Card/Deck Low Power Card Spotlight

[Rusje]

Cloudgoat Ranger gives you a 3/3 you can make into a dragon in addition to the 3 1/1s! Pretty comparable to Elspeth, and that was a change I looked to make back in the day.

hmm, I do not agree that the cloudgoat is comparable to elspeth. Thing is: there is more creature removal (con for the goat), cloudgoat is a one trick pony (but blink power!). Elspeth makes tokens and stays alive, let alone the agency that elspeth gives. Yes you can attack elspeth, but you can choose to guard her.

Planeswalkers are often value machines, clocks, and answers in one (and do not need other cards to shine). The goat is just a clock spread over bodies.

 

[ravnic]

Is Jace really that powerful? I've played against him in a cube with a power level compareable to mine (maybe 5% higher, but not much more) and it felt not too crazy. Isn't he just a slow draw spell if you don't get to the ultimate? Like, I feel like he's not above stuff like Fact or Fiction really.

 

[Seeker]

Jace is the type of card that's so simple players don't feel bad loosing to it. IMO that makes Jace a good choice for Cubes that normally wouldn't play cards as powerful as he is.

Part of the reason (some) players don't feel bad losing to it is that they don't know they're losing to it (again, imo) - like Phyrexian Arena, but with loyalty.

Is Jace really that powerful? I've played against him in a cube with a power level compareable to mine (maybe 5% higher, but not much more) and it felt not too crazy. Isn't he just a slow draw spell if you don't get to the ultimate? Like, I feel like he's not above stuff like Fact or Fiction really.

The ultimate being written on the card is about the entire power level you get out of it - when it kills, it really didn't, because you had an unanswered Jace for 4+ turns and could have just been -1ing - but I think it's probably... around as good as Fact or Fiction as a card? Maybe slightly better, 3 mana is so much better than 4, and it provides a different style of "opponent has choices that impact how many cards you get" that I think is a little stronger. But that's not me insulting Jace! I think the other four shown are cards I would all put far below FoF. Maybe Elspeth Tirel would at least be in the conversation, but I'd put her several rungs below Jace.

 

[LadyMapi]

Any reason why you're not considering my favorite Nissa?

 

[Chris Taylor]

Any reason why you're not considering my favorite Nissa?

Lemmie tell ya playing against this thing without trample/flying/hero's downfall felt miserable when I ran it.
-2 almost never activated, just block, block, block into draw 7 cards

 

[IanGitax]

So, I was considering some lower powered planeswalkers for my occasionals module. I don't want them to be too oppressive and snowbally, they needed to be good but not too good in an environment where Honored Hydra or Seeker of the Way are fine cards to take early. I also wanted them to be not to wordy, as I hate nothing more than reading planeswalkers where each ability is 3-4 lines of text. These are my five candidates right now:



Now I want to know if you think that any one of them could be too much for my Casual Champions Cube.

The 6-drop starter deck planeswalkers feel way too weak even at your cube’s power level. Since you’re avoiding FTKs, I’m guessing you want to avoid the standard “-x kill, +x for card advantage” template. Some options:

 

[ravnic]

I think you might be right about Nissa specifically. And Nissa, Vital Force seems like a more apt choice for my cube. I'll get a copy of that one instead!

Also, for red, I think I will go with the original Chandra Nalaar. Comes down a turn earlier and is a bit better at impacting the board.

However, I doubt that Vraska will be too weak. She comes into play and immediately kills the best thing on the other side, than threatens to do again, when they can't kill her, in two turns. Seems pretty decent to me.

 

[ravnic]

Although, now that I think about it, Chandra Nalaar seems much stronger than that Vraska. Argh, I suck at evaluating PWs ...

EDIT: Guess I'll try CHandra and upgrade Vraska to Liliana, the Necromancer.

 

[Seeker]

Maybe Koth, Fire of Resistance or Chandra, Flamecaller? Red's in a weird place with walkers.

 

[Nanonox]

She is a fun walker! Small tokens to buff or sacrifice and a pseudo Snapcaster Mage ability ties a lot of themes in Red.

 

[Brad]

I also suck at evaluating walkers, but I know that any walker that can protect itself has better odds of being a problem.

 

[ravnic]

How much better is Goblin Guide than Savannah Lions Warship Scout?

 

[MilesOfficial]

How much better is Goblin Guide than Savannah Lions Warship Scout?

Meaningfully. That second point of toughness on Goblin Guide goes a long way. My experience with Isamaru, Hound of Konda is that it gets made useless by tokens and 1/Xs much less frequently. The haste really does help -- it gets an extra 1+ damage on average over the course of a game because haste matters more the earlier in the game it happens.

That said, Warship Scout is plenty fine. If it's unable to attack in the occasional situation where Goblin Guide could and deals maybe one less damage over the course of a typical game, that matters, and aggressive players can feel the difference -- many games come down to those kinds of margins. But that's the difference between what, for many years, was the best aggressive one-drop in the game and a color-shifted uncommon printed in 1993.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

How much better is Goblin Guide than Savannah Lions Warship Scout?

I think they're pretty comparable, but GG is essentially an uncuttable card for many Cubes with Aggro in my opinion since it is far and away the most fun Red one drop.

Despite the ever-increasing number of Red 1s, most of them still don't offer a lot of fun value. The offerings from the last ~16 months have helped a bit, but I don't think we're quite to the critical mass of cool that I've desired for the past ~7 years now.

 

[Seeker]

I think they're pretty comparable, but GG is essentially an uncuttable card for many Cubes with Aggro in my opinion since it is far and away the most fun Red one drop.

I don't know if I've told this story on this specific forum before!

Back in 2013?ish, I was at PAX East and Dave Humpherys was working the "play against a WotC employee, get a free booster" spellslinging table. I stood in line, sat down opposite him and pulled out literally his World Championship 2003 semifinalist deck from my pocket. Pure chance, I was gonna meet some buddies and jam Worlds decks into each other cause it's way faster/more portable than Cube.

He loved it, we played a couple games because there wasn't any line after me. At one point I asked something like "can you tell me a cool story about being in R&D", he asked me to narrow down, and Goblin Guide is one of my favorite cards - it's still my Arena username - so I said, you got anything about Goblin Guide, or Zendikar in general? And he says actually, Goblin Guide changed in testing.

When they first created it, it put the revealed land directly into play.
Turns out that in any normal Limited game of Zendikar you had a ~40% chance to trigger all your opponent's landfall creatures and get your entire board eaten alive by suddenly enormous blockers.
Oops.

You think it's fun now, imagine how much adrenaline that unplayable version would have produced when you attacked!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

You think it's fun now, imagine how much adrenaline that unplayable version would have produced when you attacked!

The unplayable version sounds miserable TBH