MTG Salvation

I actually misread this card when I first saw it, thinking it was just another bad cataclysm, but when I played a 1v1 game with the precons I realized how interesting it is.

Barring politics, everyone is going to pick the most innocuous permanents they can find, so you can game the system a bit by having the least threatening permanents. You can also trade favors. "I'll keep your X alive if you keep my Y alive"...although of course other people are free to do the same, which could be a huge disadvantage to this sort of effect. One thing I particularly like, as a Phelddagrif player, is that you can offer rewards to anyone who chooses your permanents, in the form of hippos/life/cards, allowing you to break the symmetry even further.

Of course, if you're ahead, it seems awful. Besides the normal issue of boardwipes being best from behind, your opponents could coordinate to save each others' best stuff and leave you with nothing.

Anyone tried it? Did everyone just pick the crappiest stuff? Did people coordinate? Were you able to break the symmetry and get a bunch of stuff saved?
Or did they ally against you? I've slotted it into my $2 Phelddagrif deck to give it a shot.

I've seen it played a couple of times, and it's not bad, in that it's rare anything significant is left behind (people discussed what the biggest threats were, but didn't collude to keep good stuff around), but Tragic Arrogance is much better at the same cost from my experience.

There are just better things to play. I know if it were me I would pull the table towards making a1ure the person casting it were maximally screwed.

Well, it says "destroy", so the obvious way to break it is obvious. You can also use Martyr's Bond to ensure you're the only one left with any nonland permanents (and kill any Dryad Arbors and artifact lands). Granted, most people will still pick each other just as a middle finger to you in either case, but those are options.

Quote from hyalapterouslemur »

Well, it says "destroy", so the obvious way to break it is obvious. You can also use Martyr's Bond to ensure you're the only one left with any nonland permanents (and kill any Dryad Arbors and artifact lands). Granted, most people will still pick each other just as a middle finger to you in either case, but those are options.

I don't think that sort of synergy is the way to best abuse it, simply because it's always going to be worse than other similar wipes which don't risk your enemies colluding to keep their permanents alive. To be superior to those, I think you need to find a political way to manipulate your opponents into choosing your permanents and make the chosen permanents a positive thing for you.

The real question for me is, will two enemies collude if they're in the most powerful positions at the table? I.e. will one guy keep another guy's kozilek alive in exchange for keeping his jin gitaxias alive? Especially questionable since technically one person has to go first, which leaves the window for the later chooser to backstab, and they have a clear reason to want to do that. In contrast, if you have relatively innocuous permanents it could be a lot easier to convince others to collude with relatively low risk of backstabbing, and people might choose yours simply to have the least impact. But I don't have any real-world experience with the card yet to see how that plays out.

I do think it's funny when people approach these sort of political conundrums with facile replies like:

I know if it were me I would pull the table towards making [s]ure the person casting it were maximally screwed.

Really? So if the person casting it had next-to-nothing on board, and you didn't have much either, you'd choose to keep alive another player's DEN or other nasty threat alive for the sake of petty "revenge"? I suspect if it actually happened, you'd be a little more pragmatic and realize that sometimes your best interests align with the person playing the wipe.