Back in the first set of magic, Wizards made a five color cycle where the blue card in the cycle was the best magic card ever printed and the white one was one of the worst cards ever printed.
How much life would Healing Salve have to gain to be constructed playable?
Bonus Question!: How much life would Healing Salve have to gain to be as good as Ancestral Recall?
I would say at least 6 - 7 life. Good as Recall.. probably 12 - 14 life; it would be an unfair swing in life gain, but Recall is already broken, so a life gain spell would also have to be broken. But then would be like making the damage from Lightning Bolt be 6, just to be as equally broken. This is why Time Warp is a 5cc spell, not a 2cc.
Hmm... I remember that Rest for the Weary saw some minor play in fog decks when it was legal, so that's probably the closest benchmark for straight-out lifegain. So Sorcery speed, two mana (that's usually how it was played, unless you had unused fetch lands out) is worth 8 life for minor play in niche decks.
Before anyone goes with their usual "lifegain without anything else is always bad because it doesn't affect the board state", let me just say that if we made a hypothetical card that gained you 20 life for W, then that card would be played in every white deck ever and be the death sentence of every burn or fast aggro deck ever. Since 3 life is too weak and 20 life too strong, the optimal number should be somewhere in between. Wizards just never took the trouble to figure out this number and let lifegain fester on the sidelines.
Personally I'd say that 7 or 8 life for 1 mana should be about right for standard. A lifegain card would care less about the difference between 1 or 2 mana than, say, a counterspell or a creature, because the timing doesn't matter. Gaining X life is exactly as strong regardless of whether it happens on turn 1 or turn 6, as long as you're still alive. So I'd say that spending a card for 7 or 8 life with no additional effect would at least put it in the "to be considered" pile. 10 life would probably make it a sure deal.
It depends on the format and the metagame, though. In Vintage, they could print a card that gained you a billion life for 0 and it would not see play. In formats where burn or fast aggro decks are prevalent, lifegain is fairly powerful, since those decks are based around getting the opponent from 20 to 0 in as little time as possible. Adjusting that number throws off their calculations and will leave them grasping once they run out of gas. Control decks probably care less, although it can still make the difference in a staring contest.
As for the bonus question, that's comparing apples and oranges. In any format where Ancestral Recall is legal, lifegain is a moot point anyway. If you were to throw Ancestral Recall and a hypothetical super-lifegain card into any other format, then every deck would play Recall and the lifegain card would be played depending on whether the metagame demands card slots for purely defensive purposes. The actual amount would not matter that much.
To be constructed viable, it'd have to be a minimum of 6, probably more like 8. It would also depend on their being a viable burn or red aggro deck in the format, and even then it would be relegated to the sideboard.
To be as good as Recall... 20? 100? It would have to be an insane amount of life.
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To be constructed viable, it'd have to be a minimum of 6, probably more like 8. It would also depend on their being a viable burn or red aggro deck in the format, and even then it would be relegated to the sideboard.
To be as good as Recall... 20? 100? It would have to be an insane amount of life.
This.
Really tough to say what it would take to be as good as Recall. In older formats where combo is a thing I am not sure any amount of life would be as powerful as Recall, which as a 4-of could just set up infinite combos or mill combos so easily.
But in something like limited or standard, where people are playing "fair", probably ~20.
To be playable? Like someone said above, depends of the format. Eternal? Probably lots, LOTS of life. Modern and standard? I would say something between 7-8 life. But it's very difficult to determine the exact number, because lifegain in a large number of situations is just irrelevant. But i think that Save would never be as good as recall (assuming a realistic amount of life gain), because draw a card is just MUCH BETTER than lifegain. It gives to you options, solutions and opportunities, and the game is about it, while H. Save gives you... a little time maybe?
Bolt, ritual, recall and even giant growth are cards that you play looking for victory in most cases, but healing save in most scenarious is just a way to avoid death. It's hard to compare this two opposite situations.
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There is no possible way for Healing Salve to be as good as Recall in existing eternal Magic formats. Life is too easily circumvented. This is probably true even in Modern. . Think of just one popular card, Jace TMS, in Legacy or Vintage.
All you would get from a super healing salve (let's say W: gain 100 life) is to push burn and aggro decks completely out of the format and warp the format around combo decks and non-damage win conditions. For example if you were playing Vintage Shops you would start including ways to mill the enemy out after locking the board down. On the other hand if you're playing Blue in Vintage you don't even care since you still win with Jace or Vault-Key or both.
The card is fundamentally flawed. Pure lifegain from a card is always bad unless you're getting something else out of it.
In order to make a card like that playable you'd need it to:
Draw a card
Make a dude
Redirect the damage to something
As straight life gain it simply will not see constructed play. I mean, you can say some stupid amount of lifegain for 1 mana (8, 10, etc) but that is not realistic as something 1 mana should ever be able to do, so I won't bother considering it.
In conclusion: The card as written is awful, numbers tweaks will not help it.
I'd like to remind people that Martyr of the Sands was quite a competitive T2 Deck. Although it wasn't instant, costed mana to activate, and wasn't guaranteed life, that little bugger gained at least 9 life. I guess the broken part was forecasting a proclamation of rebirth every turn with the urzatron out! lol.
Not to mention, I see where wizards went with this. Healing salve is a counter spell to lightning bolt. You prevent 3 damage and lightning bolt deals 3 damage.
I'd say in order for healing salve to be playable it simply needs a redirection clause instead of a prevention clause. "Gain 3 life or redirect the next 3 damage that would be dealt to target creature or player to another target creature or player"
I would play this in U/W control, especially if the meta plays a lot of double strike/first strike dudes.
Enough that the life gained is able to negate more than one alpha strike from an aggro deck. Less than that and it's equivalent to or worse than a fog and no one runs those.
Even if Healing Salve gave you 50 life for (which is ridiculous), there would still be matchups where you'd take it out because it wouldn't accomplish anything, such as infinite-combo decks like Splinter-Twin.
I'd like to remind people that Martyr of the Sands was quite a competitive T2 Deck. Although it wasn't instant, costed mana to activate, and wasn't guaranteed life, that little bugger gained at least 9 life. I guess the broken part was forecasting a proclamation of rebirth every turn with the urzatron out! lol.
Not to mention, I see where wizards went with this. Healing salve is a counter spell to lightning bolt. You prevent 3 damage and lightning bolt deals 3 damage.
I'd say in order for healing salve to be playable it simply needs a redirection clause instead of a prevention clause. "Gain 3 life or redirect the next 3 damage that would be dealt to target creature or player to another target creature or player"
I would play this in U/W control, especially if the meta plays a lot of double strike/first strike dudes.
Actually wizards has explained the design philosophy behind healing salve. First you have to understand the card was in Alpha, it's design predates the release of the game to the public so the philosophy is based purely on theoretical "fun" ideas and not based on game testing with players trying to think of the most efficient scenarios.
5 cards in the game were designed as what were called "boons"; each color would get 1 card that cost 1 mana and give 3 of something
1 White: healing salve; 3 life or prevent 3 damage
1 Blue: ancestral recall: draw 3 cards
1 Black: dark ritual: 3 mana
1 Red: lightning bolt: do 3 damage
1 Green: giant growth: boost +3/+3 to your creature
It's been mentioned that ancestral recall prior to launch was considered boring as it did not add to the game in progress but instead just gave you stuff to use later on another turn; it wasn't until later when people started really examining the mechanics for long term win conditions that 3 cards suddenly was realized as the most potent overall where everything else was just a flash in the pan
Of those 5 the only one considered consistently balanced has been giant growth which has been reprinted an obscene number of times compared to the other 4. Healing salve has always been considered weak and didn't take long to move from weak to useless. The other 3 have fallen in and out of favor and seen some reprinting.
You'll find various attempts at fixing the boons over the years with similar effects or tweaked casting costs. Red consistently keeps getting 2 cost spells that do 3 damage (incinerate, lightning strike, etc); Ancestral recall was re-attempted as brainstorm, though even that is still considered a strong card. Healing salve however just doesn't do something most people will need so even trying to tweak it creates a mechanic (life gain) that is generally only considered useful when its a bonus effect to something else you are doing already.
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As for how to fix healing salve; blessed wine is a step in the right direction; though blessed wine in particular is too weak to be relevant. If the card gave you life / prevented damage and than replaced itself by letting you draw another card the next turn, you'd have a viable healing salve and even at 3 life gain it wouldn't be horrible. It would still be a bit slow, but the fact you gained the life and than not giving up card advantage in the long term would be acceptable in many cases.
This is how I would fix healing salve:
---
1 white
instant
Gain 3 life or prevent 6 damage to a creature you control
Draw an additional card during your next draw phase.
---
You now have a card that can give you a tiny amount of life or save a creature and it doesn't put you at a card disadvantage
Or up the cost slightly and:
---
1 white 1 colorless
instant
Gain 3 life or prevent 6 damage to a creature you control
Scry: 1; Draw an additional card during your next draw phase
----
Or come up with something else entirely, point being that life gain is only useful if its in addition to some other effect
I think a ridiculously broken Healing Salve could see play in eternal formats. It would make Tendrils-based storm decks a lot worse and would completely shut down aggro and burn. Storm and aggro are relevant in Vintage, so if this Broken Healing Salve was good enough, it would see play there. And of course it would see play in Legacy and Modern.
There are decks and win conditions that completely ignore life total, though (Splinter Twin combo, High Tide combo, Blightsteel Colossus, etc.), so you could only push Healing Salve so far before you reached a point of diminishing returns. After a certain point, aggro and burn just become straight up unplayable, and no matter how much more life gain you add to Broken Healing Salve it doesn't matter, because the only decks left don't care about your life total.
Of course, if aggro and burn got pushed out completely, then people might stop playing Broken Healing Salve altogether, and then someone could time things right and bring back Burn when the metagame was unprepared for it and crush people. Kind of like that few week period a while back when Burn was winning Legacy opens. That would actually be hilarious.
Martyr of Sands is probably the baseline for how powerful a pure lifegain card needs to be in Standard to see play as straight lifegain. Martyr begs to be recurred, though, which is something you can't easily do with Healing Salve (Isochron Scepter?)
For a lifegain effect to be viable, as straight lifegain, without other tricks, it has to be twice as much 'average' damage you would take from an aggressive turn. Otherwise it's better to use a Fog-like prevention effect. Swinging with a 2/X and a 3/X together is pretty common in this format, meaning 10 would be the magic number right now (for W).
With another trick attached, you need to gain enough to be more than an average attack, but not up to the same at least double. So we're looking at 6-7.
10 life or something absurd. It's still a bad topdeck, doesn't kill the opponent, draw a card, make a dude...the times that life gain has done something is when it's incidental like thragtusk, baneslayer angel, and sphinx's revelation among others. Rest for the weary gained 8 life and the card was still awful.
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7+. no question. You have to want to see it or it provide some hell against aggro in a sb. aggro typically comes at you with 4-12 power in turns 2-4 depending on format. just my opinion.
My goodness some of these numbers are positively absurd. 10 life for W? Are you kidding me? That would kill aggro so fast it wouldn't even be funny. Martyr generally gains people 9 or 12 life, and that ends up costing you 2 mana and you have to reveal some cards from your hand.
You're aware that Reviving Dose, Captured Sunlight and Survival Cache all saw play while they were in standard right? You're kidding yourself if you think 5 life and a cantrip should cost W.
Healing Salve is fine the way it is. The damage prevention is highly undervalued and the lifegain is essentially card advantage against burn decks.
Unfortunately every try hard from Sacramento to Shanghai preaches from the top of their 27 lands + Mana Reflection that Tooth and Nail and Time Stretch are fine to play in the same turn but Armageddon is unfair.
If you make healing salve 10 life, then aggro decks just die, and control decks dominate.
And when control decks dominate, 10 life doesn't seem so hot anymore. Games just turn into board control, then once board control is established you might as well have 100 life and you'd still lose. Whoops, looks like that 10 life healing salve is now useless again.
So, it isn't just a matter of increasing how much life healing salve does.
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How much life would Healing Salve have to gain to be constructed playable?
Bonus Question!: How much life would Healing Salve have to gain to be as good as Ancestral Recall?
This should be in Magic General.
Before anyone goes with their usual "lifegain without anything else is always bad because it doesn't affect the board state", let me just say that if we made a hypothetical card that gained you 20 life for W, then that card would be played in every white deck ever and be the death sentence of every burn or fast aggro deck ever. Since 3 life is too weak and 20 life too strong, the optimal number should be somewhere in between. Wizards just never took the trouble to figure out this number and let lifegain fester on the sidelines.
Personally I'd say that 7 or 8 life for 1 mana should be about right for standard. A lifegain card would care less about the difference between 1 or 2 mana than, say, a counterspell or a creature, because the timing doesn't matter. Gaining X life is exactly as strong regardless of whether it happens on turn 1 or turn 6, as long as you're still alive. So I'd say that spending a card for 7 or 8 life with no additional effect would at least put it in the "to be considered" pile. 10 life would probably make it a sure deal.
It depends on the format and the metagame, though. In Vintage, they could print a card that gained you a billion life for 0 and it would not see play. In formats where burn or fast aggro decks are prevalent, lifegain is fairly powerful, since those decks are based around getting the opponent from 20 to 0 in as little time as possible. Adjusting that number throws off their calculations and will leave them grasping once they run out of gas. Control decks probably care less, although it can still make the difference in a staring contest.
As for the bonus question, that's comparing apples and oranges. In any format where Ancestral Recall is legal, lifegain is a moot point anyway. If you were to throw Ancestral Recall and a hypothetical super-lifegain card into any other format, then every deck would play Recall and the lifegain card would be played depending on whether the metagame demands card slots for purely defensive purposes. The actual amount would not matter that much.
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When you have other effects it obviously is skewed a lot. Here's looking at you Thragtusk.
To be as good as Recall... 20? 100? It would have to be an insane amount of life.
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This.
Really tough to say what it would take to be as good as Recall. In older formats where combo is a thing I am not sure any amount of life would be as powerful as Recall, which as a 4-of could just set up infinite combos or mill combos so easily.
But in something like limited or standard, where people are playing "fair", probably ~20.
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Bolt, ritual, recall and even giant growth are cards that you play looking for victory in most cases, but healing save in most scenarious is just a way to avoid death. It's hard to compare this two opposite situations.
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All you would get from a super healing salve (let's say W: gain 100 life) is to push burn and aggro decks completely out of the format and warp the format around combo decks and non-damage win conditions. For example if you were playing Vintage Shops you would start including ways to mill the enemy out after locking the board down. On the other hand if you're playing Blue in Vintage you don't even care since you still win with Jace or Vault-Key or both.
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In order to make a card like that playable you'd need it to:
Draw a card
Make a dude
Redirect the damage to something
As straight life gain it simply will not see constructed play. I mean, you can say some stupid amount of lifegain for 1 mana (8, 10, etc) but that is not realistic as something 1 mana should ever be able to do, so I won't bother considering it.
In conclusion: The card as written is awful, numbers tweaks will not help it.
Not to mention, I see where wizards went with this. Healing salve is a counter spell to lightning bolt. You prevent 3 damage and lightning bolt deals 3 damage.
I'd say in order for healing salve to be playable it simply needs a redirection clause instead of a prevention clause. "Gain 3 life or redirect the next 3 damage that would be dealt to target creature or player to another target creature or player"
I would play this in U/W control, especially if the meta plays a lot of double strike/first strike dudes.
Actually wizards has explained the design philosophy behind healing salve. First you have to understand the card was in Alpha, it's design predates the release of the game to the public so the philosophy is based purely on theoretical "fun" ideas and not based on game testing with players trying to think of the most efficient scenarios.
5 cards in the game were designed as what were called "boons"; each color would get 1 card that cost 1 mana and give 3 of something
1 White: healing salve; 3 life or prevent 3 damage
1 Blue: ancestral recall: draw 3 cards
1 Black: dark ritual: 3 mana
1 Red: lightning bolt: do 3 damage
1 Green: giant growth: boost +3/+3 to your creature
It's been mentioned that ancestral recall prior to launch was considered boring as it did not add to the game in progress but instead just gave you stuff to use later on another turn; it wasn't until later when people started really examining the mechanics for long term win conditions that 3 cards suddenly was realized as the most potent overall where everything else was just a flash in the pan
Of those 5 the only one considered consistently balanced has been giant growth which has been reprinted an obscene number of times compared to the other 4. Healing salve has always been considered weak and didn't take long to move from weak to useless. The other 3 have fallen in and out of favor and seen some reprinting.
You'll find various attempts at fixing the boons over the years with similar effects or tweaked casting costs. Red consistently keeps getting 2 cost spells that do 3 damage (incinerate, lightning strike, etc); Ancestral recall was re-attempted as brainstorm, though even that is still considered a strong card. Healing salve however just doesn't do something most people will need so even trying to tweak it creates a mechanic (life gain) that is generally only considered useful when its a bonus effect to something else you are doing already.
-------------
As for how to fix healing salve; blessed wine is a step in the right direction; though blessed wine in particular is too weak to be relevant. If the card gave you life / prevented damage and than replaced itself by letting you draw another card the next turn, you'd have a viable healing salve and even at 3 life gain it wouldn't be horrible. It would still be a bit slow, but the fact you gained the life and than not giving up card advantage in the long term would be acceptable in many cases.
This is how I would fix healing salve:
---
1 white
instant
Gain 3 life or prevent 6 damage to a creature you control
Draw an additional card during your next draw phase.
---
You now have a card that can give you a tiny amount of life or save a creature and it doesn't put you at a card disadvantage
Or up the cost slightly and:
---
1 white 1 colorless
instant
Gain 3 life or prevent 6 damage to a creature you control
Scry: 1; Draw an additional card during your next draw phase
----
Or come up with something else entirely, point being that life gain is only useful if its in addition to some other effect
There are decks and win conditions that completely ignore life total, though (Splinter Twin combo, High Tide combo, Blightsteel Colossus, etc.), so you could only push Healing Salve so far before you reached a point of diminishing returns. After a certain point, aggro and burn just become straight up unplayable, and no matter how much more life gain you add to Broken Healing Salve it doesn't matter, because the only decks left don't care about your life total.
Of course, if aggro and burn got pushed out completely, then people might stop playing Broken Healing Salve altogether, and then someone could time things right and bring back Burn when the metagame was unprepared for it and crush people. Kind of like that few week period a while back when Burn was winning Legacy opens. That would actually be hilarious.
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GW is not W.
7 life for GW is in an entirely different ballpark than 8 life for W.
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With another trick attached, you need to gain enough to be more than an average attack, but not up to the same at least double. So we're looking at 6-7.
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You're aware that Reviving Dose, Captured Sunlight and Survival Cache all saw play while they were in standard right? You're kidding yourself if you think 5 life and a cantrip should cost W.
Healing Salve is fine the way it is. The damage prevention is highly undervalued and the lifegain is essentially card advantage against burn decks.
And when control decks dominate, 10 life doesn't seem so hot anymore. Games just turn into board control, then once board control is established you might as well have 100 life and you'd still lose. Whoops, looks like that 10 life healing salve is now useless again.
So, it isn't just a matter of increasing how much life healing salve does.
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