MTG Salvation

Hivestone

Imagine you have a deck that recycles creatures and sacs for profit, sport, and a combination therein. I.e. Meren, Alesha, Karador.

How many relevant sac slivers would you want to run (necrotic, acidic, darkheart, and etc), to justify granting those sac abilities to your other creatures-turned-slivers such that Hivestone is becomes a fair include?

The idea being to maximize the desired sac effect you want and spread amongst your non-slivers such that they can use the outlet too.

The only one that's really that strong is necrotic, and that gets really mana intensive to get value out of.

In a competitive, or even 75%, sense I'd say it's probably a nonstarter. But it's definitely an amusing johnny card to try to make good. I'd want more than just sac slivers though, personally.

Quote from DirkGently »

The only one that's really that strong is necrotic, and that gets really mana intensive to get value out of.

In a competitive, or even 75%, sense I'd say it's probably a nonstarter. But it's definitely an amusing johnny card to try to make good. I'd want more than just sac slivers though, personally.

In theory, granting your recruiters the will to die on command (in, say, Alesha) on top of some of the other free sacs, or in place of when you're short on deck space, is amusing. Basal Sliver is probably also worth considering here as it's a mana ability. Ideally you'd add some other potent slivers to sliver-share abilities with (Syphon, Ward, & Bonescythe come to mind, Sedge for the potent lord effect) and...

See, this is my mind going a hundred different directions at once. Every single archetype. Anyway, this premise came to me in Alesha while noting I can keep Hivestone safe with Resto Specialist to sliver-share everything to a deck that not just regularly goes into the redzone, but actually prefers it, in an attempt at squeezing just a smidge more efficiency out of the rest of my cards.

I mean, there's probably a fun alesha deck to be made around slivers, or partially around slivers, where hivestone could be good. Black seems critical to ensure you can get hivestone reliably.

Will it be a top-tier deck? I mean, probably not. But I'm sure there's a version of the deck that's at least decent.

I think the biggest struggle for hivestone is that, if you're running enough slivers that it's good, why not just go all-in and run a full-on sliver deck? It's kind of hard to rely on the hivestone as a linchpin of your deck when it's so easily destroyed - you'd need to work with or without it. So hitting the right balance could be tricky.

I've been playing 3c slivers centered around Contamination for years now and it's been fine for the metas I wind up in. This comes from trying to squeeze the less good slivers out in favour of the usual suspects of Alesha goodstuff but while still being able to claim to be a slivers deck.

A pure synergy card like Hivestone really needs at least 14 other cards to synergize with in order to be worth it (14 is a general rule of thumb that I have come up with). A quick Gatherer search tells me that there are only 11 Slivers with sac abilities spread out over all 5 colors, so you wouldn't be able to run all of them in any of the decks you are looking at. I think that if you are only running 4-5 Slivers, the effect isn't worth the card slot.

Furthermore, some of the abilities can be had by using other permanents. For example, the good half of Cautery Sliver can be replaced by Goblin Bombardment, and Mnemonic Sliver can be replaced by something like Vampiric Rites. It would probably be better to have something that works all the time rather than something that only works in combination with 4-5 other cards.

Also, something like Mirror Entity might be a much better option to accomplish the same thing as Hivestone. It's not playable in Meren, but Alesha and Karador could both use it.

Quote from Forgotten One »

A pure synergy card like Hivestone really needs at least 14 other cards to synergize with in order to be worth it (14 is a general rule of thumb that I have come up with). A quick Gatherer search tells me that there are only 11 Slivers with sac abilities spread out over all 5 colors, so you wouldn't be able to run all of them in any of the decks you are looking at. I think that if you are only running 4-5 Slivers, the effect isn't worth the card slot.

This is a good point. It might just be that I'm trying too hard to make a narrow card into an over-arching one, a classic mistake in every sense of the word.

I’ve seen this used to good effect in Mistform Ultimus decks, but it’s more about making all your creatures unblockable and draw cards since it’s mono-blue.

Real solution is just to play Sliver Hive instead. Slots into the manabase, not ebt, sometimes fixes the sliver spells I want to play, and can make food for contamination/skullclamp sometimes with relevant typing, and pretty decent at creating a monarch theft device, if you've dived down that rabbit hole.

You could at least consider Dormant Sliver and maybe Harmonic Sliver. Still not a viable strategy, though.

The obvious choice for Hivestone is Donate it and run Plague Sliver.

Quote from hyalopterouslemur »

You could at least consider Dormant Sliver and maybe Harmonic Sliver. Still not a viable strategy, though.

Don't have access to green in Alesha, but yes, BUG or 4c no red would be perfect.

Quote from Lithl »

The obvious choice for Hivestone is Donate it and run Plague Sliver.

But...then I can't put people on tilt by making them lose to my sliver contamination. Don't really want them bashing my face in with their free 5/5 either.

no, you just need to donate hivestone, not the plague sliver. Plague sliver runs the old formatting, where it affects all slivers, not just yours. That means that you can run only plague sliver and dormant sliver as your only 2 slivers, stop your opponent from attacking, and just make them bleed to death.

Quote from 3drinks »

Quote from hyalopterouslemur »

You could at least consider Dormant Sliver and maybe Harmonic Sliver. Still not a viable strategy, though.

Don't have access to green in Alesha, but yes, BUG or 4c no red would be perfect.

What happens when I can't read good. There aren't a lot of good red slivers besides Homing Sliver. And the main one I can think of in WB is Necrotic Sliver.