MTG Salvation

Negate

What are the general opinions on this card?

I think this card is underrated and should be re-evaulated by todays cube standarts.

The most game changing effects are mostly non-creature spells. Additionally, creatures can also be handled by removing or stealing them. As a blue deck, the most worrying spells from my opponent are geddons, walkers, equipments and that last burn spell to the dome. The etb effects of creatures are still problematic, but I think very few of them are as devastating as the mentioned non-creature spells. Duress is a staple. Why does Negate see so little play in cubes?

I think it's because Duress is half the mana and the disruption is more valuable to the decks that typically play the effect, and it deals with cards the color may have no other way of taking care of. And you don't have to keep mana up and play reactively with Duress either; it can slide anywhere into your curve.

Negate is a fine spell, but there's a lot of countermagic that can target any type of spell you may need to target for the same cost, and that's what ultimately keeps it out of my list. It competes with spells that can handle a wide variety of all the types of cards they could play against you. I actually think Spell Pierce is probably a better version of this same spell, because countering spells for 1 mana is really good. It at least pushes the cost of the spell down to make up for the limitations.

I prefer Spell Pierce as well. Cheap and free countermagic is extremely valuable and there are not that many instances where your opponent won't tap out for their spell you need to counter. We run a large suite of 1 mana or less countermagic and Pierce is a key element of that.

Negate is a fine spell indeed, but suffers from having a lot of better counters at 1U. I wouldn't slate anyone for running it because it's very solid and has a lot of targets, but we preferred the more versatile two mana counters. It would be the next one of those that I would include, so it's not far off.

We already have plenty of 2cc counterspells that can hit any target.

It's clean and not fussy. It's understandable that some may want to cut it because it's too honest a counter. You know, like good ol' peanut butter. Some just wanna taste the latest strawberry jam.

Who the **** doesn't want peanut butter?!

Negate has been a fine spell for us, but the blue section is really tight and I can see why some smaller lists cut it.
At 720 it is still included here and probably will be for a while .

I've run both spell pierce and negate for a while. Certainly underrated.
95% of the best cards in cube are non-creature permanents, as well as > 50% of the cards that make main decks.

Also, there's much more creature removal in the avg deck than non creature removal, so it's often less important that you counter creatures.

I like them both for mid sized powered cubes. I can see playing zero or one of the two for design reasons, but they absolutely belong for power level.

Like it a lot less for larger unpowered cubes. I prefer essence scatter in those cubes.

Wizards is gonna print walkers in every set. On top of artifacts, enchantments, sorceries, instants. If anything, it should stand the test of time.

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

It might be, but it also has massive drawbacks in not being able to counter ~40% of the cards in a typical cube. Like it's fine and will probably stay in my cube as they stopped printing good counter spells, but it's never felt too good for us.

Quote from CuberAng »

Well, eventually I decided to cut this card because it was just too good against Wildfire and combo decks (reanimator, cheat/fatties).

Im glad you mentioned this...
Counter spells are very very good in cube because a lot of the "combo" or ramp decks lack redundancy in their combo peices (IE sneak attack/eureka).
This also applies to thoughtseize/duress.

Limiting/increasing the number of hard counter spells is a good way to tweak the relative power level of these archetypes.

My approach was to make linear/combo archetypes as powerful as possible, but also give interactive decks the proper tools to interact with them.

I've cubed a ton with negate and my opinion hasn't changed one bit from a few posts up.

Yeah, we do run Negate since the cube grows up to 630 and we do enjoy it so far. We think it's the better option at the 2CC spot after all the traditionnal stuff. And we do prefer it to Spell Pierce because it's always on. Great against combos, walkers, ramp, control and midrange. Really fine card for 540 and more.

I think its a lot better than Spell Pierce unless you are playing a small powered cube. I like it since 2CC hard Counters get few and far between at 720.