Card/Deck [MCD] Sweeperz
- Thread starter CML
- Start date
I wrote about this in Discord once:
"I'm actually moving towards 4-mana board wipes because I want my "aggro" decks to be built and played having in mind board wipes, so resilience and refueling is important."
Longer version: when I tried 5 mana board wipes, aggro was more incentivized to go under it rather than play around it. That created less tension between overcommitting vs slow rolling threats. Hitting 5 is a lot harder than 4.
In terms of agency: it's good when casting your board wipe the first time you can is as choice and not a forced play. It's also good when a game is not just about trying to goldfish until opponent finds Fumigate + 5 lands.
Does this mean the environment is slower? Yes, and I want this to happen. I don't think it makes aggro inviable - after all, not all decks want to run wraths; aggro has tools to be resilient: blue aggro-control has counters, blue, red and black have card draw, white, black and green have recursion, black has discard, white and red have equipment, etc;
The presence of 4 mana board wipes means people are incentivized to pace their threats instead of going as fast as possible, unless they are sure the opponent doesn't have them. Measuring the odds they have it given how they are playing and what cards you see is a simple, implicit subgame.
In terms of card selection:
Magus of the Disk and Oblivion Stone are the weakest there. They hit artifacts and enchantments though, which is a nice safety valve for control decks. I don't expect them to be played as much as Wrath of God and Damnation, but they are useful pieces to offer.
My environment has small creatures, so Drown in Sorrow, Slice and Dice and Sulfurous Blast are a lot better than in most cubes, close to Wrath and Damnation. They have the added bonus that you can build a control deck with creatures around them, if you mind their toughnesses. They also curb the most aggressive draws in particular.
Wide power band is more of an issue when goods are interchangeable, like good-stuff threats, because then you're never playing the worse ones over the better ones. Board wipes are a separate category and tacking one onto a random deck, despite it being "better" than all cards in the deck, would on average make it worse.
Now, I can be wrong about Magus of the Disk - maybe it's suboptimal to ever play it since it's so vulnerable to removal, but my previous testing experience says that it's playable, especially in midrange control and in conjunction with more creatures to draw removal.