I think Cabal Therapy is a sweet piece of tech that rewards you for being good and punishes you for being not as good. It's always a nice laugh when it misses and a shock when it gets 2 cards with flashback, and I love that kind of dramatic play. I picked one up in a cheap eBay lot (that rad crazy foil new art one) and though it isn't always awesome, it is often enough. Depends a lot on the skill of your drafters though and how whiny they get
Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight
- Thread starter Dom Harvey
- Start date
Chris Taylor
Contributor
and weather or not all the cards in your cube can be found on gatherer
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Maybe you want to run more cabal therapy?
I absolutely am tempted. If I up black's discard suite (something I'd very much like to do), Therapy would probably be my go-to, as it really fortifies the sac theme in black and ties in well with tokens. I'm just not sure where they'd fit, space-wise! Hypnotic Specter is suffering for the same sin; wanting to go into a very full section. Maybe on my Zendikar update... (who am I kidding I'll probably burn more cash on my cube in like two days)
Speaking of warts, that's exactly how I think about Ponder. The re-draw is a huge plus over Brainstorm, but it's much closer than people generally consider since -- again thinking in absence of plentiful shuffle effects -- Ponder is "all or none" and not really "best of three". Brainstorm does have a handful of its own advantages -- of course instant speed, but also the fact that you get all three cards at once, which can mean multiple cards to play use away. Add in minor stuff like Courser interactions, and how goddam good the card is when you DO get to shuffle afterwards, that I think people are pretty severely overrating Ponder while underrating Brainstorm.
Also, re: Pauper -- you're looking only at Delver, which turns the biggest drawback of Ponder into a huge advantage (free Delver flip). Pauper Familiar, for comparison, is an all-in combo deck... and it runs 4 Preordain, 0 Ponder in most instances because Ponder-locking yourself is awful unless you immediately follow it up with your infinite mana/draw/mill combo to win.
Ponder gives you the option of accepting 1 of 3 or shipping them back for a new 1. Brainstorm gives you 1 of three with no option, which is why I'm more inclined to pick Ponder over Brainstorm if I'm not running enough fetches/any Miracles to make Brainstorm feel "good". That said, my format's draft experience is radically different from everyone else's here, so I don't feel that I should talk about why I run 3 Brainstorms, because it's not relevant to anyone here but me.
This is the fundamental misunderstanding/overrating of Ponder that I'm talking about. It's not 1-of-3, it's all three (one now and two later) or a blind re-draw.
(again, speaking in the case of not having a fetchland or Land Tax or whatever to use)
Aoret
Developer
Okay so here's a crazy thought that I had, and have not refined at all. But what if we just.... gave people fetchlands? I don't know what the right number would be, how I'd do it, what changes I'd make to my fetchland count within my 360, etc. But I think it's an interesting thought experiment. The traditional argument against doing something like this is that people enjoy tension between picking fixing and picking spells.
The flip side of this, and the thing I don't hear anybody saying, is that we talk a lot about how our constraints are different because of (and how in some ways we're even limited by!) not having Modern-like or Legacy-like manabases. What if we just got rid of that constraint? Try to ignore the implementation details for a second and just do the thought experiment about what stuff you could do in your cube if you could assume a constructed-like fetchland density. All of this brainstorm being crappy stuff goes away. Our gripes about CC spells or mulitcolored two drops go away.
Granted, I'm sure this creates a whole host of problems that I'm not anticipating, but I feel like this is an untapped design space. RiptideLab has challenged damn near every tenet of cube as a format, but for some reason we've left that stack of basic lands in the cube box untouched. Why?
The flip side of this, and the thing I don't hear anybody saying, is that we talk a lot about how our constraints are different because of (and how in some ways we're even limited by!) not having Modern-like or Legacy-like manabases. What if we just got rid of that constraint? Try to ignore the implementation details for a second and just do the thought experiment about what stuff you could do in your cube if you could assume a constructed-like fetchland density. All of this brainstorm being crappy stuff goes away. Our gripes about CC spells or mulitcolored two drops go away.
Granted, I'm sure this creates a whole host of problems that I'm not anticipating, but I feel like this is an untapped design space. RiptideLab has challenged damn near every tenet of cube as a format, but for some reason we've left that stack of basic lands in the cube box untouched. Why?
Chris Taylor
Contributor
The main downside I see is that
A) people might skimp on manafixing if they know they're being given some baseline (someone with a ULD weigh in on this shit)
B) The guy with lotus cobra and 4 brainstorms gets exactly as many as the red drafter with Zozu
A) people might skimp on manafixing if they know they're being given some baseline (someone with a ULD weigh in on this shit)
B) The guy with lotus cobra and 4 brainstorms gets exactly as many as the red drafter with Zozu
Aoret
Developer
re: the zozu point, I wouldn't force the red drafter to run fetches if he didn't want to, but I think your real point is "where's the love for the monocolored guy?" which is definitely something I'd need to brainstorm about a bit. (Because does anyone actually run Zozu?). I don't really see monocolored being a thing that actually happens here, but I do agree we should help aggro.
I guess the more I think about this the more I'm realizing it's a wildly different design space and probably way more complicated than I can figure out on my own as a designer (although I'm starting to think I'll try it regardless). I do feel like you'd see a shift towards more multicolored decks, which is what has me thinking about wasteland being more necessary to keep people honest.
Re: the people skimping point, I'd honestly be willing to just go to the extreme and say, have a ball and run four of any fetch you'd like. If people still have to get their duals from the draft, I can preserve that tension (I'd cut fetches from the 360 entirely in this case). I have no idea if this is a desirable implementation of the idea. I'm certainly open to other looks. I guess maybe the reason nobody has ever done this is that it's a large investment in proxy time and an even more obscenely large investment in dollars if you were to do it for real.
I guess the more I think about this the more I'm realizing it's a wildly different design space and probably way more complicated than I can figure out on my own as a designer (although I'm starting to think I'll try it regardless). I do feel like you'd see a shift towards more multicolored decks, which is what has me thinking about wasteland being more necessary to keep people honest.
Re: the people skimping point, I'd honestly be willing to just go to the extreme and say, have a ball and run four of any fetch you'd like. If people still have to get their duals from the draft, I can preserve that tension (I'd cut fetches from the 360 entirely in this case). I have no idea if this is a desirable implementation of the idea. I'm certainly open to other looks. I guess maybe the reason nobody has ever done this is that it's a large investment in proxy time and an even more obscenely large investment in dollars if you were to do it for real.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
I support shuffling, library manipulation, and the like more than most people, and even I found that going deep on Brainstorm was only tenable if I also had the other blue selection spells available. The upside on Brainstorm is incredibly high, but the whole point of something like Preordain in a 'normal' blue deck is the lack of prerequisites - I don't always want to fire it off on the first turn, but I can keep a one-lander or a hand with a missing piece because I know Preordain can fill in the gaps. Relying on Brainstorm to fix a sketchy hand and then being locked under it is miserable.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I think that helps illustrate one of the big differences: turn one preordain or ponder is generally fine, turn one brainstorm is generally a misplay.
Good discussion on Brainstorm/Ponder. Can't add anything more than what has already been said. There are good arguments for and against all three of the usual suspects (ponder, brainstorm, preordain).
What do you guys think of Opt? I like that it's instant, even if it's usually less good than the first three.
One thing I've found is that filtering for card quality in cube (where every card in your deck is good) is generally better as a reactionary move (instant) than a proactive or delayed one (sorcery). For example, if my opponent doesn't pressure me, I want to dig for something that furthers my plans and hurts him. If I'm on the back foot though, I want that removal or stop gap spell NOW (because without it I'm probably dead). With a sorcery, I usually have to choose one before I know which I'm going for and that can be costly.
What do you guys think of Opt? I like that it's instant, even if it's usually less good than the first three.
One thing I've found is that filtering for card quality in cube (where every card in your deck is good) is generally better as a reactionary move (instant) than a proactive or delayed one (sorcery). For example, if my opponent doesn't pressure me, I want to dig for something that furthers my plans and hurts him. If I'm on the back foot though, I want that removal or stop gap spell NOW (because without it I'm probably dead). With a sorcery, I usually have to choose one before I know which I'm going for and that can be costly.
Drawing one-of-three CAN MATTER A LOT because that one-now might be a game-winning card this turn and utterly inconsequential at later turns. I shouldn't have to educate anyone on the merits of card selection here. It doesn't matter if those two come later and you don't want them, because this game is won by sequencing plays, and card selection allows you access to even greater control over how you sequence those plays. Getting that one game-winning card is worth drawing two pieces of garbage the next two turns, if that's what it takes to win.
Further: Being able to ship away 3 definitely bad cards that are not helping you win for the chance of better cards is a good move. I really wonder how someone who plays this game could not grasp that. I feel that it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the game to underappreciate the impact a shuffle can have. Like it or not, this game is luck-based and hinges on these randomizations for how games actually play out. Ponder and Brainstorm both can reveal 3 cards that you don't want/need right now; while shuffling them away doesn't guarantee a better position, it does offer the very real possibility of doing better than 3 bad cards you know you don't want right now. This is really an incredibly simple concept to grasp, and I don't see why anyone would need to have their hand held to get it. If your topdeck is 3 lands, or a dead piece of removal and a fatty you can't win with and a land, Brainstorm is pretty worthless. If your topdeck is 3 lands, Ponder can, through the joys of randomization, potentially give you a better string of draws. Can you control it? No, of course you can't, it's friggin random. Accept it and appreciate it, though, because a Ponder shuffle can lead to wins that Brainstorm simply couldn't. Though it is the ever-scorned "anecdotal evidence", real-world gameplay will attest to situations where Ponder's shuffle leads to a win that Brainstorm's 3-card-dig/no-shuffle self cannot. Is it random? Yes. Will Ponder shuffling sometimes be an incorrect play? Obviously, but I can't care about misplays, I'm building a skill-testing format, not rock'em sock'em Magic.
But despite the random elements, and despite the fact that it won't always be needed or phenomenal, Ponder is still better, and yes, due to the shuffle option on a 1-mana card selection tool.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Just to clarify for those following along but who hasn't really played with these cards in the wild: with the right support, brainstorm is much more powerful of a card than preordain or ponder (both of which are very powerful cards in their own right) and plays completely different.
Preordain and ponder (and too a much lesser extent serum visions) are two of the strongest pure card filtering/card quality spells ever printed, and you can just fire those off turn one if you want to fix your hand. Alternately, you can top deck one in the late game, and fire it off looking for whatever you need to win or stabilize. Ponder is a very challenging card to play because the decision to shuffle or not can be pretty intense, as well as how you want to sequence your next several draws. The card requires you to look at three cards, and predict how you think those next several turns will play out, and whether you are better off with a blind draw or not.
I think this is why kevin and I aren't seeing eye to eye on the card, as i.m.o if you are playing ponder well, you should never (or at least rarely) ever feel like you are "ponder locked." That, to me, means you are just misplayed ponder.
Brainstorm is a card that you ideally want to be firing later in the game, on your mainphase, with a fetchland in hand or play, and some chaff to put back TOL and shuffle away. If you play brainstorm like that, its much more like ancestral recall than it is a card selection spell like ponder or preordain.
This is not a card that you want to be casting EOT if you can avoid it, or firing off turn 1 to fix your hand. Once you add abundant fetchlands to the mix, it completly changes the nature of the card and how its plays, from being a (quite frankly) terrible draw smoother (which is what it basically is in pauper) to being a card that emulates one of the most powerful draw spells in the game: ancestral recall. This is why it defines legacy and is restricted in vintage.
Now, the fact that it has a bunch of other utility with discard spells or TOL manipulation or can function as a terrible draw smoother in a pinch is nice, but the real worth of the card is rooted in its ability to do an amazing ancestral recall impersonation.
And the depth of play behind it is incredible (with fetchlands), far exceeding ponder, and probably only rivaled by cabal therapy, and gifts ungiven.
Preordain and ponder (and too a much lesser extent serum visions) are two of the strongest pure card filtering/card quality spells ever printed, and you can just fire those off turn one if you want to fix your hand. Alternately, you can top deck one in the late game, and fire it off looking for whatever you need to win or stabilize. Ponder is a very challenging card to play because the decision to shuffle or not can be pretty intense, as well as how you want to sequence your next several draws. The card requires you to look at three cards, and predict how you think those next several turns will play out, and whether you are better off with a blind draw or not.
I think this is why kevin and I aren't seeing eye to eye on the card, as i.m.o if you are playing ponder well, you should never (or at least rarely) ever feel like you are "ponder locked." That, to me, means you are just misplayed ponder.
Brainstorm is a card that you ideally want to be firing later in the game, on your mainphase, with a fetchland in hand or play, and some chaff to put back TOL and shuffle away. If you play brainstorm like that, its much more like ancestral recall than it is a card selection spell like ponder or preordain.
This is not a card that you want to be casting EOT if you can avoid it, or firing off turn 1 to fix your hand. Once you add abundant fetchlands to the mix, it completly changes the nature of the card and how its plays, from being a (quite frankly) terrible draw smoother (which is what it basically is in pauper) to being a card that emulates one of the most powerful draw spells in the game: ancestral recall. This is why it defines legacy and is restricted in vintage.
Now, the fact that it has a bunch of other utility with discard spells or TOL manipulation or can function as a terrible draw smoother in a pinch is nice, but the real worth of the card is rooted in its ability to do an amazing ancestral recall impersonation.
And the depth of play behind it is incredible (with fetchlands), far exceeding ponder, and probably only rivaled by cabal therapy, and gifts ungiven.
yes
sparingly so
very much yes. I'd recommend anyone interested in learning more about how Brainstorm works in Legacy check out this (heavily-cut-down) four-thousand-word AJ Sacher article, "Fishing Lessons - Pondering Brainstorm". It's a brief (yes, this is brief) attempt to deconstruct Brainstorm's history, play options, and what it brings to Legacy that makes her fundamentally different from other Magic formats. A few choice quotes, because I know not everyone's gonna read the whole thing:
As an aside, it's kinda astonishing to me how many people will play out lands they don't need to, especially if they're not looking for shuffle triggers. Don't crack that third fetch! That top-decked land is a card until you play it, then it's nothing.
literally this entire paragraph can apply to brainstorm, and in fact every point you make applies BETTER to brainstorm since you can keep and instantly use all three cards if you put back some chaff cards that were previously sitting in your hand.
no, that's my entire point. it has to be "played well"... just like brainstorm. it doesn't smooth draws on its own. they both have pros and cons but are very fundamentally similar.
ponder IS probably slightly better on its own, since even a 20-fetchland 360 cube can't come close the density of shuffle effects of legacy and the free re-draw beats the many smaller advantages of brainstorm. but it's very close, yet a ton of people -- filthy curs of the unspeakable "other" cube forums, and even a lot of people here -- keep trudging onward with the BRAINSTORM BAD, PONDER GOOD idea which i think is hooey.
tl;dr bernie sanders + vice president preordain '16
(i also like serum visions a lot as a "fill in your curve when you have open mana and smooth out your draws" effect, more than opt or... sleight of hand, or whatever second-tier motley crue we have to choose from)
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
The number of times I Ponder, see three cards I don't want, and throw them back is substantial - not quite 50%, but also closer to that than I would've guessed when I first tossed it in. I think some folks might be underestimating how good the "scry ALL of these cards away" option is, as well as how often that's the correct choice.
sorry -- this is just a fundamentally wrong assessment of magic cards, like saying wind-scarred crag is better than battlefield forge due to its life-gain
it's not that hard to look back at a format that allowed 4 ponder, 4 preordain, but has zero fetchlands. it's m12 standard. here's a sample top 8 from a major tournament: http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/usnat11/welcome#1
by FAR the dominant deck was caw-blade, a blue control deck which played... four preordain, zero ponder. the actual finals were won by a DIFFERENT blue control deck... that also used four preordain zero ponder.
the only deck to use ponder at all (in the top 8) was an all-in, pyromancer ascension combo deck.
fugue seems like a decent option at the same mana cost, and i have good memories of it from ancient (slow) draft formats... though i guess it's strictly worse than mind shatter
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
That is relevent to a ponder vs. preordain comparison, not a ponder vs. brainstorm comparison in a fetchlandless or fetchland light environment.
For your reference, the response to my post which I was responding to was:
I don't mean to come across here as rude, but I really don't see what your contention is.
Ponder has a built in shuffle effect, while brainstorm does not. Brainstorm is dependent upon environmental shuffles, while ponder is not. This makes ponder the better draw smoother if you lack a shuffle effect. This is evidenced by the texts of the card.
You even liked the post where Eric pointed out ponder's value of being able to just shuffle away the three cards ponder revealed, as well as liking safra's post that talked about the importance of holding brainstorm in legacy unless you have a fetch.
What are we arguing about here? Is this what trolling is like?
If thats the case I surrender: you can shoot those brainstorms off without shuffles, if you want to believe its only slightly worse than casting ponder thats fine by me.
hey i feel like it hits one- and three- colour decks hardest actually, my three-colour decks have lots of multi-colour spells so you get extra hits even if you ostensibly make the wrong choice. I don't really know though, gotta test it!
Thinking more about this card and I have this sneaking suspicion that it's, uh, good. It's blanked pretty hard in standard but if your Villain takes turn one to cast a spell or play a scryland (super realistic options) it lets you ramp 1-2-4 and turns into a genuinely solid card. As I've been shifting my mana jumps from 1-3-4 to 1-2-4 (using the three-mana slots to go a little harder and heavier than twos while still not quite feeling as giant as four+ ones do makes for a cool dynamic) I'm looking at (the buy-a-box promo version of) this guy again and I just feel like if it isn't trading with all the tokens in standard it's gonna be doing some coooooolllllllll thingsssss. It feels like the kind of mana dork Sultai/Jund want to land a t3 four-drop, for instance. Maybe Sylvan Caryatid is just better for that goal, though, and maybe Sultai doesn't need the help.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
We really don't have mono colored decks here, so for us its not really an issue. I know you like devotion and other mechanics that push people towards mono colored, so it would probably be a poor choice for you.