MTG Salvation

Force of Negation
Link
1UU
Counter a non creature spell. If it's countered this way exile it.
If it's not your turn you may exile a blue card from your hand rather than pay this cards mana cost.

This card has the modern world in a tizzy but I'm curious about it's place in cube. It seems like a slam dunk inclusion to me but it does miss creatures making it a narrow card. Creatures are obviously incredibly important and missing those sucks, but having another card that doesn't leave you sheilds down when you tap out is such a high upside. And at 3 mana it's completely castable for the standard cost (if underwhelming).

I'd guess it probably depends on the sort of blue decks you're supporting but if you support and tempo variant this seems like a no brainer to me.

I feel like for the most part I'd rather have Spell Pierce. Not free protection on your turn means it's meh in combo decks. And one of the awesome things about force is slamming something like Monastery Mentor and protecting from an instant speed removal spell. I'm not super interested in this, but I can also see it overperforming.

Solid card, but this is how I feel about it:

Quote from steve_man »

Eh, Force of Will is good, but not great in cube and this is well below it. Negate and Spell Pierce are cubeable, but are definitely tier 3 counterspells in my book, and this probably falls in the same boat. I’d like this more if it didn’t have the turn restriction, but even then it’d probably still be borderline at best to me.

I'm not sure I actually prefer it to Spell Pierce/Negate in this format, and those aren't spells I've historically had success with. Maybe I'm wrong and this is great, since the 3cc failsafe mode is much fairer than FoW's 5cc option, but I've been burned too many times on the noncreature counter clause to get excited for this kind of interaction, regardless of how effective it can be in certain windows.

I think this is a card that's good in constructed but just not for cube.

I'll be replacing Negate with this probably, seems like enough upside to justify.

I think it's ok if you're into the all combo all the time MTGO style Vintage cubes. Outside of that I agree that there are better options.

I actually love Force of Will in cube, I support unfair stuff and fast mana so having safety valves is nice.

However .... I really don't like target conditional counters in Cube. Decks can be really almost all creatures or have just a few bolts which are worth the card disadvantage. I often use Force as a 2 card time walk. I lay out my finisher early knowing the opponent will go to drop their haymaker or removal they have been couching when I'm tapped out. I just force and take over. This just won't work that way very often.

I much prefer mana leak and other taxing spells (Play daze instead of this people, totally worth it in low cmc power cubes) or tempo spells like memory lapse.

Caveat, I have never really considered negate for cube.

Quote from ThatOneNinja »

I think it's ok if you're into the all combo all the time MTGO style Vintage cubes. Outside of that I agree that there are better options.

This is probably what's coloring my opinion. My old cube wasn't as all in on combo as the vintage cube but it was supporting storm and poxy stax decks. So having more free counter magic is appealing. Daze and Force were probably two of the three most prized counterspells in my cube at that stage (with Drain ahead).

I'm surprised at saying you'd prefer negate, but can understand preferring spell pierce. Is the one less mana really worth losing the pitch ability even as narrow as it is?

My experience is that this is actually a tier 2 counter spell on the level of Miscalculation. It's definitely above Negate and Spell Pierce, but certainly below Mana Leak.

Quote from IMorphling89 »

It's definitely above Negate and Spell Pierce, but certainly below Mana Leak.

I would agree with this. Played better than I expected it to. I only run one of these kinds of counterspells in my blue spell section, but I ended up liking Force of Negation the most out of the three (much to my surprise).

Quote from IMorphling89 »

My experience is that this is actually a tier 2 counter spell on the level of Miscalculation. It's definitely above Negate and Spell Pierce, but certainly below Mana Leak.

We found it to be in that tier 4 of counterspells, on just about the same powerlevel as Negate. Hoped it would play like a better Spell Pierce but we found it to be worse. We haven't even played Spell Pierce in ages (because we didn't think it was cubeable enough) but the testing we got from that definitely outperformed the results we found from Force of Negation. Both are surprisingly narrow, but having to cast it for 3 or not having it find good targets often enough just felt terrible and we found it to be pretty bad in this format. I don't think it's at all on the same powerlevel as Miscalculation (a top tier counterspell in my experience), but if you guys all really felt it was that much better than something like Spell Pierce then maybe my playgroup missed something or just got unlucky and it deserves a second chance.

Force of Negation was a card I had originally dismissed, but I'm reconsidering.

In a typical 450 card Legacy cube, where would this fall between fringe include, solid include and must have? Would you run it over any of the following:
- Forbid
- Condescend
- Arcane Denial

I like me some Force of Negation, but I think I like the other three cards slightly more. Maybe over Condescend if I had to pick a cut for it.

Quote from bnans_25 »

Force of Negation was a card I had originally dismissed, but I'm reconsidering.

In a typical 450 card Legacy cube, where would this fall between fringe include, solid include and must have? Would you run it over any of the following:
- Forbid
- Condescend
- Arcane Denial

I haven't been a fan of Forbid. The double blue is a pretty heavy commitment. The format is incredibly Talisman/ Signet heavy that 3 is not where you want to be. In theory this card could be a discard outlet, but I've never had that work out too well.

Arcane Denial an incredibly strong card. The effect is incredibly strong. One feature of Arcane Denial people often forget is you can counter your own your spells to essentially draw 3 - This is actually a surprisingly common use case during counter spell wars where you can counter your own spell that is being countered, counter your removal pointed at a creature where your opponent sacrifices in response or to "cycle" a dead card.

The second part is Arcane can be an upside with cards like Notion Thief, Leovoid or Narset.

Condescend is also a very strong card - especially in powered cubes with incredibly broken spells and card draw, one blue to scry 2 is not the worst use of the card.

How are we finding this card lately?

I’m still on the mindset of “no conditional counters”, given this format has strong creature bombs.

Wanted to ask because 2x2 might be a good time to buy this.

Force of Negation is great. Both the pitch mode and the 3-mana mode are relevant. Nearly every deck in my cube has an extremely powerful sorcery speed noncreature threat. Whether that's a Planeswalker in a superfriends deck, or Natural Order in a ramp deck, or Armageddon in an aggro deck, or Tinker, or Recurring Nightmare, or Opposition, or Jitte, the list goes on. It's rare for Force of Negation not to have a relevant target. I think the pitch mode makes Force of Negation play much better than Negate, as well.

I don't much care for counterspells with restricted target pools, but Force of Negation has been a good card for us. Much better than I expected.