Card/Deck Tokens

James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
It's about time we had a general token thread! (*salutes*)

I want a GW token theme. The reason is I want try again with the RW double strike theme, a GW token theme, with good anthems as crossover.

I have a few questions for yall. Firstly, who here even runs a token theme? I never hear about it, apart from Raise the Alarm and Gather the Townsfolk. It seems like people complained about army-in-a-can cards ages ago and I haven't heard about any big token makers since.

So let's discuss.
1) Token Makers

This is the only one I'm thinking about right now. It looks like it would be good in white aggro with humans, double-strike aggro with anthems, and WX control - something I'm also trying to improve right now. Any thoughts? Can anyone recommend some other token makers?

2)Anthems
I'm thinking about these ones:

Any others? Has anyone had any success with Pianna and Soltari Champion? I tried this theme while ago and they weren't good. I was also pretty unimpressed with Accorder Paladin, but I still run one. Is Signal Pest any good?

3)Wraths
If the token deck is good, I'll need ways to fight it.

I dunno what else.

But the real question is: Is this just not a fun deck? I was playing MM2 and I really hate playing against tokens. But maybe it would be ok if my deck had the tools to fight it.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist



Maybe there is a way to get something more out of tokens than just all-in 1/1s and anthemes? Green has some access to slightly bigger ones, and Selesnya have had both its mechanics geared towards doing stuff with tokens. I think you can balance a theme like this out with running very very few army in a cans, and limiting the number of bodies a single card can give. I can imagine playing versus a resolved increasing devotion and any kind of on-board pump can feel pretty bad, since there's usually nothing you can do against that board state par having access to a board sweep. Incidentally you seem have found a niche for RB control in fighting little weenies. I do like the idea of finding a cross over between WR double strike (aggro-combo?) and tokens.

If you are running pump like that, you can also support some kind of elves-build I think, since those decks rely on weenies as well.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Gavony Township is a decent one

Honestly I think if you try and go mono tokens, you end up slow or bad, since raise the alarm is not a great spell, but you don't want to be starting on T3.

The easiest overlap is with pod:

 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I've gone the Lucas route - all instant-speed token makers! - and it has been paying dividends. I wouldn't knock Raise the Alarm until you've tried it - turns out that it's much better than Gather the Townsfolk, despite the latter's tribal synergy.



The last one is a little dodgy, but I'm leaving it in there in hopes that it'll do something, someday.

Along with the above, some sorcery speed tokens to supplement:



I had stuff like Nest Invader and Kozilek's Predator in at the beginning, but those were too underpowered to be of any impact. I can see guys like those working a lot better if the Eldrazi Spawn tokens help you either ramp to something huge, or benefit from some sort of sacrifice archetype that's centred in green.

Though honestly, since I've added Purphoros, it's actually RW tokens that's become all the rage.



In my opinion, midrange token producers - i.e. those that cost five and up, like your Cloudgoat Rangers and Captains of the Watch - are boring because they tend to gum up the ground and prolong otherwise good games of Magic. For that reason, I'm not a fan of Increasing Devotion. I feel like tokens are better when the archetype has an aggro slant to it, both because it gives the aggro decks better protection against Wrath effects, and because it gives those decks another dimension - go wide and swarm around the Thragtusk! - rather than being stymied as soon as the opponent lays down a 3/3 or 4/4 blocker.
 
Modin

Modin

I'm with Eric. Tokens are most fun when combined with other archetypes (spells/sacrifice) or as a random bonus/payoff as seen in the beloved Young Pyromancer. In my experience you are much rather gonna pick up some token cards incidentally and then take cards that go well with them. Cards that just spit out a bunch of tokens at once are just not that exciting .
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Yeah, as far as payoff cards go, any of the Ajanis work fine, with the original Goldmane probably still being the best. Dictate of Heliod is ridiculously strong if your environment isn't heavy on enchantment removal; for a lighter touch, you could play something like Sublime Archangel or Jazal Goldmane. Mirror Entity is also pretty nuts, because he tends to end games the very next turn, but he's a great fit in environments with a lot of cheap, high-powered removal.

In green, Curse of Predation remains the best payoff, though it's a card that's strong enough that it'll get snatched up by any green drafter within a few miles of an aggro deck. You could always play stuff like Overrun and Overwhelming Stampede, though cards like those tend to be situational and are really poor when you're behind. Lately I've been testing Creeperhulk as a pseudo-Overrun-on-a-stick, though again he's got enough juice that you might lose out on him to the midrange green drafter.

For answers to tokens, I agree that the more your environment supports spitting out dorks turn after turn, the more sweepers you want to pack. There's also more specialized token hate, like Engineered Explosives, Ratchet Bomb, Maelstrom Pulse, and Detention Sphere, that also do double duty as all-round answers to troublesome permanents.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I agree with the other posters in that tokens is best, not so much as an archetype but as a somewhat common tool. For example:



This is a spell for Saheeli, humans for Champion of the Parish and fodder for Aristocrats. If you run Raise the Alarm, the tribal synergy is replaced by "surprisingly decent removal".

Some cards I like in the same vein:

s e

Thopters and Servos are much more useful than the average token by virtue of being artifacts.

I also like



As payoffs.

Cards I dislike:



Mirror Entity is kind of dumb. Half of the time, you play and then swing with everything with as much mana as possible. Good card, and not broken or anything but it's a bit meh on the strategic level.
 
ravnic

ravnic

I habe 14 token producers in white and 13 in green, which are my main colors for the midrange token deck, as well as 9 in red. I also support a boros gowide deck which is really aggressive, but you need less actual token producers here, as most 1- and 2-drops work just great with anthems as they are
 
TekLazar

TekLazar

Karn Cuberated said:
How many token makers would you, guys, recomend to run to make the archetype more or less consistent?
Click to expand...

It depends on the size of your cube, but if you're looking to make say populate good with cards like vitu-ghazi guildmage: I looked at the asfan on Return to Ravnica for token makers and it's .77 per pack. For a 360 cube that's around 20 cards that are token makers. BUT for Cube I always give a little more to be conservative if your packs are trying to be as random as possible so lets say like 22-25. (and like ravnic said I would split these among your token colors). Looking at your cube you have almost 40 token makers across all of the colors, so why do you ask? Are they not coming in at the right colors?
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

TekLazar said:
It depends on the size of your cube, but if you're looking to make say populate good with cards like vitu-ghazi guildmage: I looked at the asfan on Return to Ravnica for token makers and it's .77 per pack. For a 360 cube that's around 20 cards that are token makers. BUT for Cube I always give a little more to be conservative if your packs are trying to be as random as possible so lets say like 22-25. (and like ravnic said I would split these among your token colors). Looking at your cube you have almost 40 token makers across all of the colors, so why do you ask? Are they not coming in at the right colors?
Click to expand...

I mainly want to support tokens as a black-white archetype, splashing red or green (mostly red). During the previous draft I felt like it's, perhaps, too much support in black-red-white for tokens and trimmed things down, but decided to check out whether I should make even more cuts/stay at this point/bring some cards back.
 
Brad

Brad

I used to run an updated Eldrazi Domain cube around the time of BFZ. Lots of 0/1 and 1/1s running around as well as quite a few 1 damage ways to get rid of them. But the ground always got so stalled up. If you were playing 2/1s in aggro... Good luck getting through.

I had a similar experience in one of the Modern Masters drafts. I had all the token producers, I'd jam the board to shit and then instant win when I got any kind of team buffing spell.

Therefore, I basically hate the Tokens Deck. I do like tokens, however! I just think that a huge quantity of creatures readily available is pretty detrimental unless the format is warped around that possibility a bit with tons of trample, flying, small board wipes (that also fuck up aggro badly), etc. It's too bad because it's definitely a fun deck, but it has always seemed unfun to play against to me.
 
TekLazar

TekLazar

Karn Cuberated said:
I mainly want to support tokens as a black-white archetype, splashing red or green (mostly red). During the previous draft I felt like it's, perhaps, too much support in black-red-white for tokens and trimmed things down, but decided to check out whether I should make even more cuts/stay at this point/bring some cards back.
Click to expand...

I see, Cube is definitely something you should feel out firsthand so it's good you noticed. To me trimming it sounds good, and you can use what the thread has discussed so far to do that. Do keep messing with it though, I have a similar theme, but in different colors so I'm curious how yours will pan out.

Brad said:
Therefore, I basically hate the Tokens Deck. I do like tokens, however! I just think that a huge quantity of creatures readily available is pretty detrimental unless the format is warped around that possibility a bit with tons of trample, flying, small board wipes (that also fuck up aggro badly), etc. It's too bad because it's definitely a fun deck, but it has always seemed unfun to play against to me.
Click to expand...

I actually have had some good success with tokens cuz most of my beefy boys are flyers or tramplers, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on them. Tokens can be tough to balance just based on what you have said, but my players and I like populate so we're trying it out haha.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

ravnic said:
I habe 14 token producers in white and 13 in green, which are my main colors for the midrange token deck, as well as 9 in red. I also support a boros gowide deck which is really aggressive, but you need less actual token producers here, as most 1- and 2-drops work just great with anthems as they are
Click to expand...

And how many tokens decks typically appear during th draft?
TekLazar said:
I see, Cube is definitely something you should feel out firsthand so it's good you noticed. To me trimming it sounds good, and you can use what the thread has discussed so far to do that. Do keep messing with it though, I have a similar theme, but in different colors so I'm curious how yours will pan out.
Click to expand...
I will write, if any positive results
 
ravnic

ravnic

We usually draft with 4-5 people and have around 1 drafter per draft, who goes more heavily in the token archetype. But tokens appear to some degree in 80% of the decks I'd say.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

So, as I promised, what I currently have on tokens count.
This deck went 1-2. It seemed to be ineffective at swarming the board with tokens.

WBg Tokens (1--2) from CubeTutor.com










I played with numbers a bit and came up to the quantity which seemed to be optimal - around 12-13 token generators.
Another Problem with the deck is it has low winrate in Aggro matchups. I tried adding Elspeth Tirel, but it resulted in games becoming binary. The tokens player either did catch Elspeth and restore their life, outclassing Aggro in the late game, or didn't draw it and most commonly lost.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how we could make this deck better? Should I add some finishers, but more fair ones than Elspeth? More unconditional anthems for the late game?

Upgraded List










 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

So, this is, perhaps, the best I could get.

WB Tokens Test from CubeTutor.com









The main mistake was going all-in on tokens plan, forgetting about early creatures that trade or stop the opponent’s aggression. I also added 3 finishers, 2 of which are lords at the same time. The number of token producers has been reduced to 8-10 cards without losing too much effectiveness at swarming the battlefield. I guess, earlier this struggling with developing the board state was caused mainly by the absence of early plays.
As for the spread of token makers by colors, I think, it would be correct to play 7-8 in white as the main color and 3-5 in secondary colors at 360 cards. In my list it is 19 cards in total. That’s what my cube had several updates ago and what we’ve found to be effective so far as a result of several drafts we’ve recently done. Depending on how deeply you want to support the theme, numbers may change, of course.
As I can see, most of the cards mentioned so far in this thread have been of relatively low power level. (maybe people were just looking for not so obvious inclisions?). Time to jam some good-stuff here.
I currently run the following:
Some notes
Raise the Alarm. It has been in our list since its very creation, but now it’s gone. At our power level it happened to be lackluster. On turn 2 you’re, probably, expected to cast something more impactful, and further in the game it becomes less and less exciting. The same thing with its cousins Gather the Townsfolk and Servo Exhibition I once ran, too. My pretensions to Midnight Haunting are similar, even though it spawns flyers.
If you’re interested in GW theme, you could, perhaps, try Nissa, Voice of Zendikar. I cut it few days ago for Garruk Relentless and haven’t been disappointed so far. But we’ll see how it goes during the next several drafts.
Also, back in the days I was messing around with Green-Black swarm-and-sacrifice midrange deck, I had Awakening Zone. Not a bad one, I should say. Chump blockers come in handy, and it goes into Ramp, too. But these decks might be interested in more quick ways of developping mana, I guess.
How people find Woe Strider, I wonder? Is it Aggro-playable?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top