Card/Deck Vanilla creatures
- Thread starter Jonas
- Start date
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
That is, without a doubt, the biggest "vanilla" creature you can run. I considered him, but he isn't that interesting to be honest. Lightning Angel and Numot, the Devastator seem more at place in your typical WUR deck.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
If I am going to lose with awful creatures, I might as well win with awesome flavor text.
So which creature is your preferred one for that then?
Dom Harvey
Contributor
I've never understood that line of thinking re. hybrids. If I would play Snakeform if it was 2G, or if it was 2U, I'm supposed to not play it because it could be either of those.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
The parallel is if snakeform was 1UG, which I don't think it'd be that great at...
If I am going to lose with awful creatures, I might as well win with awesome flavor text.
Yeah,
is uh, let's say 7 times more restrictive than . Does that sound about right?
That's what I'm saying though. Because you can play it in either G or U decks, it's even more attractive (which is why IMO they should not be in the guild section but in one of the mono colored sections competing with those cards). If you treat it like a multi-colored card, it has to compete for one of 2-3 slots in your entire cube (for a much more narrow color combination). From a design perspective, you really are stuck using those slots for specific arch type enabling cards or cards that are stupid value (Vindicate and friends). There is simply no room for "good" cards in your gold section because of how much competition there is now. In 2008, yes. But not today.
If you could only run 3 one drops in Green, you would be having to exclude virtual auto includes (Llanowar Elves for example doesn't make the cut if all you can run is three green 1 drops). We are technically all excluding virtual auto includes in our gold sections because you can't run more than X amount without ruining drafts. So there are tons of very powerful cards that aren't getting played in most cubes. It is what it is though.
If card classification really matters that much, just lump hybrids with artifacts. Seriously. Kitchen Finks is almost as easy to cast as Bottle Gnomes, and easier to cast than Trained Armodon.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
One way you can somewhat get around that problem is having a number of your archetype enabling cards be off-color activation/interaction cards in the mono sections: desperate ravings kird ape loam lion forbidden alchemy etc.
I've always liked protean hulk's flavor text, but he is hardly vanilla enough. Canyon minotaur would probably be a good candidate.
That seems like a stretch. Then again, I did have a separate hybrid section at one point so pretty much the same thing I guess. I didn't like that though because it got unbalanced and I didn't really know where to draw the line since hybrids weren't competing with anything directly. It got easier when I put them in the mono-colored sections. For me at least.
Slippery slope though. You end up running too many gold cards while hiding them in your mono-colored sections. It might look better on paper than running giant gold sections, but your draft is going to be hurt all the same.
I'm only doing this with flashback cards since they aren't useless if you only have one color. I suppose you can argue Kird Ape isn't useless either, but a 1/1 vanilla for R is terribad. At least with Lingering Souls you get decent value for one activation and you really only need a single W or B at some point in the game to get retarded value out of it. The Ape actually requires a forest be in play for him not to suck, not just a single green mana at some point in the game. It represents a much larger commitment so I really don't think running it in red sections is doing your cube any favors.
It's kind of a grab bag. If you think of your cube as 2-color decks, hybrids (cast in 70% of decks) are halfway between mono (cast Trained Armoden in 40% of decks, Bottle Gnomes in 100%).
If you think of your cube as 3-color decks, the percentages tip to 90% / 60% / 100%, pushing hybrids closer to artifacts.
If you're a mix of 2 and 3 color decks artifacts are mathematically closer.
Hybrid cards are great. They have the opposite effect of a regular gold card on your drafting environment.
Kird Ape/Loam Lion/Wild Nacatl and off-color flashback cards are much closer to actual gold cards than hybrids.
Fair enough. When you get down to the math, I see your point.
With all the artifacts I've removed recently, I might be able to put my hybrids in the colorless section and have them compete with artifacts. Hmm.... tempting actually. The only thing I like about having them in mono colored is it forces me to balance them better and when I'm off it's more obvious (I'll have 4 hybrids in white and 1 in blue for instance).
Still, I might have to think on making this change. There are definitely mono colored cards I'm not running that I'd like to run and losing an artifact to do so would be an easier cut I think (which is what this move would amount to).
For what it's worth I jam them in mono but Eric's comment has me considering moving them. I don't think it matters much though, I'm not going to cut artifacts in order to move them.
CML
Contributor
Can somebody explain to me why this card mentions tokens?
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
What I did when I designed this new cube, was I sat down and wrote out each of the 10 guilds, and than tried to decide on a main theme and a sub-theme for each.* From there, I made a judgment call on what I would need to push people in those directions, and then adjusted it based on how people were playing. As a result, right now I am running loam lion to push people more into the G/W direction, but not kird ape, since I have not observed a problem with people wanting to explore G/R. Loam lion is a powerful early beater; and as such, is a reward for someone to go into an aggressive G/W deck early in the draft. I guess I don't really see it as an issue of hiding multiplayer cards, but more as a problem solving tool to provide draft structure.
*I think I saw this approach featured in either one of Jason's articles or a WOTZ article--don't remember which, but it worked for me.