Chris Taylor
Contributor
Fuck you delver sucks
Sets [FRF] Fate Reforged spoilers
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Fuck you delver sucks
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Cloudfin Raptor is the real deal though, I cut Delver of Secrets completely and now play two Raptors in my cube.
I do wonder what your definition of "cheap good creature" is though if you lament the fact that blue never gets good cheap creatures. Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique are pretty bonkers in my book
I thought mediocre creatures was like... blue's flavor.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Cloudfin Raptor is the real deal though, I cut Delver of Secrets completely and now play two Raptors in my cube.
I do wonder what your definition of "cheap good creature" is though if you lament the fact that blue never gets good cheap creatures. Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique are pretty bonkers in my book
Cheap: 0-2 mana. Snapcaster costs 3+ unless you're flashing back gitaxian probe, and there's a million good blue 3s:
The backbone of an aggro deck is the 1s and 2s, otherwiseyou end up midrange and mediocre.
I like cloudfin raptor in theory, but the problem with everything surrounding him is they're usually either definitely triggering evolve (Serendib) or really not doing so (Kira, or god forbid chasm skulker). It also demands a rather high density of creatures which can go against blue's strengths (Countermagic) and requires 2 creatures to be played before it starts taking good chunks out of an opponent's life total.
I kinda actually prefer phantasmal bear
Sure he can't pick up equipment but he doesn't require so much work. Delver requires a stupid amount of work and has one of the worst Broken // Awful disparities of any card I've ever ran.You can do all sorts of crazy shit in blue if you aren't attacking, but it's so insanely hard to break out of that rutt
Sigh.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Oh, you want to run a mono-blue aggro decks. Yeah, that's not going to happen soon is it?
I combine Raptor and the excellent 3+ cc drops with the aggro drops of another color if I want to draft a "blue" aggro deck. Blue-based tempo decks are pretty good, despite the lack of aggressive blue drops.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Don't forget back-to-back Pro Tour champion Judge's Familiar!
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Actually you know what, I'm going deeper here. Check these blue 2 drops. Even if we accept that delver/raptor/bear is a fine card, here's what you're following them up with:
We have the "Too small to actually contribute to beatdown":
Great as they may be, they don't really advance an aggro deck's gameplan. They can help, but we need something else to be the backbone.
We have the "I actually cost more than 2 mana despite my CMC":
Bonus points if people pretend these creatures are okay if you only ever sink 2 mana into them. You'd cube goblin piker, right?
There's the "Holy Crap that's a lot of work but boy would it be sweet if it did work":
Motherfucking Student of Elements man, I want my 3/3 Levitation for 2!
And there's the Just not that great:
Blighted agent is kinda like fencing ace, right?
A few that would be great creatures if they were just blue:
I kinda want a mono-blue frilled occulus even if it basically feels mono-green
And really great cards that suck when played on curve: (Bit of a theme with these guys)
And I'm going damn deep with this list. I doubt anyone's ever really thought "Man, wormfang newt sounds like a great fit for my cube", but I've dug.
We have the "Too small to actually contribute to beatdown":
Great as they may be, they don't really advance an aggro deck's gameplan. They can help, but we need something else to be the backbone.
We have the "I actually cost more than 2 mana despite my CMC":
Bonus points if people pretend these creatures are okay if you only ever sink 2 mana into them. You'd cube goblin piker, right?
There's the "Holy Crap that's a lot of work but boy would it be sweet if it did work":
Motherfucking Student of Elements man, I want my 3/3 Levitation for 2!
And there's the Just not that great:
Blighted agent is kinda like fencing ace, right?
A few that would be great creatures if they were just blue:
I kinda want a mono-blue frilled occulus even if it basically feels mono-green
And really great cards that suck when played on curve: (Bit of a theme with these guys)
And I'm going damn deep with this list. I doubt anyone's ever really thought "Man, wormfang newt sounds like a great fit for my cube", but I've dug.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Oh, you want to run a mono-blue aggro decks. Yeah, that's not going to happen soon is it?
I combine Raptor and the excellent 3+ cc drops with the aggro drops of another color if I want to draft a "blue" aggro deck. Blue-based tempo decks are pretty good, despite the lack of aggressive blue drops.
A deck is not "Base blue" if it has to borrow half it's curve and basically ALL it's creatures from another color
Do you want other colors to have no reason to exist or something?
In an effort to stay on-topic, how boring is this as a rare?
In an effort to stay on-topic, how boring is this as a rare?
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I don't want blue to just become other colors. I want blue to have an identity beyond super niche things, control, and being too broken to print.Do you want other colors to have no reason to exist or something?
In an effort to stay on-topic, how boring is this as a rare?
Wildcall --> Super Boring
Also boring: Basically just hill giant over here. I thought the white one that "makes a bear for 1W" didn't really need a cycle behind it. Is there that much morph that's going to be playing with these things?
Maybe this is a 3rd set Ah-Ha moment, since that draft format will be BCC rather than the ABC we usually get. Though I don't like that anything that's horrible design wise can be written off as "It'll make sense in 4 months"
Also:
DAMN IT THEY BUTCHER GHOUL'D ME AGAIN!
This guy: WAAAAAAY too much to ask for apparently, though I'd totally settle for 2/1 > 2/2 or something similar.
A blue Vampire Interloper would be nice.
Aren't welkin tern and vaporkin just better? Or is this some kind of next-level sarcasm I don't understand
Goblin piker with a cool ability? Neat. If your opponent has hexproof or something do you just keep it? Edit: or can you just not activate it? You need a target to activate this, don't you?
At the very least it kills your opponent superdead unlike its brothers.
It's just hard for me to read "give blue a wider pie slice" when it's already the most bent or whatever terminology you want to use.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Next level sarcasm
I'm not actually sure what you mean here. Bent as in "close to broken"? Bent as in "Does a lot of things"?
This one. It dips into every other color's special place one way or the other, while other colors have extremely strict NO policies. Its tools are so mechanically flexible that it has plenty of strength/power, and getting equal ground where it is supposed to be awful as a form of balance, like having good aggro creatures, sounds insane to me.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Thats the beauty of delver: you don't need 2 drops, or an aggro curve. Just jam him into any blue deck with counterspells and randomly win games.
Though with all of those prowess creatures, delver might be less niche now. You have young pyromancer in red, soulfire monk and monastery mentor in white, and shu yun the silent monk in blue: those are all high power payoff cards for U/W/R spells matters. Toss in talrand's invocation, talrand sky summoner, mystical tutor, and the white spirit/bird token makers; and you have yourself a lot of great reasons to go into a spells heavy deck.
I agree, but I think blue could get a couple more decent aggro options while still being "worst" at aggro. One thing I've disliked about my cube is the designation that Mountains means you're playing aggressively and Islands means you're control. Over time I've found ways to allow red to do more in other places, for example, by doubling up on Prophetic Flamespeakers, a more traditionally blue effect. I want to take away some of blue's reign over control cards and thereby make the color more interesting, and the only direction to go in is aggro.
Yeah I like your thinking. Blue already does everything, it doesn't need to do more, but it's cool to be able to play control without blue. I think it's possible.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Thats the beauty of delver: you don't need 2 drops, or an aggro curve. Just jam him into any blue deck with counterspells and randomly win games.
Though with all of those prowess creatures, delver might be less niche now. You have young pyromancer in red, soulfire monk and monastery mentor in white, and shu yun the silent monk in blue: those are all high power payoff cards for U/W/R spells matters. Toss in talrand's invocation, talrand sky summoner, mystical tutor, and the white spirit/bird token makers; and you have yourself a lot of great reasons to go into a spells heavy deck.
Lets throw out some insane numbers here and assume your deck is 16 land, 4 delvers, and 20 spells. That deck would be horrible and threat light as all hell, but that's still a damn coinflip for delver to be worth something. I don't think I want any card that is literally 50/50 on being good/worthless, and those are some slanted odds!
You'll notice most (not all, but most) of the prowess creatures we're playing are decent creatures if they don't trigger every turn. (Taylor Swiftspear excluded).
I see your point. Part of the problem with what I want here is that it would probably fuck up legacy/vintage something fierce, (Maybe modern) and standard would recover in (at worst) 2 years.
This is the problem with having a format where you can exclude things (cube) and a million other people playing a format where you can't (Legacy). I'd love for a single solid aggro blue 1/2 drop to be printed every 1-2 years. None of them ever come out in the same format, so there's never a deck around, but now my cube has tools it didn't have before. Only problem is now there's even less of an incentive to play other colors in legacy than before.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I guess what I am trying to say, is that traditionally delver has been bad in cube because limited tends to be very creature-centric, and delver has never been strong enough on its own to shift people towards spells. However, when you suddenly have a bunch of these spellfocused 2 drops in white and red, their might be enough pull to draw someone into a spell heavy aggro-control deck: which is the environment delver excells in.
I don't think straight blue aggro or aggro-disruption is really possible at most people's power levels, but you can certainly now draft a control deck capable of getting draw sequences that put a lot of pressure on the opponent from the opening turns.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
The only problem is that "excells in" actually means "Has about a 40% chance of flipping".
I don't know what the odds of delver flipping would have to be to make me want it, but I think 50% is still too low.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Its cool, everyone is different; i'm happy with a 50% flip rate in those types of decks. I just really like this shift towards spells on WOTZ's part.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Me too! I will say I love prowess more than the traditional young pyromancer style, but both are sweet now that we have some redundancy there.
Also, something positive for once:
Oh god if you activate the ability you can force all their guys to group block a bloodghast so the one downside between this and master warcraft is basically not there *Gasp*
Deep Breaths. Damn this set though! All mythics
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
They've made a few different versions of this card over the years and it has never been good. Have they finally costed it right? Only thing that's kind of depressing is you can't find it with Imperial Recruiter.
I like her. Red threes are a little thin as it is, and I already run the ever popular sac theme, so she's got some synergy.