Opponent goes t1
Champion of the Parish, t2 Gather the Townsfolk on the play. Hits you for 3. You untap and
Volcanic Hammer the champ. They untap, hit you for 2, then play
Fabled Hero. You untap, cast
Augur of Bolas, hit a
Hero's Downfall, pass. They untap,
Bonds of Faith their
Fabled Hero and smash you, leaving up 1W.
Opponent goes t1
Champion of the parish, t2
Gather the Townsfolk on the play. Before combat you
Lightning Bolt the champ. Untap, t2
Augur of Bolas hitting a
Hero's Downfall. They untap, no attacks, no spells for the turn. You untap, land go. They untap, land,
Fabled Hero leaving up W, go.
I loved this post except I think the example is kinda super wrongheaded. For one, I would have just as much luck against that start with a shock as a bolt. It feels pretty wrong killing 1 drops with 2cc spells, but thats why one drops are good and I can get behind that entirely, but what you have to remember is unless you are really holding the right card for the job, most of the strong white and black removal options tend to fall between the 2-3 cc mark. I guess white has it's ousts and whatever and I'm probably not giving those the credit they deserve.
I really feel for whoever is playing this Auger - Hammer - Demise deck too, that guy was probably really reaching.
Ah I could go on and on about this subject, but truly I am glad grillo is having such a great time with the cube he's decided to sculpt, and all this conversation has been serving to make me really want to draft some triple theros as MC was saying. If he's got a great format for building megadorks and making control decks around profitable blocks, more power to him. I've enjoyed those formats and although I find combat somewhat daunting sometimes, I really think more cubes could use more emphasis on blocking.
I've got a lot of angles I'd like to cover here, but I keep getting drawn back to 2 points when I see these posts.
- 1) I don't like this association between control and midranged you guys seem to foster a lot. When those decks start getting too inbred I feel like it's a sign of a problem and I don't really see that as being overly related to how accessible cheap trades are in your cube. Like good removal does a lot more to make midranged decks feel dumb then they do for aggro decks in my opinion, and my goal in most control decks I'm playing is to get to a point where I am casting more than one spell per turn or spending mana activating a permanent like a man land, not really going above anyone's head or crushing spirits with grave titans upon baneslayers one after another. If anything I find better removal forces control decks to rely less on stabilizing dumb idiots (total midranged move bro) and makes midranged a scarier bet because now aggro decks and control decks can make their 5 mana werewolf look really dumb, or feel less bad about killing a thragtusk because they ended up out a lot of mana for their beast token. It's not as if threats aren't super resistant to removal these days anyway.
- 2) My understanding of removal is very much around the lines I was describing earlier as tempo plays. I feel like it's also more important to have slight removal for one deck than the others and I think it helps foster diversity. I think there's also the problem I've brought up before that premium removal is exciting for most decks but usually more accessible to midranged and aggro than control. I pretty much don't want removal if I'm not trading up. If I'm more concerned with simply not dying I'm already wrong footed and my deck isn't doing something right and I might as well just pack it in. Wanting removal to push damage through or to feel safe are real situations that do come up, but the whole idea there is that this thing needs to be giving me tempo dollars or why am I not just playing a creature deck. Like lightning bolt is a special case, but for the most part removal spells are really shitty cards compared to creatures if they aren't going some distance for you. Like this thing can't attack. It has two major advantages that you need to be making use of for the card to be functionally a smart decision, it avoids your opponent's decision making for the most part and it should be in bad cases be trading more or less evenly with the cost of the opposing creature at your leisure. Now this rule applies less to traditional limited for me, but I'm taking a constructed line here because cube is full of yavimaya elders and other such value creatures or monsters that are hard to deal with.
When I think about this stuff I always remember an early flores article on Mirrodin where he looked at platinum angel and said something like "it's got a good ability, but that's 7 mana for a 4/4 and in this format 4/4s cost 0-2 mana." Look at how good your attacking creatures are. Look how resourceful threats are these days. If you're trying to cultivate a lot of diversity in your archetypes I think more thought could be put into how you nurture the control deck and make it feel distinct from "go bigger than aggro" or "good stuff". Do you guys know how awful it feels to mana leak a frogmite? Like thank god almighty for vedalkan shackles because you don't win games by trading instants and sorceries down all day. And every Compulsive Research is putting you farther and farther behind in the spend all your money game. We've all played starcraft right? We are talking about a format with incredible saturation of strong and aggressive body 1 and 2 drops and we are really having a conversation about Murder?
P.S. Yeah I've liked eric's focus on sorcery speed removal in creating a different feel for the game but I've been wondering for a while what it does beyond make dorky creature buffing better? You get a big free swing with a were wolf or maybe when you reveal the wolf run you've been holding right? I'm honestly just trying to remember what it does because I can't remember all the implications.
I guess I have an outward control bias, but I think I talk about it because I feel like we have a good handle on how to buff aggro and how midranged decks work. I think control is more tricky because it's relies so much on construction that you don't get to finesse in a draft environment. And to be really honest, I think allowing white decks to attack with battalion more often etc is like the least interesting thing in the game we could be enabling