So I've seen a couple of people running this card in their lists, is it any good? I love rebuying myself some ETB's and drawing myself cards, but when is it just up against too much competition in a regular riptide-cube?
Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight
- Thread starter Dom Harvey
- Start date
So I've seen a couple of people running this card in their lists, is it any good? I love rebuying myself some ETB's and drawing myself cards, but when is it just up against too much competition in a regular riptide-cube?
ugh you guys are being so lame about your golgari problem. honestly golgari gets it's interesting decks through the way their monocoloured themes work and how the deck's choice of a third colour can often change the deck's focus entirely. Keep the generically good creatures and ubiquitous interaction, it helps oil a wonderful machine.
like play thragtusk and arena thoughtsieze and damnation in a deck
try out finks, geist, confidant and mesmeric fiend together
have you guys ever taken a look at the cards profane command and eternal witness?
like its so easy to make weird reanimator decks or crazy value decks in those colours, they can even be hyper aggressive or play very assertive tapout control decks.
Honestly BG is the closest colour combination to UW, you have very ubiquitous answers and very resilient creatures and access to both easy synergies and heaps of card advantage. Use your imaginations, it's not that difficult lol. Having removal that is special for them that or the odd efficient guy may not give you a special dumbass buildaround but honestly they have them already and trust me the removal is appreciated.
like play thragtusk and arena thoughtsieze and damnation in a deck
try out finks, geist, confidant and mesmeric fiend together
have you guys ever taken a look at the cards profane command and eternal witness?
like its so easy to make weird reanimator decks or crazy value decks in those colours, they can even be hyper aggressive or play very assertive tapout control decks.
Honestly BG is the closest colour combination to UW, you have very ubiquitous answers and very resilient creatures and access to both easy synergies and heaps of card advantage. Use your imaginations, it's not that difficult lol. Having removal that is special for them that or the odd efficient guy may not give you a special dumbass buildaround but honestly they have them already and trust me the removal is appreciated.
I've run Ninja of deep hours off and on. It's something of a pet card but it probably doesn't belong in my cube. And that explains why I take it out each time my nostalgic tendencies get the better of me.
There are certainly cool synergies with ninja. But cube is just so efficient now. I don't know, now I want to put it back in again. Never should have replied.
There are certainly cool synergies with ninja. But cube is just so efficient now. I don't know, now I want to put it back in again. Never should have replied.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I love ninja of the deep hours, but I don't think he has quite the right support to make it in most cubes. A big part of his value is on the buyback, so he ideally wants a low CC evasive creature with an impactful ETB. That way it minimizes the tempo loss of replaying the creature.
The one environment where he really has caught on is pauper, where his primary job is getting rebuys off of spellstutter sprite: a 2cc flyer that counters most of the cards that matter in a format so condensed that 3cc spells are often seen as too expensive.
Its hard to find a density of creatures that specialized in most cubes, especially in blue.
The one environment where he really has caught on is pauper, where his primary job is getting rebuys off of spellstutter sprite: a 2cc flyer that counters most of the cards that matter in a format so condensed that 3cc spells are often seen as too expensive.
Its hard to find a density of creatures that specialized in most cubes, especially in blue.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
I've found Ninja hits exactly once and then never again, defeating the point of playing it
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I think the problem with BG/x isn't that its not good, its when the decks start to feel like different flavors of the same <x> value deck, which is more or less the final resting place for a catagory of decks often built around general goodness and ubiquitous answers. I don't think its even really an issue of power level: thoughtseize decks in their various forms have generally made up a (not surprisingly) disproportionate % of the standard metagame for about a year now.
If absolute power corrupts, generally good creatures and ubiquitous interaction corrupts a lot of drafters. When going into the unknowns of a diverse draft format, it can become a safety blanket strategy, where week after week they avoid the cube's metagame (you know, that thing you took month's to design) in favor of drafting generic goodness against whatever they face. Whether its siege rhino or thragtusk, putrid leech or rakshasa deathdealer, languish or damnation, eternal witness or den protector, those cards will never actively be bad. Facing removal heavy decks? Profane command or whip of erebos to disrupt their removal. And of course, they have access to the most ubiquitous of answers besides actual cheap counterspells in the form of cheap targeted discard.
In diverse formats thats a smart strategy, especially in cube where you probably lack impactful sideboard cards. But as someone running a casual play group, those sorts of value decks just get boring real fast, especially when you realize that players are just using it as crutch to avoid learning the meta you took so much time to craft. The only thing really keeping the deck in check is that they are unlikely to have multiple copies of discard as good as thoughtseize.
Not that I'm bashing the color combination--I really love my lim-dul's vault powered BUG decks. I'm just saying that I can understand some designer's frustration with wanting more personality in those decks. I think providing them with a variety of different engines is a good starting place. I like the idea of the den protector deathmist raptor engine, for example, from standard (though doubt its directly portable to cube), and I've enjoyed vault and insidious dreams in my BUG decks to setup big self-mill plays. Genesis is another good engine card for the attritionay tortured existence version of those decks.
I don't feel its an ideal aggro setup for a lot of cubes, but its possible with a little restructuring to green 1s and blacks 2s.
If absolute power corrupts, generally good creatures and ubiquitous interaction corrupts a lot of drafters. When going into the unknowns of a diverse draft format, it can become a safety blanket strategy, where week after week they avoid the cube's metagame (you know, that thing you took month's to design) in favor of drafting generic goodness against whatever they face. Whether its siege rhino or thragtusk, putrid leech or rakshasa deathdealer, languish or damnation, eternal witness or den protector, those cards will never actively be bad. Facing removal heavy decks? Profane command or whip of erebos to disrupt their removal. And of course, they have access to the most ubiquitous of answers besides actual cheap counterspells in the form of cheap targeted discard.
In diverse formats thats a smart strategy, especially in cube where you probably lack impactful sideboard cards. But as someone running a casual play group, those sorts of value decks just get boring real fast, especially when you realize that players are just using it as crutch to avoid learning the meta you took so much time to craft. The only thing really keeping the deck in check is that they are unlikely to have multiple copies of discard as good as thoughtseize.
Not that I'm bashing the color combination--I really love my lim-dul's vault powered BUG decks. I'm just saying that I can understand some designer's frustration with wanting more personality in those decks. I think providing them with a variety of different engines is a good starting place. I like the idea of the den protector deathmist raptor engine, for example, from standard (though doubt its directly portable to cube), and I've enjoyed vault and insidious dreams in my BUG decks to setup big self-mill plays. Genesis is another good engine card for the attritionay tortured existence version of those decks.
I don't feel its an ideal aggro setup for a lot of cubes, but its possible with a little restructuring to green 1s and blacks 2s.
I've seen like a zillion kinds of GB decks drafted in cube, many of them feel competitive and a couple are some of the most interesting decks for me to play. I don't know what more to tell ya, did you read any of the examples in my post? Have you ever played a ramp/reanimator deck? Wrath resistant aggro? Graveyard value? Midranged control? Bird into hypnotic? Curve-out midranged? Fuck you can even make a pretty good braids stax deck in those colours or if you go for 3 colours enable all sorts of dumb outlier combinations.
I can't imagine how you expect cramming in a bunch of narrower build around enablers into the special-just-4-me-rewards will help diversify your gb decks, people are gonna sigh and have to try to force the build around, or they will feel cheated and try to make a worse version of one of the sweet decks I've described above and endlessly since joining this forum. I love GB decks lol.
I can't imagine how you expect cramming in a bunch of narrower build around enablers into the special-just-4-me-rewards will help diversify your gb decks, people are gonna sigh and have to try to force the build around, or they will feel cheated and try to make a worse version of one of the sweet decks I've described above and endlessly since joining this forum. I love GB decks lol.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Yeah, I think all of those cards are pretty commonly played and so are those deck types. Those are pretty stock G/B/x midrange/control archetypes. Though usually the aggro decks running sweepers ommit green, at least in cube over here. Our green sections never really facilitated aggro very well, and the sac. + wrath decks are typically R/W or R/B.
Those types of decks were one of the reasons why I started cutting the generically good midrange value creatures in the first place. Just because they are good or interesting to a subset of player dosen't mean they are good for the environment as a whole, and thats just something you just have to balance out when deciding how your GB decks are going to look.
I felt the past year of standard helped put things in perspective, where we've had about every flavor of G/B/x value aggro/midrange/control deck imaginable; and thats fine to a point until that sort of good stuff value deck--built around generally good creatures and ubiquitous answers--are consistantly overrepresented in the meta. If you are going to run those types of decks, you have to balance their general strength against the risk of people using them to out meta your metagame.
I'm kind of surprised to see you arguing in defense of them honestly. Those decks tend to compete with blue control decks for efficent removal and they have ample tools to use recursion to generate card advantage off of opposing removal. Those are usually things you hate.
Those types of decks were one of the reasons why I started cutting the generically good midrange value creatures in the first place. Just because they are good or interesting to a subset of player dosen't mean they are good for the environment as a whole, and thats just something you just have to balance out when deciding how your GB decks are going to look.
I felt the past year of standard helped put things in perspective, where we've had about every flavor of G/B/x value aggro/midrange/control deck imaginable; and thats fine to a point until that sort of good stuff value deck--built around generally good creatures and ubiquitous answers--are consistantly overrepresented in the meta. If you are going to run those types of decks, you have to balance their general strength against the risk of people using them to out meta your metagame.
I'm kind of surprised to see you arguing in defense of them honestly. Those decks tend to compete with blue control decks for efficent removal and they have ample tools to use recursion to generate card advantage off of opposing removal. Those are usually things you hate.
I feel like a lot of people on this forum say "value" with a scowl and then spit on the ground.
I like crazy Johnny value strategies in low-power formats, so don't get me wrong; I used to play gallons of Pauper. But I wonder if people having "goodstuff G/B decks" is really all that bad for your format? If anything, it sounds like a good litmus test for your cube powerlevel. If people go into G/B looking for easy value and do alright consistently (as in, not always crushing everyone, but taking a reasonable number of wins and losses on average), then there's no issue. Remember that there are players who are more Spike-ish in any draft group, and those players will naturally gravitate towards value decks and do well with them, which is how Spikes get their fun. I find Spikes win more and are satisfied with that, while Timmies are satisfied to just do cool things, and Johnnies are satisfied to just steal a few wins with something strange. G/B is usually the safest direction for value decks in an unpowered list, which is impossible to really stop because both Green and Black tend to be the colours most inclined towards being Pretty Good or Hot Garbage. If the pieces are there in G/B to make a deck that can come together and make Spike happy, though, you should be happy, too!
As cube designers, we have a choice: make a good environment for our drafters to have fun in, or showcase how very clever we are to our drafters. The latter, by the way, is something I'm quite guilty of; I love including stuff like Mesmeric Orb, winning off a durdly mill combo, and then watching the people I draft with try the same thing later. That's just fine to do! But it becomes an issue when showing off that cleverness comes at the cost of ruining anyone else's more generic, value-oriented fun. If people do well with a value deck, but aren't crushing the entire field with it, then I don't know why you'd want to deprive your format of a little easy value. There are people other than you who just want to cast Deathrite Shaman and have fun, and if your players aren't all whining about those ~unfair G/B decks~ with their ~generic playability~, is it really so terrible to allow a section to not devolve into a pile of cute jank?
I like crazy Johnny value strategies in low-power formats, so don't get me wrong; I used to play gallons of Pauper. But I wonder if people having "goodstuff G/B decks" is really all that bad for your format? If anything, it sounds like a good litmus test for your cube powerlevel. If people go into G/B looking for easy value and do alright consistently (as in, not always crushing everyone, but taking a reasonable number of wins and losses on average), then there's no issue. Remember that there are players who are more Spike-ish in any draft group, and those players will naturally gravitate towards value decks and do well with them, which is how Spikes get their fun. I find Spikes win more and are satisfied with that, while Timmies are satisfied to just do cool things, and Johnnies are satisfied to just steal a few wins with something strange. G/B is usually the safest direction for value decks in an unpowered list, which is impossible to really stop because both Green and Black tend to be the colours most inclined towards being Pretty Good or Hot Garbage. If the pieces are there in G/B to make a deck that can come together and make Spike happy, though, you should be happy, too!
As cube designers, we have a choice: make a good environment for our drafters to have fun in, or showcase how very clever we are to our drafters. The latter, by the way, is something I'm quite guilty of; I love including stuff like Mesmeric Orb, winning off a durdly mill combo, and then watching the people I draft with try the same thing later. That's just fine to do! But it becomes an issue when showing off that cleverness comes at the cost of ruining anyone else's more generic, value-oriented fun. If people do well with a value deck, but aren't crushing the entire field with it, then I don't know why you'd want to deprive your format of a little easy value. There are people other than you who just want to cast Deathrite Shaman and have fun, and if your players aren't all whining about those ~unfair G/B decks~ with their ~generic playability~, is it really so terrible to allow a section to not devolve into a pile of cute jank?
I feel like you see all decks that play 3s 4s and 5s + removal as the same midranged deck and I'm not sure I can show you what I love. I am content in that I do not have to though.
I think green and black is one of the combinations with the most potential for range, to be built to effect or to be misbuilt. I feel like that depends on how mindful you've been about making most of your cards relevant to broad number of archetypes.
Being wrath resistant doesn't mean you have to be wrathing too. I've won a lot of matches in cube by attacking by two or three, using my turns efficiently and generating some kind of value. Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is to face down a mesmeric fiend and a kitchen finks on the draw?
I'm gonna stop myself before I start going on about how much I love survival in ramp decks even with a splash of black. Honestly are you guys kidding me? Are you just making green and black sections that don't get along so people need rhinos to win?
I think green and black is one of the combinations with the most potential for range, to be built to effect or to be misbuilt. I feel like that depends on how mindful you've been about making most of your cards relevant to broad number of archetypes.
Being wrath resistant doesn't mean you have to be wrathing too. I've won a lot of matches in cube by attacking by two or three, using my turns efficiently and generating some kind of value. Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is to face down a mesmeric fiend and a kitchen finks on the draw?
I'm gonna stop myself before I start going on about how much I love survival in ramp decks even with a splash of black. Honestly are you guys kidding me? Are you just making green and black sections that don't get along so people need rhinos to win?
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Guys, guys, lets all calm down here.
You can design G/B however you want, but you have to be attentive to the realities of your play group. If you've been getting a disproportionate % of your meta jamming value decks, you should be being cautious about what you are running. I think everyone here has played with cards like finks, thragtusk, arena, and damnation in the same deck, and also played with them in different decks, or just been tired of seeing them continuously showing up in other decks, often times by poor players just using them as a crutch. I know because I put up with about a year of that nonsense, and either see or get PMs from people complaining about it.
At the end of the day, we all have to:
If that means cutting down on some of the value dudes, given how your group is drafting, you should do that.
You can design G/B however you want, but you have to be attentive to the realities of your play group. If you've been getting a disproportionate % of your meta jamming value decks, you should be being cautious about what you are running. I think everyone here has played with cards like finks, thragtusk, arena, and damnation in the same deck, and also played with them in different decks, or just been tired of seeing them continuously showing up in other decks, often times by poor players just using them as a crutch. I know because I put up with about a year of that nonsense, and either see or get PMs from people complaining about it.
At the end of the day, we all have to:
If that means cutting down on some of the value dudes, given how your group is drafting, you should do that.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
I agree they are two different decks.
Fwiw I always imagined you as more of a rock type player: using interactions like profane command and arena to create value: than a straight value midrange guy. I don't think we are actually disagreeing, which is why I didnt quote your actual post.
Fwiw I always imagined you as more of a rock type player: using interactions like profane command and arena to create value: than a straight value midrange guy. I don't think we are actually disagreeing, which is why I didnt quote your actual post.
I used to run this. Does anyone here like it?
Isn't it really trite to play against? It makes combat pretty one sided and is difficult to interact with.
I took it out when I removed most of my artifact removal suite. It's a fun card kind of, like, a unique way to win that doesn't come up all that often. I never felt bad losing to it, which was rarely, because most decks don't want it.
Maybe this isn't the perfect place to ask, but:
Why don't I see this in anyone's ULD? Is it too powerful? I'm finally seeing about putting together a ULD of my own, so I've been looking at every land ever, and this sticks out as a notable exclusion from, I believe, most of the land lists I could find that everyone here has posted someplace I could see.
Why don't I see this in anyone's ULD? Is it too powerful? I'm finally seeing about putting together a ULD of my own, so I've been looking at every land ever, and this sticks out as a notable exclusion from, I believe, most of the land lists I could find that everyone here has posted someplace I could see.
Maybe this isn't the perfect place to ask, but:
Why don't I see this in anyone's ULD? Is it too powerful? I'm finally seeing about putting together a ULD of my own, so I've been looking at every land ever, and this sticks out as a notable exclusion from, I believe, most of the land lists I could find that everyone here has posted someplace I could see.
Seems like an oversight. Fetchable, can finish off the opponent. I see no reason not to run it, good find.
So it's two mana to drain one life. And it ETB tapped. Seems too slow in all but the most controlling of B/x decks. And even then, you might not have enough permanents on the field to activate since durdly decks like that often just want to wrath and reset over and over. Does seem like an okay inclusion for utility though, wouldn't mind trying it out sometime (missed the swamp typing!).
I've had it in my utility land draft for about a year... and it's been nabbed exactly zero times. I'll probably have to force it once myself to give it a test drive. I don't think it's great in control decks - those decks tend to stick fewer nonland permanents - but it might be fine in an aggro or midrange deck that's looking for that last little bit of reach.
The one I always thought had promise in that Shadowmoor cycle was
Sadly, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to recycle cards from the bottom of my library profitably in cube.
The one I always thought had promise in that Shadowmoor cycle was
Sadly, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to recycle cards from the bottom of my library profitably in cube.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
The Mistveil Plains effect is only really good in decks resembling the UW Revelation-Elixir deck from last Standard or the Gaea's Blessing control decks that have popped up over the years. It's hard to make it work in Cube but I'd love to try.
(To clarify, it's much easier to just finish your opponent with an efficient threat or set up recursion through Academy Ruins/Volrath's Stronghold/Erratic Portal/whatever than to go through your whole deck)
(To clarify, it's much easier to just finish your opponent with an efficient threat or set up recursion through Academy Ruins/Volrath's Stronghold/Erratic Portal/whatever than to go through your whole deck)
The thing I always wanted to do in that Standard was to combine Mistveil Plains with the card below somehow in a mono-white control shell.
That was the era of everyone running 4x Cryptic Command, between Faeries and 5cc, so it wasn't a realistic option... but I would've liked to try.
That was the era of everyone running 4x Cryptic Command, between Faeries and 5cc, so it wasn't a realistic option... but I would've liked to try.