Hi folks,
It's time for another Best Multiplayer Cards Available vote!
For those new to these threads, I ran Multiplayer Power Rankings votes between 2012 and 2015, aimed at both producing a list of the best multiplayer cards available, and helping to develop something close to the optimal list of cards for a multiplayer cube. The results between the 2014 and 2015 editions of the Power Rankings were so close that it was obvious we were going to start repeating ourselves for not much reason. In other words, we were close enough to an initial list.
You can see the Best Multiplayer Cards Available thread here. If you're interested in seeing the multiplayer cubes these votes developed, you can find links to them in my signature below.
Those votes got us through to Dragons of Tarkir / Magic Origins. So the question became "how do we keep updating this?". We wanted to have a new vote every three months... but that didn't account for my busyness / lack of sleep / complete and utter slovenly laziness.
We've had votes since for BfZ / OGW / C15, SOI / EMN / CNS2 and KLD / AER / C16. The last one was almost dead on six months ago, so it's time for me to get off my backside again.
Yes, Ixalan is out. No, you can't vote for it yet - we'll keep the voting to a block at a time (and wait for Rivals of Ixalan to be a thing in the new year).
So, enough of the history and banter... the rules!
Hand me what you consider to be the top ten multiplayer cards across Amonkhet, Hour of Devastation and Commander 2017!
Order matters! We'll use your vote order to rank the cards later on.
Only cards newly printed in AKH / HOU / C17 are valid votes (so reprints are not valid... e.g. Crackling Doom in C17).
You've got eight days to vote. I'll close this vote at 4am UTC on Wednesday December 20th (this is noon where I am... yes, I really am on the other side of the planet to you). I have been known to completely miss this deadline, extend it if you ask nicely etc. etc.
I'm happy to take "honorable mentions", so long as you don't give me 15 of them.
Okay, go for it! I'll stick the final results up here once the voting has closed.
Ramunap Excavator was the only card to receive votes from five different people (and I was the one missing it from my list... and I confess I almost gave it an honorable mention).
Liliana, Death's Majesty and Kess also finished on 2.3, just missing the top ten. They're only outside due to not receiving a top vote like Razaketh.
Oketra's Monument. Surprisingly raw power. Watched it go bananas next to Arashin Foremost, Samut and Bramblewood Paragon on MTGGoldfish's Commander Clash this week. (Why yes, I'll have a hasty 2/2 double-striker with vigilance every time I cast a critter. Thanks!)
Neheb, the Eternal. I don't know how this guy has snuck under people's radars... fill the board with Impact Tremors, Harsh Mentors and hate, and then get mana for your troubles? Sure!
Solemnity. This thing is sneaky good. I already have a shell of four of these, four Glacial Chasms and some Sun Titans for redundancy... let's see what win-cons I can jam into it...
Hmm.... it's days to Christmas, and everyone's too busy holidaying to vote... who'd have thunk it? That'll teach me to start these sooner.
Holding this open until I get enough sets of votes to play with!
These should be 1-2 in everyone's list and I don't think that it's even close to being close. I'm kinda shocked to see neither listed because they've both completely changed the way that I build certain archetypes. I'm not even joking. I've literally gone through all of my Control decks, pulled out whatever I was previously using for win conditions and left slot for 4x Approach. Even if they weren't previously playing White mana I've since changed my mana rocks and lands to support it (think Exotic Orchard, Trilands, Fellwar Stone, etc). It's the single best 1-card budget Control finisher ever printed and has completely changed how you have to build and play against Control decks in multiplayer. I strongly encourage everyone to re-evaluate their lists and weigh the merits of the cards that they chose over 1-card win conditions such as these. They should both be included in the final build and I'll be saddened if they aren't. Note, I'm not saying that these are fun cards to play against. They most certainly aren't. I think that they're both wildly oppressive mistakes that shouldn't have been printed. Irrelevant. When asked "what are the best cards" you have to sit down and ask yourself "what cards will win the most games of Magic" and the answer, bar none, is "Razaketh and Approach."
I would love to see the 2 Egyptian God Cards in a deck for reference.
There's 3! Personally I don't think that the Gods are worth building around and since they're legendary + resilient I typically suggest to field them as 1-ofs in decks that can support their colors. They're all pretty good (Scarab God is clearly the best though) as long as you have some support for them.
For instance, are you mainly looking to cheat out Razaketh? And what does a multiplayer Approach deck even look like? Wraths, draw, and counters?
Razaketh is the second best creature-based finisher in Black (behind Griselbrand). Reanimation, ramp, Birthing Pod, it literally doesn't matter how you get him into play because the effect is completely oppressive once he's there. It's unlimited + free Demonic Tutors as long as you have bodies to spare and since Black has throngs of cards like Dusk legion Zealot and Ophiomancer that's a trivial requirement. Moreover, the main card that breaks him in my experience is Life // Death. You don't need a massive Green splash by any means but basically as soon as you can activate him once you can fetch your 1-of Life // Death to essentially win the game. It's crucial to highlight the fact that Life // Death is never a dead card since the Death mode is legitimately useful in reanimator lists and so it's not a pure combo card or anything. The base card is fine, it does what you need it to do, and then it reads "oops I win" once Razaketh is out. I love interactions like that where an already good card suddenly has even more inherent worth based on on a cool interaction.
You can either play completely broken and fetch things like Ornithopter/Lion's Eye Diamond/Dark Ritual/etc. off of things like Reassembling Skeleton (you'll often want to play him in a Buried Alive deck so having access to cards like Bloodghast and Skele help) in order to straight kill with Aetherflux Reservoir and the like. He can also easily assemble any 2-card combo and the fast mana to cast it if needed. Otherwise you can also play him as "fair" (I use the term loosely) value engine that reads "draw whatever you want whenever you want" which is... yeah... pretty good :). It mostly depends on what format you're playing and how broken you want your deck to be. The card is just really, really, really good and I play it in all of my Black decks at this point. I mostly play EDH and Cube now and it's so nice to be able to play with a Griselbrand-level threat in EDH again and he's always a windmill slam in Cube. There's so many ways to Reanimate/Sneak/Ramp him into play and once he is it feels like you're cheating (because you are).
Approach of the Second Sun is the most mindless card that I've ever played with. At first I was skeptical but after playing with it a couple of time I quickly realize that it's horrifically imbalanced. To answer your question, yes, that's exactly how you build the deck. You get to play as much ramp, mass removal, permission and card draw as you want because your win condition literally beats everything. Protection, removal, defense, none of it matters in the face of Approach. I've won so many games doing something as simple as curving a lategame Wrath into an Approach into an Approach because the fact that it's a 7 drop means that you often have 2 by the time that you're looking to cast the first. Obviously you can Rev into the same one if needed (or Preordain into Fact or Fiction or anything really) and since aggro isn't really a thing in multiplayer most players are powerless to stop you. It's a soul-crushing card to play against because I'll often do things like play it in decks that don't actually have White mana/spells but then I'll randomly tap my Fellwar Stone or Exotic Orchard for white and jam it alongside a Toxic Deluge or whatever. From there you can just see the hearts of your opponents sink because they just know that you already have the second ready to go and that there's nothing that they can do about it. They sigh, cast their spells and wait for you to kill them on the following turn. After all, it's as though none of the actions taken by any of the other players mattered. Approach literally doesn't care about anything that anyone did up until that point short of "kill you." It laughs, says "oops I win, thanks for playing chumps" and walks away with the pot. It's a terrible Magic card that's already been banned from our circles and that had to be removed from the Cube.
Okay, the OP is updated with the results.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote! It was a tight one this time around!
I'll endeavour to update the Best Multiplayer Cards thread, and get a representative cube for 2017 out as per years past.
As per previous votes, only anything over 4.0 gets considered a Best Multiplayer Card (TM), so The Scarab God is the only one that sneaks in this time around. Suspect that might change with the Ixalan Block vote in a couple of months...
Until the next one!
It's time for another Best Multiplayer Cards Available vote!
For those new to these threads, I ran Multiplayer Power Rankings votes between 2012 and 2015, aimed at both producing a list of the best multiplayer cards available, and helping to develop something close to the optimal list of cards for a multiplayer cube. The results between the 2014 and 2015 editions of the Power Rankings were so close that it was obvious we were going to start repeating ourselves for not much reason. In other words, we were close enough to an initial list.
You can see the Best Multiplayer Cards Available thread here. If you're interested in seeing the multiplayer cubes these votes developed, you can find links to them in my signature below.
Those votes got us through to Dragons of Tarkir / Magic Origins. So the question became "how do we keep updating this?". We wanted to have a new vote every three months... but that didn't account for my busyness / lack of sleep / complete and utter slovenly laziness.
We've had votes since for BfZ / OGW / C15, SOI / EMN / CNS2 and KLD / AER / C16. The last one was almost dead on six months ago, so it's time for me to get off my backside again.
Yes, Ixalan is out. No, you can't vote for it yet - we'll keep the voting to a block at a time (and wait for Rivals of Ixalan to be a thing in the new year).
So, enough of the history and banter... the rules!
I'm happy to take "honorable mentions", so long as you don't give me 15 of them.
Okay, go for it! I'll stick the final results up here once the voting has closed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DONE!
The Top 10
T.U.R.F (Trends, Useless Ramblings and Facts)
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
In order of preference, best/most special is first.
At number 10 Anointed Procession which I haven’t bought but still might.
My meta: 3 or 4 player free for all, anything goes but boring games or broken decks cause a vote to end that game.
My 450ish 1vs1 cube
Holding this open until I get enough sets of votes to play with!
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
- Torment of Hailfire
- Hour of Revelation
- Anointed Procession
- Disrupt Decorum
- Teferi's Protection
- Hour of Promise
- Kindred Discovery
- Oketra's Monument
- Pull from Tomorrow
Yes, I am aware that's only 9, but I feel there's a clear break between above and below.Honorable Mention
- Ramunap Excavator
- Manglehorn
- Scavenger Grounds
Scarab God, Neheb, and Kess probably belong, but I haven't seen them used...My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
2 Hour of Promise
3 Teferi's Protection
4 Cut // Ribbons
5 Ramunap Excavator
6 Glorybringer
7 Razaketh, the Foulbloodex
8 Torment of Hailfire
9 Approach of the Second Sun
10 Vizier of the Menagerie
All of these went into my cube, except hour of promise, at least for the time being. Hour has just been busted for me in enabling HUGE mana.
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
1. Razaketh, the Foulblooded
2. Approach of the Second Sun
These should be 1-2 in everyone's list and I don't think that it's even close to being close. I'm kinda shocked to see neither listed because they've both completely changed the way that I build certain archetypes. I'm not even joking. I've literally gone through all of my Control decks, pulled out whatever I was previously using for win conditions and left slot for 4x Approach. Even if they weren't previously playing White mana I've since changed my mana rocks and lands to support it (think Exotic Orchard, Trilands, Fellwar Stone, etc). It's the single best 1-card budget Control finisher ever printed and has completely changed how you have to build and play against Control decks in multiplayer. I strongly encourage everyone to re-evaluate their lists and weigh the merits of the cards that they chose over 1-card win conditions such as these. They should both be included in the final build and I'll be saddened if they aren't. Note, I'm not saying that these are fun cards to play against. They most certainly aren't. I think that they're both wildly oppressive mistakes that shouldn't have been printed. Irrelevant. When asked "what are the best cards" you have to sit down and ask yourself "what cards will win the most games of Magic" and the answer, bar none, is "Razaketh and Approach."
Bonkers tier:
3. Hour of Promise
4. Abrade
5. Teferi's Protection
Good tier:
6. Kess, Dissident Mage
7. Ramunap Excavator
8. Manglehorn
9. Cut // Ribbons
10. Vizier of the Menagerie
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
I haven't been playing so much multiplayer outside of cube, so I base my thoughts on speculation amd what you guys talk about here.
For instance, are you mainly looking to cheat out Razaketh? And what does a multiplayer Approach deck even look like? Wraths, draw, and counters?
There's 3! Personally I don't think that the Gods are worth building around and since they're legendary + resilient I typically suggest to field them as 1-ofs in decks that can support their colors. They're all pretty good (Scarab God is clearly the best though) as long as you have some support for them.
Razaketh is the second best creature-based finisher in Black (behind Griselbrand). Reanimation, ramp, Birthing Pod, it literally doesn't matter how you get him into play because the effect is completely oppressive once he's there. It's unlimited + free Demonic Tutors as long as you have bodies to spare and since Black has throngs of cards like Dusk legion Zealot and Ophiomancer that's a trivial requirement. Moreover, the main card that breaks him in my experience is Life // Death. You don't need a massive Green splash by any means but basically as soon as you can activate him once you can fetch your 1-of Life // Death to essentially win the game. It's crucial to highlight the fact that Life // Death is never a dead card since the Death mode is legitimately useful in reanimator lists and so it's not a pure combo card or anything. The base card is fine, it does what you need it to do, and then it reads "oops I win" once Razaketh is out. I love interactions like that where an already good card suddenly has even more inherent worth based on on a cool interaction.
You can either play completely broken and fetch things like Ornithopter/Lion's Eye Diamond/Dark Ritual/etc. off of things like Reassembling Skeleton (you'll often want to play him in a Buried Alive deck so having access to cards like Bloodghast and Skele help) in order to straight kill with Aetherflux Reservoir and the like. He can also easily assemble any 2-card combo and the fast mana to cast it if needed. Otherwise you can also play him as "fair" (I use the term loosely) value engine that reads "draw whatever you want whenever you want" which is... yeah... pretty good :). It mostly depends on what format you're playing and how broken you want your deck to be. The card is just really, really, really good and I play it in all of my Black decks at this point. I mostly play EDH and Cube now and it's so nice to be able to play with a Griselbrand-level threat in EDH again and he's always a windmill slam in Cube. There's so many ways to Reanimate/Sneak/Ramp him into play and once he is it feels like you're cheating (because you are).
Approach of the Second Sun is the most mindless card that I've ever played with. At first I was skeptical but after playing with it a couple of time I quickly realize that it's horrifically imbalanced. To answer your question, yes, that's exactly how you build the deck. You get to play as much ramp, mass removal, permission and card draw as you want because your win condition literally beats everything. Protection, removal, defense, none of it matters in the face of Approach. I've won so many games doing something as simple as curving a lategame Wrath into an Approach into an Approach because the fact that it's a 7 drop means that you often have 2 by the time that you're looking to cast the first. Obviously you can Rev into the same one if needed (or Preordain into Fact or Fiction or anything really) and since aggro isn't really a thing in multiplayer most players are powerless to stop you. It's a soul-crushing card to play against because I'll often do things like play it in decks that don't actually have White mana/spells but then I'll randomly tap my Fellwar Stone or Exotic Orchard for white and jam it alongside a Toxic Deluge or whatever. From there you can just see the hearts of your opponents sink because they just know that you already have the second ready to go and that there's nothing that they can do about it. They sigh, cast their spells and wait for you to kill them on the following turn. After all, it's as though none of the actions taken by any of the other players mattered. Approach literally doesn't care about anything that anyone did up until that point short of "kill you." It laughs, says "oops I win, thanks for playing chumps" and walks away with the pot. It's a terrible Magic card that's already been banned from our circles and that had to be removed from the Cube.
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
Okay, the OP is updated with the results.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote! It was a tight one this time around!
I'll endeavour to update the Best Multiplayer Cards thread, and get a representative cube for 2017 out as per years past.
As per previous votes, only anything over 4.0 gets considered a Best Multiplayer Card (TM), so The Scarab God is the only one that sneaks in this time around. Suspect that might change with the Ixalan Block vote in a couple of months...
Until the next one!
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor