I play hexproof and I see little reason to run VoR. Pillar of Flame hoses the card (which, in my mind, is counter to the only reason you run hexproof....to hose targeted removal) and if I need resiliency to sweepers, I can either slow roll with multiple hexproofs in hand or run Strangleroot Geist or Rootborn Defenses or Boros Charm if I'm feeling saucy. Silverblade Paladin can win the game for you a turn early if they don't have a Searing Spear...too many decks rely on cards like Azorious Charm, when Silverblade can affect combat by not attacking itself. I didn't like the list that went to the top 8 in NJ, and I don't see it as support for VoR to become a thing. End story.
I will say that Unflinching Courage is the real deal. I won many games just because of that card. The extra 1 damage and trample instead of flying is very relevant over Gifts.
Rancor is what gives Voice the nod. Put pressure on with your two-drop with a Rancor then enchant the token until you get to your hexproof/unblockable threats. The bonus of "instant hate" is what gives it the nod over other similar two-drops that replace themselves such as Strangleroot Geist.
One "good" removal spell (Pillar) isn't going to stop an insane value card like VoR... heck, it would probably take 4+ before it impacted the playability.
Voice of Resurgence is going to be main-deck in Bant Hexproof decks until Rancor rotates and then it remains to be seen what's left for the deck.
It's an instant speed 5/5 trampler for 4. Wtf do you people want seriously? It has applications in populate/ above the curve beats decks, or in Bant control/ flash. I seriously think anyone mad at this card for any reason other than losing an attacker to instant speed wurm, should go home and make their own awesome card game and leave the rest of us alone.
Rancor is what gives Voice the nod. Put pressure on with your two-drop with a Rancor then enchant the token until you get to your hexproof/unblockable threats. The bonus of "instant hate" is what gives it the nod over other similar two-drops that replace themselves such as Strangleroot Geist.
One "good" removal spell (Pillar) isn't going to stop an insane value card like VoR... heck, it would probably take 4+ before it impacted the playability.
Voice of Resurgence is going to be main-deck in Bant Hexproof decks until Rancor rotates and then it remains to be seen what's left for the deck.
We shall see...I did miss VoR against a UWR flash deck, but otherwise, didn't feel the pinch. I'm sure it's more effective, but I feel the benefit is marginal compared to the increased cost of VoR vs Pally.
Even in the case of a pillar all they are removing is a 2 drop with a 1 mana sorcery.
This can also be troublesome if they planned to play something else that would take their entire land pool after you dropped voice. I mean people are playing massive grave hate and yet you still see cards like snapcaster and unburial rites.
It also helps that only red can cast pillar of flame and despite being fairly popular red is not everywhere.
There is a small restriction with Voice, though. It gets far worse with Rest in Peace, as that stops cards from hitting the graveyard and therefore shuts off "dies" triggers. If graveyard-based decks remain popular and RIP remains a critical piece of hate, the card won't be nearly as good. That, or decks will switch to either Tormod's Crypt, Grafdigger's Cage, or Ground Seal as their principal piece of grave hate.
It is, at least something to think about so far as interactions against Snapcaster decks are concerned.
I remain convinced that VoR is very strong, and will maintain a 15-20 tag over the next few months, but not that it will necessarily be the end-all in every G/W/x deck. Especially if RIP becomes more needed to combat the meta.
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There is a small restriction with Voice, though. It gets far worse with Rest in Peace, as that stops cards from hitting the graveyard and therefore shuts off "dies" triggers. If graveyard-based decks remain popular and RIP remains a critical piece of hate, the card won't be nearly as good. That, or decks will switch to either Tormod's Crypt, Grafdigger's Cage, or Ground Seal as their principal piece of grave hate.
It is, at least something to think about so far as interactions against Snapcaster decks are concerned.
I remain convinced that VoR is very strong, and will maintain a 15-20 tag over the next few months, but not that it will necessarily be the end-all in every G/W/x deck. Especially if RIP becomes more needed to combat the meta.
If I was facing Bant Auras and had RIP in the board I wouldn't bring it in against them. SBing a card just to deal with one card that is just a random addition to their deck seems bad. It's like when people sb stuff like tormod's crypt against snapcaster and maybe a flashback think twice in my deck.
If I was facing Bant Auras and had RIP in the board I wouldn't bring it in against them. SBing a card just to deal with one card that is just a random addition to their pool seems bad. It's like when people sb stuff like tormod's crypt against snapcaster and maybe a flashback think twice in my deck.
No, I wouldn't either. That wasn't really a comment about the vs. Bant Auras matchup. It was more along the lines of saying that if you play VoR maindeck and you're having to bring in RIP because you're playing against lots of Junk Reanimator or Snapcaster-based Midrange/control decks, there's a nonbo to watch out for. I think that this fact should be considered when looking at the fact that it may be harder for top decks to jam in 4x copies of it if they are in a graveyard-dependent heavy meta.
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The issue is that the Bant-style RIP/Wrath decks got targetted hard in DGM. Not just a little bit of hate, but loads upon loads upon loads of hate coming from all angles and color combinations. So even though they're good against Voice, those strategies may not be ideal in the new format.
Just as a note for information purposes about the count of shocklands in the boxes. They are far less than anticipated. The typical pull per box is 1-2 shocks per box. My wife and I just spent all day opening 4 cases and we got 32 shocklands, or roughly 1.3 per box. DGM is not going to dump tons of shocks into the market. The problem is that stupid Maze's end (worst card ever printed) takes up the space of shocks when you would otherwise hit one.
Just as a note for information purposes about the count of shocklands in the boxes. They are far less than anticipated. The typical pull per box is 1-2 shocks per box. My wife and I just spent all day opening 4 cases and we got 32 shocklands, or roughly 1.3 per box. DGM is not going to dump tons of shocks into the market. The problem is that stupid Maze's end (worst card ever printed) takes up the space of shocks when you would otherwise hit one.
Did you get any boxes that had four shocklands? I have a friend that pulled four from their box.
Shocks are not going to tank. I am already sick of guild gates, and it's sad that the Temple Gardens I opened in one box was the best card from that box. 2 shock box for me.
I pulled two shocks out of a box, and then bought a fatpack at release because I'm weak and got 3 shocks and a maze's end (worst card) in the fatpack. Freak luck I'm sure, but most of my friends who have bought boxes have been in the ~2 shock range as well.
I agree that DGM isn't going to flood the market with shocks, but there will be an increased supply the next few months with people drafting DGM/GTC/RTR and a decent chance (6-8%) at a shock in every pack.
According to WotC, you're about half as likely to open a shock in DGM compared with RTR or GTC. There are 121 cards on a large-set rare sheet, and each shock, as a rare (as opposed to a Mythic) is printed twice on that sheet, so the chance of opening a shock in RTR/GTC is 1/12, or about 3 shocks per box. So, that average of 1.3 is pretty much in line with what one would expect.
As for that 4 shock pack, we can estimate the likelihood of that occuring with a binomial distribution. If we accept as given that the true likelihood of opening a shock is 1/24 (.0417), then the standard deviation is sqrt[(1/24)(1-1/24)/36] for the average number of shocks opened in a box (i.e. a sample size of 36). This comes out to be ~0.0333, so applying a normal distribution for a 95% CI gives us [0, .1069], which suggests that 95% of the time, you should get between 0 and 3.85 shocks.
What does this tell us? Getting 4 shocks in a box is plausible, but one shouldn't expect it to happen but maybe 2-3% of the time. Consider it a box of good fortune. Getting 5+ shocks should only happen about once in every 300 boxes, and is probably impossible given the non-independence generated from the printing pattern.
We can map out the likelihoods of getting a certain number of shocks directly from the Binomial distribution.
Note that this assumes that the packs in a box are all iid, which, due to the way print runs are handled and sheets are cut, is probably not the case. One would expect that the distribution would be skewed a little more toward the mean than these calculations would indicate.
So, this means that the box is most likely going to have 0, 1, or 2 shocks, with 3 and 4 being somewhat rarer, but inside the realm of possibility. This should give you an idea both of what how likely you are to open a shockland, as well as what the distribution of shocklands across boxes will look like.
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In my first 4 boxes I opened 2 shocklands and 1 maze. Seems like they're really rare. With the increased demand for shocklands that Dragon's Maze creates with all the multicolour, and relative lack of mana fixing, I don't think the additional supply is going to have ANY effect on prices.
Sorry for not getting a proper running tally up yet. I'm not JUST a nerd, I'm also an avid gardener, and the weather in my area has made me hold off my main projects, but suddenly we've had good weather so I'm frantically getting everything dealt with. It's time sensitive and if I don't get certain things done now, I lose my seeds, and have to wait till next year to start again. I'll have the first tally up (and the first update, at the same time) this weekend. But in short, here's what I've got today:
1) Voice
2) Ral
3) Blood Baron
4) Legion's Initiative
5) Deadbridge (I'm impressed. I like that it always "draws" you a card each turn even if you don't get the more impressive effect.)
6) Gaze of Granite (I value this higher than most do. Perhaps too much so. It just seems to me that it's being evaluated wrong. Where's the downside here?)
7) Advent of the Wurm
8) Master of Cruelties
9) Blood Scrivener (I keep seeing people say it has a drawback to work around. Where? It's a 2/1 Zombie for 1B with "sometimes you get to draw an extra card for 1 life".)
10) Savageborn Hydra
I'm also REALLY impressed with Skylasher. Seriously undercosted extremely powerful weenie.
Not to mention tons won't even trade shocks at a really low price anyways. They could make throw a million more Temple Gardens into the market in a special printing (on top of all the shocks added in DGM), and you would still have trouble finding people willing to trade temple gardens for other standard cards if the price drops a few bucks mid because of that special printing.
I feel like alot of rares are getting undervalued, notion thief, and a few others have the chance to be broken. Notion thief is certainly the most intriguing card this set has for legacy, the only question is can he be played as a 4 drop?
Most of the rares in this set merely look cool (and are at best sideboard cards, if they're even actually playable) or need to wait for Innistrad to rotate to gain relevance. For example, Exava/Rakdos's runner is competing with Hellrider, Falkenrath Aristocrat, and Ghor-Clan Rampager -- all cards that are almost universally better than it -- for 4-drop slots in Mono- and Mostly-Red decks. Varloz, the Scar-Striped has so sicknasty applications with Death's Shadow and similar cards, but then you're playing a GB Scathe Zombies or an unaided Death's Shadow in a deck without nut combo draws.
You also have a lot of people right now suffering from that fact trying to get any value out of their jank while it's still so close to release and prices are, perceptually, high for their "junk rares."
I wouldn't move all in on any cards currently, except possibly Sire (honestly if Advent is $3 more than it, that's a huge mistake as they're the breakout card of the respective archetypes they appear in). Advent seems properly priced, Sire seems underpriced, Voice may be correctly priced but I think that depends more on Modern and Legacy outcomes more than anything, and the slow descent of value is accurate to what we've come to expect out of the third set of a block recently ($4-6 Restoration Angels, $2-3 Silverblade Paladins, $3-4 Terminus, $20 Tamiyo, $40 Bonfire).
In my first 4 boxes I opened 2 shocklands and 1 maze.
That seems almost absurdly off to me. In my first 2 boxes, I pulled 4 Shocklands and a Maze's End. After two cases, I had 17, putting the rate of Shocklands/Box somewhere around 1.33-ish (one box had 0 Shocklands, one had 3, most had 1, a couple had 2; an overseas seller informed me he was seeing roughly 1-per-box). The distribution of Maze's End seems to put off the number of Shocklands in a given box, though, as all of the boxes I opened with Maze's End had a disproportionate number of Shocklands in them. It's possible your print run may have been disrupted by the Maze's End and you wound up at the unlucky end of the curve.
Also, @r_e: Planar Cleansing does essentially the same thing as Gaze of Granite "for less" and is $0.40-.50. Having the ability to buy now and pay later is what made Deed Deed and what makes this substantially less likely to see play.
@Kijin: Do remember that Advent is a Mythic while Sire is only a rare. This means that there's twice as many Sires floating around, which does depress the price somewhat. That $3 gap between them is entirely reasonable.
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Well, I'm not lying or whatever, I really only got 2 shocks in 4 boxes. Perhaps the other 2 boxes from that case have lots, I dunno. I'll be opening more this weekend so hopefully I'll "catch up".
I think Gaze beats Cleansing (in decks that can handle the mana of course) because you choose X, and assuming you're smart, you'll choose well and bash your opponent more than yourself with it. And I think Gaze has some drawbacks when compared to Deed, but also has the advantage of not being a permanent that sits in play until you've untapped the following turn. I got my Deeds killed many times when I used to play them, that was their drawback. Sure Gaze requires a bit more black in the deck I guess, but it doesn't have Deed's vulnerability to removal.
That said, I've been overvaluing sweepers lately. I guess removal has picked it up a notch in recent years, and it takes something really backbreaking to even see play now. Gaze would have been in every deck, even mono-red sligh (yes, sarcasm) 7 or 8 years ago. Now it looks like it won't even make the tally (unless I keep my own price on it far above eBay's).
I also enjoy that it kills all tokens for 3 mana, in a pinch. That might come in handy sometimes. I can see it as a 2 or 3-of in a fair number of decks.
I'm also a huge fan of Notion Thief, and fail to see the drawback, other than "sometimes it's just a 3/1 flash for 4", but even a 3/1 flash has uses against most decks (removal against attacking Thragtusks for example) so it would very rarely be a dead card. And of course in the right matchup, it negates several cards from their deck, and perhaps their entire strategy if it involves card draw.
@Kijin: Do remember that Advent is a Mythic while Sire is only a rare. This means that there's twice as many Sires floating around, which does depress the price somewhat. That $3 gap between them is entirely reasonable.
Are you looking at a different Advent of the Wurm than I am?
Advent of the Wurm
Set Name Dragon's Maze
Rarity R
I don't remember there being a "R" in the word Mythic, but my specialty is card values, not spelling.
Well, I'm not lying or whatever, I really only got 2 shocks in 4 boxes. Perhaps the other 2 boxes from that case have lots, I dunno. I'll be opening more this weekend so hopefully I'll "catch up".
I don't think you're a liar! Like I said, one of my boxes had 0, and the boxes I had with Maze's End had off numbers of Shocks in them. I think you'll likely find more in your future boxes, I just wanted to curb any scare over a shorted supply as there will probably be a good flow of Shocks between DGR sealed and drafts all putting more copies into circulation.
I'm also a huge fan of Notion Thief, and fail to see the drawback, other than "sometimes it's just a 3/1 flash for 4", but even a 3/1 flash has uses against most decks (removal against attacking Thragtusks for example) so it would very rarely be a dead card. And of course in the right matchup, it negates several cards from their deck, and perhaps their entire strategy if it involves card draw.
The only issue with that is that we've been spoiled lately with Flash creatures and we can expect way more for the same or less mana except in response to a Sphinx's Revelation -- Thief competes with Restoration Angel (an evasive flash 4-drop with built-in card advantage [rather than opportunistic card advantage] that survives most attacks and much removal), Snapcaster Mage (similar to Resto but cheaper depending on what you're flashing back), and now Advent of the Wurm (the creature is bigger and you can flash it back with Snapcaster). Being a 3/1 for 4 is a poor place to be. It does a lot against UBW and UWG decks that rely heavily on Sphinx's Revelation, Azorius Charm, and Think Twice, but it also stands to see how those decks stack up (since the only major post-rotation event was heavily dominated by Sire of Insanity-based Jund decks piloted by and played against some of the best players in the world). It is certainly a sideboard option, but it'll take rotation before the "Flash mob" in Standard has fewer cards edging it out.
Actually, I think comparing Notion Thief with Exava is pretty reasonable -- it's a good card burdened by cards that are just way better than it at the same cost in Standard.
Edit: I also forgot Izzet Staticaster as a flash guy (that kills Notion Thief), but I also excluded UWR from my analysis, which is also kind of stupid because the deck does play Revelation and Think Twice/Azorius Charm.
@Kijin: Do remember that Advent is a Mythic while Sire is only a rare. This means that there's twice as many Sires floating around, which does depress the price somewhat. That $3 gap between them is entirely reasonable.
Nope... both are rare. EDIT: and nathed on this first part of my post.... next part still applies.
Keep in mind though with Sire... jund loses a lot of it's toys on rotation. There will be new ones for sure... but it might do worse come fall. Advent on the other hand I think will get better with the rotation (again this could easily change once we see M14 and theros).
Still.... currently I agree they should be similar in price. Right now they only look to be about $1 off from each other so not too bad. This could be accounted for in the fact that sire of insanity does not look good to your typical casual. It seems like an "unfun" card.
I must have misremembered it as a Mythic for some reason. I apologize for that, and I retract my previous statement in its entirety.
Thanks for correcting my error.
Haha, no problem. I'm just being a sassy lassie. Advent of the Wurm is so expensive because token decks are really freaking popular and a 5/5 for a reasonable cost that goes with those decks is not a small gain. It also helps that a pro player did well with it at the SCG event last weekend and that token/little kid green white decks are roughly as well-performing as RG and mono-Red decks in block.
Rancor is what gives Voice the nod. Put pressure on with your two-drop with a Rancor then enchant the token until you get to your hexproof/unblockable threats. The bonus of "instant hate" is what gives it the nod over other similar two-drops that replace themselves such as Strangleroot Geist.
One "good" removal spell (Pillar) isn't going to stop an insane value card like VoR... heck, it would probably take 4+ before it impacted the playability.
Voice of Resurgence is going to be main-deck in Bant Hexproof decks until Rancor rotates and then it remains to be seen what's left for the deck.
We shall see...I did miss VoR against a UWR flash deck, but otherwise, didn't feel the pinch. I'm sure it's more effective, but I feel the benefit is marginal compared to the increased cost of VoR vs Pally.
This can also be troublesome if they planned to play something else that would take their entire land pool after you dropped voice. I mean people are playing massive grave hate and yet you still see cards like snapcaster and unburial rites.
It also helps that only red can cast pillar of flame and despite being fairly popular red is not everywhere.
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It is, at least something to think about so far as interactions against Snapcaster decks are concerned.
I remain convinced that VoR is very strong, and will maintain a 15-20 tag over the next few months, but not that it will necessarily be the end-all in every G/W/x deck. Especially if RIP becomes more needed to combat the meta.
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Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
If I was facing Bant Auras and had RIP in the board I wouldn't bring it in against them. SBing a card just to deal with one card that is just a random addition to their deck seems bad. It's like when people sb stuff like tormod's crypt against snapcaster and maybe a flashback think twice in my deck.
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No, I wouldn't either. That wasn't really a comment about the vs. Bant Auras matchup. It was more along the lines of saying that if you play VoR maindeck and you're having to bring in RIP because you're playing against lots of Junk Reanimator or Snapcaster-based Midrange/control decks, there's a nonbo to watch out for. I think that this fact should be considered when looking at the fact that it may be harder for top decks to jam in 4x copies of it if they are in a graveyard-dependent heavy meta.
Went to a new shop from a friend's recommendation, DQ'ed for willful violation of CR 100.6b.
Have played duals? I have PucaPoints for them!
(Credit to DarkNightCavalier)
$tandard: Too poor.
Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
Did you get any boxes that had four shocklands? I have a friend that pulled four from their box.
I can confirm another 4-shock box as well. (Unless we're talking about the same Russian box.)
Current post- Grand Prix KC Modern Postmortem (7/7/13)
I think Shocks will remain a safe bet to keep as trade "currency" throughout the next
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I agree that DGM isn't going to flood the market with shocks, but there will be an increased supply the next few months with people drafting DGM/GTC/RTR and a decent chance (6-8%) at a shock in every pack.
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No, his was English.
According to WotC, you're about half as likely to open a shock in DGM compared with RTR or GTC. There are 121 cards on a large-set rare sheet, and each shock, as a rare (as opposed to a Mythic) is printed twice on that sheet, so the chance of opening a shock in RTR/GTC is 1/12, or about 3 shocks per box. So, that average of 1.3 is pretty much in line with what one would expect.
As for that 4 shock pack, we can estimate the likelihood of that occuring with a binomial distribution. If we accept as given that the true likelihood of opening a shock is 1/24 (.0417), then the standard deviation is sqrt[(1/24)(1-1/24)/36] for the average number of shocks opened in a box (i.e. a sample size of 36). This comes out to be ~0.0333, so applying a normal distribution for a 95% CI gives us [0, .1069], which suggests that 95% of the time, you should get between 0 and 3.85 shocks.
What does this tell us? Getting 4 shocks in a box is plausible, but one shouldn't expect it to happen but maybe 2-3% of the time. Consider it a box of good fortune. Getting 5+ shocks should only happen about once in every 300 boxes, and is probably impossible given the non-independence generated from the printing pattern.
We can map out the likelihoods of getting a certain number of shocks directly from the Binomial distribution.
P(0 shocks / box) = [(23/24)^(36)]*36C0 = 21.6%
P(1 shock / box) = (1/24)*[(23/24)^35]*36C1 = 33.8%
P(2 shocks) = (1/24)^2 * (23/24)^34 * 36C2 = 25.7%
P(3 shocks) = (1/24)^3 * (23/24)^33 * 36C3 = 12.68%
P(4 shocks) = (1/24)^4 * (23/24)^32 * 36C4 = 4.5%
And P(5+ shocks) is about 1 - .9828 = 1.72%.
Note that this assumes that the packs in a box are all iid, which, due to the way print runs are handled and sheets are cut, is probably not the case. One would expect that the distribution would be skewed a little more toward the mean than these calculations would indicate.
So, this means that the box is most likely going to have 0, 1, or 2 shocks, with 3 and 4 being somewhat rarer, but inside the realm of possibility. This should give you an idea both of what how likely you are to open a shockland, as well as what the distribution of shocklands across boxes will look like.
Went to a new shop from a friend's recommendation, DQ'ed for willful violation of CR 100.6b.
Have played duals? I have PucaPoints for them!
(Credit to DarkNightCavalier)
$tandard: Too poor.
Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
Sorry for not getting a proper running tally up yet. I'm not JUST a nerd, I'm also an avid gardener, and the weather in my area has made me hold off my main projects, but suddenly we've had good weather so I'm frantically getting everything dealt with. It's time sensitive and if I don't get certain things done now, I lose my seeds, and have to wait till next year to start again. I'll have the first tally up (and the first update, at the same time) this weekend. But in short, here's what I've got today:
1) Voice
2) Ral
3) Blood Baron
4) Legion's Initiative
5) Deadbridge (I'm impressed. I like that it always "draws" you a card each turn even if you don't get the more impressive effect.)
6) Gaze of Granite (I value this higher than most do. Perhaps too much so. It just seems to me that it's being evaluated wrong. Where's the downside here?)
7) Advent of the Wurm
8) Master of Cruelties
9) Blood Scrivener (I keep seeing people say it has a drawback to work around. Where? It's a 2/1 Zombie for 1B with "sometimes you get to draw an extra card for 1 life".)
10) Savageborn Hydra
I'm also REALLY impressed with Skylasher. Seriously undercosted extremely powerful weenie.
.
Feel free to bid on my cards here!
Most of the rares in this set merely look cool (and are at best sideboard cards, if they're even actually playable) or need to wait for Innistrad to rotate to gain relevance. For example, Exava/Rakdos's runner is competing with Hellrider, Falkenrath Aristocrat, and Ghor-Clan Rampager -- all cards that are almost universally better than it -- for 4-drop slots in Mono- and Mostly-Red decks. Varloz, the Scar-Striped has so sicknasty applications with Death's Shadow and similar cards, but then you're playing a GB Scathe Zombies or an unaided Death's Shadow in a deck without nut combo draws.
You also have a lot of people right now suffering from that fact trying to get any value out of their jank while it's still so close to release and prices are, perceptually, high for their "junk rares."
I wouldn't move all in on any cards currently, except possibly Sire (honestly if Advent is $3 more than it, that's a huge mistake as they're the breakout card of the respective archetypes they appear in). Advent seems properly priced, Sire seems underpriced, Voice may be correctly priced but I think that depends more on Modern and Legacy outcomes more than anything, and the slow descent of value is accurate to what we've come to expect out of the third set of a block recently ($4-6 Restoration Angels, $2-3 Silverblade Paladins, $3-4 Terminus, $20 Tamiyo, $40 Bonfire).
That seems almost absurdly off to me. In my first 2 boxes, I pulled 4 Shocklands and a Maze's End. After two cases, I had 17, putting the rate of Shocklands/Box somewhere around 1.33-ish (one box had 0 Shocklands, one had 3, most had 1, a couple had 2; an overseas seller informed me he was seeing roughly 1-per-box). The distribution of Maze's End seems to put off the number of Shocklands in a given box, though, as all of the boxes I opened with Maze's End had a disproportionate number of Shocklands in them. It's possible your print run may have been disrupted by the Maze's End and you wound up at the unlucky end of the curve.
Also, @r_e: Planar Cleansing does essentially the same thing as Gaze of Granite "for less" and is $0.40-.50. Having the ability to buy now and pay later is what made Deed Deed and what makes this substantially less likely to see play.
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Went to a new shop from a friend's recommendation, DQ'ed for willful violation of CR 100.6b.
Have played duals? I have PucaPoints for them!
(Credit to DarkNightCavalier)
$tandard: Too poor.
Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
I think Gaze beats Cleansing (in decks that can handle the mana of course) because you choose X, and assuming you're smart, you'll choose well and bash your opponent more than yourself with it. And I think Gaze has some drawbacks when compared to Deed, but also has the advantage of not being a permanent that sits in play until you've untapped the following turn. I got my Deeds killed many times when I used to play them, that was their drawback. Sure Gaze requires a bit more black in the deck I guess, but it doesn't have Deed's vulnerability to removal.
That said, I've been overvaluing sweepers lately. I guess removal has picked it up a notch in recent years, and it takes something really backbreaking to even see play now. Gaze would have been in every deck, even mono-red sligh (yes, sarcasm) 7 or 8 years ago. Now it looks like it won't even make the tally (unless I keep my own price on it far above eBay's).
I also enjoy that it kills all tokens for 3 mana, in a pinch. That might come in handy sometimes. I can see it as a 2 or 3-of in a fair number of decks.
I'm also a huge fan of Notion Thief, and fail to see the drawback, other than "sometimes it's just a 3/1 flash for 4", but even a 3/1 flash has uses against most decks (removal against attacking Thragtusks for example) so it would very rarely be a dead card. And of course in the right matchup, it negates several cards from their deck, and perhaps their entire strategy if it involves card draw.
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Are you looking at a different Advent of the Wurm than I am?
Advent of the Wurm
Set Name Dragon's Maze
Rarity R
I don't remember there being a "R" in the word Mythic, but my specialty is card values, not spelling.
I don't think you're a liar! Like I said, one of my boxes had 0, and the boxes I had with Maze's End had off numbers of Shocks in them. I think you'll likely find more in your future boxes, I just wanted to curb any scare over a shorted supply as there will probably be a good flow of Shocks between DGR sealed and drafts all putting more copies into circulation.
The only issue with that is that we've been spoiled lately with Flash creatures and we can expect way more for the same or less mana except in response to a Sphinx's Revelation -- Thief competes with Restoration Angel (an evasive flash 4-drop with built-in card advantage [rather than opportunistic card advantage] that survives most attacks and much removal), Snapcaster Mage (similar to Resto but cheaper depending on what you're flashing back), and now Advent of the Wurm (the creature is bigger and you can flash it back with Snapcaster). Being a 3/1 for 4 is a poor place to be. It does a lot against UBW and UWG decks that rely heavily on Sphinx's Revelation, Azorius Charm, and Think Twice, but it also stands to see how those decks stack up (since the only major post-rotation event was heavily dominated by Sire of Insanity-based Jund decks piloted by and played against some of the best players in the world). It is certainly a sideboard option, but it'll take rotation before the "Flash mob" in Standard has fewer cards edging it out.
Actually, I think comparing Notion Thief with Exava is pretty reasonable -- it's a good card burdened by cards that are just way better than it at the same cost in Standard.
Edit: I also forgot Izzet Staticaster as a flash guy (that kills Notion Thief), but I also excluded UWR from my analysis, which is also kind of stupid because the deck does play Revelation and Think Twice/Azorius Charm.
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I guess so.
I must have misremembered it as a Mythic for some reason. I apologize for that, and I retract my previous statement in its entirety.
Thanks for correcting my error.
Went to a new shop from a friend's recommendation, DQ'ed for willful violation of CR 100.6b.
Have played duals? I have PucaPoints for them!
(Credit to DarkNightCavalier)
$tandard: Too poor.
Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
Nope... both are rare. EDIT: and nathed on this first part of my post.... next part still applies.
Keep in mind though with Sire... jund loses a lot of it's toys on rotation. There will be new ones for sure... but it might do worse come fall. Advent on the other hand I think will get better with the rotation (again this could easily change once we see M14 and theros).
Still.... currently I agree they should be similar in price. Right now they only look to be about $1 off from each other so not too bad. This could be accounted for in the fact that sire of insanity does not look good to your typical casual. It seems like an "unfun" card.
Haha, no problem. I'm just being a sassy lassie. Advent of the Wurm is so expensive because token decks are really freaking popular and a 5/5 for a reasonable cost that goes with those decks is not a small gain. It also helps that a pro player did well with it at the SCG event last weekend and that token/little kid green white decks are roughly as well-performing as RG and mono-Red decks in block.
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