizy

shamizy

I like Lone Missionary way more because of the 2/1 body. It's no joke against an aggro deck; trading for a guy and nullifying a turn worth of damage is big game. It's an okay blink target, able to return via Ojutai's Command, helps stabilize your life total (4 life takes you out of the range of most burn kills pretty often), you can set up a dumb 4 mana loop with Phyrexian Reclamation where you net 2 life each time, and you can Alesha him back if you're really hurting for good targets. Suture Priest is okay, but it's just not as interesting with that 1/1 body. I much prefer Zulaport Cutthroat if I'm looking for that 2nd Blood Artist effect, it's also a Human!

Missionary is not an amazing card, but it's a great roleplayer in a variety of strategies. It's exactly the kind of card I like; non-embarrassing card that will usually make it into your final 22-23 and generates solid value whenever you play it.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
shamizy said:
I like Lone Missionary way more because of the 2/1 body. It's no joke against an aggro deck; trading for a guy and nullifying a turn worth of damage is big game. It's an okay blink target, able to return via Ojutai's Command, helps stabilize your life total (4 life takes you out of the range of most burn kills pretty often), you can set up a dumb 4 mana loop with Phyrexian Reclamation where you net 2 life each time, and you can Alesha him back if you're really hurting for good targets. Suture Priest is okay, but it's just not as interesting with that 1/1 body. I much prefer Zulaport Cutthroat if I'm looking for that 2nd Blood Artist effect, it's also a Human!

Missionary is not an amazing card, but it's a great roleplayer in a variety of strategies. It's exactly the kind of card I like; non-embarrassing card that will usually make it into your final 22-23 and generates solid value whenever you play it.
Click to expand...

I'd like to clarify that Suture Priest is not actually a blood artist effect: it feels like a blood artist effect :p
It can provide the same feeling where you attack with 3 creatures, they're at 3, and you have a blood artist in play; the kind of damnned if you do damnned if you don't.

Like, that smiter is probably going to do well for you, but it does put you to 3, and I am playing red.

What it does not do is synergize with other cards in your deck to kill your opponent (Well maybe pridemate) like on the 5th gravecrawler cast and you're opponent realizes they've got a long way to go to win this if they topdeck All is Dust right this second.

It's a cool card, and it feels cool, and it's a fine candidate for the "White 2 drop that gains you some life". But despite my comparison, the good part of blood artistis deffinitly the life loss :p
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Yeah. I'm not sure it's going to work out, but I'm compelled to play cards that feel cool even if they don't end up being good. I've run Lone Missionary before. It always felt like filler. It's also one of those easy mode include white durdle cards that occasionally gets abused with blink/recursion. Totally justifies a slot in my cube, but I'm looking to shake things up a little with my next update. And this guy is not critical in my mind.
 
shamizy

shamizy

Very true, I just treat all of those gain/drain increment cards as Blood Artist-lites. Suture Priest is okay, I'm just not as big a fan of it as I am of Cutthroat b/c leveraging your dudes into draining life is the cool tech-y kinda of play that those B/W Aggro decks usually want for reach. I also don't have much of a token theme in white anymore so there aren't too many life-gain shenanigans to leverage on your end with the Priest. I just don't feel like I can punish an opponent very much with it unless they're a recursive aggro deck or a token build. It's definitely capable of being really really gross with Pridemates or the new Karlov card. I mean, going like Soul Warden --> Suture Priest --> Karlov of the Ghost Council is disgustingly strong. Imagine if you had a Bitterblossom somewhere in the deck? Geez.
 
Lucre

Lucre

ah the age old question, incredibly boring or incredible awkward?
I'm gonna tell ya to follow your heart on this one but maybe you can find something better for the slot anyway.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

I finally added the life gain theme not too long ago, but the one guy that would have drafted it is no longer a regular. I tested it myself and it seemed cool, but I'm not sure it's going to be a thing with my players. So I don't know if pridemate and co. will be around after the update, which certainly hurts suture priest.

I don't want to completely discard life gain as a thing for white though (pridemates or no) because it feels very true to the color and there is power in incremental incidental life gain. My attraction to suture priest is probably a bit misplaced, but it feels like a tool that will not be narrow based on how I know my group builds decks. So while you can't trigger the life drain on suture like you can on priest/cutthroat (both of which I already run BTW), it's going to happen just as a course of playing Magic.

And it won't be something people want to kill due to how small it is but they may eventually regret that as the game wears on and it paper cuts them every time they advance their board. I really like cards like that which are not auto kill targets but their are long term consequences in leaving them around. Feels like it will have a lot of play to it. This is where one shot effect type cards like missionary just don't have the same appeal. Who kills that after it comes down when 90% of the value has already been realized (unless you fear blink.dec)?
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
shamizy said:
Very true, I just treat all of those gain/drain increment cards as Blood Artist-lites. Suture Priest is okay, I'm just not as big a fan of it as I am of Cutthroat b/c leveraging your dudes into draining life is the cool tech-y kinda of play that those B/W Aggro decks usually want for reach. I also don't have much of a token theme in white anymore so there aren't too many life-gain shenanigans to leverage on your end with the Priest. I just don't feel like I can punish an opponent very much with it unless they're a recursive aggro deck or a token build. It's definitely capable of being really really gross with Pridemates or the new Karlov card. I mean, going like Soul Warden --> Suture Priest --> Karlov of the Ghost Council is disgustingly strong. Imagine if you had a Bitterblossom somewhere in the deck? Geez.
Click to expand...

The problem that I have there is that Soul Warden --> Ajani's Pridemate is already strong (If they play a creature you threaten to swing with a 5/5 for fucks sake) so adding another soul warden and a better pridemate to that picture doesn't really make me more interested, you're just further in magical christmas land :p

Also pretending that bitterblossom needs any other card to be good is a no no
 
shamizy

shamizy

Chris Taylor said:
The problem that I have there is that Soul Warden --> Ajani's Pridemate is already strong (If they play a creature you threaten to swing with a 5/5 for fucks sake) so adding another soul warden and a better pridemate to that picture doesn't really make me more interested, you're just further in magical christmas land :p

Also pretending that bitterblossom needs any other card to be good is a no no
Click to expand...

The thing is, it's still just a dumb beater at the end of the day that most removal will be able to deal with initially and you'll only be punished if you aren't interacting with the board-state. My drafters like being able to do super powerful things from time to time and I'm fine with letting it be available to them every now and then with certain cards. I'm at 420 cards so there's a good chance that that build won't come together all that often. Pridemate is the kind of card that has been a last or second to last pick in like 80% of my drafts aside from that one time that the nut life-gain deck happened after a P1P1 Archangel of Thune. I like Karlov as a card that a person actually needs to build upon to get max value, and even then, they need to have a specific curve-out for it to be oppressive. I'm pretty okay with that, especially since aggro and control are both a bit pushed in my environment.

I've actually seen way more people die b/c of the Blossom than actually pull out games. It's just not as good in my cube for some reason. Except that one time I had Braids.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I dunno, I feel like if you have anything resembling a reasonable draw and bitterblossom is a part of it, you're golden. The games I lost when I had bitterblossom there wasn't a card in magic that would have saved me (though bitterblossom did buy me some time)
 
RavebornMuse

RavebornMuse

I'd run Student if I wasn't so cheap. But it's on my list of options...

We tried Impersonator and imho it too often was misplayed by less experienced drafters who either put it out wrong or had it for some cute jank plan which led to it becoming a last pick after repeated failed uses. I like skill-testing cards but it was too embarrassing to watch usually, idk if I would put myself through that again anytime soon
 
RavebornMuse

RavebornMuse

japahn said:
I am trying to imagine an embarrassing misplay of Impersonator. Please do share.
Click to expand...

Tangle Wire when the opponent has craploads of aggro dudes and the caster had no board presence
Curse of Shallow Graves with no creatures into opponent's BG fatty midrange clusterfuck
Bow of Nylea with no green on-board for the deathtouch in a creature-light deck (they might've had fixing somewhere, don't remember seeing it tho)
A mana rock happened one time, don't recall which (maybe Pristine Talisman)

Players get excited to do something "tech-y" and make purposefully weird plays to try and show off
I do too (a lot, I am as Johnny as they come) but I literally only saw Impersonator copy something good like twice and it was very whatever to me
 
Lucre

Lucre

clones kinda annoy me unless they're pretty efficient. Like dragon cube anyone?
waiting till there is something worth 4cc you want to have a slower copy of that you also don't immediately need to kill seems lame and isn't having mirrored boardstates a great way to get into a stall?

Zzzz

I guess its neat in the same way blinking your riftwing is neat if thats the kinda thing that gets you excited.
 
Lucre

Lucre

I like Dack's better than I like an awful lot of UR spells and I very rarely play it. I always have trouble figuring out what to side out for 'em even in the midranged matches. Maybe I'm just bad at clones? I'm bad at a lot of magic stuff actually...

Anyway I like electrolyze way more than Dack's anyway, especially now that wizards is dead set on forcing 2-3 drop small creatures into every conceivable deck archetype. And you guys already know my diatribe about how multicolour removal is usually essential to drafting control in todays cube environment anyway.

The phyrexian clone is pretty cool but more so in monolith or powered environments. It's less interesting in your guys cubes and wont randomly keep you in games you'd lose to fast fatty decks as often in your environs. Clones are way better in environments where people want to play turn 3 6drops.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Tanner K. said:
043_oddish.png
Click to expand...

In the last month, the 6th most popular search term leading to Riptide Lab was "oddish".

For the curious:
WiwH51F.png
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top