General "Looking for a card"-Thread

TekLazar

TekLazar


is the only one I have. Makes a cute Braids impression if you have enough mutate cards. Way better than Deathbringer Regent which I was running before.
Don’t think Magus of the Disk counts, but I’ll always plug it when talking about 4 drops.

I tried to do a food theme, but outside of breaking singleton and Jumpstart I don’t think it works. I really like it for Golgari shells though. Hopefully we get more food soon.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Food is so cool for Riptiding because they are artifacts, are tokens, they gain life and they have cards that reward for fooding. But the reward part is parasitic so it’s one of those mechanics that needs a second round of ideas and prints in order to really kick in cubes. And if they make a round 3 food, it will suddenly be an Riptide all-star mechanic.

With your Dirge Bat you will have to ‘lose’ a creature in order to gun down another, right? Ikoria had such great ideas but such poor execution. That set could have been Eldraine level!
 
Velrun

Velrun

Oh and I forgot to answer your question.

You asked AKA the most broken set since Urza’s Saga?

Answer: Mirrodin was more broken but Eldraine was a perfect set if you look past Oko, which should have been a 4-cost planeswalker. Eldraine was a flavor home run and the mechanics created interesting game play choices as well as helping decks lifting their floor to a medium because many spells were both a creature OR an instant/sorcery plus a creature. Ikoria had the opportunity to do the same but they pushed some of the companions while they also changed how mutate functioned.

Companions would have been awesome if they has been lower power but still build-aroundable. That is how they were designed but Aaron Forsythe told us that the testing team buffed them short before print. They were meant for a Standard format where Oko, Thief of Crowns and Field of the Dead were legal but because the best cards were no longer part of Standard, the second best cards got to shine. And they did that not because the mechanic isn’t brilliant but because they pushed the numbers.

Mutate started as a way to grow, grow and grow your creatures into a huge battlecruiser monster 1v1 fight. But they changed mutate so they wouldn’t grow and instead replace the creature under the top creature.

This is what I mean by “what could have been”
Ikoria could have been so brilliant with tricolor, ultimatums, companions and mutate but instead they nerfed mutate and pushed companions = unwanted result.

Companions had their card text changed. The actual the wording on the cards. Almost unheard of :)

You are sometimes a little too quick to fire your gun. Sometimes it’s better to listen. It’s so weird you want to start these discussions sometimes but I will obviously always answer your questions.

Edit: I did not know all the companions got banned in Vintage and Legacy. That is quite impressive but I agree with Aaron that they shouldn’t have pushed the numbers. He said this before the spoiler season began in the Ikoria kickoff video where they showed us the first one (Lutri, the Spellchaser.)
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
All snide aside, I do love Eldraine though. Brilliant execution of the faerie / Arthurian legend crossover flavor, and it had a wealth of very cool cube cards. Gingerbrute has to be one of my favorite cards in recent memory :)
 
Velrun

Velrun

Exactly!

And Ikoria could have been up there. Imagine if they hadn’t changed those two things (companion buff and mutate nerf). Obviously mutate would still be parasitic for a cube but would be great for Standard and limited. Companions are such cool additions to cube but they aren’t balanced. Either too strong or weak :( And that is how you kill a set. People will forget it or look back upon it with a “mistake..many cards banned..all over the place..dislike” etc.

Which is sad. It could have been great and we would all praise it.

Okay I am done now :) What is done is done.

/rant over <3
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
Eldraine was a perfect set if you look past Oko
Click to expand...
Edit: It appears we were typing at the same time (even though I took a lot longer to finish typing :)). I wasn't trying to start a fight here, just pointing out that Eldraine, as great as it undeniable was in certain areas, certainly wasn't perfect from the perspective of a Standard player (which I'm not, btw, but still).

While I agree with your comments on Ikoria, Eldraine had a lot more problems besides Oko. Just take a look at the Standard ban list: Once Upon a Time was quickly identified as hugely problematic, getting the banhammer in Standard, Pioneer, and Modern. Cauldron Familiar turned out to be oppressive as well in combination with Witch's Oven, a card from the same set! You'ld think they could have caught that in testing. After they nerfed all of the "broken" decks, it turned out Fires of Invention was just as broken. Oops. And just this week, after first banning Uro, they came to the conclusion that 4c Omnath was the problem after all, except at the same time they axed another sleeper powerhouse from Eldraine in Escape from the Wilds, as well as the key card of a deck poised to take over after the inevitable demise of Omnath in Standard: Lucky Clover. That's six unique cards, none of them part of a cycle, banned in Standard (so far). I think the set was a bit overtuned for constructed, but the plus side of that is that there's a lot of really cool designs as well. Cards like Bonecrusher Giant are pushed without feeling unfair.

Esit 2: For the record, various overtuned designs from Eldraine have now impacted Standard for a good year since it's release. That's a long shadow that set cast over the format there.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
TBH a lot of recent standard sets have been amazing once you ignore the top 2-10 cards.

Which turns out is how a lot of us build cubes anyhow :D
Anyone who's getting their cube games ruined by Oko is probably used to them being ruined by Jitte anyways
 
Velrun

Velrun

Hard agree: We don’t have to let Standard meta affect our cubes.

About the bannings of all the Eldraine cards, I don’t agree with them. The bannings gave us this meta:

1F79A123-D5D9-4BA8-AEE7-64A46DCB74D4.jpeg

Had they not been banned we woul have a meta where there would also be a mix of Fires of Invention decks and Cauldron Familier variants. Maybe Standard would have been healthy with Oko, Companions un-nerfed etc. if they were thrown in here. (Debatable and impossible to know. The only people who have played it are Wizards’ testing group that gave it green light) But the bannings Onde is talking about above gave us a meta with 60 ish % Omnath.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
WotC gave us Omnath, the banning season had nothing to do with that :p But yeah, each of those decks drove people away from playing Standard, so it wasn't like they were going to unban it all to see if that would create a more interesting metagame. Still, Chris's sentiment is entirely right, as cube owners we don't have to care about those top 6-10 degenerate cards, and the new design philosophy made the cards below that tier a lot more interesting!

PS. Who else is curious what 5 color Omnath will look like? By this point he's only missing black mana... z this can only go wrong, can't it? :')
 
ravnic

ravnic

I loooove Eldraine for flavor and mechanics. Had so many hits for my cube.

Anyways, I was wondering if there are any colorless buildarounds on single-card-archetype-level like Drake Haven, Demonic Pact or Wildfire? Doesn't need to be super powerful (Isochrone Scepter is out)
, just fun and not too parasitic.
 
Brad

Brad

TrainmasterGT said:
Not really. Most creatures in cube die to Wicked Wolf, so often ends up being either Nekrataal or Impale in Green provided the target has 3 or less toughness. The food stuff is trinket text.
Click to expand...

As someone who's very anti free-tempo-ETB-bullshit, Wolf is not as heinous because it's pretty limited in how much tempo it can steal.

For Vel, some of the blue ETB bounce mages might work for you. There's one on basically every CMC.
 
Velrun

Velrun

But imagine how many fewer than 60 % of players would play Omnath if Fires, Cat Oven or Oko would be unbanned or some Companions would be unnerfed.

Colorless build arounds hmm

Mesmeric Orb Build your control deck with a low converted mana cost.
Platinum Angel Protect the president
The Ozolith Put lots of counters into your deck and watch your giant battlecruiser carry the torch from the last giant battecruiser.
 
Zoss

Zoss

Sorry for the late post--@Velrun re: Nekrataal

I dunno if these are my favorite as they're all so different, but right now I think these are some of the most interesting ones in Black.



As may be evident, I like to push the situational highs and lows of each card*, which is usually the opposite of what people are looking for when they look for a Nekrataal (i.e. reliable value on a body). Are you hoping to broaden your options, or are you looking for something with some particular qualities?

Skinrender is also quite good.


*specifically, the Rebel is very environment-dependent, Throat-Slitter is deck-dependent, and the Rider offers the most flexibility, but asks you to put a lot of thought into sequencing in return. Rider also kinda stinks against aggro due to the expense and the life loss...until you realize that it's also a 2/3 lifelink body, which might be just the speed bump you need!



And for overlooked White cards, I've always loved the following, though I'm really not sure how many would be a good fit for your particular cube-style. Some of them are bad, but they're definitely not boring!




Thanks for helping me remember these cards--like I said, they're favorites that even *I* had begun to overlook! I'd like to end with a shout-out to my boy Preeminent Captain who made my favorite kitchen table deck so obnoxiously good that the other middle-schoolers started netdecking :p
 
ravnic

ravnic

It is sweet in every white creature deck, sometimes even in the very aggressive ones, but can really be a sweet buildaround if you add some selfmill, creatures that sac themselves or have a tendecy to die, even better with EtB/die triggers (like the splicers).

Sorry for double posting, I have a bad connection here with phone
 
Velrun

Velrun

No worries Zoss <3 No pressure.

Damn I had to read that Debt of Loyalty twice :p Undercosted AF but then I remembered the old rules. This is a very sweet card because it is so difficult to deploy and so rewarding.

Peacekeeper is dangerous but I guess we're over that period where white almost couldn't remove white creatures and green had literally no creature removal at all. I think I'm going to give this a run.

Regarding Nekrataals I (like the rest of my cube) likes high highs and low lows.

I want to comment more but I have to watch a football match :D Be right back
 
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