MTG Salvation

Never really been a Reckoner fan. Boros has better options.

I don't eat beef, so I guess I'll go with chocolate milk. That, or pepper jack cheese. Just not both in the same meal.

I ran Reckoner for a while, but it was pretty bad.

Favorite beef or dairy product: bleu cheese. I also like ribeye. These combine nicely.

Boros Reckoner seems to have fallen out of favor with most of the community, coming in at a mere #7 in the latest Boros Power Rankings vote. I had it in my cube quite a bit longer than most, because I'd classified it as one of the 2 free hybrids I allowed each guild from my cube's inception. As an HHH hybrid, though, it's not really that much more flexible than a straight up gold card, because you pretty much have to be Boros, mono-white, or mono-red to play it. Still, since red 3-drops weren't very good for a pretty long time, I was willing to let this old cow slide on a technicality. I've been gradually trimming my hybrids to make room for colorless cards, and now that we have plenty of great 3-drops in both red and white, Reckoner can go to the slaughterhouse.

Still, Reckoner is a really good 3-drop that's hard to interact with in combat, and has the last word when dealt with by any damage-based removal. It especially shines in the difficult aggro vs. midrange matchup where it can trade with pretty much everything. In one game I played it in, it was able to hold an Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger that had been cheated into play by an opponent who was at less than 10. Being able to give Reckoner first strike may not have been necessary to make this card good, but it makes it that much harder to interact with. In a shallow guild, Reckoner is still a fine choice.

There's little I love more in this world than a thick, charcoal grilled T-bone steak, cooked medium rare. I also make a mean vanilla pudding from scratch, and even the vanilla's been make from scratch extracted at home with Madagascar vanilla beans.

Reckoner has a difficult casting cost. Problem is, even in Boros or mono red decks, I'd prefer the majority of the mono-colored options over it. When it was released the competition was limp in red, now there are less and less reasons to run it by the set.

And to think that if not for the recent reprints, newer Magic players might have never known whether or not there were tombstones in orochi territory....

Sakura-Tribe Elder



BONUS QUESTION

Do you enjoy playing green ramp decks?

STE is sweet. Instant speed rampant growth on a creature is great. I think it's a staple.

I love playing green ramp decks. Big stupid creatures is like my favorite thing in magic, and green is of course king. I'm debating throwing in a progenitus to my cube so I can run it with the Natural Order/cheat strategies. It's probably my favorite cheat creature, and my favorite to natural order out as a back up in the green ramp decks. I've done T3 Channel->Green Sun Zenith->Progenitus, feels good.

Love Sakura Tribe Elder. I think green ramp decks are only fun if you have creatures that can stand up to removal. Not necessarily shroud or hexproof, but more cards like Hornet Queen and Terastodon.

STE (or Shakira as my group calls it) is fantastic. Being able to ramp and absorb a few points of damage is exactly what I want in green.

Tribe Elder has been in most iterations of my cube. It does solid work in pretty much any green deck. Usually not more than filler, but really great filler that almost always makes your deck play better.

Self sacrificing creatures have interesting synergies too. Like Meren of Clan Nel Toth plus STE is a really ridiculous engine that takes very little time to get going.

Great creature. Benefits from all the creature interactions, and it can soak up combat damage + Rampant Growth. Hell, it can pick up a Sword if the need arises.

Staple card is a staple.

I love Green ramp, usually paired with Red or Black. Big dumb monsters are fun.

Steve is great, and green ramp is too. There are lots of flavors of green ramp decks, though. There's your GR Wildfire decks playing land-based ramp. There's your GX decks playing big cards in a variety of color combinations, possibly excluding GB for now. There's your GG or GGx decks that top out with Craterhoof. There's Xg or XXg Oath decks that splash green for Oath, Selvala's Stampede, and Cultivate effects. Etc. Lots of ways to make big mana work for you.

No step on snek or he get heckin mad. Great card, full staple.

I love green ramp. My favorite thing to tie it with is massive red burn. G/R ramp into X-burn is what my very first deck turned into.

This is easily the best Rampant Growth variant, it's hard to overstate just how good it is for a cube environment to have this effect on a saccable body as opposed to in sorcery form. On top of the ramp, fixing. and deck-thinning from getting the basic land of your choice out of your deck and into play, it protects you from an attacker for a turn, can be recurred through graveyard shenanigans, and even carry a Sword in a pinch. I love it when cheap commons become stone-cold staples the way Steve has.

After tempo decks, green ramp is probably my favorite kind of deck to draft and play. When I first played Magic, all I wanted to do was cast and play Craw Wurm, Crash of Rhinos, and Verdant Force, and it's always a blast to get to build a deck that can bring absolute monsters into play.

Speaking of land and graveyard shenanigans, is this your white knight, or just a relic?

Knight of the Reliquary



BONUS QUESTION

What kind of identity do you try to promote in your cube's Selesnya section?

I love KotR. It's a bit unassuming, and people tend to overlook it, but it's a house. Dump a land, find a fetch, use the fetch, and it's instantly +2/+2 bigger, and your deck is thinned out. The fact that it finds any land is amazeballs, and should never be understated.

I try to make my Selesnya very midrange and high value type cards. Knight of the Reliquary, Qasali Pridemage, Kitchen Finks and the like.

Im not a fan of KotR. The situations JohnnyDegenerate do happen and they're sweet, but it can be kind of a slow-roller if you don't have the fetch. And sure, you want to build around it, but not every draft works out that way and when it doesn't you have a bit of a slow engine. Regardless, it can be great as described, and it's another one of those cards that I don't run but never seems out of place in a pack.

I try to just run the best stuff that supports what those archetypes do, but sometimes you just play the best card. Like, Kitchen Finks doesn't necessarily support the ramp decks that GW can end up in, but there is no universe where I don't run that card. I guess it varies between some combination of efficient creatures/hate bears and Mirari's Wake, which tends to come and go. That card is sweet, and a reason to splash white, but is usually the card I'll switch out if I need to test something.

Knight of the Reliquary suffers from being the only good Knight of the Reliquary type card. We need more Titania, Protector of Argoth and Terravore kinds of cards before aggro-Loam is a reality in this format.

It's a nice card, and I love the ability, but Knight fell a little short.

My Selensya section has cards that support a few different archetypes. Mostly, the cards are good value plays.

It's a niche card. And unless you go out of your way to support interactions, it's not worth a gold slot IMO. Even following a cataclysm (one of the better plays), it's still just a big vanilla creature with no evasion that you paid 1GW for. It has performed decently in my midrange cube, but only because that's a slower less degenerate meta. And even there it's not amazing.

Knight of the Reliquary seemed to be on its way out of a lot of cubes as I was building mine, and it's not a cheap card, so I never bothered shelling out for it. It does seem to have an absurd ceiling for 3 mana, but I'm glad to hear that I'm not missing that much.

If there's an identity to my Selesnya section, it's efficient weenies that hose popular strategies. Qasali Pridemage messes with artifact ramp and Tinker, Kitchen Finks with burn & aggro, and Voice of Resurgence with control. Wilt-Leaf Liege is the exception, and it's been a really solid anthem on a stick for all the token producers in both colors, although I do look forward to the day it gets Mind Twisted into play.

The MTGO Legacy Cube is back, so it's time to pick on, err.... discuss some of their card choices!

If these are "fast lands", why were they so slow to complete the cycle, amirite?

Darkslick Shores and the rest of the SOM/KLD fast lands




BONUS QUESTION

What incomplete cycle would you like to see WoTC complete next?

First, YA U RITE

Second, these cards are alright. I think there is generally better fixing available, but it's nice to have a full cycle for large cubes.

Completed sword cycle would be cool. Don't know if I would run 10 swords, so it would be an interesting design choice as well.

Fine lands but vary in relative power level for two main reasons:
1) They're obviously better in aggressive guilds like Rakdos than slower ones like Dimir.
2) There are less good dual lands for the enemy guilds than allied ones.

If we would get the enemy Talismans it would create big waves in my cube. I'd have to rethink a lot of the mana rocks, fixing lands, artifact hate and artifact support.

I've thought about running a broken cycle of lands before, but I don't like the prescriptivism of giving BR the fastland, pushing them toward aggro, and giving UB a tapland, cornering them into control. Shocks, fetches, and duals are good in any deck. Creaturelands add to threat density. Anyway, at 450 I'm glad I don't have to worry about this too much.

Enemy Talismans getting printed would replace the Signets in a second in my cube. They would make supporting colorless easier, help split mana between phases, and give just a little punishment to control decks wanting to wrath on T3.