MTG Salvation

I feel like a lot of people don't appreciate this card, and having just added and tested it, it's definitely worth appreciating.

The main argument I've seen against it is cascading into memory lapse sucks. While it's almost always a bad idea to judge a card purely based on it's worst case scenario, Here's the exhaustive list of bad cascades in Blue, Green, and Colorless from my personal cube:

• Counterspell
  
• Mana Leak
  
• Memory Lapse
  
• Force Spike
  
• Spell Pierce
  
• Phantasmal Image
  
• Berserk
  
• Rancor
  
• Utopia Sprawl
  
• Vines of Vastwood
  
• Regrowth
  
• Tangle
  
• Mox Diamond
  
• Clan Defiance
  
• Abrupt Decay
  
• Simic Charm

As well as the following custom cards:
Primal Ferocity (A Giant Growth Variant)
Boundless Rage (A Rancor Variant)

as well as Standstill possibly, I'm not sure if it just auto-triggers and gives your opponent 3 cards, and Remand, because sometimes you might just want a 3 mana Whispers of the Muse.

That list might seem big, but I'll remind you that's out of a possible 102 cards.

That's a little less than 20% wiffs, and a lot of these are context specific (Utopia Sprawl if you don't have any forests but still have a green source to cast her, Phantasmal Image if you cast her onto an empty board, Abrupt Decay assuming your opponent's board is some combination of Expensive/Empty, Mox Diamond with no lands in hand, etc)

Realistically, the card has a few modes:
Wood Elves++ (Moxen, Ramp Spells)
Nekrataal++ (Doom Blade, Dreadbore)
Boltcaster Mage
Elvish Visionary's Big Brother (Brainstorm, Preordain)

and my Personal Favorite:
Moan of the Unhallowed (Literally any beater)

Take a long hard look at your blue section (where I assume most of these problems come from), look at how much of the three important sections are true wiffs, and think about the adventurous spirit of your drafters.
You can probably make this card work, and the upsides are entirely worth it. You've played with Bloodbraid Elf, cascade is insane.

The biggest problem we had with it, was that the deck that wants Shardless Agent wants all of those cards in it. It was good in GR/u decks with no whiff cards, but ultimately it proved to ride the boards WAY too much in UG decks, because I'd much rather be able to play all my splashable counters in a Simic tempo deck than the Agent.

In a UG deck without all those good conterspells, it's great. But unless I drafted it super early and built-around not playing countermagic, he didn't make the cut.

I should also add that playing her in a deck with 1-2 wiffs isn't as damning as you might think. If my UG tempo deck has memory lapse and remand alongside 5 other targets, I'll still run this, since on average it'll be good.

I'm also playtesting a 1GG version due to green's lack of 3 drops, and that card has been preforming outstandingly, FWIW

Quote from Dandy_Lions »

I'm also playtesting a 1GG version due to green's lack of 3 drops, and that card has been preforming outstandingly, FWIW

I have no doubt that it would. It's a lot better.

I also don't think green is lacking in 3-drops.

Quote from wtwlf123

I have no doubt that it would. It's a lot better.

I also don't think green is lacking in 3-drops.

Oh there are a bunch sure, but I think they're all really mediocre. I don't play powered mind, so Viridian Shaman doesn't have a guaranteed target against most people.

I would think that even in an unpowered cube, there are plenty of artifact targets for Viridian Shaman and friends. They don't target Moxen nearly as often as they target other cards.

Whoa, people actually dislike Shardless Agent? This is very surprising. Agent has been a solid inclusion for the blue/green-based aggro/tempo decks in spite of the whammy targets. There are few plays I like more than second turn Agent off a Bird. Maybe my group is value-crazy, but it tables very little and gets played in most drafts.

My UG tempo decks just played too many counterspells. It whiffed too often.

Like I said above, it was great when the blue part of the cost was a splash (particularly RGu decks), but we're a lot happier after switching it to Simic Charm. It goes in the same decks and can't whiff.

It wouldn't trigger Standstill to cascade into it. It triggers whenever spells are cast rather than when they resolve.

I'm playing it again right now, and it's doing solidly. There are times it doesn't fit because of a wide selection of countermagic in the deck, but if you take it early, you can build some pretty cool proactive tempo decks with it. It's a great splash into any aggro deck that can get the mana for it (which makes it much better if you support green aggro, at least a little bit). I don't know if it'll be in forever, but it can be fun in a deck with the right composition.

I'm going to say this with very heavy bias. It is my favorite card ever. I think that Shardless Agent is the best Blue Green card. It works incredibly well with Tinker it is always a 2 for 1. Most decks should construct themselves like Legacy variants and try to minimize the nonbo targets that it could hit. You don't need counterspells in most of these decks because I find them to be more Green based or even more multicolor with minimal blue splashes. Ancestral Vision, Thoughtseize Abrupt Decay Skullclampare also amazing with this card.

Cascade is just too good of a mechanic to not play.

We've found that agent easily provides enough value for 3 mana to compensate for the whiffing. Very happy with how it performs in straight UG, but perhaps even better in tri-color.

This card was discussed here in the Random Cube Card of the Day thread.

As I stated in the random card thread, if I had a copy I'd probably run it because cascade is a great mechanic. Flipping a counter is obviously bad, but you also have a lot of tools in both U and G to manipulate or otherwise know what your top card is (brainstorm, courser of Kruphix, et all). Therefore, you have the most potential to setup your cascade in this particular color combination. To me, it means Shardless has potentially a higher ceiling than bloodbraid but it requires more effort to unlock (i.e. lower floor).

Cards like that IMO make drafting better.

That's a great way to put it. Higher potential, requiring more effort. Though nothing was as fun as dropping BBEs into Ball Lightning or Blightning back in alara standard.

This card is great in the right deck, and I think its reputation suffers from people jamming into decks that have too many whiffs. Today I ran it in a UG super ramp fatty cheating deck, and it was great because almost everything it could hit was really nice. Some of the hits included Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, Joraga Treespeaker, Sylvan Library, and some other ramp cards. Specifically having more chances of hitting Grim Monolith and Mana Vault felt really strong. I was actually able to set up a cascade after a Sylvan Library upkeep into Manavault 2 cards down digging past a land. The value was nice.