MTG Salvation

Yes, my friends. It's come to this. We're judging the good ol' bird.

Thieving Magpie

Is it still good enough? Too expensive? Too easily answered? Too ubiquitous? Too good?

Some background on me, my format and my playgroup: I'm an optimizer. I powermax. That said, I do have my wonky moments and biases. Anyway, after our most recent draft, one of the guys piped up and made the point that my format may have too many evasive creatures. This has led me to be a little harder and more discriminating on the fliers/etc that I run. I've long excluded guys like Kor Skyfisher and recently cut Quickling, for example. I'm just not sure this guy is the four-drop my format wants in blue.

What do you think

I haven't run it in a number of years

Lu Xun, Scholar General is a Masters Edition (MTGO) uncommon which most of the community considers fair game for Peasant cubes. I have him and he's OK/solid but not a super high pick.

Downgrading the card from Horsemanship to Flying is a pretty huge loss. It's not totally unplayable, but I'd be pretty unexcited to include it in a Cube or actually draft it/play it.

Cool. I figured as much, but just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy.

Magpie takes a lot of work to get a Concentrate. Plus he dies to everything.

For a similar amount of work with a more interesting play dynamic and higher potential upside, I do still like Coastal Piracy.

I always play in my cube just for the sentimental reasons. Was one of the first cards I ever cracked in a pack of 10th edition. I want there to be some variety in the power level of the UW fliers

wasn't magpie obsolete with the printing of tandem lookout?

Yeah Lookout is the better card overall, but Magpie still does something different (usually in low-creature-count / control decks)... not JUST worse.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, Lu Xun, Scholar General is what's actually obsoleted the Magpie.

I think it's just worse than Honden of Seeing Winds for decks that want it (you know, slow control lists).

edit: Lu Xun is ALSO a "just better" Archivist in like 99.5% of scenarios

It takes 4 turns for it to equal concentrate, and very few people if any run that

I would, generally speaking, give you this advice:
If a card is going to do accumulate advantages over time, first check to see how much value you can get in a one-shot burst.
For things that give you stuff (drawing cards, making tokens), it's very hard for then slower cards to compete. Theres just no solid reason why you don't want to draw 4 cards now as opposedd to drawing 1 extra card over 4 turns (Honden of seeing winds vs Tidings).

Unless you are drawing 5 cards, getting 5 tokens, gaining 10 life, dealing your opponent 5 damage and destroying their hand

I feel like it's worth mentioning that Thieving Magpie can block grounded dudes and fliers, while Lu Xun, Scholar General can only block grounded dudes.... and horsemanship.

That's like saying Path is better than Swords since you can use it on your own dudes to ramp/fix -- technically true and relevant in like 5% of games, but nowhere near enough to make Card B better than Card A.

I wasn't arguing bird is better than horse

Honden of cruel ultimatum?