Card/Deck Low Power Card Spotlight

it's a good low power card for retail to standard-y cubes.
i would want to add +1/+1 or -1 mana, -0/-1 to run it in older-format power levels.

my experience with double spell in general is that it gets worse as power level decreases because cards that your drafters are forced to maindeck cost more mana and dont generate as much value on their own, which makes double spelling repeatedly harder.
 


What are people's opinions on this card? Is it good? Is it too powerful for lower power levels?

In a lower-powered cube, a 3MV gold card is going to be halfway to a turn 4 play on average unless your drafters focus on fixing. Even at low power levels, paying 4 mana for "draw an extra card every turn" is strong but rarely oppressive. For context, even my reject cube, a purposely de-powered environment, cut Phyrexian Arena a few years ago for not being compelling enough.

This card is 1) two colors, 2) a creature, thus easier to remove, and 3) requires you to spend resources to get the extra card every turn. It can't snowball snowball because you're maxed out to once a turn and you're only getting one card when you need two to get the effect out of it. It seems super safe imo, but still totally playable and fun.
 


In a cube that has both Amass and Heroic as available archetypes, is it insane to run Wildspeaker as support for a hypothetical UG Ramp deck with some bounce land untap?
 


In a cube that has both Amass and Heroic as available archetypes, is it insane to run Wildspeaker as support for a hypothetical UG Ramp deck with some bounce land untap?
I think a play pattern you're often going to run into with Garruk Wildspeaker is "+1 mana–>Overrun" in decks that don't pay too much attention to the cute untap synergy stuff. The card is powerful enough that players can easily use it as a good value card in divergent strategies aside from the decks you're trying to support. That's not necessarily an issue, but just remember that people are going to play Garruk Wildspeaker well outside of his intended purpose more often than other synergy cards.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I think a play pattern you're often going to run into with Garruk Wildspeaker is "+1 mana–>Overrun" in decks that don't pay too much attention to the cute untap synergy stuff. The card is powerful enough that players can easily use it as a good value card in divergent strategies aside from the decks you're trying to support. That's not necessarily an issue, but just remember that people are going to play Garruk Wildspeaker well outside of his intended purpose more often than other synergy cards.
Honestly, I typically play wildspeaker as beasterblossom, so your mileage my vary :p
 
Garruk's a solid lad. I think that playing him as a three 3/3s in a trenchcoat or a slow overrun is totally fine — having a card that's a completely different roleplayer in a bunch of different decks is fun and cool.

That could actually make a good thread, honestly — just a list of solid Planeswalkers that fit into different roles in different decks.
 
I think I'm perfectly fine with having a card that _can_ do some cutesy stuff but also stands on its own.

I'll try to remember to put in enough planeswalker removal to not make them too annoying.
Sounds great! There's a lot of good Planeswalker removal nowadays that also doubles as creature removal, so that really helps to seamlessly integrate Planeswalkers into more Cubes.
 
Garruk is also one of those planeswalkers where getting them off the board by attacking them isn't unreasonable., so you might not even need to increase your planeswalker-ok removal density all that much.
 
Fortunate Few is a poor man's Tragic Arrogance. Oddly Uneven is silver-bordered, but wipes all Goats without touching the troll (or the other way around, I suppose).
Oddly Uneven sounds fun, I will try that one.

EDIT: Actually I checked and most creatures in the cube have an even number of words in their names, so it wouldn't work well (if you kill the goats you are probably leaving other creatures alive).
 
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Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
A few notes on those suggestion; Single Combat disappointed in testing and played far worse then expected, and Sculpted Sunburst is iffy because it does nothing if you can't choose a creature (either because you don't have one or because your only creature got Swords'ed in response). By Invitation is great, but doesn't synergize with the troll because your opponent is up two creatures after playing it.
 
Am I the only person who likes...

?

Like, on the surface, it's just a tribal support piece for a tribe that very few people are going to be supporting outside of, I dunno, an Innistrad cube. But it shines if combat tricks are a thing in your format. In that kind of environment, it replaces itself if villain tries to remove it and builds up a mini-army when you pump it.

The only real downside is that man does the flavortext suck. What is it with the Werewolves of Innistrad and dry, explain-y flavortext?
 
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