MTG Salvation

I'd value this soley on how much you support reanimator. I don't think I have ever bothered to play it outside of reanimator as it is just too low impact. In straight combo-style reanimator its pretty good at being an early discard outlet and then helping prevent the opponent from catching back up. The aggro or Loam/Crucible angle isn't enough to justify it even at 720+.

I have a copy of Raven's Crime that I am adding into my cube. It's not super efficient or anything but despite coming out even in terms of card advantage at a certain point the card quality is going to be much higher on their end. It not giving any information about my opponent's hand is a major strike against it, but if it did that it would be much more widely played.

We now have more cards like Ramunap Excavator and Tasigur, the Golden Fang to help make use of lands in the graveyard. For those running The Gitrog Monster (something I keep considering) it makes for a sweet draw engine as well as generally helping the Loam decks.

I like that it just sits in the yard and lets me trade 1-for-1 with cards in hand as well as being a repeatable discard outlet in a pinch. Top decked lands in the late game suddenly become live cards as you can get possible answers out of their hand.

I can see it might end up being a bit too slow and grindy but I have a soft spot for cheap discard.

When I still ran Gifts Ungiven, I enjoyed the Raven's Crime, Life from the Loam and 2 lands pile. Definitely slow and grindy, but a nice thing for UBG decks to build toward. When I cut Gifts, Raven's Crime and Loam went with it.

I been thinking about this card again. In addition to the land recusion, reanimator discussion,

I been thinking about its application in spells matters for cards such as Sedgemoor Witch but also as an enabler to help fuel graveyard such as Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger, Bedlam Reveler etc.

Has anyone tried this card in spells matters/ delve style shells?

We tried it years ago when we were at 540, and it was pretty low impact. Can't necessarily speak on how good it is now with new synergies but I would assume probably not that much better

Haven't tried it, but have been curious for a while. I love cards that have all these little synergies but I feel it's important to remember what the payoff is, for best case and worst case scenarios. Best case scenario ... you get to turn your lands into discard spells that make your opponent probably discard some lands of their own. You can generate a few tokens with Sedgemoor, or you can self-discard for reanimator, but probably not both in the same deck, is my guess. Unless you're using something like Loam - likely in yet another deck altogether - you're probably not generating card advantage either.

Worst case scenario you're in some rando black deck who can stuff this as their 23rd card or just play an extra land. It's not worthless but feels very bad if I'm not getting synergy.

Overall, the card just feels very mediocre. I feel like I want the card to either be more powerful, or be more of a keystone for a unique deck. I love playing cards that lack raw power but become overcharged in the right deck, because it feels like I achieve something when all the pieces come together. I think for Raven's Crime to achieve that, there needs to be more spells-matter payoffs or like, easy ways to refill when you ditch your lands. Like, it seems really cool if I've also got The Gitrog Monster, but that's another card with its own vulnerabilities - and I don't want to advise making room for other mediocre cards just to validate the card you originally wanted. If you really wanna go that deep, I think you have to start brainstorming these cards as a new package or archetype altogether. Which, incidentally, I find really really fun, but I think it's hard to justify drastic changes when making broad suggestions about a single card.

I'd be really curious if anyone has great success with it, but my instinct is that it's gonna be a challenge to find someone who really sees it shine.

I might have to agree with you guys on this. I think trying to make the lands deck work is a losing proposition.

Despite not being as parasitic as other archetypes, its difficult to interact with and often hard to draft together.

I really starting to like creature based combos - this includes the infinite combos as well as Flicker/ Aristocrat/ Recursion decks. They have a lot more back and forth, a lot less parasitic and easier to assemble.

Quote from steve_man »

Quote from Breathe1234 »

I might have to agree with you guys on this. I think trying to make the lands deck work is a losing proposition.

I've always treated lands matters as a subtheme. In my cube, you wouldn't build a deck around the lands matters cards, but you can slot lands matters type cards in decks that can already support them.

I'm starting to really hate these lands archetypes - These lands player go into these 4-5c lands - value decks are draft all the fetches. They also not that interactive and the cards are kinda parasitic.

Wow it's weird seeing one of my comments from 7 years ago lol.

With Ledge Shredder, Dragon's Rage Channeler etc. I might be tempted to give this a try to give Spells Matters a try.