Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

Zuran Orb was busted in the first revisions of my cube. I'm afraid it's still megabusted now but it might enable more Land Tax-based decks and other funky synergies. What do you think?



Honestly, I don't really see what it would do in your cube. The biggest payoff seems to be The Gitrog Monster which is great. Other than that, gain 2 life a turn with Crucible of Worlds? It seems like it would draw out games for no reason more than anything.
Why did you want to include it?

I wanted to touch on



I drafted a deck from Erik's cube and it is everything I want to be doing in Magic right now:










This is the first deck I have seen where I actually want Yawgmoth's Will. You can buy back all the small artifacts which go perfectly with Emry and Saheeli too. Since the artifacts sacrifice themselves for mana, you don't actually need 7 mana or whatever before you can cast Will for value.

I'd like to know if others have examples of non-storm decks where Yawgmoth's Will can shine.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Zuran Orb was busted in the first revisions of my cube. I'm afraid it's still megabusted now but it might enable more Land Tax-based decks and other funky synergies. What do you think?


This was busted in the old lifegain version of my cube (oops), then mostly ignored after that. What are the synergies that make it busted in your cube?
 
Zuran Orb was busted in the sense it made you very hard to kill. Still, I don't think it would be an issue now. I just want more WR non-creature decks based around Cataclysm, Land Tax and Devastating Dreams.
 
Entomb's main use is Reanimation, I don't think Life from the Loam and recursive creatures are enough to justify the slot otherwise.

Gamble can be used to search for anything. Sure, sometimes you lose a card and a mana but it's a very powerful card. Still, I like it for artifact reanimation Wildfire, Loam and other similar cards. It's more cuttable than Entomb, thought.
 
Entomb's main use is Reanimation, I don't think Life from the Loam and recursive creatures are enough to justify the slot otherwise.

Would you still use Entomb in "fair" reanimator? By fair I mean that the reanimation spells are generally 4+ mana.

I just had a thought, the incarnations (Anger for example) are good with both too.
 
It was, but the key difference is that with Tragic Arrogance YOU choose what lives, whereas Single Combat says that you choose what of your stuff lives and your opponent chooses what of their stuff lives. So it's a lot worse :/ The "can't cast more critters" bit is nice, though!
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
It was, but the key difference is that with Tragic Arrogance YOU choose what lives, whereas Single Combat says that you choose what of your stuff lives and your opponent chooses what of their stuff lives. So it's a lot worse :/ The "can't cast more critters" bit is nice, though!
The problem, I've found, is that it's quite bad if your opponent has a better creature out than you do, and there's no way to really break the symmetry on the "can't cast creature or planeswalker spells until the end of your next turn" clause. Your opponent will be the first one with a chance to redeploy, and oftentimes the first one to attack again. I was really excited for Single Combat when it was first spoiled, but it never really lived up to my own hype. It doesn't help that it was set to replace Tragic Arrogance, which turned out to be a vastly superior (and more fun, to play at least) card. Another thing that bothered me when testing Single Combat was that the off turn for your opponent was often spent casting a removal spell on your remaining threat, a card draw spell, and/or holding up countermagic for your next big play. Giving your opponent less options doesn't mean they have no options. And you have got to have a follow up card in hand as well, because if you can't play a reasonable card on your off turn, you're just giving the tempo advantage to your opponent!
 


never tested it (always wanted to do so, though) but this already looks like a more interesting version of single combat, since it's like a two times 'more-than-1' removal for Wx control.
 
The mono-green land creatures are nice. I especially like the Reclaimer as an enabler for land in the GY, landfall and shuffle effect. The fact that he scales is just gravy.
The Sower has good baseline stats and it is really easy to trigger his token making ability. The fact that they are 0/1 means that the token spam isn't too bad and you have to work for them to do anything.
I'd mostly ignore the sacrifice ability, but maybe you have a Blood Artist and a discard outlet and a Life from the Loam one time.

Lastly, I don't like Omnath because of the life gain. He is already a 4/4 for 4 that draws a card. Gaining 4-8 life per circuit is just crippling against aggro. He has some very sweet play and draft potential which attracts me, but not to the point of including him.
 
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