Why do you think banishing the top 4 of your deck changes in any meaningful way the distribution of your deck?
Say your deck is 25% lands. That means, on average, one of the four cards Impulsive Wish banishes is a land. This does not change the land distribution of your library in any way.
People run fetchlands to thin their deck because they fetch LANDS. Meaning there are fewer lands for you to draw in the future. Your card, since it is completely random, does not change the distribution of lands or anything else in your deck in any way.
If I ran no other wishes, why in the world would I want to run this card over even the lowly Thought Scour? Why would I just make resources disappear? Those milled cards are a resource for any number of things (as has been discussed in this thread without you ever addressing it). Why would I instead want to remove those resources from the game, indeed play a card SPECIFICALLY to remove cards in my deck from the game and make them harder to access?
If I was going to banish random cards just to wish for them, why not just draw them directly from my deck like a normal person?
Cards that mill for delve/flashback are specific to those types of decks.
This one isn't. It's really that simple.
It doesn't have any greedy dream application in those strategies to make them any more powerful than they already are, but certainly does have one where it's applicable.
I mean it is just as narrow to those types of decks. If you have no way to Wish for cards it's worse than Opt or any other draw a card with marginal upside. Removing cards from your deck at random isn't an upside. So this is purely restricted to Wish decks because otherwise you'd just run Opt or Crash Though or whatever slight bonus is better for your deck than removing 3 random cards permanently.
There is no reason to play this unless you run Wish cards. And as for your point that it lets them play in kitchen table games we already have a solution for that. Letting people pull cards out of their binder. Never bothered me when my friends used Spawnsire of Ulamog to drop a binder full of eldrazi onto the battlefield when playing casually.
Running this in a split with Ponder alone will definitely do something.
You're suggesting there's no way to do anything.
My point is that you're trying to create a consistency increasing card but you've created one worse than pretty much all of them all while insisting it's better. The design isn't that bad I just think you have misunderstood the powerlevel and that your designs would be better if you understood what is powerful. That's why I mentioned your comment in the Chainwhirler standard thread despite it being off topic to this design.
Yes you could run it with ponder and then you get to exile two unwanted cards off the top of your deck. But you might randomly draw one of them and exile two good cards instead. Or you may look at 3 cards you want and have Impulsive Wish stuck in your hand wasting a mana because you can't afford to risk exiling them and drawing a blank instead. Which would be brutal. Why would I take that risk when I can just run preordain, brainstorm, serum visions, or opt with my ponder instead and have card selection I can actually control? I'm not disagreeing with you that it has uses, my point is that they are narrower and weaker than you think. Which is fine! There is nothing wrong with narrow and weak cards at all! You just need to be aware that's what they are when you're designing them.
Running this in a split with Ponder alone will definitely do something.
You're suggesting there's no way to do anything.
But if I'm pondering, I can just put the card I want on top of my deck and DRAW IT. Neither your card nor the wish even need to exist in this equation.
But if I'm pondering, I can just put the card I want on top of my deck and DRAW IT. Neither your card nor the wish even need to exist in this equation.
Right, but you can also tech several specialty 1-of's in different types and then make selective power-plays without adulterating your deck's consistency.
But if I'm pondering, I can just put the card I want on top of my deck and DRAW IT. Neither your card nor the wish even need to exist in this equation.
Right, but you can also tech several specialty 1-of's in different types and then make selective power-plays without adulterating your deck's consistency.
If I want to run 1-ofs in my deck, I can just Tutorforthem. RFGing to then wish for them is just wasting time on an extra step, especially since your card RFGs cards at random so the one card I need likely isn't even going to be available to wish for. It isn't worth it.
By leaving them outside the game I can wish for them without having to cast your spell in the first place. You who seem to think you understand gameplay should realize that being 100% able to wish for the card I need casting your spell is better than casting your spell and hoping the card I need to wish for is one of the 4 that randomly gets RFGed.
But if I'm pondering, I can just put the card I want on top of my deck and DRAW IT. Neither your card nor the wish even need to exist in this equation.
Right, but you can also tech several specialty 1-of's in different types and then make selective power-plays without adulterating your deck's consistency.
Okay, I think that I'm seeing the basic line of thought here. If your deck is filled with lost of situational silver bullets with something to cover every situation, the odds are that any card milled is far more likely to be a dead card (a silver bullet for a non-applicable situation) than the one you are after. By getting rid of cards that are more likely to be dead than alive, you are increasing the speed at which you can access the card you need. By this logic, are are encouraged by play as many varying silver bullets as possible as doing so decreases the chance of something usable being permanently removed by the wish. With that, there are some problems
1. sideboards exist. Having the card you want in the sideboard is easier. You say that this card allows people to "not have a sideboard" but there is no incentive for players not to want a sideboard. The sideboard is where you want those cards to be and guaranteeing that you get what you want with a 2-mana wish is better than possibly-maybe getting to a card faster with a 1-mana wish. If you are trying to say that sideboards should not exist in the same way that you think London Mulligans should not exist, please be more specific.
2. Time Matters. While it is certainly true that the odds of a card you want being in the top 4 are much lower than them being in the bottom 48 or 49 on turn one, remember that most silver-bullet cards need to be pulled out in a very timely manner when you need them. If you need them by turn 4 (not at all uncommon), the math suddenly changes. You essentially get 4 chances of drawing the needed card outside of your initial hand (3 if you are playing first). If you cast this spell on turn 1, the real question becomes whether the card you want to draw is more likely to appear within cards 1-4 on top of your deck (which are removed by the wish) or on cards 5-8 of your library (which you would draw before it is too late to use the card). When you only compare cards 1-4 vs. 5-8 rather than cards 1-4 vs. 5-48, you have just as much of a chance of removing the card you need as accelerating yourself into it.
3. This card is random: Just reminding you that this card adds one of the four cards at random to your hand. You mention that this card allowing tactical selection but you literally choose nothing when casting this spell. Also, I wanted to point out that the random nature of this card makes it absolutely terrible at finding a specific 1-of card from your deck.
In fact, let me do the math right now.
Let's pretend that you start with a hand that contains four copies of this card and two lands that can play it (and a random 7th card) and that you are on the draw so you can thin your deck as much as possible. Assuming that the 1-of silver bullet isn't the seventh card of your hand or the top card of your library... well, your odds get bad really fast.
On your first turn, you play a land and cast the wish. The odds of the 1-of being in the top 4 cards is between 7% and 8% (check the calculator here if you don't believe me). If the card is in those top four, there is a 25% chance of adding the card to your hand instantly, a ~50.25% of adding it to your hand on turn 2 when you cast one or two additional wishes, and a 24.75% chance of adding it to your hand on turn 3 when you cast your last wish. Again, that's assuming that you had multiple wishes in your starting hand (which is not guaranteed in most games if you play a turn 1 wish and accidentally screw yourself by removing your 1 silver bullet and adding a different card back to your hand).
That 8% chance that I mentioned above? The odds of getting the card that you want from this wish drops DRASTICALLY from there if you don't get this card on the first wish. Thanks to the changes you made to the card design, you can remove another set of 4 cards when you cast your second wish instead of adding a card that you know will be bad. Let's assume that the one silver bullet you were looking at was in the second set of 4 cards (another 8.1% chance) and that you have 3 chances to get it into your hand... except that you are now selecting from among 7 cards at random (the three junk cards from the first time plus the four new cards). The odds of ever getting that 1-of silver bullet into your hand if you pick it up the second time drops from 100% (albeit with a chance that you'll need to draw every copy of the wish) to... 43.36% (and if you consider both the 8.1 percent chance of the second wish getting the spell and of the 43% chance of the second, third, or forth wish adding it to your hand... that's a 3% chance).
We aren't saying that the design isn't interesting. It is. We are simply pointing out that it wouldn't be powerful as you seem to believe.
Right, but this was saying in combination with other effects, such as Vampiric Tutor.
Okay... what do you mean? I may be lost.
Are you talking about using effects like vampiric tutor or ponder and the like to make sure that your 1-of silver bullet is on top of your library before you cast the wish?
Right, but this was saying in combination with other effects, such as Vampiric Tutor.
At that point playing Opt, Preordain, Ponder, Brainstorm, crash through, et al is better because you are guaranteed to get the card you Vampiric tutored to the top of your deck. If the idea is to put a dead card on top for thinning then you are using 2 cards to avoid it and still have a 25% chance of drawing the card you don't want.
Edit: If you want to keep the removing chaff part of it you could make this into a Sleight of Hand variant. Wishboarding one card and putting the other into your hand would give it the functionality of throwing unwanted cards away and selecting ones you want. I think without breaking the card too badly.
You could change a few words on Manipulate Fate and I think the design would be better, even if it's entirely an unecessary card to make
If you mean changing up the functionality so that you can search for 4 cards instead, I had thought about that, but I don't think it's as fun and doesn't preserve enough aspect of challenge (even if you increase the cost to suit).
Right, but this was saying in combination with other effects, such as Vampiric Tutor.
That is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.
Why (1) Cast vampiric tutor to put the card on top (2) Cast your spell to RFG the card (3) cast a Wish to put the card in my hand
when I can just
(1) Cast Vampiric tutor to put he card on top and (2) draw the card
Your plan require 3 cards in hand and 3-4 extra mana, mine accomplishes the same thing for 1 card and 1 mana. Whatever argument there is for your card to have functionality, you failed to make it in spectacular fashion.
You could change a few words on Manipulate Fate and I think the design would be better, even if it's entirely an unecessary card to make
If you mean changing up the functionality so that you can search for 4 cards instead, I had thought about that, but I don't think it's as fun and doesn't preserve enough aspect of challenge (even if you increase the cost to suit).
I just meant changing "exile" to "move to sideboard"
Right, but this was saying in combination with other effects, such as Vampiric Tutor.
That is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.
Well of course, the most alpha potential is finding the mathematical proportions for the type you can bolster.
And that's not even a coherent sentence. You've still yet to address why you think casting three spells to get the same effect as the as just casting the Vamp tutor is in any way an intelligent play pattern.
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Say your deck is 25% lands. That means, on average, one of the four cards Impulsive Wish banishes is a land. This does not change the land distribution of your library in any way.
People run fetchlands to thin their deck because they fetch LANDS. Meaning there are fewer lands for you to draw in the future. Your card, since it is completely random, does not change the distribution of lands or anything else in your deck in any way.
If I ran no other wishes, why in the world would I want to run this card over even the lowly Thought Scour? Why would I just make resources disappear? Those milled cards are a resource for any number of things (as has been discussed in this thread without you ever addressing it). Why would I instead want to remove those resources from the game, indeed play a card SPECIFICALLY to remove cards in my deck from the game and make them harder to access?
If I was going to banish random cards just to wish for them, why not just draw them directly from my deck like a normal person?
I mean it is just as narrow to those types of decks. If you have no way to Wish for cards it's worse than Opt or any other draw a card with marginal upside. Removing cards from your deck at random isn't an upside. So this is purely restricted to Wish decks because otherwise you'd just run Opt or Crash Though or whatever slight bonus is better for your deck than removing 3 random cards permanently.
There is no reason to play this unless you run Wish cards. And as for your point that it lets them play in kitchen table games we already have a solution for that. Letting people pull cards out of their binder. Never bothered me when my friends used Spawnsire of Ulamog to drop a binder full of eldrazi onto the battlefield when playing casually.
You're suggesting there's no way to do anything.
My point is that you're trying to create a consistency increasing card but you've created one worse than pretty much all of them all while insisting it's better. The design isn't that bad I just think you have misunderstood the powerlevel and that your designs would be better if you understood what is powerful. That's why I mentioned your comment in the Chainwhirler standard thread despite it being off topic to this design.
Yes you could run it with ponder and then you get to exile two unwanted cards off the top of your deck. But you might randomly draw one of them and exile two good cards instead. Or you may look at 3 cards you want and have Impulsive Wish stuck in your hand wasting a mana because you can't afford to risk exiling them and drawing a blank instead. Which would be brutal. Why would I take that risk when I can just run preordain, brainstorm, serum visions, or opt with my ponder instead and have card selection I can actually control? I'm not disagreeing with you that it has uses, my point is that they are narrower and weaker than you think. Which is fine! There is nothing wrong with narrow and weak cards at all! You just need to be aware that's what they are when you're designing them.
But if I'm pondering, I can just put the card I want on top of my deck and DRAW IT. Neither your card nor the wish even need to exist in this equation.
Right, but you can also tech several specialty 1-of's in different types and then make selective power-plays without adulterating your deck's consistency.
If I want to run 1-ofs in my deck, I can just Tutor for them. RFGing to then wish for them is just wasting time on an extra step, especially since your card RFGs cards at random so the one card I need likely isn't even going to be available to wish for. It isn't worth it.
By leaving them outside the game I can wish for them without having to cast your spell in the first place. You who seem to think you understand gameplay should realize that being 100% able to wish for the card I need casting your spell is better than casting your spell and hoping the card I need to wish for is one of the 4 that randomly gets RFGed.
Okay, I think that I'm seeing the basic line of thought here. If your deck is filled with lost of situational silver bullets with something to cover every situation, the odds are that any card milled is far more likely to be a dead card (a silver bullet for a non-applicable situation) than the one you are after. By getting rid of cards that are more likely to be dead than alive, you are increasing the speed at which you can access the card you need. By this logic, are are encouraged by play as many varying silver bullets as possible as doing so decreases the chance of something usable being permanently removed by the wish.
With that, there are some problems
1. sideboards exist. Having the card you want in the sideboard is easier. You say that this card allows people to "not have a sideboard" but there is no incentive for players not to want a sideboard. The sideboard is where you want those cards to be and guaranteeing that you get what you want with a 2-mana wish is better than possibly-maybe getting to a card faster with a 1-mana wish. If you are trying to say that sideboards should not exist in the same way that you think London Mulligans should not exist, please be more specific.
2. Time Matters. While it is certainly true that the odds of a card you want being in the top 4 are much lower than them being in the bottom 48 or 49 on turn one, remember that most silver-bullet cards need to be pulled out in a very timely manner when you need them. If you need them by turn 4 (not at all uncommon), the math suddenly changes. You essentially get 4 chances of drawing the needed card outside of your initial hand (3 if you are playing first). If you cast this spell on turn 1, the real question becomes whether the card you want to draw is more likely to appear within cards 1-4 on top of your deck (which are removed by the wish) or on cards 5-8 of your library (which you would draw before it is too late to use the card). When you only compare cards 1-4 vs. 5-8 rather than cards 1-4 vs. 5-48, you have just as much of a chance of removing the card you need as accelerating yourself into it.
3. This card is random: Just reminding you that this card adds one of the four cards at random to your hand. You mention that this card allowing tactical selection but you literally choose nothing when casting this spell. Also, I wanted to point out that the random nature of this card makes it absolutely terrible at finding a specific 1-of card from your deck.
In fact, let me do the math right now.
Let's pretend that you start with a hand that contains four copies of this card and two lands that can play it (and a random 7th card) and that you are on the draw so you can thin your deck as much as possible. Assuming that the 1-of silver bullet isn't the seventh card of your hand or the top card of your library... well, your odds get bad really fast.
On your first turn, you play a land and cast the wish. The odds of the 1-of being in the top 4 cards is between 7% and 8% (check the calculator here if you don't believe me). If the card is in those top four, there is a 25% chance of adding the card to your hand instantly, a ~50.25% of adding it to your hand on turn 2 when you cast one or two additional wishes, and a 24.75% chance of adding it to your hand on turn 3 when you cast your last wish. Again, that's assuming that you had multiple wishes in your starting hand (which is not guaranteed in most games if you play a turn 1 wish and accidentally screw yourself by removing your 1 silver bullet and adding a different card back to your hand).
That 8% chance that I mentioned above? The odds of getting the card that you want from this wish drops DRASTICALLY from there if you don't get this card on the first wish. Thanks to the changes you made to the card design, you can remove another set of 4 cards when you cast your second wish instead of adding a card that you know will be bad. Let's assume that the one silver bullet you were looking at was in the second set of 4 cards (another 8.1% chance) and that you have 3 chances to get it into your hand... except that you are now selecting from among 7 cards at random (the three junk cards from the first time plus the four new cards). The odds of ever getting that 1-of silver bullet into your hand if you pick it up the second time drops from 100% (albeit with a chance that you'll need to draw every copy of the wish) to... 43.36% (and if you consider both the 8.1 percent chance of the second wish getting the spell and of the 43% chance of the second, third, or forth wish adding it to your hand... that's a 3% chance).
We aren't saying that the design isn't interesting. It is. We are simply pointing out that it wouldn't be powerful as you seem to believe.
Okay... what do you mean? I may be lost.
Are you talking about using effects like vampiric tutor or ponder and the like to make sure that your 1-of silver bullet is on top of your library before you cast the wish?
At that point playing Opt, Preordain, Ponder, Brainstorm, crash through, et al is better because you are guaranteed to get the card you Vampiric tutored to the top of your deck. If the idea is to put a dead card on top for thinning then you are using 2 cards to avoid it and still have a 25% chance of drawing the card you don't want.
Edit: If you want to keep the removing chaff part of it you could make this into a Sleight of Hand variant. Wishboarding one card and putting the other into your hand would give it the functionality of throwing unwanted cards away and selecting ones you want. I think without breaking the card too badly.
If you mean changing up the functionality so that you can search for 4 cards instead, I had thought about that, but I don't think it's as fun and doesn't preserve enough aspect of challenge (even if you increase the cost to suit).
That is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.
Why (1) Cast vampiric tutor to put the card on top (2) Cast your spell to RFG the card (3) cast a Wish to put the card in my hand
when I can just
(1) Cast Vampiric tutor to put he card on top and (2) draw the card
Your plan require 3 cards in hand and 3-4 extra mana, mine accomplishes the same thing for 1 card and 1 mana. Whatever argument there is for your card to have functionality, you failed to make it in spectacular fashion.
I just meant changing "exile" to "move to sideboard"
Well of course, the most alpha potential is finding the mathematical proportions for the type you can bolster.
And that's not even a coherent sentence. You've still yet to address why you think casting three spells to get the same effect as the as just casting the Vamp tutor is in any way an intelligent play pattern.