A common problem with +1/+1 counter decks and go-wide decks is drawing the deck out of order, and
Relief Captain is a good example of this problem. If your hand is full of this sort of middling pump effect but you need to go a bit wider to capitalize on them, or if your hand is full of 1/1 producers and you aren't ripping a way to make use of them from the top of your deck, you're probably going to lose in a few turns, and you're not going to have a fun time of doing it.
Relief Captain furthers this feast or famine dilemma; a 3/2 body with no keywords and an awkward ETB is unacceptable at 4cmc, and only passable if you're getting at
least 2 targets for it. That's a bad card.
Given that this deck is often best centered in
, this problem of "I need to draw my deck in the right order or I lose" is a common one; both colors typically have terrible card draw/selection abilities, especially in these lower-power, oops-all-chaff formats, and this doesn't go anywhere near addressing the problems such decks can face. To help those sort of decks, you
really need to reward them when variance gives them their cards in the right order or when they stretch their deck to address the core problems of it (by including card draw/selection tools to help them from falling behind like
Arcane Encyclopedia or
Alchemist's Vial, for example).
Relief Captain does neither.
Of course, amateur drafters, or drafters playing in a format that fail to give them what their deck wants (card draw/selection tools) or what makes it enjoyable (sequence-testing combo pieces) often hope to overcome this inherent weakness by brute force, packing their deck with these narrow payoffs like
Reward Captain and hoping it'll be enough to address the variance of the game. This makes for a boring, on-rails draft where you scoop up all the 12th-pick unplayables nobody else wants because it is glaringly obvious it was intended for your "color pair archetype" and not theirs, and once you get to the actual games, there's very little skill involved; it encourages an incredibly linear and common strategy to be performed with limited input from the pilot for a very mediocre reward.
Note that these reasons also explain why
Goldnight Commander sees play at lower power levels: it's a bad body, but it's a go-wide card that doesn't punish you for drawing it early and committing it to the board before you've got enough go-wide tools, and it offers a lot of power if you sequence your plays cleverly, testing the pilot's skill and rewarding them for demonstrating good game sense.
