MTG Salvation

Quote from PyreDream »

As an engine card, I actually like Birthing Pod more than this

This card gets around a few of Birthing Pod's weaknesses that made it a mediocre cube card IMO:

1) Can sac at instant speed.
2) As long as you have a creature in your library, this will hit. I ran into problems with Birthing Pod where I would end up with a hole in my curve because I only had one 4 drop or something.
3) Cheaper to cast and activate. Granted, you can play BP in any colored deck, eating the life loss became a big deal. This card is much more efficiently costed.

On the downside, the creature comes to your hand, so you need to spend mana to cast it, but still, I think this card will fare better in cube than BP did. The main reason being it can be activated at instant speed so you can respond to chump blocks and instant speed removal with ease.

Also, Red13th, totally agree about the crappy art!

I like this card WAY more than Birthing Pod for the cube.

Pod and this go into the same deck though. I wonder if the provided redundancy will make Pod more popular?

Quote from Zetsu_Sensei »

Quote from Red13th »

I'm interested in giving this a try, but I wish the art was better, it's so ugly.

Trully? I kind of like it very much!

Yeah I like the art a lot too. And I still think this card is going to be completely busted in aggro.

This looks like a pure midrange card to me. Can't see myself maining this in an aggro deck.

The art is fine. I see where they were going and it was a good and fitting idea, but the execution seems a bit lacking.

If the aggro deck has token engines or recursive creatures, I would maindeck this there. But I agree that in other scenarios, it looks too reactive for hard aggro in general.

Yeah, I was thinking of a random Gruul or Selesnya aggro deck. In those, I'd rather run more creatures, removal and cards that help me push damage trough.

Quote from noshadowkick »

Quote from PyreDream »

As an engine card, I actually like Birthing Pod more than this

This card gets around a few of Birthing Pod's weaknesses that made it a mediocre cube card IMO:

1) Can sac at instant speed.
2) As long as you have a creature in your library, this will hit. I ran into problems with Birthing Pod where I would end up with a hole in my curve because I only had one 4 drop or something.
3) Cheaper to cast and activate. Granted, you can play BP in any colored deck, eating the life loss became a big deal. This card is much more efficiently costed.

On the downside, the creature comes to your hand, so you need to spend mana to cast it, but still, I think this card will fare better in cube than BP did. The main reason being it can be activated at instant speed so you can respond to chump blocks and instant speed removal with ease.

Also, Red13th, totally agree about the crappy art!

The main reason by far birthing pod is not good in most cubes is it requires you draft many worse cards than you otherwise would. Therefore , when you don't draw pod, your deck is much worse. There are not enough cards in cube that synergize with the concessions you have to make. (taking advantage of a CMC chain of creatures).
If you don't make those draft concessions, then pod doesn't work.

(If you have a pick between a strong 4 drop planeswalker and a mediocore 4 drop creature, that has an ETB effect and happens to fill out a hole in your curve, you take the 4 drop creature for pod).

This cards synergy requirements are much much less stringent. Which is why it may work in cube.

In the idealized cube deck, pod is WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more powerful than this card.
In a cube that gives redundancy to Pod, as well as supports powerful pod chains (my cube), pod is very very good.

Wow, that's a nice twist on Survival of the Fittest, clearly not quite as great but still very strong. If this was tutoring like Survival instead of getting a random one it would even be close. Sacrificing instead discarding makes this great with tokens and devalues their removal.

I also like this much more than Pod (never was a fan of Pod in Cube though).

This card seems incredibly reactive unless you can synergize with recursive creatures or token producers.

It is reactive.

I don't know that I want such a reactive card in my green decks. That's my point. If I'm playing this solely on the idea that it'll be good vs my opponent's removal, then I think it's probably just better being another creature.

Man, I don't agree with that at all. It's great against the kinds of effects that normally wreck green decks, and it's great in the matchups that you struggle against the most. Every removal spell the control player fires off turns into another threat. That's way better expected value than drawing 1 more body. The game's gonna go long; turning every Doom Blade into an Unsummon and every Wrath effect into an Undo is amazing value, because it gives you the inevitability you need to grind out wins in bad matchups.

And it's not solely good against the opponent's removal. Even if you're not on the token/recursion creature combo plan with the card, it can still be used at face value to "upgrade" mana dorks and utility bodies into legitimate threats. And transform all your chump blockers and throw-away attackers into more gas. In addition to nullifying your opponent's removal. Generating card advantage all the while.

I mean, sac outlets are good when they can restore any kind of value from an otherwise lost card. If there was a card that said 1, sac a creature: Draw a card, it would be amazing. And this effect is better than that, because it guarantees that the drawn card is gas.

I think this is exactly the kind of card that green decks want/need in this format.

Understandable calibretto, but it can also be proactive. Only in certain situations, but that's because getting to sac weenies for the next creatures in your library is the kind of thing that's just naturally good to do at instant speed, as any Aristocrats-style deck can tell you. Pod would be absolutely absurd if you could sac the creatures at instant speed, but that doesn't mean you'd never do it right away to assemble a combo. If you're in need of a real threat, you can absolutely use this aggressively on your turn if you need.

And I think perhaps you underestimate the kinds of things that would be good with this. It feels like over 50% of the creatures on the board in cube these days are either tokens, ETB/Dies creatures, persistent, or recursive in some way. Many others are weenies that you can keep feeding to this on the cheap if their time has passed. Draw a turn 7 Llanowar Elves? Play it, chump if you can afford to wait, cycle it.

Maybe I'm wrong and going to conclusions a bit too fast, but I'd say that this card has a good shot to become one of the best none-creature card in the hole green section. There's some staples in front of it for sure, but it's definitly very powerful. I do like it very much, and the more I read it, the more I think it will serve the cube well.

Actually, it's more like G, Foster.

That's a great evaluation of the card. I was viewing in a vacuum too much, I think. It's certainly better than my initial thoughts.

Quote from calibretto »

I don't know that I want such a reactive card in my green decks. That's my point. If I'm playing this solely on the idea that it'll be good vs my opponent's removal, then I think it's probably just better being another creature.

You definitely have a valid point... Overall green cannot compete with the card advantage of blue, so your overall strategy you want to be proactive.

That being said , the best non-blue non-agressive fair strategies involves a deck of mostly proactive cards + a few non-proactive card advantage engines that can take over the game if not answered. It allows you to "attack" blue on multiple angles.

A deck involving this card, sylvan library, a couple swords, phyrexian arena, skull clamp, a few removal spells etc... and like 8 utility creatures will not be good. 12-14 creatures including many of them that can win the game unopposed by themselves? Now we are talking.

It comes down to the ratio you are looking for... But you do have to keep an eye that you aren't being TOO reactive with the green deck.

Quote from LucidVision »

But you do have to keep an eye that you aren't being TOO reactive with the green deck.

This is one of the things that makes the card work so well in the cube though, I think. Green is stacked with proactive effects, so having this be the sole reactive plan in a creature-heavy midrange deck should work out great.

My first impression is that this card is extremely efficiently costed, and that any cube size should test it.


I ran this in my Gu Opposition/Natural Order deck last night along with Survival of the Fittest and Sylvan Library.

Evolutionary Leap was great, I used it to draw more gas with elves and my tokens once they had done their thing. I drew a few duds and bombs with it. It's a good insurance policy if my opponents were to cast wrath, clones, or Control Magic, since I could sacrifice them in response. The shuffle effect was great with Sylvan Library too. I also wanted more green mana in play for this.

This card is going to be sticking into my list for a while as I have been craving for more instant speed sacrifice effects in cube. Sacrifice effects are generally underrated in my opinion.

I want to try this in a aggressive build featuring some threaten effects. Evolutionary Leap into Yasova Dragonclaw, next turn steal your guy, punch you in the face with it and sac it to get myself another dude. That sounds like a pretty stellar play to me. I wish there were more cubable threaten effects because it plays so well with sac outlets.

Speaking of which, I agree with Nathan that sacrifice effects are underrated as a general rule (their usefulness is often not apparent). This card I think has a ton of play to it and it's probably going to have wildly different results depending on how your group builds decks and how your meta plays. This card has combo potential, it can also offer inevitability as wtwlf mentioned, but it also might do nothing in certain deck lists and match-ups too. This isn't going to be an auto-pilot broken value card. You are going to be rewarded for structuring your deck to maximize the mechanic and it will be dead at times if you try and slot it into every Gx build.

While I think this card is very different from Pod, it is likely going to garner a similar divide in the community where one side says it's awesome and the other says it's garbage in cube. On a side note, I actually am happy to see Wizard's designing cards like that where they aren't black and white include/excludes for cube. Very cool actually.

Similarly, it'll be really good with Vedalken Shackles.

Played against is yesterday at Origins prerelease. Was simply the best card on the table when it appears in a game. It replaces every single creature I used removal on when I was force to do it in order to keep the tempo on. Very annoying and full of value effect. The guy who was playing it filtered all creatures in his whole library a some stage, but only because I had a lot of removals. In cube, with all those value creatures and ETB effetcs strap on, I think the card will simply be insane. Less and less doubt about it.

I had this in my pre-release deck today and it was great if I was pressing or if I was on my heels. Because you know that you're getting a creature from the draw it is actually much better than just 'draw a card'. I could make bad attacks (to a degree) and if one of my guys gets eaten he just turns into something else. It will be great with all the etb effect in cube and another sac outlet is always welcome.

yeah card is cleary insane in origins limited.. Speed of the cards value generation (to make up for the loss of both card + tempo for a creature deck) and and it's power relative other engines is the concern for cube, neither of which apply at all for a low powered limit format.