In my C/Ube, it's one of the coolest cards. Not exactly strong, but useful in pretty much any situation and it turns your deck into 23 spells, 17 discard spells if that's what you need. An opponent on a mulligan is surprisingly easy to exhaust with that card.
Specialities about the cube: U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
I'm a big fan. Usually, it's not card advantage, and it will rarely be played as such. But it can contribute to serious advantages in card quality. That said, it's one of those cards whose worst case scenario in opening hand is not bad, but makes some bad hands much better.
However, it never makes a good hand into a great hand without combo enablers, and it is usually a poor topdeck. Finally, it's not exactly the kind of proactive threat that requires a response from the opponent, unless you have one of those combo pieces. It's rare to have a "dream hand" with raven's crime unless Life from the Loam (or Entomb) are also in it.
While playing this, keep in mind exactly how many lands your opponent likely has in his or her hand. In the later game, most people will keep one (sometimes two) in hand to play around this and similar effects. At this stage of the game, you'll often want to cast it twice in the same turn.
But it is at least possible, you can also increase the chances with tutors. I included Raven's Crime recently and I am interested how it plays, though I admit that I am not exactly very optimistic.
I love retrace as a mechanic, but sadly, there aren't any outright cubable cards with it. Raven's Crime may be the only borderline one (next to the overcosted by 1Spitting Image and maybe Call the Skybreaker which both miss the mark in smaller multicolor sections). I am tempted to run it for this reason alone.
For the people who have played with it: Would you play it in a monoblack deck with only light discard otherwise and no crucible? In other words, would you play it as a way to make your aggro deck have something to do with late game lands instead of just playing them, or is it not good enough unless you're abusing it?
I like the card a lot. It's fit into a few different archetypes in my cube as well (mono B control or agro, W/B agro, Reanimator, etc.) I would highly recommend everyone give it a try if they're even considering it. I threw it in on a whim and have been nothing but pleased with it.
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Currently playing in EDH:
W Jazal Goldmane WR Daretti, Scrap Savant R B Ghoulcaller Gisa BUG Prime Speaker ZeganaUG UG Edric, Spymaster of Trest UGBG Nath, of the Gilt-Leaf BG RG Ruric Thar, the Unbowed RGUB Dragonlord Silumgar UB UBG Damia, Sage of Stone UBGWUG Roon of the Hidden Realm WUG WRG Marath, Will of the Wild WRGBRG Prossh, Skyrider of Kher BRG WUB Sydri, Galvanic Genius WUBUBR Thraximundar UBR URG Yasova Dragonclaw URGWUR Zedruu, the Greathearted WUR WBG Daghatar the Adamant WBGWUBRG Horde of Notions WUBRG
But you can dose the card parity as you wish, you can hold up a few lands, let your opponent play his small beaters that you can hopefully deal with, then cast three Crimes in the same turn to make him discard his six-drop, his situational card and his removal. That's pretty much best case scenario mentality, I know, but one thing to keep in mind is that this card suffers from Mind Rot Syndrome: On the receiving end, it's a lot more brutal.
Another way to look at it is this: It's not stone cold card advantage, but it's virtual card advantage, or card quality advantage, especially if you're flooding. If
[lands you have] - [lands you need] > [lands opponent has] - [lands opponent needs]
, then you can start to trade irrelevant lands for relevant spells or lands. There are two ways to achieve this: Make [lands you need] small, i.e. lowering your curve, or make [lands you have] big, i.e. Life from the Loam, Yavimaya Elder, Crucible of Worlds,...
It's one of these cards that are primarily flexible. Nothing looks too good on the surface, but ingame, there's pretty much always something to do.
Specialities about the cube: U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
But you can dose the card parity as you wish, you can hold up a few lands, let your opponent play his small beaters that you can hopefully deal with, then cast three Crimes in the same turn to make him discard his six-drop, his situational card and his removal. That's pretty much best case scenario mentality, I know, but one thing to keep in mind is that this card suffers from Mind Rot Syndrome: On the receiving end, it's a lot more brutal.
Another way to look at it is this: It's not stone cold card advantage, but it's virtual card advantage, or card quality advantage, especially if you're flooding. If
[lands you have] - [lands you need] > [lands opponent has] - [lands opponent needs]
, then you can start to trade irrelevant lands for relevant spells or lands. There are two ways to achieve this: Make [lands you need] small, i.e. lowering your curve, or make [lands you have] big, i.e. Life from the Loam, Yavimaya Elder, Crucible of Worlds,...
It's one of these cards that are primarily flexible. Nothing looks too good on the surface, but ingame, there's pretty much always something to do.
Specialities about the cube: U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
It enables early reanimation and can compelety grind your opponent down through attrition as it always trades 1 for 1. With Loam or Crucible it becomes stone cold nuts. That sort of synergy is Eternal format worthy.
The best thing about Raven's Crime is that it hinders your opponent from actually being to cast relevant while you beat them up cheap threats. The second thing it does is magnifies card advantage. So any card advantage you gain is more significant that than normally. There is a difference between 5-4, 2-1 and 1-0. Yes there is.
Lastly it allows you to gain card quality advantages over your opponent, because as we all know, cards don't all have equal values. Lands can often be virtual dead cards cards in the later part of the game, whereas you can trade those 'dead' cards for actually ones on your opponents hand.
The major downsides with Raven's Crime is that it can requires support to actually be good in a deck. This involves having the cards that best take advantage of it. Sometimes certain cards make it back breaking, while other times it will be just be decent support for that aggressive deck.
Raven's Crime can be really bad against some aggro decks, although not all, and bad against decks with plenty of graveyard synergies, but often great against against mid-range and some control builds (depends on the amount of card advantage).
We play Raven's Crime in 450 powered. It is a very reliable discard outlet for reanimation (you target yourself). After we saw players turn one Thoughtsieze themselves to play a turn 2 animate dead/exhume/dance of te dead we gave it a shot and it hasn't disappointed. It will sometimes allow you to bin a creature again later to animate again after a sweeper or something for the low price of a land. That's something most of our discard outlets can't do, particularly on color. It has been fetched with Gifts Ungiven before, an it's a good target there (especially with LftL!). We like it.
Putting cycling on a card that already trades 1:1 at almost any point in the game would be rather bad design-wise.
Well unburden can trade 1 to 1 at any time crime can but is more likely to be a 2 for 1. I'm sure you meant to give me a better justification for your criticism than "at any time you can usually get it's card's worth" anyway. The real interesting part is what having crime in your graveyard does to the lands you draw, which has incredibly little to do with whether you cycled your crime to hit a card in their hand or not.
Do you really think cycling unbalances the card? Is having had to pay Band and trade my crime for one of their cards a necessary price to pay for the amazing ability to poop lands to keep hand sizes down later? I know the ability to turn my lands into bad spells is pretty solid but is it really necessary, in cube, to have to play a bad spell as the price? Would Cycling 2 be too powerful?
Anyway sorry for derailing this conversation. I do wana say though, that most of us understand what card advantage is and the benefits of types of selection and advantage and where one ends and begins. This is one of those areas where it gets kind of tricky because how this card performs is very reliant on the potential of both players to generate card advantage. It's very interesting really and one of those areas that rewards your ability to produce any sort of CA irrelevant of quality with cards like say Kodama's Reach or Krosan Tusker or Gifts Ungiven. This goes a long way to helping enforce your higher quality, given that the more cards you have to pitch, the more likely you are to be able to hit the choice ones that survived all your initial crimes.
Tons of people in this thread talking this card up. I'll be honest it looks pretty interesting to me, especially since I just added Life From the Loam. However, this card doesn't even appear in the CubeTutor 720 list, meaning it doesn't seem particularly popular. Has it just been outclassed since the discussion here?
Tons of people in this thread talking this card up. I'll be honest it looks pretty interesting to me, especially since I just added Life From the Loam. However, this card doesn't even appear in the CubeTutor 720 list, meaning it doesn't seem particularly popular. Has it just been outclassed since the discussion here?
You just get a lot less lands in the yard in cube because decks't aren't running 10+ fetches. So it's only ok in a select few decks (reanimator as a self discard and the full on stax/LD/crucible deck) and it's not good enough in those few decks to make up for how completely unplayable it is in normal cube decks.
Well, here's my take on this card. Assuming you can make changes in cube to exploit this card, would that scenario add a positive experience to your table? Many groups (most?) will probably not find heavy discard strategies fun, though YMMV. If your group enjoys mind twist, this is probably not a concern.
If you can't exploit this card, is it really worth a slot in the cube? Because a 1 for 1 un-targeted/non-random discard effect really isn't all that great IMO (best case scenario, you get them to discard their worst card and worst case scenario you help them enable a graveyard strategy).
++ A one mana reanimator enabler
+ Good with Life from the Loam/Crucible of Worlds
+ Ok with draw spells for potentially having more lands
- Opponent decides
- As a real discard spell only really good if you can empty the complete hand.
My Peasant Cube: @ mtgsalvation---- @ cubecobra
Cheers,
rant
My Cube
CubeCobra: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/5f5d0310ed602310515d4c32
Cube Tutor: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/1963
450, Peasant*, unpowered**
Specialities about the cube:
U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
However, it never makes a good hand into a great hand without combo enablers, and it is usually a poor topdeck. Finally, it's not exactly the kind of proactive threat that requires a response from the opponent, unless you have one of those combo pieces. It's rare to have a "dream hand" with raven's crime unless Life from the Loam (or Entomb) are also in it.
While playing this, keep in mind exactly how many lands your opponent likely has in his or her hand. In the later game, most people will keep one (sometimes two) in hand to play around this and similar effects. At this stage of the game, you'll often want to cast it twice in the same turn.
"What am I looking at? Ashes, dead man."
Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG
It can't be card advantage.
You can use it to generate CA from Loam/Crucible, but the Crime itself can't generate card advantage.
It's repeatable card parity all the way down the line.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
My MTGSalvation Cube Page (not always up to date, but sweet pics of my alters)
W Jazal Goldmane W R Daretti, Scrap Savant R
B Ghoulcaller Gisa B UG Prime Speaker ZeganaUG
UG Edric, Spymaster of Trest UG BG Nath, of the Gilt-Leaf BG
RG Ruric Thar, the Unbowed RG UB Dragonlord Silumgar UB
UBG Damia, Sage of Stone UBG WUG Roon of the Hidden Realm WUG
WRG Marath, Will of the Wild WRG BRG Prossh, Skyrider of Kher BRG
WUB Sydri, Galvanic Genius WUB UBR Thraximundar UBR
URG Yasova Dragonclaw URG WUR Zedruu, the Greathearted WUR
WBG Daghatar the Adamant WBG WUBRG Horde of Notions WUBRG
Well....Obviously.
This is a pretty useless quibble, don't you think?
Another way to look at it is this: It's not stone cold card advantage, but it's virtual card advantage, or card quality advantage, especially if you're flooding. If
[lands you have] - [lands you need] > [lands opponent has] - [lands opponent needs]
, then you can start to trade irrelevant lands for relevant spells or lands. There are two ways to achieve this: Make [lands you need] small, i.e. lowering your curve, or make [lands you have] big, i.e. Life from the Loam, Yavimaya Elder, Crucible of Worlds,...
It's one of these cards that are primarily flexible. Nothing looks too good on the surface, but ingame, there's pretty much always something to do.
450, Peasant*, unpowered**
Specialities about the cube:
U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
Another way to look at it is this: It's not stone cold card advantage, but it's virtual card advantage, or card quality advantage, especially if you're flooding. If
[lands you have] - [lands you need] > [lands opponent has] - [lands opponent needs]
, then you can start to trade irrelevant lands for relevant spells or lands. There are two ways to achieve this: Make [lands you need] small, i.e. lowering your curve, or make [lands you have] big, i.e. Life from the Loam, Yavimaya Elder, Crucible of Worlds,...
It's one of these cards that are primarily flexible. Nothing looks too good on the surface, but ingame, there's pretty much always something to do.
450, Peasant*, unpowered**
Specialities about the cube:
U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
Well, you said it could be played as card advantage, and it can't. I was clarifying.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
It's actually one of the few T2 reanimation enablers.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
Especially against the kind of decks that can sit on capsize/forbid/etc.
It's as though you get to cast mind rot for B over 2 turns, and disrupts the rest of the game just by existing.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
The best thing about Raven's Crime is that it hinders your opponent from actually being to cast relevant while you beat them up cheap threats. The second thing it does is magnifies card advantage. So any card advantage you gain is more significant that than normally. There is a difference between 5-4, 2-1 and 1-0. Yes there is.
Lastly it allows you to gain card quality advantages over your opponent, because as we all know, cards don't all have equal values. Lands can often be virtual dead cards cards in the later part of the game, whereas you can trade those 'dead' cards for actually ones on your opponents hand.
The major downsides with Raven's Crime is that it can requires support to actually be good in a deck. This involves having the cards that best take advantage of it. Sometimes certain cards make it back breaking, while other times it will be just be decent support for that aggressive deck.
Raven's Crime can be really bad against some aggro decks, although not all, and bad against decks with plenty of graveyard synergies, but often great against against mid-range and some control builds (depends on the amount of card advantage).
I can't wait for more discard stuff and lands matter stuff. It will certainly deserve another look then, but remain pretty narrow.
Cube talk, design community and much much more!
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=385729
Well unburden can trade 1 to 1 at any time crime can but is more likely to be a 2 for 1. I'm sure you meant to give me a better justification for your criticism than "at any time you can usually get it's card's worth" anyway. The real interesting part is what having crime in your graveyard does to the lands you draw, which has incredibly little to do with whether you cycled your crime to hit a card in their hand or not.
Do you really think cycling unbalances the card? Is having had to pay Band and trade my crime for one of their cards a necessary price to pay for the amazing ability to poop lands to keep hand sizes down later? I know the ability to turn my lands into bad spells is pretty solid but is it really necessary, in cube, to have to play a bad spell as the price? Would Cycling 2 be too powerful?
Anyway sorry for derailing this conversation. I do wana say though, that most of us understand what card advantage is and the benefits of types of selection and advantage and where one ends and begins. This is one of those areas where it gets kind of tricky because how this card performs is very reliant on the potential of both players to generate card advantage. It's very interesting really and one of those areas that rewards your ability to produce any sort of CA irrelevant of quality with cards like say Kodama's Reach or Krosan Tusker or Gifts Ungiven. This goes a long way to helping enforce your higher quality, given that the more cards you have to pitch, the more likely you are to be able to hit the choice ones that survived all your initial crimes.
Cube talk, design community and much much more!
Tons of people in this thread talking this card up. I'll be honest it looks pretty interesting to me, especially since I just added Life From the Loam. However, this card doesn't even appear in the CubeTutor 720 list, meaning it doesn't seem particularly popular. Has it just been outclassed since the discussion here?
You just get a lot less lands in the yard in cube because decks't aren't running 10+ fetches. So it's only ok in a select few decks (reanimator as a self discard and the full on stax/LD/crucible deck) and it's not good enough in those few decks to make up for how completely unplayable it is in normal cube decks.
375 unpowered cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/601ac624832cdf1039947588
If you can't exploit this card, is it really worth a slot in the cube? Because a 1 for 1 un-targeted/non-random discard effect really isn't all that great IMO (best case scenario, you get them to discard their worst card and worst case scenario you help them enable a graveyard strategy).
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/