Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

[Onderzeeboot]

I legitimately can't tell if you're actually trying to argue against the quoted text or agree with it, because you seem to be restating my points. (I will say that you're using "triggered" awfully loosely here, and you'd be better served just saying "bothered".)

Sorry, non-native speaker here, thanks for the suggestion

The point I was trying to make is that Thoughtseize is not the root of the negative variance, and it's a bad reason, in my opinion, to cut it from your cube. Yes it stings when you have to mulligan and your opponent answers with Thoughtseize, but Inquisition of Kozilek hurts just as much in that scenario, because it too will strip you of your presumably only early play. The real reason you lose these games is not because your opponent cast Thoughtseize, it's because you had to mulligan. The negative variance, in this case, is caused by the inherent randomness of the game.

Of course, if you want to cut cards, like one mana discard spells, that punish mulligans that's fine, but competitive alternatives to Thoughtseize, like IoK, punish a mulligan just as well in most of these corner cases. You're not losing the game because your opponent stripped away your 4+ drop.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

 

[NimbusToad]

That being said, we aren't talking about a metagame with one copy of Thoughtseize, but a metagame where there could be a suite of 1cc targeted discard cards.

I guess in the end these cards are too situationally good for me to worry about them when they give Black a way to interact powerfully and uniquely. I would always rather a Lightning Bolt or a Counterspell (except perhaps in my opening hand vs a combo deck - but my cube doesn't support those).

 

[sigh]

Black definitely doesn't need discard to be good. It's probaby one of the stronger colors in my cube, and it is because of the graveyard synergies. Why does it have to have another focus besides that? There certainly.isn't just one angle to the GY so it seems like a pretty rich color as far as Ive seen in my cube's drafts.

I do run thoughtsieze, by the by. Don't really see it used, though? Am thinking about taking it out for something like Blackmail cuz I guess people don't value it highly anyway, so might as well not accidentally ruin someone's Saturday night? Really on board with reducing negative variance if I can.

 

[sigh]

Discard spell that I really love and can provide important protection against boardwipes and control effects, while doing tons of other cool stuff at the same time

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yeah, Collective Brutality is really sweet!

 

[Dom Harvey]

Nobody has shown yet that Thoughtseize taking your best card in a subpar draw creates any more non-games or negative variance than Bolt killing your T1 Birds in a mana-light draw or Mana Leak countering your one threat that you spent your whole turn to play. Those are effects that AFAIK everybody here not only doesn't object to but actively tries to pack into their Cubes. Thoughtseize suddenly being the symbol of everything that's wrong with power-max Cubes is baffling to me. The utility of discard in particular scales with the format's power band - if most cards are 3/10s but some are 8/10s, sniping those is crucial - and it's more important in a high-powered environment where cards' inherent power let them dominate games by themselves, but that doesn't mean that Thoughtseize itself is oppressive "in the same way" at all. Opposition is a platinum hit in any format you put it in. Thoughtseize is... a good card that you'll take in the middle of the pack if you're in black. That's true in Holiday Cube and it's true in Theros Limited.

Also, the logic that allows thoughtseize also allows other similar cards: IOK, wasteland etc. Either we're commited to reducing this type of negative variance or we're not

The logic that allows something allows similar things in the right quantities at the right power level. Who is forcing you to make this binary choice? Do I fall into a time paradox if I include Thoughtseize in my Cube but not Wasteland?

If we're applying the same arguments to Thoughtseize as Sol Ring we may as well stop using card names altogether because all cards are the same and any example is purely hypothetical


P.S. Thoughtseize can also:

- Allow your synergistic deck to remove the answer that would bring your house of cards down
- Allow your slower deck to break up a nut draw, opening the game instead of condensing it
- Force you to consider the pacing of the game so that you can time your Thoughtseize properly to get your threat to stick
- Extend the period of relevance for less powerful early plays, removing some of the swinginess inherent in many aggro draws (as Grillo argues in his thread; now, if you want to argue against Hymn to Tourach...)


P.P.S. You don't have esteemed competitive players writing in-depth strategic analysis about Sol Ring

 

[sigh]

I think the primary difference is that Thoughtsieze feels worse. You don't even get to try your cool game plan, it just sorta withers away. The hand info thing is stacked on feel-bad. Same argument against land destruction. People want to actually try. Personally, a bolted bird doesn't feel as bad as a thoughtsiezed bird that leads to a game loss later from no drawn lands. One feels like you interacted and your deck screwed you over, the other feels like thoughtsieze stripped away your keep able hand and you lost without being able to even start. Just a personal experience take on it.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

It also represents a non-interaction when you fire it off. Its like you're just warping the game start in a weird one sided manner. Maybe it feels different when you have a lot of fow in a format, but it feels terrible otherwise, and the way it affects mulligan decisions feels unhealthy. The only way you can play around it is by not taking advantage of a core game rule designed to produce better games. Why would someone print a card like that, much less reprint it.

The bird-bolt play actually represents some form of shared interaction, which we at least conceptually want.

 

[RavebornMuse]

Nobody has shown yet that Thoughtseize taking your best card in a subpar draw creates any more non-games or negative variance than Bolt killing your T1 Birds in a mana-light draw or Mana Leak countering your one threat that you spent your whole turn to play. Those are effects that AFAIK everybody here not only doesn't object to but actively tries to pack into their Cubes. Thoughtseize suddenly being the symbol of everything that's wrong with power-max Cubes is baffling to me. The utility of discard in particular scales with the format's power band - if most cards are 3/10s but some are 8/10s, sniping those is crucial - and it's more important in a high-powered environment where cards' inherent power let them dominate games by themselves, but that doesn't mean that Thoughtseize itself is oppressive "in the same way" at all. Opposition is a platinum hit in any format you put it in. Thoughtseize is... a good card that you'll take in the middle of the pack if you're in black. That's true in Holiday Cube and it's true in Theros Limited.

This analysis of "bolting the bird" also spoiling games completely misses the fact that your bolt does nothing to my Wall of Omens, Wrath of God, Farseek, Mind Stone, or any of a plethora of cards I could have in hand that are critical to me being able to do anything after a shaky mulligan. It also ignores the fact that keeping a 1-lander and a Birds of Paradise is a very risky hand to keep, and that keeping that hand is a calculated risk. I can keep Birds of Paradise on a one-lander and make that calculated risk, knowing full well that a T1 Lightning Bolt will undo me. But those aren't the only sorts of games that Thoughtseize will ruin, and Thoughtseize ruins the "bolt the bird" game in a way that Bolt doesn't, by forcing me to reveal my hand.

Let's move beyond the bird roast and look at other times that Lightning Bolt won't replicate Thoughtseize in any way. I can also keep, for example, that 2-lander and a Wall of Omens or a Farseek and hope for the best, or 4 lands, a Thraben Inspector, and a Wrath of God and feel comfortable enough in my do-nothing hand that I probably won't lose before drawing into something else because, hey, at least I have this boardwipe if I start flooding. Thoughtseize decimates each of these perfectly reasonable keeps in a way that Lightning Bolt doesn't, because 1. it can strip any non-land card, whereas Lightning Bolt has much finer parameters for what it can answer, and 2. Thoughtseize insists being played out immediately for maximum value, whereas Lightning Bolt is significantly more flexible about its timing, and 3. Thoughtseize not only answers one of my cards in-hand, it also lets you know what else I could possibly play, allowing you to craft some great follow-up turns based off of this information and denying me the chance to bluff my way forward with a bad hand.

Sure, Mana Leak can similarly wreck most of these hands; but that's matching my cards with your answers in an appropriate fashion, because you paid the opportunity cost of leaving mana up to counter, and you take a calculated risk Leaking my, say, Farseek, not knowing that I'm land-light and counting on Farseek to keep me in the game. Thoughtseize not only denies me all hope in response to each of these hypothetical, reasonable mulligans, it also lets you know how screwed I am. Mana Leak lacks this feature. I don't know about you, but if I'm on control, I'm not Mana Leaking a Wall of Omens typically; I'm saving my counterspells for something a little spicier. And ignoring that play means my 2-land hand digs deeper into my deck for land, which might just allow me to recover from the less-than-perfect mulligan I kept. And these aren't pie-in-the-sky, you-were-never-gonna-win mulligan keeps, either! These were perfectly acceptable hands, that were wrecked before the game even had a chance to get underway.

Thoughtseize in each of these scenarios is such a significant blow, that even comparing it to a Counterspell/Murder hybrid doesn't do it justice, because you also get to see how bad my hand is post-removal. I really can't stress this enough; it gives you a full license to play out aggressively as you please and run me over because you can make certain assumptions or calculations about where my hand might develop, and it's all thanks to this one little card. It's a very powerful effect.

(sidenote: I hate these Amonkhet invocation arts appearing on mouse-over now... I wish we could get rid of them!)

 

[Chris Taylor]

Look, I'd be super interested in what we WOULD like

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Discard spell that I really love and can provide important protection against boardwipes and control effects, while doing tons of other cool stuff at the same time

Yes, thats a vastly superior card both design wise, and within the context of a cube.

It actually helps address negative variance, as the modal nature coupled with discard helps address mana flooding. + it has incidental lifegain, which is always in demand and hard to find.

10/10 would like again.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I love how we clearly have two opposing camps here. We can keep arguing back and forth, but that won't change the fact that "we" think you're making a giant mountain out of a tiny molehill, and "you" think we're ignoring the negative impact Thoughtseize has (can have?) on a game of Magic. Dom sums it up perfectly for me, there's a bunch of scenarios where Thoughtseize actually opens up games, and only a few where it single-handedly ends a game. Axing Thoughtseize feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. I also don't feel like we're closing the "divide". I read your arguments and still think, well, mountain, anthill... I suppose my argument that you are actually blaming Thoughtseize for the inherent negative variance of the game (a.k.a. mulligans suck harder than Thoughtseize) evokes a similar reaction from you in the other direction, anthill, mountain... Anyway, I saw plenty of eloquent arguments from "you", but none of them convinced me to change my stance, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. In short, it seems we reached an impasse, and more arguing about Thoughtseize isn't going to change that.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I suppose my argument that you are actually blaming Thoughtseize for the inherent negative variance of the game

We aren't, we're saying it accentuates the games inherent negative variance, and that there is no reason to do so, when you can run targeted discard spells that do the same thing without accentuating one of magic's design problems. Especially within the context of a hypothetical competitive format, where we want to get negative variance as close to 0 as possible. No one is actively trying to persuade anyone from cutting it from a casual format. I run all sorts of silly things in my formats, but this discussion is a different context.

I'm a bit at a loss that this is an issue. It seems like a basic presupposition that if we were to sit down and actively craft a competitive magic format we would want to purge negative variance enhancers, and either get rid of them completely or replace them with more benign options, which is something we can clearly do here. This seems like level 0 of this type of design, on a card thats a middling pick in cube anyways, that occasionally works against our format's own stated design specs for no real unique format benefit. No wonder its 2017 and WOTC is still obliviously printing variance machines for their flagship competitive format.

Its not like we can't just put collective brutality in that slot and have our cake and eat it too.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Can I just shrug, agree to disagree, reaffirm that Collective Brutality is indeed a cool card, and leave it at that now? I don't feel like repeating myself ad infinitum here.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I really quite like the Thoughtseize family of cards, but that may be a personal bias towards cheap hyper-efficient 'interaction'. It feels great to cast, and yes sometimes it sucks to be on the receiving end, but I don't personally find it more negative of a feeling than other scenarios.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I'ld like to add that, if we're building a cube that appeals to competitive people, replacing constructed all stars with anonymous alternatives feels off. Thoughtseize will appeal to a competitive mind because they know it's a (very) good card, and because there's recognition, or how should I put it... Nostalgia of sorts? It has been a constructed staple across formats, so people will appreciate that the card is in the cube for that reason. If you replace Thoughtseize with, say, Blackmail, you're dropping the card that resonates for a card that doesn't, for the, in my honest opinion, negligible benefit of eliminating an extremely limited percentage of nongames.

 

[ahadabans]

The more I think on this thoughtseize argument the more I feel it might just be a difference in power level.

In a lower powered list, things are more "fair" and the meta sort of revolves around incremental advantages gained from synergy (either early game or late game depending on how your deck is constructed). Disruption is maybe more punishing here? The higher power level you go though, I think the more critical it becomes as a balancing piece for decks trying to battle degeneracy. I actually think the effect is indispensable beyond a certain power threshold.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I'ld like to add that, if we're building a cube that appeals to competitive people

Think of it as we're building a format for people that absolutely hate negative variance in game play, because each time it arises they know it will cost them thousands of dollars in high stakes gameplay.

They're competing at a very high level, with an incredibly small skill-gap between players, and they are hyper-sensitive to even very tiny fluctuations in consistency.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Think of it as we're building a format for people that absolutely hate negative variance in game play, because each time it arises they know it will cost them thousands of dollars in high stakes gameplay.

They're competing at a very high level, with an incredibly small skill-gap between players, and they are hyper-sensitive to even very tiny fluctuations in consistency.

Yeah, I don't buy it. Sure, coin flip cards are horrible, and a format solely decided by who opens the best bomb also sucks, but that doesn't mean they can't handle any variance. If you can't handle that to the extent you're describing here, you don't play Magic. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a limited high stakes tournament end in a room full of tantrum-throwing adults. Give them some credit please.

Also, it's impossible to weed out any and all negative variance, as removing one card just causes another one to be responsible for the most annoying losses. It's a great idea to cut the biggest offenders, i.e. cards that will lead to a nongame the majority of games in which they are played. Obviously the big problem cards like Sol Ring, Time Walk, and Ancestral Recall, and even lesser offenders like Opposition, Hymn to Tourach and Armageddon. Thoughtseize is just not one of those cards, especially not in the wide competitive format we are postulating. The most it can be is a one for one, it can't nab lands, and it doesn't undo a play by the opponent (it just prevents it), so in the vast majority of games the player on the receiving end has the time to draw out of trouble. I'm not arguing it's not a good card, because it is, it's just, imho, not the bogeyman you are making it out to be. If you want to reduce negative variance in a draft format, try setting up a wide power band, lowering the average mana cost of cards, and making sure there are a plethora of balanced archetypes available instead.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yeah, I don't buy it. Sure, coin flip cards are horrible, and a format solely decided by who opens the best bomb also sucks, but that doesn't mean they can't handle any variance. If you can't handle that to the extent you're describing here, you don't play Magic. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a limited high stakes tournament end in a room full of tantrum-throwing adults. Give them some credit please.

Also, it's impossible to weed out any and all negative variance, as removing one card just causes another one to be responsible for the most annoying losses. It's a great idea to cut the biggest offenders, i.e. cards that will lead to a nongame the majority of games in which they are played. Obviously the big problem cards like Sol Ring, Time Walk, and Ancestral Recall, and even lesser offenders like Opposition, Hymn to Tourach and Armageddon. Thoughtseize is just not one of those cards, especially not in the wide competitive format we are postulating. The most it can be is a one for one, it can't nab lands, and it doesn't undo a play by the opponent (it just prevents it), so in the vast majority of games the player on the receiving end has the time to draw out of trouble. I'm not arguing it's not a good card, because it is, it's just, imho, not the bogeyman you are making it out to be. If you want to reduce negative variance in a draft format, try setting up a wide power band, lowering the average mana cost of cards, and making sure there are a plethora of balanced archetypes available instead.

Well thats great. I agree that magic is a poor competitive scene compared to other e-sports, which in theory we were going to address in our thought experiment, before our great debate over the significance of running a card that can undermine our own mulligan rules. I know that you're 100% ok with that, or that its not a big deal, or that its just not going to happen enough for it to bother you. Thankfully, as was mentioned many posts ago, we have collective brutality to run instead, which fills the same function, but does so in a way that reduces negative variance, rather than accentuating it, as well as just being a better all-around cube card. It might even be a better overall design.

But than you wouldn't be able to continue arguing with me.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Think of it as we're building a format for people that absolutely hate negative variance in game play, because each time it arises they know it will cost them thousands of dollars in high stakes gameplay.

They're competing at a very high level, with an incredibly small skill-gap between players, and they are hyper-sensitive to even very tiny fluctuations in consistency.

I think if people hate variance so much they should pick a different game.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Well thats great. I agree that magic is a poor competitive scene compared to other e-sports, which in theory we were going to address in our thought experiment, before our great debate over the significance of running a card that can undermine our own mulligan rules. I know that you're 100% ok with that, or that its not a big deal, or that its just not going to happen enough for it to bother you. Thankfully, as was mentioned many posts ago, we have collective brutality to run instead, which fills the same function, but does so in a way that reduces negative variance, rather than accentuating it, as well as just being a better all-around cube card. It might even be a better overall design.

But than you wouldn't be able to continue arguing with me.

Well, like I said before, I don't think we are ever going to see eye to eye on this, but I'm not one to turn down a discussion. You're as guilty of that as I am though

Collective Brutality, while a great design, does not fill the same function as Thoughtseize. It's a two drop, which means it interferes much more with developing your board on curve. It only targets instants, sorceries, and small creatures, which means it doesn't adress black's biggest weaknesses, i.e. artifacts and enchantments. Thoughtseize is a proactive answer that can be run on curve, and as such is a much better disruptive spell in the early game. I believe we should make room for both of those cards in this hypothetical competitive environment. I wouldn't have bothered continuing the argument if I thought there was a valid replacement for Thoughtseize. IoK is close (and should also be in imo), but doesn't solve your objections to Thoughtseize anyway.

Edit: In fact I run all three in my own cube, plus Harsh Scrutiny because I like scrying. I've never had any nongames because of any of these discard spells, though Thoughtseize into Necromancy reanimating a Ruric Thar did cause some grumbling. Nobody blamed the Thoughtseize there though.

 

[Aston]

Look, I'd be super interested in what we WOULD like

Cabal Therapy!

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I think if people hate variance so much they should pick a different game.

Thats a valid opinion.

Its interesting, since WOTCs might than be correct in using competitive magic as purely a card marketing mechanism. In that lens, making magic more competitive with other e-sports is not desirable, and the trick would be to push the illusion of competitiveness enough to keep the pro players coming back, at least until the current system obviously and empirically breaks down.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

The good news is that there are obviously famous faces in Magic, people that rise to the top tables time and again despite the variance inherent to the game. Also, Hearthstone is successful as an e-sport, and has much more variance than Magic, so I don't think that's what's holding back Magic