General I Was Completely Wrong About. . .

FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
In this thread, we confess our failures at card evaluation and cube design.

I will start with two, one very old and one very recent.

After winning a cursed scrolled in a Tempest draft, I thought it was total jank and traded it immediately for a despotic scepter. One year later there were 28 cursed scrolls in the top 8 of the Type 2 World Championships. Oops.

More recently, I thought Domri Rade was absolute ass at first. They were going for $10. After playing him in my friends group, I completely change my mind, but apparently so did everyone else and he's just shy of $30!
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Tarmogoyf

I got a couple of these in Future Sight packs. I was disappointed and tossed them in with my other "junk" rares. Didn't take me long to realize that was a mistake when I was pursuing StarCityGames and saw their cost. Then years later I thought they couldn't get more expensive and I hawked one, only to see them double in price since then. Sigh...

On a related note (and no offense intended), but how does anyone underestimate Planeswalkers? I don't get it. They are a fundamentally broken card type. Walkers are multiple spells you pay for only one time that can be rebounded each turn for free an infinite number of times (with one of the effects essentially being an auto-game winning ability that you simply have to wait a couple turns to play). You pretty much can't make Planewalkers suck because they break the core rules of the game. Now, it's possible to make walkers just "OK" by over-costing them and making their abilities subpar, but "jank" Planeswalkers simply don't (and can't) exist.
 
anotak

anotak


"if you can tap it for a ton of mana you're already winning"

still vaguely true but it ends up not mattering that much. i really underestimated how much worse 3 color decks had gotten with innistrad rotating
 
FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
Planeswalkers, whether or not you think they are a broken card type, still have opportunity costs associated with them. They still rely on a supporting cast and synergy to work. There are very good reasons why constructed formats and even powermax cubes are not simply dominated by the decks that can jam the most planeswalkers into them.

And let's be honest, most of them are designed specifically to be really powerful. There not "Grey Ogreing" any planeswalkers here.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

FlowerSunRain said:
Planeswalkers, whether or not you think they are a broken card type, still have opportunity costs associated with them. They still rely on a supporting cast and synergy to work. There are very good reasons why constructed formats and even powermax cubes are not simply dominated by the decks that can jam the most planeswalkers into them.

And let's be honest, most of them are designed specifically to be really powerful. There not "Grey Ogreing" any planeswalkers here.
Click to expand...

I'm certainly biased against Planeswalkers. You might even say I have a personal vendetta against them, that's how much I dislike them. Which is why I can't help but somewhat hijack this thread for a spell so I can rant a little. My apologies up front for getting on a tangent here...

Take Garruk Wildspeaker for example. For a one-time mana cost of 2GG, you get a colored mana sol ring, potentially infinite call of the herd flashbacks, and overrun all in one card. Now, there are limitations of course. You have to use the sol ring ability a couple times to have the option for your overrun. But still, this is costing you 4 mana one time and you get to do these things FOREVER unless your opponent gets rid of this card.

If Wizards printed this artifact, we'd all say it was broken. This is essentially Garruk Wildspeaker as an artifact.

Artifact
2GG
When this comes into play, put 3 charge counters on it. Put this into your graveyard when all charge counters are removed.
Your opponents can choose to deal damage to this artifact. If they do, remove a number of charge counters from it instead.
Tap: Untap two lands. Add a charge counter
Tap, remove a charge counter: Cast Call of the Herd for free.
Tap, remove 4 charge counters: Cast Overrun for free.
All abilities can only be used any time you could cast a sorcery.

That artifact (aside from having way too much text) is ridiculous. It's better than any other artifact every printed at 4 mana except maybe Nevinyrral's Disk. And honestly, IMO it's better than that.

And this isn't even the best walker.

To call Planeswalkers "pushed" is an understatement.
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

I mean... at best Garruk is whatever you want to call him. At worst he's GG gain 4(ish) life.

Like, goldfishing, planeswalkers are all absurd. When you consider the current creature-centric design principles, the ones that don't just win the game (and, really, there aren't any, they all need to ulti for that) are only as good as your gameplan to keep them alive. They're efficient, but they take time to fire, and they're easily disrupt able. Everyone's first evaluation of a new planeswalker includes the 'can this self-protect' check, because if it can't, it's probably going to fall over. If it can, then it might be useful. Garruk can't self protect and also build towards overrun. The silliest planeswalkers +abilities self-protect, and at that point, yeah, they're silly as its really hard to stop their ulti, and if their ulti is any good, then the planeswalker is probably broken.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Lucre said:

Well not so much Ajani, it still kinda sucks, but in pretty reasonable ways.
Click to expand...

Mirror Entity didn't do a thing the whole two years it was legal in Standard, and yet it's a house in cube. I'll never understand this.

Meanwhile, Goldmane was good to great in Standard, but is just ok-ish in cube. It's probably because he doesn't have four Spectral Processions to play around with in every deck, but still, I assumed he'd be better.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
Mirror Entity is a super-sweet card that costs too much mana for Constructed and finds a nice home here instead
 
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