MTG Salvation

Are the CCDD cycle interesting cards from a design point of view because they make fixing important in two-colour decks, or am I drunk (or both)?

Affectionate Indrik is a worse Somberwald Stag. I've been playing Stag for a while, and it's pretty solid. It snipes off the utility creatures that green has a problem dealing with and leaves a good body. Does get killed before the trigger occasionally, but not too often.

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Fixing is important in most 2 colour decks regardless of the CCDD cards; playing a 2GG drop and a 2UU drop in the same deck is similar to playing a CCDD card. However, I do think CCDD are really good to make casual players more aware of the importance of good fixing.

Quote from Purplemurasaki »

Affectionate Indrik is a worse Somberwald Stag.

I think he's worth a shot. I'll make a proxy'd card, Somberwald Stag on one half, Affectionate Indrik on the other side and force him into our 8 (or 6... sigh) man draft in a couple hours. I'll let ya'll know how it goes.

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Started out as a 4man group, so while we waited for people to show, we played "Overcooked! 2", which is a fantastic couch co-op game on the Nintendo Switch. Highly recommend it.

Affectionate Stag didn't get put into someone's deck, which may be a reflection on both cards. Not worth picking up as it circled the table. Maybe not. idk. I enjoyed my 2-1 deck enough to share it.

I really enjoyed pinging my opponent's creatures and face 1-2 times with Gelectrode, while having a wall of elemental/goblin tokens, Calcite Snapper and things like Abrade/Unsummon to kill/bounce anything that made it to the board past my 3 counterspells. Finished games by tickling them to death with Faerie Conclave, Gelectrode. I got four, four, three and four 2/2 zombies when I cast Rise from the Tides.

Murmuring Mystic was good in limited. Anyone tried it out in their cube?

I haven't, but Plaguecrafter has been doing really well for me in draft, so I'm probably going to try it in cube. The fact that it makes opponents without creatures discard has been suprisingly relevant in my games.

I'm pretty amazed that plaguecrafter is doing well for you. Seems to me that too many people are running burglar rats or generous strays or even sworn companions for the symmetry to be broken easily

I didn't expect it to do that well either, and I'm not 100% sure how to explain why it worked. Maybe it was related to people running slightly different decks at the very beginning of the format (I haven't drafted for a week), but it did some major work for me, including against decks that ran "superfluous" creatures. So I don't think that's it. One draft I had a Dimir deck with two Plaguecrafters, all I played against where other Dimir decks... and it was still good. It was an aggressive-ish midrange Dimir, so the board never really built up to where they had lots of extra stuff to sac. There was only one situation like that and the sac trigger still worked out ok for me, because he had to sac a 1/3 and I got rid of a 1/1. That deck also had two of the "shuffle four cards from your graveyard into your library" counterspells, so it was easy enough to recur Plaguecrafter, something that we can do in cube as well, although by other means. And there's always the discard option as well, combined with bounce spells or just to hit their last card. The discard part does add a lot of versatility.

Smart people hold lands, especially in a format with at least five playable discard effects. So the confluence of events "person has one business card in hand plus no creatures in play" sounds highly contrary to what I am used to

I find that people get ridiculously greedy with their mana bases because you have so many good cards, so getting mana screwed and not being able to fully deploy your hand is quite common. Oh no I am stuck on two lands *still plays great cards*. I find that I am desperate enough to find 8 players that I don't care if they are good players.

Should we reconsider Healer's hawk with how good it was at the pro tour? stapling life link on a 1 mana 1/1 flyer has been good before.. see Vault Skirge

I think it could work, in some environments.