Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

vennythekid

vennythekid

I want to highlight a card that caught my attention yesterday and that I employed to a 5-0 run on Arena today.Maybe it's just Orzhov in Ravnica Allegiance being very strong, but this guy does work every single game:


It trades cleanly with two-drops, can chip in for damage in the early game, and is perfect sacrifice fodder for when evasive threats come down and nullify its ability to stall on the ground. Its a low-cost all-around all-star that always picks up value, either by stabilizing early, demanding removal, or trading late.



In this specific deck, it consistently held the ground until my flyers (yeah the 4 Grasping Thrulls are ridiculous) could just take over.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
So, I've got a bunch of conspiracies lying round, and some are just too good for my tastes, or very format warping (I'm looking at you Worldknit!), but I thought, is there any merit to running the lower power ones? I mean, these are all basically free cards in your deck, so they should be pretty solid picks, right? Anyone has any opinion on and/or experience with these?

 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I feel like these are all too swingy, though I've run unexpected potential before.

Assemble the rank and vile is probably medium, unless you're naming gravecrawler. Immediate Action turns otherwise normal 6 drops into stupidly broken ones, and summoner's bond is a combo tutor that's impossible to interact with (Name Kiki-Jiki, Deciever Exarch for eg.). Even sentinel dispatch, while it's probably not going to stonewall an aggro deck, will likely trade for a card, or stop them attacking until turns 3 or later.

Maybe your cube doesn't have anything like this going on, but it's probably got more than you think. The bit that puts it over the top for me is that none of these cost you any mana or require you to draw them, you just have to be lucky enough to open them. The worth of a single draft pick in a high playables format like cube is nowhere close to what you should be paying for these effects IMO
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

Onderzeeboot said:
So, I've got a bunch of conspiracies lying round, and some are just too good for my tastes, or very format warping (I'm looking at you Worldknit!), but I thought, is there any merit to running the lower power ones? I mean, these are all basically free cards in your deck, so they should be pretty solid picks, right? Anyone has any opinion on and/or experience with these?

Click to expand...

Yeah to Unexpected Potential because it lets you play Demonic Tutor in your Mono-Red deck. Neigh to everything else for being too swingy (except for maybe sentinel dispatch although I think Chris gave a pretty decent argument against it.)
 
psly4mne

psly4mne

I'm a big fan of conspiracies in general, mostly for the "it could only happen in cube" factor.
Of the ones in that list, they're mostly on the "useful but balanced" end of the scale. Summoner's Bond, though, is probably too strong for you. In a cube with some duplicate creatures like Crumble Pie, I'd be confident that Summoner's Bond is utterly broken.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Chris Taylor said:
The worth of a single draft pick in a high playables format like cube is nowhere close to what you should be paying for these effects IMO
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I don't think the "you just have to be lucky to open them" argument works, since that is true for any bomb in any format, but I find the follow-up reasoning persuasive. I think conspiracies add a lot of spice to a draft, but you are probably right that most are not balanced in a high playables format. The reason I haven't included any conspiracies so far, is that I've been wary of the free value they provide. You're not giving up a deck slot, you're not paying mana for most of these, they're just there. Effectively turning one card in your 40 into two cards (or improving it in a way where it's significantly ahead of the curve). This is a pitty, because I do think conspiracies are a fun concept. I might try Unexpected Potential and Sentinel Dispatch (which apart form a blocker is also a free sacrifice for Braids decks and an artifact for Daretti, for example). Maybe it's possible to create some custom conspiracies that are a bit more muted in their effect and support specific archetypes or create new and interesting ones.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

Onderzeeboot said:
I don't think the "you just have to be lucky to open them" argument works, since that is true for any bomb in any format, but I find the follow-up reasoning persuasive. I think conspiracies add a lot of spice to a draft, but you are probably right that most are not balanced in a high playables format. The reason I haven't included any conspiracies so far, is that I've been wary of the free value they provide. You're not giving up a deck slot, you're not paying mana for most of these, they're just there. Effectively turning one card in your 40 into two cards (or improving it in a way where it's significantly ahead of the curve). This is a pitty, because I do think conspiracies are a fun concept. I might try Unexpected Potential and Sentinel Dispatch (which apart form a blocker is also a free sacrifice for Braids decks and an artifact for Daretti, for example). Maybe it's possible to create some custom conspiracies that are a bit more muted in their effect and support specific archetypes or create new and interesting ones.
Click to expand...

Power Play could be fun. I think being able to always go first is a great little advantage for aggro strategies.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
TrainmasterGT said:
Power Play could be fun. I think being able to always go first is a great little advantage for aggro strategies.
Click to expand...

I've heard Power Play is insanely overpowered, though I guess it depends a bit on your interpretation. There are a lot of players who interpret this as you going first every game.

Edit: This reading is confirmed by the rules (and by Matt Tabak, then rules manager).

103.2. After the decks have been shuffled, the players determine which one of them will choose who takes the first turn. In the first game of a match (including a single-game match), the players may use any mutually agreeable method (flipping a coin, rolling dice, etc.) to do so. In a match of several games, the loser of the previous game chooses who takes the first turn. If the previous game was a draw, the player who made the choice in that game makes the choice in this game. The player chosen to take the first turn is the starting player. The game’s default turn order begins with the starting player and proceeds clockwise.

and

103.2c One card, Power Play, states that its controller is the starting player. This effect supersedes these methods.
Click to expand...

So, yeah, completely busted.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Unmodified power play is arguably stronger than sol ring

Onderzeeboot said:
I don't think the "you just have to be lucky to open them" argument works, since that is true for any bomb in any format, but I find the follow-up reasoning persuasive. I think conspiracies add a lot of spice to a draft, but you are probably right that most are not balanced in a high playables format. The reason I haven't included any conspiracies so far, is that I've been wary of the free value they provide. You're not giving up a deck slot, you're not paying mana for most of these, they're just there. Effectively turning one card in your 40 into two cards (or improving it in a way where it's significantly ahead of the curve). This is a pitty, because I do think conspiracies are a fun concept. I might try Unexpected Potential and Sentinel Dispatch (which apart form a blocker is also a free sacrifice for Braids decks and an artifact for Daretti, for example). Maybe it's possible to create some custom conspiracies that are a bit more muted in their effect and support specific archetypes or create new and interesting ones.
Click to expand...

My point is mostly that they're colorless (well, effectively) and you don't even need to draw them.
 
sigh

sigh

if y'all ever take the chance to play Shandalar, they do a very similar thing to conspiracies in that game. Certain enemies start with, say, Crusade in play, and let me tell ya, it's definitely the "I don't have to draw it and it's just there from the start" part that is what makes this sort of effect bonkers as hell. You also have your deck molded to take advantage of this effect, of course. The example enemy plays white weenies, for instance.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Life is too short to play the same outdated game again and again :p

I always wanted them to update Shandalar annually with new sets and better visuals but they never did.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
Life is too short to play the same outdated game again and again :p

I always wanted them to update Shandalar annually with new sets and better visuals but they never did.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I wouldn't mind spending money on release if they did a proper update of Shandalar and ported the concept to modern age Magic. It truly is a great game, only held back by its lack of new content and its graphics.
 
psly4mne

psly4mne

I think the "free value" aspect of conspiracies (hidden agendas, at least) is way overblown, and really a product of shortcutting thinking about them. In any draft, the value of a high pick is the difference between the pick and what you would have to play instead. So to evaluate the power level of a conspiracy, you need to compare the power differential between a 24th playable and a top pick to the power differential between an average creature and that creature with the conspiracy buff. That has a lot of variance of course - sometimes your colors were open and your 24th playable is a perfectly good card, sometimes it's marginally playable, and sometimes your draft was all over the place and it's off color. A good very rough heuristic is to apply the hidden agenda to your 24th playable (or 25th for your second conspiracy), and that's how good a pick the conspiracy was. Maybe your 24th playable plus firebreathing is better than a first pick, but I kind of doubt it.

I've heard, in particular, the idea that "you're not giving up a deck slot" to run a conspiracy a few times, and I want to call that out specifically. That's not an upside, that's a downside. That means you still need to play your 24th best spell, which is making your deck worse for being there. You're allowed to play anything you want as a 41st card "without giving up a deck slot." There's a reason you don't do that.

That set me off a bit, but I tend to see a lot of frankly bad reasoning used to dismiss conspiracies.
 
japahn

japahn

On flat power level cubes, the difference between the 24th playable and whatever pick you spent on the conspiracy is not large, so the conspiracies are much better. When the power levels of individual cards are distributed along a wider range, the conspiracies become less powerful as you stated. They were balanced for retail Conspiracy, which has a wider power band than basically any cube I've ever encountered.

I tried a few conspiracies and they ended being very strong. By all means try, them out, but I think people are speaking from experience. Personally, I didn't like:
  • The consistency they provide in a game built around uncertainty of what your initial hand/draws are. Felt to me like something that's not Magic.
  • The high power level in a flat-ish power band, as said above. My cube is not really flat power level... for cubes, which have a smaller power band scale as retail sets.
  • They felt like they added nothing to how interesting the draft was. The only think I liked about conspiracies in Conspiracy is how I could leverage having many copies of a common with the same name profit from a single one. Cubes that are mostly or totally singleton (again, 100% of the ones I've encountered) don't have that effect.
 
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