Yeah I gotta second this motion. When I play a Black Devotion deck I typically play 25-26 lands and the first 4 cards are Gray Merchants. The other cards in the deck don't actually matter by comparison. Otherwise your deck has too few mass draw spells to justify so many rituals in my opinion and I personally think that Unbreathing Horde is extremely weak. With respect to Cemetery Reaper it's decent but worthless in multiples as the activated ability is far too mana intensive. The pump clearly stacks but this isn't an Elf deck or anything. I'd play ~2 and be reasonably happy about it but 4 feels like a lot to me. Bear in mind that I'm not saying that I hate Dark Ritual or anything but when I play a deck with 4 I typically want like 6-8 draw spells so that I can turn 1 a Phyrexian Arena or jam an early Syphon Mind to refill my hand. Powering out a creature is worthless as far as I'm concerned whereas jamming a powerful draw spell/engine is fine by me. In a deck with 4 Syphons I might play 2, maybe 3 tops but the full 4 seems excessive. Turn 1 Colossus is fine but turn 1 Unbreathing Horde is worthless and turn 1 Reaper isn't worth 2 cards. You're not activated it nor are you pumping anything.
I think he's quite good. While he has elements of cards like Browbeat or Vexing Devil I think that is the wrong comparison and gets in the way of proper evaluation. I would compare him more to Bob.
I mean...imagine you have a Vexing Devil or Browbeat, a FREE one, mind you, every turn? How does that sound?
He is not some flagship Punisher card, he is a one-card card advantage engine, just like Bob. Just straight-up bury them. And now he has EVASION just tacked on and is bigger. Oh, and with that casting cost, he remains as easy to splash as Bob is. SO good.
I agree putting him in Ramp/Big Red is a great way to go with him.
Now, gushing praise aside, I will concede he's incredibly fragile in multiplayer and he may never pan out there. I'm just trying to point out that everyone comparing him to Browbeat/Devil is really missing a lot of this card's raw power. It's the repeatability that makes him so much better than those, yes, crappy cards and also the FREE part. Remember: it's not the usual red 'Until end of turn, you may PAY to play this card.' that red always gets. It's 100% free.
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Something else just occurred to me.. I wonder how much of the fact this card is also a Devil is causing a little bias in people's minds. What if they had made him a Human Wizard? Would folks have made a different comparison? Impossible to know but I think it's a valid question.
I feel like a lot of people underestimate Sin Prodder's body. It comes with Menace, which makes it harder to block, which kinda makes it like a red Phyrexian Arena that can beat face in 1v1 play. That's probably not the greatest comparison but there is also very little downside to the card when, at worst, you're swinging with a splashable semi-evasive beater if nothing else.
So, the question remains whether having more opponents increases or reduces your odds of getting a free card. I think your odds are slightly better, basically because people are greedy and irrational.
I can only speak for myself but in my experience it's the polar opposite. Assuming that this is a decent card in duels I would expect it to perform adequately well in 3-player games but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole in my 8 player games. First of all I don't think that you give people enough credit because the "Elf players" (i.e. anyone flooding the field with threats) would literally have to be sleeping to let you take the Sudden Demise, Earthquake, Mizzium Mortars, Anger of the Gods, etc. The other players would keep passing (rightfully so) to ensure that you could kill them on the spot which is why they never will. Granted I'm used to playing with relatively competitive crowds and nowadays I play more EDH and Cube than Constructed but when it comes to these punisher cards I've never seen someone choose to outright lose a game that they could have easily won. For the record the main card in question here is Breaking Point which is a card that could be good in theory but in practice the person with the dominant board always takes the 6. It's actually just unplayable in my experience which is why I never bother to mention it in any of my threads. Taking 6 sure as Hell beats losing and I've never seen the Elf/Token/swarm/aggro/midrange players bin their board and ensure a loss. When 2 people have big boards of creatures it gets slightly more interesting but even then they usually just talk it out. "If you take it I won't mess with you" blah blah blah politics. Moreover, when you play in big metas someone inevitability is sitting at 80+ life due to Soul Sisters or Gray Merchants or Extort or some other stupid form of lifegain like blinking Thragtusks or Wurmcoil Engine recursion with Goblin Welders. Even if they don't deny every card draw they're not going to let you take things like Vicious Shadows that could actually kill them so you lose a lot value on that front. I should stress I've seen countless people try and make punisher cards like Browbeat and Breaking Point work to no avail and this is true even when people aren't currently at 50 life. The turn 3 Browbeat still gets eaten because people are self-aware enough to realize that they can gain it back eventually and there's no reason to give someone a draw 3.
Believe me when I say I get where you're coming from. It's easy to think "eff that I'm not going to be the one who bites the bullet" and if enough people think that then presumably these cards could work. While I can't speak for anyone other than myself I've never seen it actually happen insofar as I was mostly playing with people who knew that they were doing. I'm sure that in some % of my games these kinds of things have happened but even when I think back to the days when we had Planechase pre-cons and I couldn't beat the card Steel Leaf Paladin to save my life we still took the 5 knowing that at some point we'd draw our Armadillo Cloaks.
By that logic, is it reasonable to say that Dark Confidant is 'Dakmor Scorpion with upside' then? It may be grammatically correct--I think saying it sounds rather weird.
Every one of your upkeeps it does one of three things:
Knocks a land off your deck, since it's free not to let you have it. Presumably, you didn't really need that land anyway.
Deal damage to an opponent.
Give you a bad card.
And the same is true of Bob. You either get a land, a card you needed to kill your opponent with, or something that burns you for damage and sits in your hand. Turns out, none of these things are really bad in that deck he's in because you built your deck to minimize the drawbacks to the point of being completely negligible. You just march to victory on the back of raw card advantage.
Would you play Boggart Brute if it were 4/2? How about 5/2?
Thrilled you asked this question because it dovetails with the question *I* was gonna ask.. "What if Sin Prodder were a 2/1, and no Menace, for 1R and he did what he did? Just a straight-up 'Reverse Bob'. What that card be completely busted or is it still unplayable? I think it's completely busted.
2R 2/1 would be what I would have expected here, and yes, that would be decidely less exciting, but to get a 3/2 and Menace feels like waking up on Christmas morning to me.
My verdict is: OK but not great in multiplayer, OK but not great in Standard, not even close for Modern.
I think this is all true except I think he could show up in Modern. Someone will have to brew it up. I had a question on him actually--how does he calculate card like Boom // Bust? Do you add the costs? That seems pretty gross... edit: Confirmed!!
Really well done. I'm more of a 1v1 player so I have to take that into account when reading your reviews on some personal favourites like Sin Prodder or Prized Amalgam but otherwise I agree with you. I'm delighted to see you are as stoked for The Gitrog Monster as I am. I think a lot of people are underestimating the insane synergies that can happen here. They will learn the hard way I'm thinking about switching from Meren to The Monster in Dual Commander.
Multiplayer is extra funny when you factor in passing the buck. After all, if a game-winning Mass Mutiny gets revealed, why should I take 5 when I could just pass the problem on to you? Of course, you may resent me putting you in that spot and retaliate by allowing the Mass Mutiny so we both lose. Is that likely to happen? I don't know, depends on the people you play with. Is it the rational thing to pass the buck? This is a variation on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and game theory suggests that it's a good idea to play nice unless sufficiently provoked. It's hard to define "sufficient provocation", but keep passing the buck and you will eventually get there. So the rational thing is to share the burden at least a bit. But are your opponents that rational? Based on my experience, no. So, the question remains whether having more opponents increases or reduces your odds of getting a free card. I think your odds are slightly better, basically because people are greedy and irrational.
Emphasis mine. It would seem that we were, in fact, talking about revealing spells that actually mattered.
It will eventually reveal something that nobody wants to bump off. You won't always reveal Sudden Demises and Mass Mutinys. Sometimes there will be a mana rock or some other non-threatening card, or maybe nobody feels like taking 9 to bump off your Blasphemous Act even though it's going to hurt them either way.
You're missing the point. When I analyze a card like Sin Prodder it's not an all-or-nothing deal. As I explained in my review I wouldn't expect anyone to take 6 to eat every Inferno Titan and I agree that most people would gladly serve you that Fire Diamond. That is, I don't think for a second that every card that you reveal will get binned. What I'm saying is that 50-60% of your decks (decks that I would build) are going to be some combination of lands and "auto bins" like Earthquake. Since I don't think that a 3 CMC conditional draw engine (that draws .5 cards per turn on average) is especially competitive (nor would I play it myself) I don't think that Sin Prodder is an especially powerful Magic card. That doesn't make it horrendous nor does it mean that it will never draw you any cards. At some point we have to answer "just how good is it" and to me this isn't a competitive staple. I don't put it on the same level as a card like Relentless Dead or Engulf the Shore or The Gitrog Monster. I think that 50% of the time your land/cheap mass removal spells/game winning bomb is going to get binned and I don't value pining opponents for 1-3 damage very highly.
Personally I see her as a duel card with extremely limited multiplayer applications. The only compelling use for her that I could conceive of is that you can field her in decks with cards like Squee, Goblin Nabob and Veilborn Ghoul at which point you can grant Haste to all of your Inferno Titans, Scourge of the Thrones, Balefire Dragons, Myr Battlespheres, etc. "for free." As a generic 3/3 flier for 3 she gums up the board well enough early on (I'm not expecting miracles from 2-3 drops) and since Red has a number of creatures that generate a ton of value when they attack she could theoretically provide decent value. That being said you'd have to justify the Squee, Goblin Nabobs in your list with looting, equipment, etc. because otherwise there'd be no point in running her over cards like Hammer of Purphoros, Anger, Ogre Battledriver, etc. This is especially true ever since Flamekin Village was printed because that card is a total house.
The inherent problem with that design is that it isn't worthwhile. Red is the king of consistent Haste enabling and you can basically solve all of your problems by jamming 2-3x Flamekin Village over basic Mountains. Otherwise Anger, Ogre Battledriver and Urabrask the Hidden are actual bombs that don't ask anything of you. Since a 3/3 flier for 3 isn't a relevant threat in a multiplayer setting (it can block 1-3 drops but it's not winning any games for you) she doesn't have that going for her and I don't want to skew my deck to support an effect that I can easily acquire with no strings attached. The problem with Olivia is that while a 3/3 flier for 3 can actually win games in a duel setting her bod is trivial in multiplayer and once you take it out of the equation her persistent effect just isn't very good. Yeah, sure, she enables Madness, supports reanimator strategies, fuels Delve/Delirium and a bunch of other nonsense. Doesn't interest me. Faithless Looting is the Red "graveyard matters" spell and if you're looking to do busted things with it then jam 4 and never look back. Still need a bit a of help? There's nothing wrong with Tormenting Voice which is weaker but marginally playable. Either way the key points to emphasize here is that when don't care about the body (for whatever reason) then power, efficiency and reliability tend to matter more than anything else and Olivia is lacking on all 3 fronts.
If you/others disagree with my assessment that a 3/3 flier is mostly a trivial body that's totally fine. The awesome part about multiplayer is that every meta is different. I frequently play with 8 players and so when I see a 3/3 for 3 I don't even register it as a card that will hit the Red Zone. 3/140 is close enough to 0% (it's like just over 2% or something) that I'd rather have the extra blocker and avoid pissing someone off and possibly triggering (significant) retribution. That doesn't mean that I'm inherently right, it's just how I approach the game. Still, hey, I play a ton of 4 player games too (especially online) and even then I don't care about a 3/3 for 3. Granted I always build my decks in such a way that I don't need to care about marginal value or small beaters but the fact remains that getting in for 3 is a drop in the bucket when you're trying to chew through 60 life points. I will never initiate races or promote trades and even going 3-for-1 (i.e. attacking with Olivia and getting hit by oh, say, Elvish Mystic) isn't an exchange that I'll actively pursue. Even if it's a "fair trade" from a mathematical perspective that math doesn't take experience and technical ability into account and I'd rather preserve my own life if it means that I can play a longer game (on average) in which all of us are forced to make more decisions. By no means do I claim to be the best player in the world but I've been slinging cards for something like 16 years already and I've been following/playing the game at a competitive-level for most of that time. Be it against my friends/family/co-workers, strangers on Cockatrice, people at our LGSes, etc. I'm happy enough to pit my Magic skills against anyone.
I value Outpost Siege extremely highly, probably much higher than most. I think that it becomes an actual Phyrexian Arena extremely quickly and I'm more than happy to stack multiples whenever I get an opportunity to do so. Even in my relative high curved decks that inevitably include a copy of Insurrection and usually a whack of Inferno Titans it still feels very much like a straight draw engine and I feel that most people don't fully appreciate just how powerful and consistent that it actually is. It provides good value both early and late, it's not too slow/conditional and the easy mana requirements make it perfect for those big mana decks that include 8 colorless lands in Cloudpost and Glimmerpost. I have it ranked as the best Red draw spell/engine by a substantial margin and likely field it more than Commune with Lava, Humble Defector, Prophetic Flamespeaker and Browbeat combined.
With respect to spot removal like StP I also value it very highly. Not because I think that it's extremely powerful but because it's a limited resource that serves a specific purpose. Spot removal, to me, exists solely to remove cards that I can't actually beat. Most people probably assume that this means combo-kill threats such as Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker but in practice those tend to be few and far between compared to generic 1-card "win condition" threats. Maybe it's a reanimatedbomb, maybe it's a Crypt Ghast, could be a Prophet of Kruphix or even a Consecrated Sphinx. I would say that about 75% of my removal spells are pointed at these auto-win bombs that cannot be left unchecked if I want a legitimate shot at winning the game. Another ~20% (although that's probably high-balling it) will go towards big creatures attacking me if I feel that I won't be able to win should I fall below a certain threshhold. Between Gray Merchants, Earthquakes, Kessig Wolf Runs, etc. I find that it's extremely difficult to win games in which you fall below ~8 life early on because eventually it becomes far too easy for someone to gib you out with basically anything. Whereas in a duel you can often afford to take hits, stabilize and never lose another point of life I find that that's rarely-if-ever true for multiplayer. In that sense I feel that prevention is significantly more important than efficiency which is why you don't see the "Take the hit, EOT kill your dude" nearly as often in multiplayer. The last 5% of my spot removal utilization would be classified as "other" which I suppose is where a card like Sin Prodder would fall under. That being said I've never actually killed a "Graveborn Muse" with a spot removal spell so even then I wouldn't be fair to say that I'd kill it 5% of the time.
Sin Prodder, to me, is clearly a step above a bad card like Ongoing Investigation but it's not something that I consider to be a legitimate threat/staple. Any deck can theoretically play nay number of copies (and it does stack well for what it's worth) but at the same time it's not where I personally want to be in a MP setting. A 3 mana threat that draws .5 cards per turn doesn't make my teams and I'm not willing to risk flipping land, land, Repercussion and sitting there with my Boggart Brute wishing that I had played a real card.
Every one of your upkeeps it does one of three things:
Knocks a land off your deck, since it's free not to let you have it. Presumably, you didn't really need that land anyway.
Deal damage to an opponent.
Give you a bad card.
And the same is true of Bob. You either get a land, a card you needed to kill your opponent with, or something that burns you for damage and sits in your hand. Turns out, none of these things are really bad in that deck he's in because you built your deck to minimize the drawbacks to the point of being completely negligible. You just march to victory on the back of raw card advantage.
The difference here is that with Bob, your opponent(s) don't get to deny you your card. You could argue that doming your opponent for X life is still a win even if they don't let you get your card, but that is far from the case. Bob actually allows you to draw into your game winners, whereas, in all likely-hood, it turns your Exsanguinates into Magma Sprays for zero mana. I wouldn't even put a 0cmc Magma Spray in my deck. That's my problem with him. He turns your game winners into dumb single target burn spells. Bob doesn't do that. Sin Prodder isn't even close to Bob on a power level. And, btw, I wouldn't put my Bobs in a multiplayer deck either...
And, btw, I wouldn't put my Bobs in a multiplayer deck either...
I agree with most of what you said but I will step in to defend Bob in the context of unfair combo decks. In formats like EDH he's an auto-include and even in Constructed when your curve stops at 3 and you employ a 2-card combo that wins the game on the spot against any of opponents then Bob is a reasonable threat. Not an auto-include Bomb that dominates the game or anything but you wouldn't fault someone for playing with him. The main reason why Bob is perceived to be a bad MP card is because 95% of MP decks are slow, grindy, relatively fair and tend to have a lot of 4+ CMC spells. Bob also dies to various sweepers and if your meta is anything like mine then Earthquakes and Massacres are cast fast and furiously as needed which is why cards like Phyrexian Arena are often used instead. Arena is also nice since you can Dark Ritual it out on turn 1, never take more than 1 point per turn and never have to worry about sweepers. As such it works better in Omniscience/Enter the Infinite decks that have Academy Rectors and other nonsense. Otherwise Bob is very scary in decks with Necropotence and Yawgmoth's Bargain and since those cards are bonkers you'll usually want to run them instead.
Tangent aside I agree that Bob is generally bad because of how most MP decks are built but when I field my heinously degenerate turn 1 Waste Not turn 2 Dark Deal/Windfall/Wheel of Fortune deck that wins the game on turn 2 it's reasonable for me to include Bob as a cheap card advantage engine that can allow me to grind through interaction and dig into answers. I'm not saying that Bob is fantastic MP playable in a vacuum but when you start play with really unfair decks then he's quite the powerhouse.
By the way, I had a question about decklists. No one's commented on them yet and I'm just wondering if I'm wasting everyone's time by adding them. I'm obviously whipping them up in minutes, these aren't things that I'm pouring my heart and soul into or anything, but I figured that it might help if I posted some generic shells that could house the new cards. I'm obviously not going to do one every every new card but for things that are really new/cool/powerful I feel that it helps to showcase their potential. Any feedback (for better or worse) would be appreciated!
What has me interested in the case of Sin Prodder is that it costs 3 mana. Grindy 4-drops are a dime a dozen but 3-drops are noteworthy.
Are grindy 4 drops really that common? The ones that I play myself are Graveborn Muse, Outpost Siege and Oracle of Mul Daya but beyond that I nothing comes to mind that I field on a routine basis. There are clearly other 4 drops that provide card advantage (Greater Good, Flameshadow Conjuring, Well of Lost Dreams) but most are conditional and/or mana intensive. Just curious if you find yourself fielding anything else because I personally don't feel as though there's many "safe" 4 drop value engines that you can fire-and-forget.
What has me interested in the case of Sin Prodder is that it costs 3 mana. Grindy 4-drops are a dime a dozen but 3-drops are noteworthy.
Are grindy 4 drops really that common? The ones that I play myself are Graveborn Muse, Outpost Siege and Oracle of Mul Daya but beyond that I nothing comes to mind that I field on a routine basis. There are clearly other 4 drops that provide card advantage (Greater Good, Flameshadow Conjuring, Well of Lost Dreams) but most are conditional and/or mana intensive. Just curious if you find yourself fielding anything else because I personally don't feel as though there's many "safe" 4 drop value engines that you can fire-and-forget.
Yeah I had the Ritual mentally listed under "other" but I suppose it's probably fair enough to classify it as a consistent draw engine. Good call on that one.
TSN I messed around with briefly but it's no Bident of Thassa. Bident I actually really like as a 1-2 of in the right shells but clearly you need a more creature-focused gameplan than your average Blue list. Anyways, the problem that I had with TSN is that it always felt too slow and fair. It'll never replicate the busted things that cards like Mystic Remora, Rhystic Study, Fact or Fiction and Recurring Insight can pull off and the free 1/1 wasn't enough to win me over. Owning an Artifact is clearly a rather trivial requirement and there's always someone lacking flier defense but the problem was never that "it didn't work" or anything like that. It merely wasn't quite good enough in the face of cheaper, more consistent, more powerful alternatives that already exist within the color. In order for TSN to be actively good you have to want the Thopter and the card every turn and I guess I never built decks that wanted a 1/1 flier enough to justify it. That speaks more ill about me than it does to the card but either way I haven't played with it much since. Maybe if I had gone the extra mile to include cards like Trading Post or Helm of Possession or anything I might have been able to make it work for me.
Ephara, God of the Polis I mostly tested in Token decks with actual token producers such as Luminarch Ascension and Sacred Mesa. The idea is that you pump out a dude every turn (or as frequently as possible) as amass as many free draws as you possibly can. That plus a ton of Wrath of Gods made for a decent Control deck since you never lost anything relevant to your own removal and you always had a steady stream of draw spells and threats all game long. It also works well with cards like Cloudstone Curio and Crystal Shard insofar as you have decent Flash creatures/Prophet of Kruphix and even Riptide Laboratory on things like Snapcaster Mage and Venser, Shaper Savant worked fine. I also tried in Ophiomancer decks with sac outlets and briefly tried in Bant in a Bogles-type shell with Verdant Embrace and Dreampod Druid among other things. The best deck that I ever tried with her was a typical Prophet of Kruphix deck with Cloudstone Curio since that was easiest way to get the mana and Flash to abuse her effect. Cards like Ant Queen were useful as generic mana sinks and ensured that my cards were still relevant even when I didn't have "Voltron assembled" as it were. As to the card itself it was fine but only in small numbers. It's not especially relevant/useful early on but if you can stabilize, amass some mana and jam some powerful cards then she can help you seal the game by ensuring that your lategame is stone unbeatable for fair decks to grind through. The main reason why I stopped playing her is because adding White to the deck was rarely worthwhile and that she always felt rather win-more. When it comes to card draw I want to limit my variance as much as possible and Ehphara was never that "cast this and draw 3 cards" spell that I wanted her to be. Assuming that you survived you got your value eventually but if you fell hopeless far behind in the interim then it was all for naught.
By the way, I had a question about decklists. No one's commented on them yet and I'm just wondering if I'm wasting everyone's time by adding them. I'm obviously whipping them up in minutes, these aren't things that I'm pouring my heart and soul into or anything, but I figured that it might help if I posted some generic shells that could house the new cards. I'm obviously not going to do one every every new card but for things that are really new/cool/powerful I feel that it helps to showcase their potential. Any feedback (for better or worse) would be appreciated!
I definitely like the idea of you posting sample lists on all B-rated cards. This is important to people who don't realize synergy with older cards or how to make things work on a budget. I noticed you also did some sample lists for C and lower. The few examples seem ok, but focusing on the B cards will save you time and give us the best data.
One thing I would like to request on the deck list topic is to try to include as many cards from the set as possible. For example, the Reanimator deck list in the U section could effectively run 1-2 Rise from the Tides which you recommend in the following paragraph. I realize some of this is due to the order in which the cards are spoiled, but maybe it's worth more than one pass for the final product. You update reviews, the deck lists seem reasonable to update as well.
In summary, some of these sample lists pertain to decks I just built or are building right now, so it's a huge personal help for me. Thanks!
Not saying that Rise from the Tides deserves more than C- (6 mana is a lot), but comparing it only to red cards doesn't do it justice. It's not a good addition to "Izzet spells", but if "mono-blue spells" ever becomes a thing, this is part of it. It's sort of like a retroactive Talrand, Sky Summoner.
Fair point. I was going to discuss it in the context of Jeskai Ascendancy and similar spells as well but mostly didn't out of laziness. It's not a card that I have high hopes hopes and I was mostly trying to gloss over cards that didn't seem particularly interesting.
One thing I would like to request on the deck list topic is to try to include as many cards from the set as possible.
For what it's worth the idea behind showcasing new cards is that it gets the creative juices flowing. Anyone can build Extort.deck but I highlight 10 cards that you didn't know about then that can help too. Not saying that you're wrong or that I won't try and include more cards, just I think that both have their own merits.
C: Powerful cards that winning decks will want to play. A list full of these won't crush a table but a solid foundation of C's should be good enough to keep you competitive. Think Wight of Precinct Six, Clever Impersonator, Taurean Mauler, Thragtusk, Restoration Angel.
[...] Altered Ego: This is the easiest B of my life. [...] Much like Clever Impersonator I think that this is easily a competitive staple that any UG deck should strongly consider.
Minor discrepancy here. Your definition of a C does Altered Ego justice.
I agree that it's a discrepancy but I also think that AE is a B. The grading system has some inherent flaws since everything is done on a "curve" so to speak. Ds are playable but unexciting. Cs are better cards than Ds but not stellar. B is anything legitimately competitive but that isn't a wind-mill slam bomb that can take over the game. A is oppressive nonsense.
I think that I'm going to revamp the grading next set by changing the way As work adding the S tier. The problem is that right now I can't actually give anything an A because so few cards printed nowadays can compete with the strongest cards of all time and when you remove A and F from the grading scale it's incredibly awkward to Grade everything else at D, C and B. Like, how can I put AE and Mindwrack Demon on the same tier? AE is legit amazing and very competitive whereas the Demon is a marginal "built-around-me" playable. I also can't put cards like Ongoing Investigation and Sin Prodder on the same tier because even though I don't think that Sin Prodder is very good it's clearly a massive upgrade to cards like Clip Wings. I don't have Sin Prodder in the same tier as a card like The Gitrog Monster, not even close, but it's not as bad as filler trash.
I think that the best solution is to create a new tier for the actual broken stuff because otherwise it ruins the Grading scale.
I think that the best solution is to create a new tier for the actual broken stuff because otherwise it ruins the Grading scale.
I agree with this idea. Think of this as the traditional 0-5 scale where 0 usually means 'does not work'. Except in this case, 0 = completely busted (probably banned in some formats). You still get the A-F for set releases and occasionally something makes it into the busted category (Gary, I'm looking at you), but more than likely the best you can hope for is 'best in current print items'.
Hmmm. You make some compelling arguments and I'm going to take what you said into consideration. Still, let me share some more of my thoughts on this subject:
1. I don't feel as though I have 15 grades to work with. To me F and A are mostly superfluous tiers (as it stands) since I don't plan on grading something an F vs an F+. I obviously could but it doesn't feel relevant. With respect to A, every set will have what? One A tops? We could easily go another 3 sets without seeing one. The reason why I liked the idea of an S tier is because it's a special tier for very special cards. That isn't to say that I'm 100% going to implement it, I just think that a tier designed for 0.001% of cards shouldn't be something designed for mass consumption.
EDIT: Maybe I don't need an S-tier but can still give something an S grade. That way I don't have to muck up the review system for cards that will show up once every 3 sets but I can still clearly differentiate them between "very good cards" and "one of the best cards in the game period."
2. Right now I have D as the "I'm unhappy to play this card" Grade. A personal litmus test for D and C is that I would put Cs in my decks whereas I wouldn't ever play with Ds. This creates a huge glut of Ds in which there's a large amount of variance with respect to overall power-levels.
3. I hear what you're saying about tightness with Grades but at the same time I'm trying to make these reviews reasonably casual friendly. Take Sin Prodder. In my original review I had him in D+ because one of my litmus tests for C is that "I will personally play this card." I will never play Sin Prodder so it doesn't qualify. The problem? Sin Prodder is head-and-shoulders above Ongoing Investigation and all of the other Ds. I don't think that SP is a powerful magic card but it's not complete trash either. How can I possibly put in in the D tier when it's clearly a step up from that? That's why I have the card as a C something now.
4. Maybe I need to rethink the way I use F. Maybe F needs to be that "marginal playable" tier that's still theoretically playable but very unexciting.
I'm not sure how much it helps, but there's some ed psych* research that suggests that 7 is kind of a "magic number" when it comes to ranking/evaluating things. This research seems to suggest that five point scales don't provide enough granularity in rating (which is kind of the problem you're articulating here, I think), and ten point scales tend to be artificially compressed in use (people don't actually use the full scale when rating, so the increase in granularity is lost). Seven point scales seem to produce better results, both in terms of ease of rating, in terms of how other people interpret relative ratings. Maybe using a scale that takes advantage of this would be useful?** One way this scale might look would be something like...
7 - gamebreaking all-star, a card that could be banned, one of the best multiplayer cards in the game
6 - an exceptionally good card, but not one that is sufficiently broken to warrant banning
5 - a generically good card that you'd be happy to play in most decks where you were in the right color(s)
4 - auto-include in the right deck, but probably unplayable or marginally playable elswhere
3 - playable if you're on a budget, but there are obvious upgrades
2 - playable if it's what you have, but there are budget alternatives
1 - completely unplayable by anyone who owns more than a starter deck's worth of cards
I dunno, it's just a thought. Obviously the numbers should mean whatever you want them to mean (and you don't have to use numbers), but I was trying to think about what your qualitative opinions often say, and assign them accordingly.
As an aside, I wonder if grades are kind of a distraction - what you're really doing is providing a qualitative analysis of a card's playability. I know the grades are a kind of shorthand ranking, but I'm not sure it's important to know that Sin Prodder is a D+ - what I (or probably anyone) cares about is what I can do with a card. It's nice to have a code, but I kind of gloss over the grades to read the rest of the entry anyway; maybe other people do the same thing.
*probably there is similar research in other fields too, but I'm only familiar with this stuff.
**I don't really know why seven seems to work, but it does. I was initially skeptical, but then I started using it in my teaching, and I was surprised by how much easier it was to use, and how much more intuitive it seemed to the students.
I like this recommendation a lot but it's basically the same thing as adding an S-tier. Regardless of how I label them I just want at least 1 more tier to work with because I hate the interplay between Ds, Cs and Bs given how few As and Fs there are in a given set. Maybe a 7th "niche" tier makes sense for cards like Fevered Dreams because those kinds of cards are pointless to grade on a generic scale. They should be discussed but to give them a generic grade is completely nonsensical. I would obviously Grade them along the lines of "Niche C" to denote their strength within the niche tier but I think we can all agree that ranking certain cards in a vacuum is worthless.
OOC do others agree that an S tier is complicated? I don't play video games much any more but isn't the S grade extremely common in any game that awards them? When people post tier lists for fighting games isn't there always an S/uber tier for the broken stuff? I wasn't under the impression that this was some new/revolutionary idea since I'm fairly certain that it's extremely common. Obviously not in schools but I feel like anyone who's read a tier list or played a game that assigns rankings should probably be familiar with the concept of an S tier.
With respect to Grades a lot of people asked me to add them. It's a nice TL;DR and not everyone appreciates my verbose nature as much as you :3. Basically not everyone has the time to read everything so anything quick that's easy to digest seems to help. I like them and I'll be keeping them because I do see their value.
P.S. I'm also still wondering what other people think about the decklists. If they should include more cards from the set itself, if anyone even cares about them, if i should make more, anything.
Yeah I gotta second this motion. When I play a Black Devotion deck I typically play 25-26 lands and the first 4 cards are Gray Merchants. The other cards in the deck don't actually matter by comparison. Otherwise your deck has too few mass draw spells to justify so many rituals in my opinion and I personally think that Unbreathing Horde is extremely weak. With respect to Cemetery Reaper it's decent but worthless in multiples as the activated ability is far too mana intensive. The pump clearly stacks but this isn't an Elf deck or anything. I'd play ~2 and be reasonably happy about it but 4 feels like a lot to me. Bear in mind that I'm not saying that I hate Dark Ritual or anything but when I play a deck with 4 I typically want like 6-8 draw spells so that I can turn 1 a Phyrexian Arena or jam an early Syphon Mind to refill my hand. Powering out a creature is worthless as far as I'm concerned whereas jamming a powerful draw spell/engine is fine by me. In a deck with 4 Syphons I might play 2, maybe 3 tops but the full 4 seems excessive. Turn 1 Colossus is fine but turn 1 Unbreathing Horde is worthless and turn 1 Reaper isn't worth 2 cards. You're not activated it nor are you pumping anything.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
I think he's quite good. While he has elements of cards like Browbeat or Vexing Devil I think that is the wrong comparison and gets in the way of proper evaluation. I would compare him more to Bob.
I mean...imagine you have a Vexing Devil or Browbeat, a FREE one, mind you, every turn? How does that sound?
He is not some flagship Punisher card, he is a one-card card advantage engine, just like Bob. Just straight-up bury them. And now he has EVASION just tacked on and is bigger. Oh, and with that casting cost, he remains as easy to splash as Bob is. SO good.
I agree putting him in Ramp/Big Red is a great way to go with him.
Now, gushing praise aside, I will concede he's incredibly fragile in multiplayer and he may never pan out there. I'm just trying to point out that everyone comparing him to Browbeat/Devil is really missing a lot of this card's raw power. It's the repeatability that makes him so much better than those, yes, crappy cards and also the FREE part. Remember: it's not the usual red 'Until end of turn, you may PAY to play this card.' that red always gets. It's 100% free.
===
Something else just occurred to me.. I wonder how much of the fact this card is also a Devil is causing a little bias in people's minds. What if they had made him a Human Wizard? Would folks have made a different comparison? Impossible to know but I think it's a valid question.
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Now, in terms of multiplayer, I could definitely see myself jamming this card into a deck with that runs a set of Boros Reckoner, Flamebreak, Fanatic of Mogis, Goblin Dark-Dwellers, Blasphemous Act. Or something similar.
I can only speak for myself but in my experience it's the polar opposite. Assuming that this is a decent card in duels I would expect it to perform adequately well in 3-player games but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole in my 8 player games. First of all I don't think that you give people enough credit because the "Elf players" (i.e. anyone flooding the field with threats) would literally have to be sleeping to let you take the Sudden Demise, Earthquake, Mizzium Mortars, Anger of the Gods, etc. The other players would keep passing (rightfully so) to ensure that you could kill them on the spot which is why they never will. Granted I'm used to playing with relatively competitive crowds and nowadays I play more EDH and Cube than Constructed but when it comes to these punisher cards I've never seen someone choose to outright lose a game that they could have easily won. For the record the main card in question here is Breaking Point which is a card that could be good in theory but in practice the person with the dominant board always takes the 6. It's actually just unplayable in my experience which is why I never bother to mention it in any of my threads. Taking 6 sure as Hell beats losing and I've never seen the Elf/Token/swarm/aggro/midrange players bin their board and ensure a loss. When 2 people have big boards of creatures it gets slightly more interesting but even then they usually just talk it out. "If you take it I won't mess with you" blah blah blah politics. Moreover, when you play in big metas someone inevitability is sitting at 80+ life due to Soul Sisters or Gray Merchants or Extort or some other stupid form of lifegain like blinking Thragtusks or Wurmcoil Engine recursion with Goblin Welders. Even if they don't deny every card draw they're not going to let you take things like Vicious Shadows that could actually kill them so you lose a lot value on that front. I should stress I've seen countless people try and make punisher cards like Browbeat and Breaking Point work to no avail and this is true even when people aren't currently at 50 life. The turn 3 Browbeat still gets eaten because people are self-aware enough to realize that they can gain it back eventually and there's no reason to give someone a draw 3.
Believe me when I say I get where you're coming from. It's easy to think "eff that I'm not going to be the one who bites the bullet" and if enough people think that then presumably these cards could work. While I can't speak for anyone other than myself I've never seen it actually happen insofar as I was mostly playing with people who knew that they were doing. I'm sure that in some % of my games these kinds of things have happened but even when I think back to the days when we had Planechase pre-cons and I couldn't beat the card Steel Leaf Paladin to save my life we still took the 5 knowing that at some point we'd draw our Armadillo Cloaks.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
I feel like I've said my piece (and then some) about Sin Prodder.. I want to point out a few things though.
By that logic, is it reasonable to say that Dark Confidant is 'Dakmor Scorpion with upside' then? It may be grammatically correct--I think saying it sounds rather weird.
And the same is true of Bob. You either get a land, a card you needed to kill your opponent with, or something that burns you for damage and sits in your hand. Turns out, none of these things are really bad in that deck he's in because you built your deck to minimize the drawbacks to the point of being completely negligible. You just march to victory on the back of raw card advantage.
Thrilled you asked this question because it dovetails with the question *I* was gonna ask.. "What if Sin Prodder were a 2/1, and no Menace, for 1R and he did what he did? Just a straight-up 'Reverse Bob'. What that card be completely busted or is it still unplayable? I think it's completely busted.
2R 2/1 would be what I would have expected here, and yes, that would be decidely less exciting, but to get a 3/2 and Menace feels like waking up on Christmas morning to me.
I think this is all true except I think he could show up in Modern. Someone will have to brew it up. I had a question on him actually--how does he calculate card like Boom // Bust? Do you add the costs? That seems pretty gross... edit: Confirmed!!
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BChainer, Dementia Master(Big Mana/Reanimator)
BRRakdos, The Showstopper (Mass Life Loss/Ramp)
BUThe Scarab God (Zombie Tribal/Control)
BWKarlov of the Ghost Council (Life Gain)
BGJarad, Golgari Lich Lord (Stompy/Dredge)
BRGProssh, Skyraider of Kher (Tokens/Non-infinite Combo)
Was it? Let's take a look at what you actually said:
Emphasis mine. It would seem that we were, in fact, talking about revealing spells that actually mattered.
You're missing the point. When I analyze a card like Sin Prodder it's not an all-or-nothing deal. As I explained in my review I wouldn't expect anyone to take 6 to eat every Inferno Titan and I agree that most people would gladly serve you that Fire Diamond. That is, I don't think for a second that every card that you reveal will get binned. What I'm saying is that 50-60% of your decks (decks that I would build) are going to be some combination of lands and "auto bins" like Earthquake. Since I don't think that a 3 CMC conditional draw engine (that draws .5 cards per turn on average) is especially competitive (nor would I play it myself) I don't think that Sin Prodder is an especially powerful Magic card. That doesn't make it horrendous nor does it mean that it will never draw you any cards. At some point we have to answer "just how good is it" and to me this isn't a competitive staple. I don't put it on the same level as a card like Relentless Dead or Engulf the Shore or The Gitrog Monster. I think that 50% of the time your land/cheap mass removal spells/game winning bomb is going to get binned and I don't value pining opponents for 1-3 damage very highly.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
BChainer, Dementia Master(Big Mana/Reanimator)
BRRakdos, The Showstopper (Mass Life Loss/Ramp)
BUThe Scarab God (Zombie Tribal/Control)
BWKarlov of the Ghost Council (Life Gain)
BGJarad, Golgari Lich Lord (Stompy/Dredge)
BRGProssh, Skyraider of Kher (Tokens/Non-infinite Combo)
Personally I see her as a duel card with extremely limited multiplayer applications. The only compelling use for her that I could conceive of is that you can field her in decks with cards like Squee, Goblin Nabob and Veilborn Ghoul at which point you can grant Haste to all of your Inferno Titans, Scourge of the Thrones, Balefire Dragons, Myr Battlespheres, etc. "for free." As a generic 3/3 flier for 3 she gums up the board well enough early on (I'm not expecting miracles from 2-3 drops) and since Red has a number of creatures that generate a ton of value when they attack she could theoretically provide decent value. That being said you'd have to justify the Squee, Goblin Nabobs in your list with looting, equipment, etc. because otherwise there'd be no point in running her over cards like Hammer of Purphoros, Anger, Ogre Battledriver, etc. This is especially true ever since Flamekin Village was printed because that card is a total house.
The inherent problem with that design is that it isn't worthwhile. Red is the king of consistent Haste enabling and you can basically solve all of your problems by jamming 2-3x Flamekin Village over basic Mountains. Otherwise Anger, Ogre Battledriver and Urabrask the Hidden are actual bombs that don't ask anything of you. Since a 3/3 flier for 3 isn't a relevant threat in a multiplayer setting (it can block 1-3 drops but it's not winning any games for you) she doesn't have that going for her and I don't want to skew my deck to support an effect that I can easily acquire with no strings attached. The problem with Olivia is that while a 3/3 flier for 3 can actually win games in a duel setting her bod is trivial in multiplayer and once you take it out of the equation her persistent effect just isn't very good. Yeah, sure, she enables Madness, supports reanimator strategies, fuels Delve/Delirium and a bunch of other nonsense. Doesn't interest me. Faithless Looting is the Red "graveyard matters" spell and if you're looking to do busted things with it then jam 4 and never look back. Still need a bit a of help? There's nothing wrong with Tormenting Voice which is weaker but marginally playable. Either way the key points to emphasize here is that when don't care about the body (for whatever reason) then power, efficiency and reliability tend to matter more than anything else and Olivia is lacking on all 3 fronts.
If you/others disagree with my assessment that a 3/3 flier is mostly a trivial body that's totally fine. The awesome part about multiplayer is that every meta is different. I frequently play with 8 players and so when I see a 3/3 for 3 I don't even register it as a card that will hit the Red Zone. 3/140 is close enough to 0% (it's like just over 2% or something) that I'd rather have the extra blocker and avoid pissing someone off and possibly triggering (significant) retribution. That doesn't mean that I'm inherently right, it's just how I approach the game. Still, hey, I play a ton of 4 player games too (especially online) and even then I don't care about a 3/3 for 3. Granted I always build my decks in such a way that I don't need to care about marginal value or small beaters but the fact remains that getting in for 3 is a drop in the bucket when you're trying to chew through 60 life points. I will never initiate races or promote trades and even going 3-for-1 (i.e. attacking with Olivia and getting hit by oh, say, Elvish Mystic) isn't an exchange that I'll actively pursue. Even if it's a "fair trade" from a mathematical perspective that math doesn't take experience and technical ability into account and I'd rather preserve my own life if it means that I can play a longer game (on average) in which all of us are forced to make more decisions. By no means do I claim to be the best player in the world but I've been slinging cards for something like 16 years already and I've been following/playing the game at a competitive-level for most of that time. Be it against my friends/family/co-workers, strangers on Cockatrice, people at our LGSes, etc. I'm happy enough to pit my Magic skills against anyone.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
I think there was a bit of confusion on both of our parts. I was under the impression that we were disagreeing.
No and no.
I value Outpost Siege extremely highly, probably much higher than most. I think that it becomes an actual Phyrexian Arena extremely quickly and I'm more than happy to stack multiples whenever I get an opportunity to do so. Even in my relative high curved decks that inevitably include a copy of Insurrection and usually a whack of Inferno Titans it still feels very much like a straight draw engine and I feel that most people don't fully appreciate just how powerful and consistent that it actually is. It provides good value both early and late, it's not too slow/conditional and the easy mana requirements make it perfect for those big mana decks that include 8 colorless lands in Cloudpost and Glimmerpost. I have it ranked as the best Red draw spell/engine by a substantial margin and likely field it more than Commune with Lava, Humble Defector, Prophetic Flamespeaker and Browbeat combined.
With respect to spot removal like StP I also value it very highly. Not because I think that it's extremely powerful but because it's a limited resource that serves a specific purpose. Spot removal, to me, exists solely to remove cards that I can't actually beat. Most people probably assume that this means combo-kill threats such as Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker but in practice those tend to be few and far between compared to generic 1-card "win condition" threats. Maybe it's a reanimated bomb, maybe it's a Crypt Ghast, could be a Prophet of Kruphix or even a Consecrated Sphinx. I would say that about 75% of my removal spells are pointed at these auto-win bombs that cannot be left unchecked if I want a legitimate shot at winning the game. Another ~20% (although that's probably high-balling it) will go towards big creatures attacking me if I feel that I won't be able to win should I fall below a certain threshhold. Between Gray Merchants, Earthquakes, Kessig Wolf Runs, etc. I find that it's extremely difficult to win games in which you fall below ~8 life early on because eventually it becomes far too easy for someone to gib you out with basically anything. Whereas in a duel you can often afford to take hits, stabilize and never lose another point of life I find that that's rarely-if-ever true for multiplayer. In that sense I feel that prevention is significantly more important than efficiency which is why you don't see the "Take the hit, EOT kill your dude" nearly as often in multiplayer. The last 5% of my spot removal utilization would be classified as "other" which I suppose is where a card like Sin Prodder would fall under. That being said I've never actually killed a "Graveborn Muse" with a spot removal spell so even then I wouldn't be fair to say that I'd kill it 5% of the time.
Sin Prodder, to me, is clearly a step above a bad card like Ongoing Investigation but it's not something that I consider to be a legitimate threat/staple. Any deck can theoretically play nay number of copies (and it does stack well for what it's worth) but at the same time it's not where I personally want to be in a MP setting. A 3 mana threat that draws .5 cards per turn doesn't make my teams and I'm not willing to risk flipping land, land, Repercussion and sitting there with my Boggart Brute wishing that I had played a real card.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
The difference here is that with Bob, your opponent(s) don't get to deny you your card. You could argue that doming your opponent for X life is still a win even if they don't let you get your card, but that is far from the case. Bob actually allows you to draw into your game winners, whereas, in all likely-hood, it turns your Exsanguinates into Magma Sprays for zero mana. I wouldn't even put a 0cmc Magma Spray in my deck. That's my problem with him. He turns your game winners into dumb single target burn spells. Bob doesn't do that. Sin Prodder isn't even close to Bob on a power level. And, btw, I wouldn't put my Bobs in a multiplayer deck either...
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cEDH: WUBR Blue Farm WUBR, UG Kinnan Flips UG, U Urza Scepter U
I agree with most of what you said but I will step in to defend Bob in the context of unfair combo decks. In formats like EDH he's an auto-include and even in Constructed when your curve stops at 3 and you employ a 2-card combo that wins the game on the spot against any of opponents then Bob is a reasonable threat. Not an auto-include Bomb that dominates the game or anything but you wouldn't fault someone for playing with him. The main reason why Bob is perceived to be a bad MP card is because 95% of MP decks are slow, grindy, relatively fair and tend to have a lot of 4+ CMC spells. Bob also dies to various sweepers and if your meta is anything like mine then Earthquakes and Massacres are cast fast and furiously as needed which is why cards like Phyrexian Arena are often used instead. Arena is also nice since you can Dark Ritual it out on turn 1, never take more than 1 point per turn and never have to worry about sweepers. As such it works better in Omniscience/Enter the Infinite decks that have Academy Rectors and other nonsense. Otherwise Bob is very scary in decks with Necropotence and Yawgmoth's Bargain and since those cards are bonkers you'll usually want to run them instead.
Tangent aside I agree that Bob is generally bad because of how most MP decks are built but when I field my heinously degenerate turn 1 Waste Not turn 2 Dark Deal/Windfall/Wheel of Fortune deck that wins the game on turn 2 it's reasonable for me to include Bob as a cheap card advantage engine that can allow me to grind through interaction and dig into answers. I'm not saying that Bob is fantastic MP playable in a vacuum but when you start play with really unfair decks then he's quite the powerhouse.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
Are grindy 4 drops really that common? The ones that I play myself are Graveborn Muse, Outpost Siege and Oracle of Mul Daya but beyond that I nothing comes to mind that I field on a routine basis. There are clearly other 4 drops that provide card advantage (Greater Good, Flameshadow Conjuring, Well of Lost Dreams) but most are conditional and/or mana intensive. Just curious if you find yourself fielding anything else because I personally don't feel as though there's many "safe" 4 drop value engines that you can fire-and-forget.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
Aren't you all about Deathreap Ritual? I don't think Reaper of the Wilds is that bad either if you just want some defense and digging.
How do you feel about Thopter Spy Network and Ephara, God of the Polis?
Mono Red's Strengths and Mono White's Strengths
Yeah I had the Ritual mentally listed under "other" but I suppose it's probably fair enough to classify it as a consistent draw engine. Good call on that one.
TSN I messed around with briefly but it's no Bident of Thassa. Bident I actually really like as a 1-2 of in the right shells but clearly you need a more creature-focused gameplan than your average Blue list. Anyways, the problem that I had with TSN is that it always felt too slow and fair. It'll never replicate the busted things that cards like Mystic Remora, Rhystic Study, Fact or Fiction and Recurring Insight can pull off and the free 1/1 wasn't enough to win me over. Owning an Artifact is clearly a rather trivial requirement and there's always someone lacking flier defense but the problem was never that "it didn't work" or anything like that. It merely wasn't quite good enough in the face of cheaper, more consistent, more powerful alternatives that already exist within the color. In order for TSN to be actively good you have to want the Thopter and the card every turn and I guess I never built decks that wanted a 1/1 flier enough to justify it. That speaks more ill about me than it does to the card but either way I haven't played with it much since. Maybe if I had gone the extra mile to include cards like Trading Post or Helm of Possession or anything I might have been able to make it work for me.
Ephara, God of the Polis I mostly tested in Token decks with actual token producers such as Luminarch Ascension and Sacred Mesa. The idea is that you pump out a dude every turn (or as frequently as possible) as amass as many free draws as you possibly can. That plus a ton of Wrath of Gods made for a decent Control deck since you never lost anything relevant to your own removal and you always had a steady stream of draw spells and threats all game long. It also works well with cards like Cloudstone Curio and Crystal Shard insofar as you have decent Flash creatures/Prophet of Kruphix and even Riptide Laboratory on things like Snapcaster Mage and Venser, Shaper Savant worked fine. I also tried in Ophiomancer decks with sac outlets and briefly tried in Bant in a Bogles-type shell with Verdant Embrace and Dreampod Druid among other things. The best deck that I ever tried with her was a typical Prophet of Kruphix deck with Cloudstone Curio since that was easiest way to get the mana and Flash to abuse her effect. Cards like Ant Queen were useful as generic mana sinks and ensured that my cards were still relevant even when I didn't have "Voltron assembled" as it were. As to the card itself it was fine but only in small numbers. It's not especially relevant/useful early on but if you can stabilize, amass some mana and jam some powerful cards then she can help you seal the game by ensuring that your lategame is stone unbeatable for fair decks to grind through. The main reason why I stopped playing her is because adding White to the deck was rarely worthwhile and that she always felt rather win-more. When it comes to card draw I want to limit my variance as much as possible and Ehphara was never that "cast this and draw 3 cards" spell that I wanted her to be. Assuming that you survived you got your value eventually but if you fell hopeless far behind in the interim then it was all for naught.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
One thing I would like to request on the deck list topic is to try to include as many cards from the set as possible. For example, the Reanimator deck list in the U section could effectively run 1-2 Rise from the Tides which you recommend in the following paragraph. I realize some of this is due to the order in which the cards are spoiled, but maybe it's worth more than one pass for the final product. You update reviews, the deck lists seem reasonable to update as well.
In summary, some of these sample lists pertain to decks I just built or are building right now, so it's a huge personal help for me. Thanks!
Fair point. I was going to discuss it in the context of Jeskai Ascendancy and similar spells as well but mostly didn't out of laziness. It's not a card that I have high hopes hopes and I was mostly trying to gloss over cards that didn't seem particularly interesting.
For what it's worth the idea behind showcasing new cards is that it gets the creative juices flowing. Anyone can build Extort.deck but I highlight 10 cards that you didn't know about then that can help too. Not saying that you're wrong or that I won't try and include more cards, just I think that both have their own merits.
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Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
I agree that it's a discrepancy but I also think that AE is a B. The grading system has some inherent flaws since everything is done on a "curve" so to speak. Ds are playable but unexciting. Cs are better cards than Ds but not stellar. B is anything legitimately competitive but that isn't a wind-mill slam bomb that can take over the game. A is oppressive nonsense.
I think that I'm going to revamp the grading next set by changing the way As work adding the S tier. The problem is that right now I can't actually give anything an A because so few cards printed nowadays can compete with the strongest cards of all time and when you remove A and F from the grading scale it's incredibly awkward to Grade everything else at D, C and B. Like, how can I put AE and Mindwrack Demon on the same tier? AE is legit amazing and very competitive whereas the Demon is a marginal "built-around-me" playable. I also can't put cards like Ongoing Investigation and Sin Prodder on the same tier because even though I don't think that Sin Prodder is very good it's clearly a massive upgrade to cards like Clip Wings. I don't have Sin Prodder in the same tier as a card like The Gitrog Monster, not even close, but it's not as bad as filler trash.
I think that the best solution is to create a new tier for the actual broken stuff because otherwise it ruins the Grading scale.
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
Hmmm. You make some compelling arguments and I'm going to take what you said into consideration. Still, let me share some more of my thoughts on this subject:
1. I don't feel as though I have 15 grades to work with. To me F and A are mostly superfluous tiers (as it stands) since I don't plan on grading something an F vs an F+. I obviously could but it doesn't feel relevant. With respect to A, every set will have what? One A tops? We could easily go another 3 sets without seeing one. The reason why I liked the idea of an S tier is because it's a special tier for very special cards. That isn't to say that I'm 100% going to implement it, I just think that a tier designed for 0.001% of cards shouldn't be something designed for mass consumption.
EDIT: Maybe I don't need an S-tier but can still give something an S grade. That way I don't have to muck up the review system for cards that will show up once every 3 sets but I can still clearly differentiate them between "very good cards" and "one of the best cards in the game period."
2. Right now I have D as the "I'm unhappy to play this card" Grade. A personal litmus test for D and C is that I would put Cs in my decks whereas I wouldn't ever play with Ds. This creates a huge glut of Ds in which there's a large amount of variance with respect to overall power-levels.
3. I hear what you're saying about tightness with Grades but at the same time I'm trying to make these reviews reasonably casual friendly. Take Sin Prodder. In my original review I had him in D+ because one of my litmus tests for C is that "I will personally play this card." I will never play Sin Prodder so it doesn't qualify. The problem? Sin Prodder is head-and-shoulders above Ongoing Investigation and all of the other Ds. I don't think that SP is a powerful magic card but it's not complete trash either. How can I possibly put in in the D tier when it's clearly a step up from that? That's why I have the card as a C something now.
4. Maybe I need to rethink the way I use F. Maybe F needs to be that "marginal playable" tier that's still theoretically playable but very unexciting.
Lots to think about.
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
7 - gamebreaking all-star, a card that could be banned, one of the best multiplayer cards in the game
6 - an exceptionally good card, but not one that is sufficiently broken to warrant banning
5 - a generically good card that you'd be happy to play in most decks where you were in the right color(s)
4 - auto-include in the right deck, but probably unplayable or marginally playable elswhere
3 - playable if you're on a budget, but there are obvious upgrades
2 - playable if it's what you have, but there are budget alternatives
1 - completely unplayable by anyone who owns more than a starter deck's worth of cards
I dunno, it's just a thought. Obviously the numbers should mean whatever you want them to mean (and you don't have to use numbers), but I was trying to think about what your qualitative opinions often say, and assign them accordingly.
As an aside, I wonder if grades are kind of a distraction - what you're really doing is providing a qualitative analysis of a card's playability. I know the grades are a kind of shorthand ranking, but I'm not sure it's important to know that Sin Prodder is a D+ - what I (or probably anyone) cares about is what I can do with a card. It's nice to have a code, but I kind of gloss over the grades to read the rest of the entry anyway; maybe other people do the same thing.
*probably there is similar research in other fields too, but I'm only familiar with this stuff.
**I don't really know why seven seems to work, but it does. I was initially skeptical, but then I started using it in my teaching, and I was surprised by how much easier it was to use, and how much more intuitive it seemed to the students.
I like this recommendation a lot but it's basically the same thing as adding an S-tier. Regardless of how I label them I just want at least 1 more tier to work with because I hate the interplay between Ds, Cs and Bs given how few As and Fs there are in a given set. Maybe a 7th "niche" tier makes sense for cards like Fevered Dreams because those kinds of cards are pointless to grade on a generic scale. They should be discussed but to give them a generic grade is completely nonsensical. I would obviously Grade them along the lines of "Niche C" to denote their strength within the niche tier but I think we can all agree that ranking certain cards in a vacuum is worthless.
OOC do others agree that an S tier is complicated? I don't play video games much any more but isn't the S grade extremely common in any game that awards them? When people post tier lists for fighting games isn't there always an S/uber tier for the broken stuff? I wasn't under the impression that this was some new/revolutionary idea since I'm fairly certain that it's extremely common. Obviously not in schools but I feel like anyone who's read a tier list or played a game that assigns rankings should probably be familiar with the concept of an S tier.
With respect to Grades a lot of people asked me to add them. It's a nice TL;DR and not everyone appreciates my verbose nature as much as you :3. Basically not everyone has the time to read everything so anything quick that's easy to digest seems to help. I like them and I'll be keeping them because I do see their value.
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold
Guilds of Ravnica - Commander 2018 - Core 2019 - Battlebond - Dominaria - Rivals of Ixalan - Ixalan - Commander 2017 - Hour of Devastation - Amonket - Aether Revolt - Commander 2016 - Kaladesh - Conspiracy 2 - Eldritch Moon - Shadows Over Innistrad - Oath of the Gatewatch - Commander 2015 - Battle for Zendikar - Magic Origins - Dragons of Tarkir
Green - Blue - Red - White - Gold