Card/Deck Spirits

[ahadabans]

So has anyone worked in a spirit theme yet? Seems like we have some new tools. Maybe Tallowisp is playable (especially if you are already supporting enchantress)? Feels like a solid fit for me at least since enchantress and heroic have good overlap already.

Incentive cards
Tallowisp (really the key card)
Rattlechains (give all spirits flash is cool)

Cards you could already be running because they are good enough with zero support
Dungeon Geists
Hokori, Dust Drinker
Eternal Dragon
Blue, Black, White Kamigawa Dragons
Graveborn Muse
Bloodghast
Strangleroot Geist
Geist of Saint Traft

Maybes
Bygone Bishop (anybody test this yet?)
Windborn Muse (prison effect not tied to an enchantment could be playable and not oppressive?)
Spirit En-Dal (forecast seems powerful even if body is weak)
Tradewind Rider (probably slow, but used to be in power max lists 8 years ago)
Pale Rider of Trostad
Eidolon of Blossoms (if you support enchantress)
Topplegeist

Arcane Spells
Kodama's Reach
Rend Flesh
Otherworldly Journey

Thoughts?

 

[quanta]

In the magic duels computer game at least, Bygone Bishop is the nuts. Gives weenie decks a way to easily refill and get ahead in card advantage. On a basically irrelevant note to cube, clues are great with Ghirapur Aether Grid.

 

[frostymoose]

What creature auras are you intending to find with your tallowisp?

There are of course some good pacifisms but beyond that?

 

[ahadabans]

Well, I'm running enchantress and heroic themes as well, so there's a lot of overlap that can be exploited with that particular setup.

Gryff's Boon
Elephant Guide
Griffin Guide
Rancor
Moldervine Cloak
Song of the Dryads
Prison Term
Madcap Skills
Control Magic (maybe a bit much)
Pillory of the Sleepless
Armadillo Cloak
Animate Dead
Angelic Destiny
Stab Wound

Gatherer lists 817 aura's, so I think you could build a suite of solid options. Those are options I'm either running, have run or have considered running in the past.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Probably works in a lower powered enchantment themed cube with heroic. Basically tallowisp is the only real incentive card IMO at the moment.

 

[Kirblinx]

In the magic duels computer game at least, Bygone Bishop is the nuts. Gives weenie decks a way to easily refill and get ahead in card advantage. On a basically irrelevant note to cube, clues are great with Ghirapur Aether Grid.

Dude, I lost to a new players 70 card clue pile on Games Day because of this. I was playing Esper Demonic Pact and could not find any of my Angelic Purge's to remove the Aether Grid and he just kept stockpiling clues while I sat there with an abundance of creature removal stuck in hand and tears rolling down my face.

I guess I better stay on topic and mention that the only place I remember seeing a Tallowisp on riptide was in Modin's Fantasy Set. Which was a low power set where Tallowisp was shifted to common rarity. It was for either RW heroic, GW Pants or BW spirits. I don't know if it would be good enough to run as a 1-of in a regular cube. I really do love the little fella though. I only have about 3 kitchen table decks, one of which is a GW Tallowisp deck which is probably CHK-RAV standard legal. It is a great card to build around but to be perfectly honest it is possibly a little too much to make it work. Why not just:
?

 

[James Stevenson]

I like spirits. Not a big fan of rum though.

 

[sigh]

My format being a little on the low-pressure end taken into account, I love Bygone Bishop. Helps aggressive W decks match control decks at their own game with consistent CA into the midgame. Also relevant body that gladly accepts equips and the like. Recommend highly.

 

[ahadabans]

Bygone Bishop looks good, so glad to hear that seems to be the case in testing reports.

And I really like the clue mechanic a lot. Also ties in with an artifact theme which I really want to try and push more (ala penny pincher).

 

[RavebornMuse]

I've looked into making Spirits a soft tribal theme in my cube, but it doesn't have legs yet imho outside of low power.|

Here's what I've got for it (you would be surprised how many embarrassingly bad ideas I have tucked away...):





I think the key cards are Rattlechains and Angel of Flight Alabaster; Tallowisp could be an option for a cute spirits/auras theme (there's some cool auras if you go lower power, including some cool offensive tools like Leaden Fists that can either lock down Villain's muffins or enable your own vigilant beater), but I think you get more out of the Angel and Rattlechains, looking to exploit things like Drift of Phantasms as an awkward tutor and Nameless Inversion as removal. It's one of the themes I have floating around for a second, lower-power cube, actually, so it's really cool to see that other people have been pondering it, too.

 

[ahadabans]

Sweet. Thanks. Not sure how, but I totally missed Karmic Guide.

Light tribal is all I'd ever want to support personally since too much of that is poisonous. But having a token card in there that gets you trending a certain way is fine and it's fun when you get a handful of Goblin cards and Goblin Matron. It's not a real goblin deck, but it also isn't just a pile of random cards either.

I see tallowisp as the only card I really need to have. It's a 1/3 for 2, which is serviceable as an early blocker in control. It also comes down early enough to where you can fetch a faith's fetters when you drop dungeon geists or Kodama's Reach or whatever. Then all of a sudden that 2 drop is paying very nice dividends. We have played dudes with shittier bodies for less.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I've tried this: it was bad.

Not enough enablers concentrated in the right colors, and not enough generically good payoff cards to justify an A + B mechanic.

The payoff cards are so weak, it doesn't really exist as an incidental theme.

 

[japahn]

Payoff cards that this thread needs to contain:

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

All of those cards suffer from the poison principle.

Your cubable "lord count" than ends up being rattlechains, tallowisp, and angel of flight alabaster. Angel of flight alabaster is a bad serra angel most of the time, and tallowisp is pretty loose.

Even as an "incidental tribe," spirit interactions never came up.

 

[sigh]

If it could be done at little to no opportunity cost to the UW section as it is, seems like a fun little subtheme. Best done with the 'you might already run these!' cards, imo, so the theme can be worked in with tweaks rather than rejiggering the whole section. Here's a couple cool ones:

 

[ahadabans]

Kira is sweet. Forgot about Spirit of the Labyrinth. Nice add. Fits with enchantress too.

I think Grillo is likely correct and this is bad. But I'm going to build a deck with some incidental spirit cards, seed my opening hand with Tallowisp and see what happens. Rattlechains is a 2/1 flying flash dude for 1U. That would be playable without the spirit clause. He's to spirits as Mardu Woe-Reaper is to warriors.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I know you guys don't like being told that something doesn't work, but I ran this for about a year: there is not even enough density for a sub theme.

These are your total payoff cards that are not poisonous:




The floor on angel of flight alabaster is so bad that its arguable poisonous, leaving you with two cards. Thats too few cards to form a theme or sub theme around, and too few cards to even really promote incidental interactions. And this is assuming that tallowisp can justify its slot in a format. Even worse, these aren't even interesting tribal interactions: at least not interesting enough to give a distinct feel to a deck due to the presence of spirits.

I would be much more interested in going down the rabbit hole of a low power aura deck in W/x and try to set poor tallowisp up to be maxed out.

 

[ahadabans]

Fair enough. I wish there was a cubeable soul shift card, but man every one of those is just garbage.

The only reason I feel like I can get away with running Tallowisp is because of the module drafting I'm doing. One incentive card with half a dozen spirits and half a dozen auras to fetch (all cards you would consider drafting without Tallowisp) is enough to have it come together every once in awhile and be a nice little perk. And that's because it would be part of a 90 card block. You'll always see these cards every single time this module is drafted. That's one of the advantages to the way I'm breaking down card pools.

We can certainly debate whether this is interesting or not. But tutor effects are strong, especially when they are free. Ffull tribal is exactly what you are saying - poisonous. I don't care how well supported it is, it is really narrow and restrictive. But one card that ties a handful of draft picks together and pushes it a bit more toolbox? I don't know. I think this is cool. You reward people for choosing Dungeon Geists over Glen Elendra Archmage. Normally, you'd go with the more powerful card, but here there's a reason not to (or at least consider the less good stuffy option).

It's why I don't cut Wirewood Symbiote. For those times you get Deranged Hermit or Reclamation Sage and you chain those card. Your deck goes from being a generic Gx deck to a pseudo elf deck. All at the cost of one single slot in your 450 card cube. Sure, it doesn't typically make decks. But still feels worth it to me if the payout is there. Payout might not be there with Tallowisp, but if I could fetch Prison Term, Rancor or some other enchantment I pretty much always want to see just by running 4 spirits in my deck (3 of which I would have run anyway), am I really getting more value out of another 2 drop?

Just to put this in perspective... Grillo, you have Akroan Skyguard in Penny Pincher. Costs the same as Tallowisp. That card is barely above the bar with one heroic trigger (it's worse than Tallowisp without a trigger). This isn't a criticism mind you. Simply pointing out that the 2 slot doesn't exactly come with a high bar. Many of us were running Augur of Bolas, who 90% of the time was Tallowisp with zero upside.

 

[japahn]

You don't need zero narrow cards for a cube to work - having one or two lords that are only playable in this specific deck is not a big deal, in terms of slots taken - you just need to accept they often will be last picks.

Tallowisp is narrower than the mentioned cards, because the deck needs a reasonable Spirit AND Aura count for it to work. The other two are fine and playable in a vacuum.

I think Spirits needs a low power level to work, but it's a fine tribe, especially because it comes together naturally as a WU fliers deck and has access to good token makers at all sorts of power levels. I don't think Kamigawa Spirit/Arcane triggers are the way to go though, the fact that Tallowisp is the most workable one shows how narrow they are.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Right, but Akroan skyguard has been on my cut list for forever because the floor is so bad. I complain a lot about the heroic cards and how disappointing the mechanic has been in the penny thread.

We are all free to explore bad ideas, but I like to think actual testing results carries some weight, even if it the clearly established theories as to why this is a poor idea are no long persuasive for some reason. Like I said, I've already done this, and if your expectation is that its going to result in even infrequent spirit interactions, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed.

Lets stroll down memory lane.

Here is my past self invoking the concept of spirit tribal in 2014, while trying to drum up some sort of UW identity. Observe the formula of incidental tribal rearing its ugly head.

Some other things I was thinking of for the death or glory slot, were angel of flight alabaster and replace dictate of heliodwith celestial crusader. Theres a lot of loose (and very powerful) spirits spread across the cube, and angel seems like a good incidental spirit lord. Another thing I could do is run triplicate spirits with maybe a pride of the clouds. Also, the new fight card from Khans will eventually replace hunt the weak, the one where the guy is punching a bear.

Why, grillo why? WHY!? Just stop...don't go down this path...

But it continues...

What I kind of want to do, is encourage a U/W flyers list. Right now, the pieces are there, but the U/R delver version of the deck, I think, is much more powerful. Thats because red offers so many more powerful build arounds: young pyromancer, charmbreaker devils, guttersnipe, and burning vengeance.

The only real incentive card I have for a strong U/W list is geist of saint traft. I don't want to run drogskol captain, because hes a bit too narrow. Angel of flight alabaster does a lot of things for a geist deck, but can also get back karmic guide, ghost council of orzhova, dungeon geists, mindshrieker, fettergeist, and kira, great glass-spinner. The distribution of spirit cards, really pushes towards a U/W spirit flyers deck and she is basically a U/W card here. The main problem with angel though, is that she is overcosted on her own.

Well now, doesn't this sound familiar: its fine as a flyers deck he said.

More rationalization on its way....

I did a spirit count, and here is what I got:



So thats one major build around, and 5 quality targets one would want to recur. Thats a pretty reasonable density, but its still worth considering finding room for dearly departed. It might be worth cutting valkyrie for it.

Oh past Grillo...just listen to yourself. Reasonable desnsity, really? One build around and we are fine? One of them recurs itself and has double black in its CC, why are you counting that!?

And than along comes the fun subtheme argument, right on time. Nothing can be bad as long as its fun?

If it came down to it, I think I would prefer to break singleton on geist of saint traft rather than run Drogskol Captain. The thing I don't like about captain is that its very narrow: the body is not impressive, and if picked early it commits you to a certain tribe, deck strategy, and color combination. U/W already has a strong main theme with flyers, and we are really just looking to promote a fun sub theme in the color combination. As a result, I don't think its necessary to try to push the spirit deck into main theme territory, especially when the support is so questionable.

On the plus side, we are starting to use terms like "questionable," maybe the madness will soon stop.

Seven of the guilds were well defined in the initial cube, the 8th (U/W) I feel is pretty well defined after this spirit update

Translation: this isn't really working, but there is a good stuff flyers theme in UW, and because I run a few spirits I can pretend spirit decks are being built. /sigh

Its not until February 2015 that sanity returns with a cut/add post:

The spirit theme hasn't really panned out over the long term: too narrow. Angel gets played, but its always been a 4/4 flyer for 5, which won't cut it here.

The only thing that were missing here is the suggestion of running some generic "tribal anthem" as another justification piece: which I actually think is hidden in that thread somewhere.

One of the best aspects of having this forum is that when one of us screws up, we can share that experience, and save some other poor soul the pain of repeated failure.

If we must explore the concept of spirits, let us at least be more creative in the way we go about doing it, and not repeat Grillo's real world error, or ignore the excellent theoretical ground work established by CML and Jason.

 

[ahadabans]

Awesome post. It is crushing my dream of spirit tribal, but that might be for the best.

I am not a man of faith, so you can be rest assured when I get some free time I am building the nut Tallowisp deck and going to see first hand how bogus it is. Because I cannot help myself.

I will say that your compelling arguments against this have really shattered my optimism though. So I don't want you to feel the time you've put in here has been for nothing.