Regarding the OP I agree that GE is reasonable to play as your only infect card (it is certainly not a high pick). In my second flight I ran it in a metalcraft deck (it is an artifact, after all) and mainly used it to make big defensive blockers. I was also able to 1-hit-KO someone with it using doublestrike WW guy and Trigon of Rage (14 poison counters, awwwww yeah).
By the same thinking, it would seem correct to play Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon in your Black deck even if...by some weird circumstance...he's your only Infect creature and will almost always 2 for 1 them/prevent them from swinging at all.
They seem like the only viable single-card Infect strategies.
Depending on what you mean by "infect strategies," I disagree. Necropede is insane as a defensive card - he is like Mogg Fanatic++ (pre M10 rules). He is particularly good against opposing infect decks since they play so many 1 toughness, non-evasive creatures.
Blight Mamba also seems fine as a defensive card in some weird U/G flyers deck, though obviously he is a lot less solid and will probably be picked way earlier than you want him.
I can tell you two cards you might be seriously wrong about: Kuldotha Rebirth and Furnace Celebration. Obviously in most sets the cards are trash, but wizards has specifically designed the SOM to attempt to make them playable. The key is that the two cards have good synergy with each other, the spellbomb cycle, and other random cards (Culling Dais, Perilous Myr, Barrage Ogre, etc.). Of the sealed games I played tonight, several involved some sort of sac-synergy. This might have been an anomaly, but at the very least I think it's a draft archetype worth exploring.
Remember when people thought Bone Splinters was bad?
I guess I'm the only guy that likes him. He reminds me of a way better Wall of Shadows, which used to be one of my favorite cards when I was 8 or whatever. I agree that dying to infect is daggers, though.
Saying "only Allies are specifically linear" ignores the fact that there are a lot of allies in Zendikar. They make up about 10% of the set - that's not a small amount. They have nothing outside of Zendikar with which to interact.
Fact check! There are 19 ally cards out of 234, which make up 8.1% of the set. 19 cards. That is not a lot when you consider that the cards are spread across all 5 colors. Comparison: Time Spiral had 27 slivers out of 286 cards, or 9.4%. No one was complaining then; after all, they had no reason to!
This is a classic case of deciding that you don't like a set, and then trying to make up reasons why. Zendikar is not linear.
Also, if you're a casual player, why do you even care if Zendikar has chase rares in it? The last time I checked, casual players didn't have to play with chase rares if they didn't want to!
I think you might be overrating Jackal Familiar a tad. The fact that it needs to be coupled with a haste creature to actually attack on the second turn makes it a lot worse than Mogg Flunkies, where you could swing with it and your one drop. That said it may be playable with the huge influx of hasty creatures into the environment, but I predict that every deck that wants to play Jackal Familiar will run 4x Figure of Destiny first.
Remember though that Glimpse was a rare and this is an uncommon. So it is possible you could get it in multiples. I think the only limited decks besides mill that would want it are maybe Grixis as an unearth enabler.
It's "target opponent"
Point taken about the rarity, although the fact that you only get one pack (as opposed to Ravnica, where you got as many as 3) somewhat negates that.
no it's still true. Even if their last card that was milled was a land, there would still be a higher number of lands left in the deck in ratio to nonlands than there was before as on odds you will be milling MORE nonland cards than land cards. do the math on it and you'll see what I mean.
Yes you'll mill more nonland cards, but you had more nonland cards in your deck to start with! So the ratio should be at best unaffected.
Think about it this way: if you accept that the average number of milled cards is about 10, then you'll have milled 4 lands and 6 cards. This is exactly the same ratio as the opponent's deck, so the ratio will be unchanged. I'm pretty sure if you "do the math" you'll find that the probability actually leans slightly towards increasing the spell density, but I'm too lazy to prove it.
Someone calculate the Expected Value of Mind Funeral? I'm doing the math, and it's actually kinda complicated. Someone wants to write a Monte Carlo simulation of this or something? Heck, I'm just gonna write one for myself tomorrow, and I'll figure this out. I'm thinking it's around mill 12 cards? Just a guess.
Lol, a kindred stats nerd! Doing the super easy math that ignores the fact that we are sampling without replacement it should be about 4/p, where p is the proportion of lands in their deck. With all the panoramas and landcyclers running around p should probably be about 16/40 or maybe 15/40. Mulligans also mess the math up a bit, but it's unclear how (i.e. people always throw away all land hands and no land hands, but they're more likely to get a no land hand than an all land hand).
Anyway 4/(16/40) = 10, so if your MCMC doesn't get in that ballpark you've probably programmed something wrong.
How good is the card? Well, Glimpse was pretty much unplayable so I doubt this will be, as Glimpse cost less and did pretty much the same thing.
Predatory Advantage is hilarious in casual multiplayer, but sadly too expensive to make it in constructed. Morbid Bloom is crap, of course - there isn't much filler in the set but this is definitely one example.
Identity Crisis is definitely worth a look, and the Sniper will crush souls in limited.
Hard to say if Nulltread Gargantuan is going to be good enough, as the fact that you are opening yourself to a 2 for 1 is a pretty steep drawback. I know the "it will only get pathed" argument is a little tired, but seriously: if they Terminate your gargantuan on turn 3, you are pretty close to just losing the game right there.
Drastic Revelations doesn't even come close to being strictly better than Tidings.
- Tidings is only 3UU, instead of three colors.
- There is no discarding involved in Tidings (REALLY big deal)
That being said, the three discards at random really nerfs the card big time unless you're playing with a crapload of unearth guys. Then it's pretty nice
I said had a chance of being strictly better, not that it was strictly better. If you cast it as your last card in an unearth deck, it's strictly better. Also in this environment UBR2 is really not much harder to cast than UU3.
My point is: if something is comparable to a tournament staple and is actually better in certain cases, it's nowhere near unplayable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnqjkJTMaA&ob=av2n
Depending on what you mean by "infect strategies," I disagree. Necropede is insane as a defensive card - he is like Mogg Fanatic++ (pre M10 rules). He is particularly good against opposing infect decks since they play so many 1 toughness, non-evasive creatures.
Blight Mamba also seems fine as a defensive card in some weird U/G flyers deck, though obviously he is a lot less solid and will probably be picked way earlier than you want him.
Remember when people thought Bone Splinters was bad?
Fact check! There are 19 ally cards out of 234, which make up 8.1% of the set. 19 cards. That is not a lot when you consider that the cards are spread across all 5 colors. Comparison: Time Spiral had 27 slivers out of 286 cards, or 9.4%. No one was complaining then; after all, they had no reason to!
This is a classic case of deciding that you don't like a set, and then trying to make up reasons why. Zendikar is not linear.
Also, if you're a casual player, why do you even care if Zendikar has chase rares in it? The last time I checked, casual players didn't have to play with chase rares if they didn't want to!
EDIT:
OK, ran a program for my lunch break. My assumptions:
Your opponent's deck has 30 cards, 12 of which are land.
average cards milled = 9.53558
standard deviation = 2.91632
I did 100,000 trials.
On a side note, if you change the deck to be 11 land, 29 cards total, the average becomes 10.003.
Here's a histogram.
Here's my R-code for those who care:
deck = c(rep(1,12), rep(0,18)) mill = rep(0, 100000) for (i in 1:100000) { landcount = 0 s = sample(deck) mill[i] = 0 while(landcount < 4) { mill[i] = mill[i] + 1 landcount = landcount + s[mill[i]] } } mean(mill) var(mill) hist(mill)And yes, this is about the nerdiest thing I have ever done.
Make sure you get variance estimates as well for 40 and 60 card decks.
It's "target opponent"
Point taken about the rarity, although the fact that you only get one pack (as opposed to Ravnica, where you got as many as 3) somewhat negates that.
Yes you'll mill more nonland cards, but you had more nonland cards in your deck to start with! So the ratio should be at best unaffected.
Think about it this way: if you accept that the average number of milled cards is about 10, then you'll have milled 4 lands and 6 cards. This is exactly the same ratio as the opponent's deck, so the ratio will be unchanged. I'm pretty sure if you "do the math" you'll find that the probability actually leans slightly towards increasing the spell density, but I'm too lazy to prove it.
Lol, a kindred stats nerd! Doing the super easy math that ignores the fact that we are sampling without replacement it should be about 4/p, where p is the proportion of lands in their deck. With all the panoramas and landcyclers running around p should probably be about 16/40 or maybe 15/40. Mulligans also mess the math up a bit, but it's unclear how (i.e. people always throw away all land hands and no land hands, but they're more likely to get a no land hand than an all land hand).
Anyway 4/(16/40) = 10, so if your MCMC doesn't get in that ballpark you've probably programmed something wrong.
How good is the card? Well, Glimpse was pretty much unplayable so I doubt this will be, as Glimpse cost less and did pretty much the same thing.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true as the last card you mill is always a land.
The 3/2 Viridian Shaman will definitely see play.
Identity Crisis is definitely worth a look, and the Sniper will crush souls in limited.
I said had a chance of being strictly better, not that it was strictly better. If you cast it as your last card in an unearth deck, it's strictly better. Also in this environment UBR2 is really not much harder to cast than UU3.
My point is: if something is comparable to a tournament staple and is actually better in certain cases, it's nowhere near unplayable.