MTG Salvation

Quote from Phitt77 »

Doom Blade is only the third best 1B instant speed black removal after Go for the Throat and (usually) Ultimate Price, so I don't think there is a need to run it below 540 (and personally I wouldn't even run it at that size).

I think this statement is more about our position on cube design. It's still probably the third best black removal spell, and if you were just jamming the most powerful cards in your cube, then all three of them would go in. But I think most of want to either vary our removal a bit more, or depower it.

No, it's not the same kind of random
The existence of X/1s are why -1/-1 removal gets run at all. The value of -1/-1 removal is based entirely on how many of these cards we have. The value of a nonblack removal spell is based on... the number of black creatures your opponent has.

One's arbitrary

I think I value Murderous Cut slightly higher than Doom Blade, actually. In the right deck it's just a 2 or sometimes even 1 mana removal, no matter what your opponent is playing.

I run both Terror and Dark Banishing for nostalgia reasons, but don't really like the colour-specific issues. Other than that I run Shriekmaw and Nekrataal. One of those could be Skinrender I suppose.

And I agree with Leelue: There's a big difference between colour-restrictions and other restrictions. Sure, sometimes your Go for the throat doesn't work on their creature, but when Doom Blade doesn't work, it doesn't work on 50% of their deck.

I avoid the color restriction kill spells as well.

What I mean is that -1/-1 removal is inherently tied to the kind of creatures your opponent is running (small) and color based removal is based on nothing predictable.

For one you can go "I will be weak to aggro, so darkblast is likely to keep me alive if I get paired against it". This is a predictable, probabilistic statement. Yes it also works against merfolk looter but you pick up cards like darkblast to be better on average in certain matchups.

You cannot make the same statement about doom blade. Sometimes it kills their entire deck and sometimes it doesn't, and there is no matchup based hedging you can make.

I never said -1/-1 removal has the same rate of missing that doom blade has. -1/-1 removal doesn't work very often, we all know this. We could just as easily be having this argument about -2/-2 removal and the matchup inconsistencies are still the same but in the same family of reasoning.

This is like saying flying and wrexial, the risen deep are the same kind of random. "Some decks have flyers and some don't the same way some decks have islands or swamps."

P/T reductions can still be relevant even if he has nothing to kill, though. I agree it's generally overblown, but when you only want X amounts of certain types of effect you gotta draw a line with reasoning somewhere.

Phitt, the amount by which the card can be swingy is not the argument here. Also, the fact that nekretaal is obviously a stronger card than tooth collector is not the ideology that's on trial here.

The fact that river boa can deal 20 unanswered damage under a specific circumstance is not why river boa is terrible for limited.
The fact that its specific circumstance is "because my opponent wanted to play blue today" is what the problem I have is.
The fact that doom blade is literally half as good against these 4 color pairs compared to these 6 color pairs irrespective of the deck's strategy what the problem I have is.

If you don't see "good against a color" as a different thing than "good against a kind of creature" then we can't get anywhere on this.

There is a spectrum here that I think "good against a color" and "good against a kind of creature" are both on. You can play against strategies where Tooth Collector is actively much better or worse against and I would say the distribution of those strategies in a normal draft is also random (maybe not as much as color distribution). I personally think the real question here is how swingy specific cards are that happen to be more effective against certain colors/strategies are.

As examples, I would consider both River Boa and Timely Reinforcements to be too swingy since those cards can be go from being an A grade 40% of the time to a D grade the either 60% of the time. But Doom Blade or Sunlance being B+ grade 40% of the time and C+ the other 60% of the time seems fine to me.

There's a difference between "less effective" and "not working under any circumstance." So I'm not sure why you say Nekrataal is "slightly worse" against black, it just doesn't work against that color. 4 mana 2/1 first strike is not a card.

Quote from Phitt77 »

Nekrataal is not 'good against a color', it's 'slightly worse against a color', which is far less problematic.

I agree with this.

There's also the "you are black, so fewer of the other drafters are black"-argument. (More true for the BB-cost Nekrataal, than the more splashable Terror/Dark Banishing/Doom Blade.)

How is having half as many targets only "slightly" worse? Sure, in 75% of turns it's going to kill one of the two most important targets, but 50% of the time it doesn't kill the most important one and 25% of the time it does not kill either. A 1/4 failure rate is pretty big. I don't have a way to calculate how much more valuable the #1 threat is over the #2, but intuition would tell me that this is a big deal as well. Since it normally always kills the best card on the table, this seems like a significant drop off to me.

Tooth collector doesn't promise to kill the biggest thing on the table and then fail. It promises to kill something small, is less useful when it misses, and occasionally snipes a better target.

I'm also not sure why you keep bringing up tooth collector. It is an example of a card whose value changes in context, but you seem particularly fixated on it. This is especially confusing because you keep doing so under the context "nekretaal is good, tooth collector is bad", which isn't the argument.

It's much easier to rely on your opponent having early X/1s or just tokens you can ping off with Tooth Collector / Banewhip Bunisher than relying on your opponent not playing one of the five colors of magic. Against a standard X/B aggro deck, Tooth Collector will pretty much always find something to kill, or at the very least shrink to an unprofitable attack for the turn. However, a Terror would literally be unplayable against half of the creatures in the aggro deck, assuming a flat 50/50 split for simplicity's sake, there's a 25% chance the aggro deck's 1 drop and 2 drop are black. If you're staring down a Diregraf Ghoul into Heir of Falkenrath then Doom Blade is firewood. Which is a huge feel bad for anyone, especially new drafters, who thought they were making a good choice mainboarding catch-all removal.

In regards to this discussion, I have a few points:

1) The most relevant decision point as to playing any of these cards is deck construction and/or sideboarding. At that point, you are looking at deck-level data and not specific gameplay states. The information is along the lines of "this Doom Blade likely has ~7 targets" or "this Doom Blade likely has ~14 targets." I would think, even in our high powered environment, that most of us would still play a two-mana spell that kills 7 targets in our opponent's deck, barring an excellent alternative in the sideboard.

2) Strategy is definitely a relevant portion of judging these cards' effectiveness, along with color. Regarding Doom Blade and recent decks I have drafted on CubeTutor, I see Rakdos aggro decks with 1 target, Orzhov aggro decks with 10 targets, and Izzet spells decks with 6 targets. Given that strategies and colors are fairly randomly distributed among your opponent's decks, it is worth thinking about both of them when you consider the swingy-ness of a card. Which means not just cards like a Doom Blade, but even a Tooth Collector, or a Trophy Hunter, or a Forsake the Worldly.

3) I honestly think the main consideration here is swingy-ness between the possible power level of a card and how you judge that. Is a Doom Blade with 14 targets an A and a Doom Blade with 7 targets a C? Is Doom Blade inherently better against more powerful targets (like a ramp deck versus an aggro deck)? And once you have done this evaluation, how much swingy-ness is acceptable? I could totally understand someone would rather have a card that swings from B to C as opposed to one that swings from A to C-.

4) That said, I can tolerate a card going from A to C- (maybe a Propaganda) much more than one that goes from B to D (no idea which card is a good example of this- Breath of Darigaaz as an anti-aggro card?). I think part of what is at play here is the idea that for lower-power swingy cards, even dipping a little bit takes them out of the range of overall playability, whereas bigger swings on higher-power cards could be fine.

The biggest thing here is only needing X of an effect in your cube, and needing to find the logic to remove one of them when they're all good. When people aren't including doom blade in their cubes, it's not because it's bad, it's because there are scenarios where it is bad where other, similar options are good, and when it is good the other, similar options are still just as good. So like, when I'm playing against Rakdos that has 8 targets for my Doom Blade, Go For the Throat/Ultimate Price/Nekrataal/etc. are going to be overall better than Doom Blade for that deck. Doom Blade can still perform well, Doom Blade can still be the gold standard that it has been, but when I only want X instant speed Doom Blade effects then those scenarios are going to be the first I think of when justifying cutting Doom Blade.

It's like white 5s in legacy/vintage cube: almost none of them are bad, but I'm not going to run all of them because my cube will never want/need them all, though you could argue running almost all of the standard ones. Doom Blade effects are reaching that threshold, and while Doom Blade certainly doesn't feel out of place the non-black clause is a perfectly sound (albeit painful) reason for removing it vs another option.

Tooth collector wasn't in my cube over nekretaal over this issue. Nekretaal is missing from my cube for several reasons.

Tooth collector isnt in my list anymore either.


And again, I really have to drive this point home: I don't care how good nekretaal is. You keep saying things like "when it isn't perfect, it's still better than fleshbag marauder" but I don't care about that. The sentence isn't "I don't like nekretaal because it's expected value isn't consistent". The sentence is "I don't like nekretaal because it's expected value isn't consistent due to factors that I don't think should matter".
This next example is extremely hyperbolic (me? Hyberbole?), but it's like if the card got better or worse depending on the color of my opponents shirt. That's how I see it.

And yes, ultimate price and go for the throat have somewhat similar issues (randomly not being murder) but at least they are broader in scope. Also the drop off after these 2 drop options is too large for me to be comfortable with, which is also why I play with either. But I wouldnt put it past me to one day switch to murder if enough good last gasp/fatal push/ulcerate style cards get printed.

Exactly the kind of card this thread is for

hour of need

Something along those lines was my first impression of the card, but for whatever reason I haven't had it live up to that

Probably because I run few mana dorks or roadblocks?

Quote from Leelue »

Something along those lines was my first impression of the card, but for whatever reason I haven't had it live up to that

I also thought Hour of Need was gonna be the nuts, too. I hyped it up when it was spoiled, perhaps convinced some people that it was gonna be sweet, but it never did anything, so it got cut.

Maybe just comes down to as a finisher it's a bit awkward as the creatures lack haste and as a combat trick it's a bit expensive.

Instant doesn't help you one bit when you topdeck the thing, whereas similar finishers like Overrun can be cast the turn you draw them you have to wait with Hour. Plus if you play it during your opponent's end step you need to have that mana open, so you can't even use the turn you drew Hour to build up your board. It's not necessarily a deal breaker, but it's certainly not ideal.

Also not sure where the 1,5 for 1 is coming from. You spend three mana, a card and exile a creature to create a token that hopefully kills your opponent's creature. In many ways that's worse than a simple fight card, which isn't exactly at the top of the removal/combat trick pile but at least allows you to pick your fights instead of hoping your opponent makes an attack or a block you can exploit while you have three mana open. Even if it works, in the long run your token is more vulnerable than the creature you exiled.

It doesn't really help your case for Hour as a finisher if you have to resort to "it's better in other situations". Yeah, obviously it is, but we're talking about Hour as a finisher and a combat trick. If it fails the finisher part that's part of its justification for inclusion gone.

Developing the board: sure you can count turning creatures into 4/4s as developing the board, but that doesn't help if you have to leave mana open instead of playing more of your cards. Being forced to spend mana to protect one of those creatures can happen, not having enough creatures because you need your mana in the end step can happen. That's very clearly another potential downside if we want to use it as a finisher.

You can't just claim 2 for 1s because you upgrade a creature. If turning a creature into a 4/4 flyer for three mana while killing an enemy creature were as easy and profitable as you make it out to be, we'd all still be playing the card. 4/4 flyers are good, but not backbreaking by any means (how many of us have or were close to cutting Serra Angel?). What you said doesn't really address any of the "bad fight card" issues either.

I don't like calling Overrun a finisher either. It requires you to be in something similar to a winning situation already. Usually.

A card like Opportunity doesn't stabilize you when you're backpredaling heavily, but if you're not about to die it sorta "finishes" the game for you.

I can see how hour of need might count as a finisher, but it requires a specific deck

Quote from Phitt77 »

It is one of my favorite cards. It's the best ramp finisher in my opinion, much better for this purpose than Pelakka Wurm or any other card. Turning a bunch of mana dorks, Eldrazi tokens etc into an army of Air Elementals is game over for your opponent. You can deal with a single Plated Crusher or Ulamog's Crusher, but there is not much you can do against 3-4 Air Elementals in CU/be. Plus if you are the defending player and about to lose it's even better than if you are on offense and already winning anyway (very much unlike the previously mentioned finishers).

I would probably even run the card if that was the only purpose of it, but it's also versatile and scaleable. Very easy to get a pseudo 2 for 1 with it. Just turn your Omenspeaker into an Air Elemental to kill their Aerial Responder or upgrade your Skyship Plunderer to an Air Elemental when it is about to get hit by a Lightning Bolt. You can cast it for 3, 5, 7, 9 or even 11 mana (seen that), it is whatever you need it to be when you need it. Theoretially you can even target your opponent's creature as well (like turning an Artisan of Kozilek into an Air Elemental), but admittedly that's something that rarely makes sense.

It's exactly what I want from a Magic card. It can be used in a lot of different ways, it's fun, you can build around it, but you don't have to. I pick this very highly during draft, one of my favorite decks is ramp with Mystical Tutor + Hour of Need + all the mana dorks/green small dudes/blue utility creatures I can get. But I would put it into any relatively slow deck that runs enough creatures, especially tokens and/or utility creatures like Omenspeaker, Sea Gate Oracle, Merfolk Looter, Eldrazi Skyspawner and so on. The card will not leave my cube anytime soon.

This has been my experience with Hour of Need as well.

Phitts spirited response is the whole reason why I gave it another try. I will keep his experience in mind the next time I see it in a draft.

But the leash isnt so long