So I got around playing Sphinx's Tutelage in a peasant draft recently and it was a hoot! I normally dislike mill because its linear and on the boring side, but this card just felt right. It played with a few cards that synergies with it like Sylvan library and Sensei's Divining Top and yeah, it worked like a charm. It got me thinking about what it would be like in an "unpowered" cube like mine. It can be used as an inevitable doom counter that needs to dealt with or raced. Or build around with cards like JTMS, Dack Fayden, Merfolk Looters, Wheel of Fortune, Tireless Tracker and Edric, Spymaster of Trest, Consecrated Sphinx and so on. However, I can see this being awful as a topdeck.
Since I found no posts about this card, I figured I'd ask if anyone has any experience with it. Whether it was oppressive, slow, niche or useless. Any feedback at all. I'm planning to slip it in cube for Monday to try it and see what my playgroup thinks.
I have recently added this card to my cube because my U/R archetype is now a mill/burn per draw archetype.
The deck works with a few draw 7 spells together with a card like Sphinx's Tutelage or Jace's Erasure. You only need a couple of draw 7's with these or a single mill spell when your opponent's library is down to a couple of cards (Archive Trap)
We only drafted once with the cube since so it's hard to judge whether the deck is oppressive or not. His deck certainly was NOT useless. It seemed to be very efficient and reliable, thanks to the abundance of lots of card draw. I lost all my games to him, despite increasing my library size by 10. He had no trouble milling 50 with his deck.
That said, the guy also had a pretty sweet combo in the deck so he also won a lot of games on Fastbond + Sovereign's Realm
TL;DR: too little data at this point.
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"Everybody dies, Tracey. Someone's carrying a bullet for you right now, doesn't even know it. The trick is to die of old age before it finds you."
I don't have experience with this so this is just theory-crafting, but if I'm drawing enough cards where this wins, shouldn't I already be winning anyways since I'm drawing that many cube cards?
This card has been very effective in some lower powered rare lists from posts I've read (so good in some cases, people took it out for being too obnoxious). Problem I have with it - and why I never tested it - is it's a cheap enchantment win condition with basically zero interaction (outside you having a disenchant or racing the mill). Those types of cards generally go against the spirit of my lists, so I tend to avoid them. There are exceptions of course, but this wasn't one I was willing to add to that list.
I think there are two main inherent issues with using this as a win-con:
1) If this is the card that I need to win the game, I'm putting all my eggs into one basket. If I have no chance of winning otherwise, then my plan is disrupted by disenchant, oblivion ring, or an eldrazi shuffle effect which seems super bad.
2) If I don't have to rely on this card to win, i.e. if it's OK if it's dealt with, then why am I running it in my deck anyways? Why waste the space on a card that I don't need which could be used on an actual blue card?
I feel that the number of games where this is your win-con, you don't have other ways to win off the million cards being drawn, and it lives are too few to justify a spot. There may be a cube out there where this shines--slow, dragon cubes; mill as a supported archetype--but those cubes are few and far in between in my experience.
Well, to be fair you are putting your eggs in one basket that you are pretty much always going to find because half your deck is draw. So if you want to build around it, it's not going to be that hard to build a supporting deck around it. And protecting it is also easy since you are playing blue.
its effective at what it does but mill isnt really an archetype i want in my cube. blue gets spread pretty thin in other archetypes as is and I dont think tutelage is good enough/fun enough to warrant cutting something else. at least in small and medium sized cubes.
Sphinx's Tutelage is an interesting card in unpowered rare lists, and I encourage you to give it a try. That being said...
I was first turned onto the card in Origins draft - where it was strong. Because of that experience I tried it out in my 700 card unpowered list. I had it in for about a year, but ended up cutting it fairly recently. For the record, I do support Mill as an archetype in blue and in the Dimir color combination. That being said, I cut this card because it is VERY SLOW, and because nobody REALLY wanted it - including the Mill deck!
Sure, a blue-based control deck COULD play it, if it wanted a 23rd card that served as a win-con that came at the opponent from a different angle. But if something happened to it before it won the game for you, then it didn't really accomplish much, since it likely didn't synergize with the rest of your deck. If it did win the game for you, then that meant your deck was probably humming and drawing tons of cards, in which case you probably would have won anyway with just about anything.
Sure, the Mill deck COULD play it (again as like its 23rd card), but it probably didn't really want to because it was so slow. It was explained to me a long time ago that Mill is an aggro archetype, and in my cube it certainly plays as an aggro/combo archetype. Sphinx's Tutelage is certainly not aggro. Best case scenario: you play it turn 3, it does nothing. Turn 4, mills two, maybe more if you're playing a draw spell, but if you're doing that then you're NOT playing a mill spell. Turn 5, same thing, mills two, only more if you're again NOT playing a mill spell. Turn 6, same thing. Turn 7, if you're truly a mill deck then you're already dead. If you are somehow alive, then you're actually a control deck who has been playing cards to keep yourself alive rather than cards that "attack" the opponents library. See my point about this not REALLY belonging in Mill? And we won't even get into the scenario where this do-nothing enchantment is top-decked late when all you need is something to mill the last few cards from their library before they can kill you.
IMO, Sphinx's Tutelage probably best fits as the win-con in some sort of control deck like TurboFog, but then we get back to the fragility of the card.
Like I said, Sphinx's Tutelage is interesting, but in my experience it's not easy to find a home for the card, and it likely will be too slow for an environment as strong as cube - even in unpowered rare lists.
Since I found no posts about this card, I figured I'd ask if anyone has any experience with it. Whether it was oppressive, slow, niche or useless. Any feedback at all. I'm planning to slip it in cube for Monday to try it and see what my playgroup thinks.
The deck works with a few draw 7 spells together with a card like Sphinx's Tutelage or Jace's Erasure. You only need a couple of draw 7's with these or a single mill spell when your opponent's library is down to a couple of cards (Archive Trap)
We only drafted once with the cube since so it's hard to judge whether the deck is oppressive or not. His deck certainly was NOT useless. It seemed to be very efficient and reliable, thanks to the abundance of lots of card draw. I lost all my games to him, despite increasing my library size by 10. He had no trouble milling 50 with his deck.
That said, the guy also had a pretty sweet combo in the deck so he also won a lot of games on Fastbond + Sovereign's Realm
TL;DR: too little data at this point.
"Everybody dies, Tracey. Someone's carrying a bullet for you right now, doesn't even know it. The trick is to die of old age before it finds you."
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1) If this is the card that I need to win the game, I'm putting all my eggs into one basket. If I have no chance of winning otherwise, then my plan is disrupted by disenchant, oblivion ring, or an eldrazi shuffle effect which seems super bad.
2) If I don't have to rely on this card to win, i.e. if it's OK if it's dealt with, then why am I running it in my deck anyways? Why waste the space on a card that I don't need which could be used on an actual blue card?
I feel that the number of games where this is your win-con, you don't have other ways to win off the million cards being drawn, and it lives are too few to justify a spot. There may be a cube out there where this shines--slow, dragon cubes; mill as a supported archetype--but those cubes are few and far in between in my experience.
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/
I was first turned onto the card in Origins draft - where it was strong. Because of that experience I tried it out in my 700 card unpowered list. I had it in for about a year, but ended up cutting it fairly recently. For the record, I do support Mill as an archetype in blue and in the Dimir color combination. That being said, I cut this card because it is VERY SLOW, and because nobody REALLY wanted it - including the Mill deck!
Sure, a blue-based control deck COULD play it, if it wanted a 23rd card that served as a win-con that came at the opponent from a different angle. But if something happened to it before it won the game for you, then it didn't really accomplish much, since it likely didn't synergize with the rest of your deck. If it did win the game for you, then that meant your deck was probably humming and drawing tons of cards, in which case you probably would have won anyway with just about anything.
Sure, the Mill deck COULD play it (again as like its 23rd card), but it probably didn't really want to because it was so slow. It was explained to me a long time ago that Mill is an aggro archetype, and in my cube it certainly plays as an aggro/combo archetype. Sphinx's Tutelage is certainly not aggro. Best case scenario: you play it turn 3, it does nothing. Turn 4, mills two, maybe more if you're playing a draw spell, but if you're doing that then you're NOT playing a mill spell. Turn 5, same thing, mills two, only more if you're again NOT playing a mill spell. Turn 6, same thing. Turn 7, if you're truly a mill deck then you're already dead. If you are somehow alive, then you're actually a control deck who has been playing cards to keep yourself alive rather than cards that "attack" the opponents library. See my point about this not REALLY belonging in Mill? And we won't even get into the scenario where this do-nothing enchantment is top-decked late when all you need is something to mill the last few cards from their library before they can kill you.
IMO, Sphinx's Tutelage probably best fits as the win-con in some sort of control deck like TurboFog, but then we get back to the fragility of the card.
Like I said, Sphinx's Tutelage is interesting, but in my experience it's not easy to find a home for the card, and it likely will be too slow for an environment as strong as cube - even in unpowered rare lists.