You can take the bloodline keeper if the pack is really blank but you shouldn't expect to play it. Then again your deck was pretty bad even before you decided to splash black for skeletal grimace.
You forced a bad archetype without much reason. You tried to splash bad white cards. You splashed bad black cards and ruined your manabase for a card you can't cast anyways.
Just play your bad RG deck and leave the black in the board.
Any card that provides "infinite" value over the course of a game is worth a second look. Door is much too expensive but it will do some work if the game goes to 20 turns and give you "inevitability". I'd sideboard it in against really, really slow decks.
It's pretty bad. I guess it's really annoying to deal with, but a 5 drop defender that only kills creatures half the time is pretty miserable, even with indestructible. I'd play it in a control deck if I needed some ground defense but I'd rather have a fortress crab most of the time.
Sorry if I'm just daft, but I don't see where the card advantage comes from.
Pretend I play, but then ignore the first turn. The other player draws, takes a turn, and then I go (a second time.) If we ignore the first turn I get, my second turn is functionally identical to if I had drawn, except that I have land on the board and hopefully some awesome 1-drop.
I think of the first turn as a pregame bonus turn, and then I go second in the "real game". And if you think about it that way, I don't see how playing sacrifices any card advantage. I'm just going "second" in terms of drawing in order to get a free turn of playing mana and a one drop. Which is an awesome trade, as far as I can tell.
And sorry if this is the wrong place for this. I did play the INN prerelease and I played every time. I've just never understood drawing, and I'd like to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot.
You realize your argument goes both ways, right? The first player has more cumulative untap phases during his turn than the second player, the second player has more cards during his turn than the first player. The difference is literally whether you value your attack/main/untap phases more than your draw phase.
People think this is a slow, defensive format? I think all the evidence points to a fast, aggressive format.
Morbid encourages attacking and discourages blocking. If your deck does not attack you will never trigger morbid before turn 7. Even if you try to trigger it with removal (good luck) you're not going to get there until much later in the game. Meanwhile, the aggro decks can constantly punish your blocks with thraben militias and woodland sleuths. If you're casting think twice on turn 2 you're in trouble against a bloodcrazed neophyte.
Tricks and reach are good. You have the flashback tap 2 and flashback 2 can't block at common, as well as a ton of common auras, some of which are very good.
Creatures are big. If you miss a play you could easily be staring down 2 3 powered creatures on turn 3. You can't play a clunky 3 colored deck that takes a few hits before plopping down a big finisher like in scars, because stitched drakes and weres will put you on a very short clock. There's certainly no shortage of bears.
That's not to say you can't play control decks. You just can't draft a control deck every time and expect to win, because some of the aggro decks will be very good.
I like the mayor a lot, if you flip it for just 1 turn it's very good. Curse of death's hold is going to be very good as well.
I can almost guarantee that Skaab ruinator is a huge bomb, think eternal dragon. Mirror-mad is good but probably short of a bomb, and grimgrin is probably the same. I don't like splinterfright and essence that much, since they're both more or less big expensive green guys without evasion or immediate card advantage, but they'll be good finishers in green decks (think terra stomper or baloth woodcrasher). Heartless summoning and army are both unplayable IMO.
The quality of these bombs will really depend on the speed of the format. I can see cards like moldgraft monstrosity being bad in a fast format. Actually that card is probably just not very good overall.
Yeah moonmist transforms your opponent's creatures, but there aren't that many truly scary human transformations. Double faced cards aren't that common and each deck will have maybe 3 humans that transform. More importantly it's a good combat trick for GR decks.
I don't mind delver of secrets. It's certainly not a high pick but I suspect I'll play it in half of my aggressive decks. It's a 1/1 beater in the early game that upgrades into an evasive threat later on, much like intimidator initiate. This format feels very aggressive to me and even though there are a few good defensive creatures, there are many more cards that really punish you for playing draw-go. 1 drops are going to be important in any aggressive format, and even better when there are some good auras like curiosity and spectral flight to back it up. Trading with a 2/1 and triggering morbid or stitched drake isn't bad either.
I see very few good control cards like CA or finishers. On the other hand there's a lot of bears, aggressive weres, vampire 'sliths', and blue tempo. I'm sure the looter/flashback deck will be possible but I see aggro being the default strategy.
Is plague spores good? Of course. In invasion it could pick off a splash, and in innistrad it'll ensure that your opponent can never flashback. Into the maw of hell will be a high pick, although I suspect the set will be fairly tempo oriented given the creatures we've seen so far. I could be wrong, but the few uncommons and commons spoiled so far are quite aggressively costed.
Flashback is a great mechanic, and there was rarely ever any tension in odyssey. True, when you drafted you had to be aware of that, but I've had maybe 2-3 games total where flashbacking took me off threshold. Flashback is a great mechanic that forces you to revalue otherwise unplayable cards.
Aggro and skill are not comparable, in fact it's a completely nonsensical statement. Aggro is a strategy. Skill is one attribute of a player. Aggro > skill makes about as much sense as land count > sealed.
You sound bitter at the fact that you can't adapt to the format and lost despite your good cards. Guess what, having good cards is the opposite of skill, and putting together a bunch of bombs and 2 for 1s requires far less skill than drafting a consistent aggro deck with a plan revolving around bad cards. You might be right that in m12 aggro > midrange/control, but that doesn't equate to aggro > skill.
I simply don't understand what leads you to say skill isn't important in this format.
Arachnus spinner is insane, and who wouldn't play several arachnus webs in green? Despite the 'drawback' it's a very good card and you'll almost always main every one you get.
Arachnus spinner is both a visara with haste and a glare of subdual for all your spiders, in addition to having an incredibly beefy body that's impossible to kill in combat. It's one of the best green bombs I've ever seen in any set.
Blue's one of the best colors in M12, dunno what some people here are smoking. Looter and adept both rock in any deck, and you have a ton of good fliers, frost breath, counterspells, and mind control to back it up. It's a very deep color and possibly bested only by red.
I like green because it's open quite often, but it's an inherently weak color. Removal's scarce, the tricks are worse than usual, and even the creatures match up poorly to their white or red counterparts. I'll only move in on green if I get an overrun or stingerfling, but I'll play it quite often because it's not unheard of to table giant spiders.
Black's pretty weak too and only as a complement to red, it's probably a worse color than green.
Because saviors more or less butchers the themes and archetypes of the previous 2 sets and introduced incredibly disjointed mechanics. I wasn't a fan of CCB and its parasitic mechanics but I didn't hate it either, whereas CBS feels like a complete crapshoot.
For example, what do the cards ashen-skin zubera, patron of the nezumi, and raving oni-slave have to do with each other?
You can take the bloodline keeper if the pack is really blank but you shouldn't expect to play it. Then again your deck was pretty bad even before you decided to splash black for skeletal grimace.
You forced a bad archetype without much reason. You tried to splash bad white cards. You splashed bad black cards and ruined your manabase for a card you can't cast anyways.
Just play your bad RG deck and leave the black in the board.
I would md it if I were short on playables.
You realize your argument goes both ways, right? The first player has more cumulative untap phases during his turn than the second player, the second player has more cards during his turn than the first player. The difference is literally whether you value your attack/main/untap phases more than your draw phase.
Morbid encourages attacking and discourages blocking. If your deck does not attack you will never trigger morbid before turn 7. Even if you try to trigger it with removal (good luck) you're not going to get there until much later in the game. Meanwhile, the aggro decks can constantly punish your blocks with thraben militias and woodland sleuths. If you're casting think twice on turn 2 you're in trouble against a bloodcrazed neophyte.
Tricks and reach are good. You have the flashback tap 2 and flashback 2 can't block at common, as well as a ton of common auras, some of which are very good.
Creatures are big. If you miss a play you could easily be staring down 2 3 powered creatures on turn 3. You can't play a clunky 3 colored deck that takes a few hits before plopping down a big finisher like in scars, because stitched drakes and weres will put you on a very short clock. There's certainly no shortage of bears.
That's not to say you can't play control decks. You just can't draft a control deck every time and expect to win, because some of the aggro decks will be very good.
I can almost guarantee that Skaab ruinator is a huge bomb, think eternal dragon. Mirror-mad is good but probably short of a bomb, and grimgrin is probably the same. I don't like splinterfright and essence that much, since they're both more or less big expensive green guys without evasion or immediate card advantage, but they'll be good finishers in green decks (think terra stomper or baloth woodcrasher). Heartless summoning and army are both unplayable IMO.
The quality of these bombs will really depend on the speed of the format. I can see cards like moldgraft monstrosity being bad in a fast format. Actually that card is probably just not very good overall.
I don't mind delver of secrets. It's certainly not a high pick but I suspect I'll play it in half of my aggressive decks. It's a 1/1 beater in the early game that upgrades into an evasive threat later on, much like intimidator initiate. This format feels very aggressive to me and even though there are a few good defensive creatures, there are many more cards that really punish you for playing draw-go. 1 drops are going to be important in any aggressive format, and even better when there are some good auras like curiosity and spectral flight to back it up. Trading with a 2/1 and triggering morbid or stitched drake isn't bad either.
Flashback is a great mechanic, and there was rarely ever any tension in odyssey. True, when you drafted you had to be aware of that, but I've had maybe 2-3 games total where flashbacking took me off threshold. Flashback is a great mechanic that forces you to revalue otherwise unplayable cards.
You sound bitter at the fact that you can't adapt to the format and lost despite your good cards. Guess what, having good cards is the opposite of skill, and putting together a bunch of bombs and 2 for 1s requires far less skill than drafting a consistent aggro deck with a plan revolving around bad cards. You might be right that in m12 aggro > midrange/control, but that doesn't equate to aggro > skill.
I simply don't understand what leads you to say skill isn't important in this format.
Arachnus spinner is both a visara with haste and a glare of subdual for all your spiders, in addition to having an incredibly beefy body that's impossible to kill in combat. It's one of the best green bombs I've ever seen in any set.
I like green because it's open quite often, but it's an inherently weak color. Removal's scarce, the tricks are worse than usual, and even the creatures match up poorly to their white or red counterparts. I'll only move in on green if I get an overrun or stingerfling, but I'll play it quite often because it's not unheard of to table giant spiders.
Black's pretty weak too and only as a complement to red, it's probably a worse color than green.
For example, what do the cards ashen-skin zubera, patron of the nezumi, and raving oni-slave have to do with each other?