I do however think the repeatable regrowth got one thing that a lot of the silver bullets or trump cards I listed don't, and that's the disposability (? poor word, right sentiment ?) of it.
Like, against a deck that can clock you, you
Bone Shards their early play - pitching this. If you don't draw dead, great! You play efficiently, and this sits in the yard perhaps never getting cast. The thing is, you now don't have to
worry about drawing dead later on because you can get back that Bone Shards or whatever other stuff you had to just chuck out there to buy time to answer a midgame threat like
Questing Beast or whatever. Would I throw away the rest of my hand to kill a Questing Beast, either turning the corner or finally putting the aggro deck down? Hell yeah I would. I'm going to be drawing into gas. They're drawing into 1 mana 2/1s.
You can afford to lose a bit of card advantage because 1: You're running regrowth/s, you probably aren't the aggressor, you just need to hold on until card quality makes up the difference and likely have ways of regaining CA and 2: Any excess lands you now draw are now (mana-inefficient) plays of whichever card is the most relevant, should you need them to be - virtual CA right there. And you don't have to worry about throwing a vital creature or spell away to buy a turn, because you can spend that turn later on, after you've stabilized, rebuying that card and re-establishing your win condition. And if you do, you haven't even really
spent your regrowth, so there's not much point in the opponent going for a hail mary to deal with your win con again. If Bone Shards seems too specifically engineered, imagine it was a
Merfolk Looter to try and draw into an out, or a
Collective Brutality killing something and draining for 2 or whatever. It is, at worst, a great insurance policy that really reduces tension in a game. Now imaging you're playing Storm. This turns all of your lands into extra rituals, and then into that one copy of whatever wincon you happened to run - probably Brain Freeze because holy synergy batman. It is, at best, absolutely degenerate because you literally cannot brick your combo turn if you've seen your retrace regrowth that game.
My other concern is how it feels as a card - imagine sitting across from one or the other of these cards. "Oh, a weird Gravecrawler. I'll kill it now, stonewall it later". "You mean I'm going to have to deal with Oko
again?" Concede.
" The regrowth is a signposted threat that whatever good thing you have done or can do in the game is just going to keep on happening, that masterfully playing to your one out is not and never would have worked - you at a minimum need two, even if one of them is just "apply enough pressure that there's no time to cast the regrowth" - and that sounds
painful to sit across from to me.
I absolutely agree that it's easily hated out and a terrible tempo play. I also think it goes in fewer decks than the 2/1. I just don't think that makes it less powerful than the 2/1. I think that all the surrounding elements, in a grindy resource war cube, makes it
into one of those threats that don't belong in that kind of cube. I haven't thought about it in the context of constructed, largely because I don't think wizards would print it because it so obviously leads to repetitive game states when it does work and does stone-cold-nothing when it doesn't and wouldn't be considered exciting by modern design standards, and as such lives in the realm of "Custom cards to go in my custom format". I do think they might have printed it in Time Spiral if Retrace had been a longstanding mechanic back then, FWIW, and it probably would have done nothing more offensive than make some retail limited games incredibly frustrating and probably let Gabriel Nassif and Patrick Chapin have an even more disgusting semifinals match at Worlds
Not particularly trying to convince anyone, just getting my thoughts out there. Again, appreciate that you (and others) have put time and thought into doing the same.
