People saying this card is "color bleed" or whatever are ridiculous. You'll notice that this card is colorless. That it doesn't have color. Which means that it can do whatever any of the colors can, and sometimes more.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of colorless. If colorless worked the way you describe, there wouldn't be a point in separating mechanical effects by color - Green wouldn't need to go to another color for creature destruction, for example. It'd just run colorless answers. The mechanical separation exists so a mono-color deck doesn't have access to certain effects. Colorless /can/ do effects from a number of colors that wouldn't undermine other colors' weaknesses - you'll never see a colorless enchantment destruction card, for example, and colorless creature removal is usually pretty overcosted in exchange for its easy mana requirements.
This particular card is special in that it /requires/ colorless mana to cast it. I could see an argument that "colorless required" cards have their own little slice of the color pie, but as others have noted throughout the thread, the prevalence of colorless mana generation means some decks wouldn't need to change their mana base at all to access what would otherwise be out-of-color effects. That means, at least for the first two modes of this card, that constitutes bleed.
No. It's not a tough decision to make after you establish the flavor of the Titans. I believe they justify what colorless cards can do based off a unique titan. Warping Wail embodies possibly the flavor of the 2 titans.
Exile - Ulamog
Counter - Kozilek
Scion - Both. One needs grunts to take over/consume the world. They help cast your titans.
It's very much like the RtR charms. Take Izzet Charm for example.
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
I think I'm going to start playing Tron again given this and replace Pyroclasm with it. This is just all kinds of fantastic. I always hated playing against Twin with Tron; just felt like autolose, and Scapeshift was never a fun matchup either. This handles both pretty well.
What a time to be alive.
Man, now that I think about it, the token has additional value for getting to your major bombs. It's not uncommon to be at 7 or 9 mana and need 8 or 10 for Newlamog or Ugin and this at EoT gets you there. Amazeballs.
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
Effect looks blue to me based on precedent. However, one could argue null brooch, sorta jester's scepter, and maybe ring of immortals have let us counter stuffis in colorless before.. though cards that old are not great for making examples.shrug.
Regardless, I am fine with this card color pie wise, its kinda new territory imo and I think it will be ok.
EDIT: as far as the creature exiling is concerned....shrug, its kinda wishy washy when it comes to little creatures. vial of dragonfire and brittle effigy and similar cards could be used to explain it a little...again, wishy washy, but I think its fine
The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can tough the poison of hatred without being harmed. Since beginning-less time, darkness thrives in the void but always yields to purifying light.
I invision a future where one is not mighty when he can silence a crowd with brutality,
but when he leaves them speechless with wisdom.
You're missing the point. I never said that colorless can do things on the same level as an actual colored card. An actual blue card can do way more for two mana then just counter a sorcery. While we're on the topic of no single color being able to handle all threats, how can blue do it then? Counter, bounce and polymorph all the things you don't like.
Blue's weakness is that its removal is reactive (counterspells), temporary (bounce, freezing), or has a downside that leaves a threat in place (polymorph). Once Blue's opponent has a board presence it can be very difficult for blue to get its footing back - which is why mono-Blue Control decks aren't common. They usually at least splash B or W for mass removal.
But that's besides the point. I don't really think you've done your research. Just looking back at the last set, you have Scour from Existence which can exile any permanent at instant speed. Sure, it's seven mana, but that only goes back to how colorless/artifact cards seem to be able to do just about anything a colored card can, but usually at a lower rate of efficiency. So technically, any color can use it any play it, but will never be able to match the color that does it the best in speed, efficiency or utility.
Without the high cost that Scour from Existence has, though, it /would/ be a bleed. We know - from Mark Rosewater's design columns primarily - that WotC is very careful with what it puts on colorless cards. For an explanation of what I'm trying to describe, see #5 in "Just the Artifacts, Ma'am". This article is from 2005, so it's about Artifacts instead of colorless cards in general, but the basic idea - that giving colorless something is essentially the same as giving it to the color that's weakest at it - holds.
The effects of these cards can't be considered "out-of-color" because colorless is not a color. And since colorless/artifact cards always had access to the entire color pie, your argument is null and void. Artifacts had a variety of effects for years and people weren't complaining. You always had access to "out-of-color" effects. Not as efficiently, as I've noted already, but you did.
As that article shows, it's been on the designers' radar for over ten years. It's not that these aren't effects that colorless couldn't have; it's that they're effects some of the 5 colors probably shouldn't have access to at 2 CMC.
I don't really see this "prevalence of colorless mana generation". Look at any Standard deck now. Or any Modern or Legacy deck. Where is that prevalence exactly? The cycle of pain-lands and filter lands are the only major full cycles of dual lands which happen to also produce colorless mana. Those lands don't see play in Legacy and only slight play in Modern, since they're not fetchable. In current Standard, you have the enemy pain-lands, yes, but apart from that, you're either running Wastes, any (rather inefficient) lands from this block that specifically produce C or you're not casting these cards. Moreover, between tangolands, fetchlands and manlands, people don't really play pain-lands a lot. Your typical Atarka Red runs none, Abzan Midrange just two, Jeskai and Esper control again none and it goes on and on. All of that is evidence enough that you're wrong and that people who want to run these colorless cards will have to change their manabases quite a bit if they want to do so.
I have a Standard deck I haven't changed since FRF released. 20% of its lands can produce colorless mana, which is in splashing range. No change from when it was just a two-color deck, and I could reasonably slot Warping Wail right into that deck. Utility lands are common in eternal formats - not in every or even most decks, but enough that there are prominent decks where this card requires no change to the land base.
I'm not saying this card is going to undermine the color pie - that's why I say "bleed" instead of "break" - but there are decks for which this might as well have a cost of 2 instead of 1C, and that's out of the ordinary for a counterspell.
I'm taking data from MTG Goldfish's Modern meta breakdown decklists. The format will be the total number of different cards Warping Wail interacts with (not including flashing a 1/1 Scion to chump block) followed by a list of those cards. Some of these targets, Wail is inefficient at doing much of anything (V. Clique, Snapcaster are technically targets for Wail but both will still be able to do their thing), or they will be difficult or impossible targets (Swiftspear, Goyf, anything in affinity) but the cards will still be listed.
Of course, this is an incomplete list, but just looking at it, I think the card may be overhyped for the current Modern metagame. Many of these targets are inefficient or very very conditional. This will immensely help decks whose matchup against RG Tron are bad (Ancient Stirrings and Sylvan Scrying being super important in that deck), and running a few could potentially ruin Amulet Bloom and Twin, but it does absolutely nothing against Merfolk and has the potential of being a dead card against Infect and Affinity. The most useful Sorcery counter I can see is countering a Thoughtseize / Inquisition or Summer Bloom or other conditionally necessary sorceries.
Final thought for modern? A decent SB card but has the potential to do nothing but make a mana dork in some matchups, the value of which is dependent on the deck you have. It becomes less useful if you're not already running Tron or some other colorless deck build that sits on colorless mana; if your deck runs blue you have better counters, if your deck runs white you have better creature removal, if you're running green you have access to better ramp tech, and so on and so on. If you're thinking of including Wastes in your build because you're excited about the Sorceries this card counters for example, you're far better off splashing blue for better counters, if you're stoked because this can exile some staple creatures, White has cards that can exile a larger list of creatures. I mean, things I couldn't include in the list are Scavenging Ooze, any Merfolk lords, Tron beaters like Wurmcoil Engine... Siege Rhino, Tasigur, etc etc.
Legacy however has more than a few targets for this card, and it will be interesting to see if anyone puts it in. I can almost guarantee that some of this new colorless tech will be included in MUD lists and might actually help it creep up a tier, but we won't know til people grind it out.
I have a Standard deck I haven't changed since FRF released. 20% of its lands can produce colorless mana, which is in splashing range. No change from when it was just a two-color deck, and I could reasonably slot Warping Wail right into that deck. Utility lands are common in eternal formats - not in every or even most decks, but enough that there are prominent decks where this card requires no change to the land base.
I'm not saying this card is going to undermine the color pie - that's why I say "bleed" instead of "break" - but there are decks for which this might as well have a cost of 2 instead of 1C, and that's out of the ordinary for a counterspell.
Would you splash, say, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, probably the best 1M card at the moment, in a deck where only 20% of the manabase (~5 lands) can generate the appropriate colored mana (U)? What about something similar to this, like Dispel or Silkwrap? The answer should be no, because you'll only be able to cast those cards if you draw them by turn 4 around 63% of the time (based on a simulation where you're playing 4 copies of the splash card in a 60-card deck, with no mulligans or anything fancy). That's almost certainly worse than an on-color option that you'll be able to cast 90% of the time or more.
The same is true for this. Let's set aside how wise it is to splash a reactive card in the first place. To actually be able to cast a two-mana splashed card within a reasonable timeframe, you're looking at 10 sources of the appropriate color. That's not free by any stretch of the imagination. Colorless is further hampered by a lack of duals. Not too many lands generate both colorless and colored mana, and the ones that do typically have a drawback to the colored mana generation - after all, the colorless option wasn't a bonus until now, it was supposed to be an outlet to let you still use the land when you didn't want to pay the cost for colored mana. These get worse in multiples, which is why you rarely see a deck in eternal formats play more than a 4 filters or painlands, which also makes them a questionable foundation for a manabase. The other colorless lands are mono-colored and none of them are fetchable. Hence, the tradeoff: either you play a lot of really bad duals, degrading your manabase, or you play extra lands to fit what is functionally basic lands in your splash color.
The white weenie manabase posted above is a good example of the costs of these colorless/colored manabases: you have eight painlands and two colorless lands in your 22-land aggro deck. What happens if you only draw painlands? Are you willing to tack on "As an additional cost to cast this spell, pay 1-2 life" to all of your cards some percentage of games? You also can't keep a hand of just a Blighted Steppe, and even if you draw both a Steppe and a white source, you've basically Sphere of Resistance'd your own WW spells. All that, and you still run around a 10-15% chance of drawing this card and being unable to cast it in the most opportune window. In comparison, splashing blue with eight fetches and two Prairie Streams has far fewer problems, and that's still not "free" because it gives up the consistency of the mostly-basics manabase - hence why not all white weenie decks are inclined to do it.
The only decks for which these cards are free are those that are taking advantage of colorless lands as the foundation of their manabase already: Tron, Affinity, 12-Post, and Workshops or maybe Legacy Metalworker or Painter decks. For the other decks, it's just like splashing a color, if the only duals available to you were horrible.
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~ Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
@Alestra - That's fair, I'll concede. I will say that in Limited - what I personally have the most experience with - 20% for a splash can be perfectly reasonable. Constructed's different, though, and I should have considered that.
The point I should have focused on was Liberator's statement that "[Colorless] can do whatever any of the colors can, and sometimes more." That's what originally prompted my reply, because that's simply not true. C does give them a bit of leeway to do effects they might have otherwise been wary of, though.
The only decks for which these cards are free are those that are taking advantage of colorless lands as the foundation of their manabase already: Tron, Affinity, 12-Post, and Workshops or maybe Legacy Metalworker or Painter decks. For the other decks, it's just like splashing a color, if the only duals available to you were horrible.
I like this.
I think these colorless instants are an interesting development for certain archetypes, they give tech to decks that usually have to run relatively inefficient removal (Oblivion Stone in U Tron, the red splash in GR Tron for Pyroclasm) but I don't see this card being as good as splashing Wastes for it in a deck that already runs blue or white. The number of targets it hits is pretty low compared to other things you can splash for in the case you aren't running blue or white, and as of yet, you can't even fetchland for a Wastes which in itself makes "splashing for colorless" a bad idea.
Spatial Contortion seems like a better card overall, but again, not worth splashing for when everyone has access to Black already, and all the other tasty attrition that comes with splashing black.
Ultimately I think these cards will help decks that depend on colorless ramp to 'go off' (This is a good card for Metalworker MUD) but it makes little sense to be stoked unless you're already a grey player or have a grey deck, or want to make Clear Tron (Eldrazi Tron)
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
That took me about 5 mins to come up with. only 2 non-white sources. Easy peasy.
This mana base is the same as splashing blue with Seachrome Coast, Hallowed Fountain and some fetchlands, or splashing any other color.
It will deal damage to you unlike any other WW mana base. It will lower your life to magical 18 against Scapeshift, it will damage you against Burn and Zoo.
You are paying the price because there is nothing easy or elegant in the example.
C can do whatever they want it to do, really. Since the five colors have entirely parceled out the color pie amongst themselves, there's going to be overlap between the color pie of C and the color pie of the existing colors, but that's not unprecedented: many mechanics are shared between the colors, like card drawing in blue and green and lifelink/lifegain matters in white and black. The only restriction is that the benefits of C should be balanced against its costs.
That's a development nightmare, though. Since colorless is so restrictive on your mana, you're only going to be able to pair it with one or two colors (and if it's two colors, you're probably giving up on double-colored spells to do so). The development team was given one set to make it worth that cost or it would be a total flop. For Standard, that's relatively easy to balance, since you have full control over how big a cost that actually is by adjusting the power level of the colorless-producing lands. For older formats, that's tough. Older colorless lands tend to have large upsides to make up for the drawback of colorless mana - often, by producing more than one mana at a time. Now you've turned those drawbacks into benefits, so the cards you print with C in their cost need to be good enough for Standard but not good enough to make forgoing a lot of colored lands to play 12-post or Urzatron manabases a lot less of a cost. I wish I could say this card was the result of extensive testing that led the development team to conclude that what Modern really needed was for GR Tron to have an answer to Splinter Twin decks and Crumble to Dust, but I really doubt that was the case.
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They test for standard and limited. A card's play anywhere else is unknown. Now, as for colorless counters, they barely existed before because they really only work as instants.
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
That took me about 5 mins to come up with. only 2 non-white sources. Easy peasy.
This mana base is the same as splashing blue with Seachrome Coast, Hallowed Fountain and some fetchlands, or splashing any other color.
It will deal damage to you unlike any other WW mana base. It will lower your life to magical 18 against Scapeshift, it will damage you against Burn and Zoo.
You are paying the price because there is nothing easy or elegant in the example.
I was specifically referring to standard in my post which you must have missed.
I'd like to see some more power to make C a primary-able color instead of a splash for other colors. With blighted fen, blighted cataract, mage-ring network, foundry of the consuls, spawning bed all being in standard at the same time, a colorless primary deck would have awesome utility from its lands. Particularly since every single one of those lands greatly benefits a control mid-lategame draw/go style, something warping wail fits like a glove, rather than aggro or midrange so much. Maybe a more direct colorless manland than the token generators would be a nice addition like mutavault for C, but as long as deckbuilding concerns are coming down to "Can my dual color deck use painlands and then sacrifice the rest of their colored mana base just to use a splash of C", even cards as pushed as this will make less impact than they could
Can't wait to try this & Spatial Contortion on my mono-green EDH deck. Spatial Contortion was already black-tier quality removal, but the fact that this can counter problematic sorceries make it even better.
To be fair, MaRo did mentioned that the Eldrazi and their colorless prowess predate colored mana.
I believe as much as possible, this "powered up" C cards come with the Eldrazi in mind. In future non-eldrazi sets, I don't think anyone will see this sort of power creep again. Take note we entering a new design space for colorless. Things get a bit more powerful when we (or Wizards for the matter) try to design new stuff the very first time.
Remember Phyrexian Mana? We know how that ended up.
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
Mentioned White Weenie that now isn't afraid of mass removal can't play this with 22 Plains.
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
That took me about 5 mins to come up with. only 2 non-white sources. Easy peasy.
This mana base is the same as splashing blue with Seachrome Coast, Hallowed Fountain and some fetchlands, or splashing any other color.
It will deal damage to you unlike any other WW mana base. It will lower your life to magical 18 against Scapeshift, it will damage you against Burn and Zoo.
You are paying the price because there is nothing easy or elegant in the example.
I was specifically referring to standard in my post which you must have missed.
Format is irrelevant. You said you were dissapointed that Wizards screwed the color pie by allowing WW to disregard mass removal.
It doesn't matter if WW has Anafenza or Serra Ascendant or Mother of Runes and if their enemy is End Hostilities or Wrath of God or Terminus.
The point is that WW can't easily play the Wail without paying with life and/or consistency.
seems the tide turned against the card. main argument is what archetypes would play it, when there are at least a couple incarnations of eldrazi and ramp decks.
a card thst can do 4 things is not one to ignore. not a 4 of but 2of since you can exile, counter, chumpblock, or ramp. too flexible for decks already going to include a couple eldrazi to pass up.
i don't think of splashing for colorless; think splashing B or whatever in a colorless deck. a standard midrange C deck with hangarbacks, kozi and company, newlamog, reality smasher, a dork and some colored removal/goodstuff can work...
seems the tide turned against the card. main argument is what archetypes would play it, when there are at least a couple incarnations of eldrazi and ramp decks.
a card thst can do 4 things is not one to ignore. not a 4 of but 2of since you can exile, counter, chumpblock, or ramp. too flexible for decks already going to include a couple eldrazi to pass up.
i don't think of splashing for colorless; think splashing B or whatever in a colorless deck. a standard midrange C deck with hangarbacks, kozi and company, newlamog, reality smasher, a dork and some colored removal/goodstuff can work...
I play the Eldrazi deck, basically black has better everything minus the sorcery counterspell. If it had instant counter, I would be all over like white on rice. But, sorcery? No.
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It's interesting how Wizards introduces something format warping to mess with the color pie again and then we go back to Innistrad. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but an interesting pattern nonetheless.
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That's a fundamental misunderstanding of colorless. If colorless worked the way you describe, there wouldn't be a point in separating mechanical effects by color - Green wouldn't need to go to another color for creature destruction, for example. It'd just run colorless answers. The mechanical separation exists so a mono-color deck doesn't have access to certain effects. Colorless /can/ do effects from a number of colors that wouldn't undermine other colors' weaknesses - you'll never see a colorless enchantment destruction card, for example, and colorless creature removal is usually pretty overcosted in exchange for its easy mana requirements.
This particular card is special in that it /requires/ colorless mana to cast it. I could see an argument that "colorless required" cards have their own little slice of the color pie, but as others have noted throughout the thread, the prevalence of colorless mana generation means some decks wouldn't need to change their mana base at all to access what would otherwise be out-of-color effects. That means, at least for the first two modes of this card, that constitutes bleed.
Exile - Ulamog
Counter - Kozilek
Scion - Both. One needs grunts to take over/consume the world. They help cast your titans.
It's very much like the RtR charms. Take Izzet Charm for example.
Counter - Blue
Damage - Red
Loot - Blue and Red.
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
It has to rework the mana base for colorless requirements, and when it does Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit, Archangel of Tithes and the like will suffer.
This is not a simple bleed. You have to pay the price almost as much as splashing blue. Wizards did a great job.
What a time to be alive.
Man, now that I think about it, the token has additional value for getting to your major bombs. It's not uncommon to be at 7 or 9 mana and need 8 or 10 for Newlamog or Ugin and this at EoT gets you there. Amazeballs.
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Oh really?
That took me about 5 mins to come up with. only 2 non-white sources. Easy peasy.
Effect looks blue to me based on precedent. However, one could argue null brooch, sorta jester's scepter, and maybe ring of immortals have let us counter stuffis in colorless before.. though cards that old are not great for making examples.shrug.
Regardless, I am fine with this card color pie wise, its kinda new territory imo and I think it will be ok.
EDIT: as far as the creature exiling is concerned....shrug, its kinda wishy washy when it comes to little creatures. vial of dragonfire and brittle effigy and similar cards could be used to explain it a little...again, wishy washy, but I think its fine
I invision a future where one is not mighty when he can silence a crowd with brutality,
but when he leaves them speechless with wisdom.
Blue's weakness is that its removal is reactive (counterspells), temporary (bounce, freezing), or has a downside that leaves a threat in place (polymorph). Once Blue's opponent has a board presence it can be very difficult for blue to get its footing back - which is why mono-Blue Control decks aren't common. They usually at least splash B or W for mass removal.
Without the high cost that Scour from Existence has, though, it /would/ be a bleed. We know - from Mark Rosewater's design columns primarily - that WotC is very careful with what it puts on colorless cards. For an explanation of what I'm trying to describe, see #5 in "Just the Artifacts, Ma'am". This article is from 2005, so it's about Artifacts instead of colorless cards in general, but the basic idea - that giving colorless something is essentially the same as giving it to the color that's weakest at it - holds.
As that article shows, it's been on the designers' radar for over ten years. It's not that these aren't effects that colorless couldn't have; it's that they're effects some of the 5 colors probably shouldn't have access to at 2 CMC.
I have a Standard deck I haven't changed since FRF released. 20% of its lands can produce colorless mana, which is in splashing range. No change from when it was just a two-color deck, and I could reasonably slot Warping Wail right into that deck. Utility lands are common in eternal formats - not in every or even most decks, but enough that there are prominent decks where this card requires no change to the land base.
I'm not saying this card is going to undermine the color pie - that's why I say "bleed" instead of "break" - but there are decks for which this might as well have a cost of 2 instead of 1C, and that's out of the ordinary for a counterspell.
I'm taking data from MTG Goldfish's Modern meta breakdown decklists. The format will be the total number of different cards Warping Wail interacts with (not including flashing a 1/1 Scion to chump block) followed by a list of those cards. Some of these targets, Wail is inefficient at doing much of anything (V. Clique, Snapcaster are technically targets for Wail but both will still be able to do their thing), or they will be difficult or impossible targets (Swiftspear, Goyf, anything in affinity) but the cards will still be listed.
Splinter Twin - 5 (3 SB)
Creatures:
Sorceries:
Serum Visions
SB:
Affinity - 9 (2 SB)
Creatures:
Man Lands:
SB:
RG Tron - 4
Creatures:
Spellskite
Sorceries:
Abzan - 6 (5 SB)
Creatures:
- Dark Confidant
- Tarmogoyf
(if you're lucky)Sorceries:
SB:
Burn - 4 {5 with a very unlikely 1/1 Nacatl}
Creatures:
Sorceries:
Infect - 8
Creatures:
Sorceries:
Man Lands:
Inkmoth nexus
Amulet Bloom - 5 (1 SB)
Creatures:
Azusa, Lost but Seeking
Sorceries:
SB:
Pyroclasm
Of course, this is an incomplete list, but just looking at it, I think the card may be overhyped for the current Modern metagame. Many of these targets are inefficient or very very conditional. This will immensely help decks whose matchup against RG Tron are bad (Ancient Stirrings and Sylvan Scrying being super important in that deck), and running a few could potentially ruin Amulet Bloom and Twin, but it does absolutely nothing against Merfolk and has the potential of being a dead card against Infect and Affinity. The most useful Sorcery counter I can see is countering a Thoughtseize / Inquisition or Summer Bloom or other conditionally necessary sorceries.
Final thought for modern? A decent SB card but has the potential to do nothing but make a mana dork in some matchups, the value of which is dependent on the deck you have. It becomes less useful if you're not already running Tron or some other colorless deck build that sits on colorless mana; if your deck runs blue you have better counters, if your deck runs white you have better creature removal, if you're running green you have access to better ramp tech, and so on and so on. If you're thinking of including Wastes in your build because you're excited about the Sorceries this card counters for example, you're far better off splashing blue for better counters, if you're stoked because this can exile some staple creatures, White has cards that can exile a larger list of creatures. I mean, things I couldn't include in the list are Scavenging Ooze, any Merfolk lords, Tron beaters like Wurmcoil Engine... Siege Rhino, Tasigur, etc etc.
Legacy however has more than a few targets for this card, and it will be interesting to see if anyone puts it in. I can almost guarantee that some of this new colorless tech will be included in MUD lists and might actually help it creep up a tier, but we won't know til people grind it out.
The same is true for this. Let's set aside how wise it is to splash a reactive card in the first place. To actually be able to cast a two-mana splashed card within a reasonable timeframe, you're looking at 10 sources of the appropriate color. That's not free by any stretch of the imagination. Colorless is further hampered by a lack of duals. Not too many lands generate both colorless and colored mana, and the ones that do typically have a drawback to the colored mana generation - after all, the colorless option wasn't a bonus until now, it was supposed to be an outlet to let you still use the land when you didn't want to pay the cost for colored mana. These get worse in multiples, which is why you rarely see a deck in eternal formats play more than a 4 filters or painlands, which also makes them a questionable foundation for a manabase. The other colorless lands are mono-colored and none of them are fetchable. Hence, the tradeoff: either you play a lot of really bad duals, degrading your manabase, or you play extra lands to fit what is functionally basic lands in your splash color.
The white weenie manabase posted above is a good example of the costs of these colorless/colored manabases: you have eight painlands and two colorless lands in your 22-land aggro deck. What happens if you only draw painlands? Are you willing to tack on "As an additional cost to cast this spell, pay 1-2 life" to all of your cards some percentage of games? You also can't keep a hand of just a Blighted Steppe, and even if you draw both a Steppe and a white source, you've basically Sphere of Resistance'd your own WW spells. All that, and you still run around a 10-15% chance of drawing this card and being unable to cast it in the most opportune window. In comparison, splashing blue with eight fetches and two Prairie Streams has far fewer problems, and that's still not "free" because it gives up the consistency of the mostly-basics manabase - hence why not all white weenie decks are inclined to do it.
The only decks for which these cards are free are those that are taking advantage of colorless lands as the foundation of their manabase already: Tron, Affinity, 12-Post, and Workshops or maybe Legacy Metalworker or Painter decks. For the other decks, it's just like splashing a color, if the only duals available to you were horrible.
~ Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
The point I should have focused on was Liberator's statement that "[Colorless] can do whatever any of the colors can, and sometimes more." That's what originally prompted my reply, because that's simply not true. C does give them a bit of leeway to do effects they might have otherwise been wary of, though.
I like this.
I think these colorless instants are an interesting development for certain archetypes, they give tech to decks that usually have to run relatively inefficient removal (Oblivion Stone in U Tron, the red splash in GR Tron for Pyroclasm) but I don't see this card being as good as splashing Wastes for it in a deck that already runs blue or white. The number of targets it hits is pretty low compared to other things you can splash for in the case you aren't running blue or white, and as of yet, you can't even fetchland for a Wastes which in itself makes "splashing for colorless" a bad idea.
Spatial Contortion seems like a better card overall, but again, not worth splashing for when everyone has access to Black already, and all the other tasty attrition that comes with splashing black.
Ultimately I think these cards will help decks that depend on colorless ramp to 'go off' (This is a good card for Metalworker MUD) but it makes little sense to be stoked unless you're already a grey player or have a grey deck, or want to make Clear Tron (Eldrazi Tron)
This mana base is the same as splashing blue with Seachrome Coast, Hallowed Fountain and some fetchlands, or splashing any other color.
It will deal damage to you unlike any other WW mana base. It will lower your life to magical 18 against Scapeshift, it will damage you against Burn and Zoo.
You are paying the price because there is nothing easy or elegant in the example.
That's a development nightmare, though. Since colorless is so restrictive on your mana, you're only going to be able to pair it with one or two colors (and if it's two colors, you're probably giving up on double-colored spells to do so). The development team was given one set to make it worth that cost or it would be a total flop. For Standard, that's relatively easy to balance, since you have full control over how big a cost that actually is by adjusting the power level of the colorless-producing lands. For older formats, that's tough. Older colorless lands tend to have large upsides to make up for the drawback of colorless mana - often, by producing more than one mana at a time. Now you've turned those drawbacks into benefits, so the cards you print with C in their cost need to be good enough for Standard but not good enough to make forgoing a lot of colored lands to play 12-post or Urzatron manabases a lot less of a cost. I wish I could say this card was the result of extensive testing that led the development team to conclude that what Modern really needed was for GR Tron to have an answer to Splinter Twin decks and Crumble to Dust, but I really doubt that was the case.
~ Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
I was specifically referring to standard in my post which you must have missed.
I believe as much as possible, this "powered up" C cards come with the Eldrazi in mind. In future non-eldrazi sets, I don't think anyone will see this sort of power creep again. Take note we entering a new design space for colorless. Things get a bit more powerful when we (or Wizards for the matter) try to design new stuff the very first time.
Remember Phyrexian Mana? We know how that ended up.
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
Format is irrelevant. You said you were dissapointed that Wizards screwed the color pie by allowing WW to disregard mass removal.
It doesn't matter if WW has Anafenza or Serra Ascendant or Mother of Runes and if their enemy is End Hostilities or Wrath of God or Terminus.
The point is that WW can't easily play the Wail without paying with life and/or consistency.
seems the tide turned against the card. main argument is what archetypes would play it, when there are at least a couple incarnations of eldrazi and ramp decks.
a card thst can do 4 things is not one to ignore. not a 4 of but 2of since you can exile, counter, chumpblock, or ramp. too flexible for decks already going to include a couple eldrazi to pass up.
i don't think of splashing for colorless; think splashing B or whatever in a colorless deck. a standard midrange C deck with hangarbacks, kozi and company, newlamog, reality smasher, a dork and some colored removal/goodstuff can work...
I play the Eldrazi deck, basically black has better everything minus the sorcery counterspell. If it had instant counter, I would be all over like white on rice. But, sorcery? No.
Modern
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<a href="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-lists/588020-unpowered-themed-enchantment-an-enchanted-evening">An Enchanted Evening Cube </a>