Threats in Boros Deck Wins cost 1 or 2 mana. Usually 1 mana. That lets them play a LD spell and a threat in the same turn. Gruul's threats start at three mana. They can't do this. Also, BDW runs a low mana count so they have an easier time getting away with it. Gruul runs a high mana count and does not have the space.
Single target LD is awful. Absoluely awful. Seriously, against most of the decks in the format you're screwed if they ever make it to TWO MANA. Tribe-Elder laughs at your LD plan. So does Kodama's Reach. Also, you're not going to beat U-control unless you're playing first and get both an accelerator and a LD spell to keep them from ever hitting two lands. A Mana Leak or a Remand into a Hinder is death to you. You don't have any threats on the board and they're a turn or two away from dropping Meloku or Keiga and owning you. Also, a GOOD U-control deck will side their Apprentices out for Drift of Phantasms. It tutors for more counterspells and gets pitched to Disrupting Shoal to stop LD. You might beat Boros by mana-screwing them, but your matchup against Boros is ALREADY very good. You don't need to gimp your deck against the rest of the format by adding useless LD.
Also, Wildfire? Wildfire is a good deck, but you don't put it into a deck with Birds and Llanowar Elves. You're got to be kidding. Wildfire plays stuff like Elder, Kodama's Reach, and Wood Elves. Sticking Birds and Elves into a deck with Wildfire is just stupid, you'll wrath them off your own board and now since you are playing less lands to accomodate these accelerators, your opponent is going to recover faster than you are. Wildfire is inherent card disadvantage to begin with, you don't make it worse for yourself by playing mana creatures that die to it.
Some of you need to retake basic deck construction 101. You design your deck to do one thing well, not a bunch of things average. If you want to play mana control with Wildfire, then you build your deck around controlling your opponent's mana and getting more of your own. You play stuff like Kodama's Reach to get more lands than your opponent while destroying his. You don't put beatdown cards like Burning-Tree Shaman or Slum in this deck, you put in versatile finishers like Arashi. You play Divining Top to find what you need. You are a CONTROL deck, not an AGGRO deck. Your aim is to erase all your opponent's mana and THEN win the game, not do both at the same time. Trying to do two things at the same time ALWAYS fails.
Now, if you want to play an aggro deck, you play an aggro deck. You want to drop a Shaman turn 2 and start the pressure, not stall the game a turn. A longer game will always go to the control deck. You destroy their land on turn 2, they're just going to play another one. That lets you get out a threat on turn 3 because they can't counter, yes, but you could have had a threat out on turn 2 if you weren't playing awful LD spells. The games you win by mana screwing your mana-heavy control or combo opponents will be far less than the games you lose because you didn't have enough threats in your deck to overwhelm that control opponent.
If you want to play LD in your aggro deck, play Thoughts of Ruin. Now that's a good card. If that resolves when you're ahead on the board, you win. But Wreak Havoc, Stone Rain, etc? Bad. Awful. No.
Ponza is BAD, people. It has always been bad. It requires a god draw to win and does literally nothing when you don't get that god draw. Much better LD was available when Fires was around and they didn't play that ****, neither should you.
I don't think Gruul will be as good as everyone else thinks. The top decks are control decks. Only Wreak Havoc poses any sort of threat to a MUC deck and it's not enough to hose it. I don't think Gruul have anything over Ghazi Glare at all.
Typically in the history of MTG, cards are broken due to easily and repeatidly triggered abilities or near-unlimited activated abilities. Both of which are Izzet's domain. So if any broken deck comes out of Guildpact it'll probably be UR.
I still say a Gruul deck will be much, MUCH improved by adding blue. Electrolyze and Mimeofacture are amazing. Mimeofacture eats Jitte and a lot of control finishers. Electrolyze is also death to Boros decks, and not bad against Glare, either. Mimeofacture becomes absurd in the late game, and you can also play Ninja of the Deep Hours. I think Train of Thought also deserves testing as an uncounterable late-game card drawer.
Are you kidding? Gruul is the nightmare matchup for Boros. ALL their creatures are bigger than yours. Your non-flyers will never get in for damage because they'll always have a large, summoning sick blocker.
Teysa will see competitive play simply because it's a 2/3 for three mana. She has to generate ONE token and do nothing else to justify the mana cost. Circu was crap because it cost four and didn't affect the board. This costs three and does.
From what I've seen in the spoiler, I simply can't see Gruul decks competing in Standard. The only thing they're going to beat is Boros decks. They can't stop combo and they can't beat control.
You see, R/G Beats decks have many fundamental problems:
1. Not enough threats. Since R/G wants to play 4-mana creatures like Giant Soilfuge and Rumbling Slum, that means they have to play mana accelerators and can't cut down to really low land counts. So you're starting with a base of, say, 22 lands, 4 elves, and 4 birds. That's 30 cards right there. Now you have to add 4x Jitte, because it's Jitte. 34 cards. Now you've got 26 cards left to add actual threats AND removal. Compare this to Boros aggro, which generally has 22-24 creatures, 8 removal spells, PLUS Jitte and Anthem. Some cut Anthem to run more creatures or removal. After you add removal spells in R/G, which you'd be an idiot not to play, you only have 16-18 actual THREATS in your deck. This is simply not enough to assault a control deck packed with answers that either don't care about the size of the creature, or actually get BETTER the larger the creature is. Mana Leak is a piss-poor answer to Lantern Kami, but it's damn good against Rumbling Slum.
2. Inferior game plan. R/G Beats gives up speed in order to play far superior threats. The problem is, speed is EVERYTHING to an aggro deck. With the current format, you MUST either win by turn 6 through some disruption or disrupt your opponent enough to buy you more time to win. R/G can do neither. Turn 6 is when they untap with a Meloku in play and shut off your attack phase. Meloku doesn't care how fat your creatures are, they don't get in for damage. Turn 6 is when Greater Good combo locks you out infinitely. Turn 6 is when Heartbeat wins the game or when Ideal casts Ideal.
3. Inconsistent draws. Boros aggro can run off two lands. It's very consistent and is unlikely to get mana screwed or flooded, or have cards stranded in hand. Control/combo decks have high land counts, land search, and card drawing. Gruul has none of these. Gruul needs to draw land AND mana acceleration AND threats in the correct proportion to win. Drawing too many of any of the three is a loss.
4. Large, easily exploited weaknesses. For one, you have the problem that a significant part of your mana base is composed of creatures. Cheap, early removal will slow you to a crawl, and something like Pyroclasm or Wrath of God will probably strand cards in your hand. Glare of Subdual means you can basically scoop your cards up right there. Oh, you'll side in enchantment removal? Great, now you're down from 16 threats to 12 and can't actually KILL the GhaziGlare player after you've killed their Glare. Take out some removal and replace with Savage Twister for their token army? You just destroyed your own mana base.
5. The Jitte factor. Jitte is the most important card in the format. R/G Beats really doesn't want to play a card like Jitte. It's a tempo hole for a deck that wants to drop a large threat followed by an even larger one and doesn't have the mana to spare like a deck where all of its creatures cost one or two mana. R/G's best creatures (North Tree and Soilfuge) can't even equip the thing. The combat-altering effects of Jitte are of far less value in R/G because its creatures are already much bigger than everything else. However, Jitte is so broken that R/G MUST play it or lose to it, which is a huge detriment. Even Boros aggro, the deck's best matchup, will still easily win if they draw a Jitte and R/G doesn't.
Replicate is a triggered ability, correct? If so I hope you don't enjoy playing Vintage. Shattering Spree is a flat-out "I win" in Vintage, and you can't even effectively counter it.
I maintain my assertion that Rumbling Slum is garbage. Blastoderm was good because it was untargetable. A creature-based deck with no card advantage spells simply can't afford to play a 4 CC creature that will just get countered or removed by spells that cost less than it, being played by decks that can actually draw extra cards. It's a good way to lose, and quickly. At least Iwamori was good against weenie rush decks because they could neither chump it or efficiently rush into it. Rumbling Slum gets chumped and helps do their job for them after they've gotten in early damage with creatures.
It does survive Wildfire, but if your deck is designed to generate six mana for Wildfire you're MUCH better off just playing something like Arashi which is both a fatty and mass removal.
As far as enabling Bloodthirst goes, we will of course have to see the entire set to know for sure, but it sure seems like an awful Constructed mechanic to me. It's very draw-dependent and mana-inefficient. You have to draw damage spells, your Bloodthirst creatures, and then you have to play them both on the same turn, so your creature effectively costs a lot more and the whole plan is extremely vulnerable to counterspells.
Rumbling Slum is mediocre to crappy. It's worse than Iwamori of the Open Fist, and nobody played that either. 5/5s for 4 with only a drawback simply don't get played.
Yes, I'm aware that R/W has hate against it. FIrst off Wrath of God is next to unplayable in ths iformat. Hideous Laughter is teh decks real problem. I dotn knwo if your forgettign or not but the thing is R/W Aggro has soem pretty nice burn. You can't deny the awesome power of Lightnign Helix. Teh card is just insane. Char is also a really nice card. Peopel are gettign painland happy. People forget that painlands favor aggro. G/B Control is most likly going to run 4 of each painland. We can assume that they start out with 16 life instead of 20. WHen you have 4 Char, 4 Lightning Helix, and 4 Volcanic Hammer it shouldn't be too hard to burn yoru opponent out of the game. Not to mention teh fatc that 8 of your 1 drop creatures have two power.
Gifts Ungiven is like G/B but it's much harder to play and it will most likyl use even more pains for smoothing so it probally starts out at 14 life. Red Aggro was a great way to fight against Gifts Ungiven in Block because it had good burn. Now Gifts Ungiven starts out at around 14 life, Red's burn is much better, and it's creatures are SIGNIFICANTLY better.
G/W Aggro would admittidly be a rather bad match-up. They have big creatures like the wolf dude (even though every single burn spell coudl kill it) and Loxodon Heirarch is an absolute pain in the ass. All I'm sayign is that R/W Aggro will be a Tier 1 deck.
You don't know that Wrath of God is unplayable. Granted, I don't know if it is, but I do know it would see a LOT of play in block constructed if it were legal.
Green-based decks will not require painlands at all. They have the awesome power of Sakura-Tribe Elder. In KBC Gifts decks are running three colors with ZERO painlands. Some of the new lands will probably be played, but only because you can drop them into play tapped. Green-based control isn't going to have much in the way of one-drops, they can drop them into play tapped turn 1 no problem.
R/W also has the problem of not enough deck slots. First you add the creatures. You need at least 24 for consistency. Now you have to run 4x Jitte, because it's Jitte. Thoughts of Ruin is also way too good not to run in this kind of deck, so you need at least three of those. Assuming 22 lands you only have 7 slots left for burn. That's nowhere near enough to burn someone out.
RW aggro looks awful. I'm sorry, but when I look at the spoiler all I see is massive control deck dominance.
ALL the RW creatures are 2 or less toughness. Wrath of God, Hideous Laughter, Kagemaro, Plague Boiler, Pyroclasm all just destroy you, and with all this acceleration these spells will consistently always be cast on turns 3-5. Control decks will hit you with mass kill on turn 3 or play the spell that searches it up on turn 3, then kill you on turn 4. The few spells that enable you to resist this type of mass kill all have RR or WW in their costs. (Adamaro, Glorious Anthem, Thoughts of Ruin, Hokori) Combine this with the fact that most of your vanilla creatures like Hand of Honor also cost double colored mana and you have massive consistency issues.
Next, you have to deal with the absolutely insane stalling cards that Green gets. Thundersong Trumpeter would normally be a great card for this type of deck.....except for the fact that Sakura-Tribe Elder is also in Type II, which makes all X/1s suck almost by itself. Green also gets the 2/5 cantrip wall that you are pretty much guaranteed to have to expend two cards to get through, while it costs them no cards.
Finally, if a GW deck ever becomes even Tier 2 quality, it's going to create even more problems for RW because their two-drop 3/3 is bigger than every creature you have.
I also wouldn't underestimate milling decks. Any green-based control, especially green-based with Gifts or decks with Dredge, will do a lot of the work for them with their multiple land search and cantrip effects.
EDIT - The Rock was not named for Pernicious Deed. The Rock got its name from Phyrexian Plaguelord, and it kept that name long after Plaguelord stopped getting played.
Am I the only one who thinks the R/W guild is just awful for constructed? Every single one of their creatures that's even remotely constructed worthy dies to Hideous Laughter. G/W might not have burn, but at least it's much harder to sweep away their creatures.
Ok wrong wrong wrong. Spiritmonger IS USED. It has been ALWAYS until the questionable moment of when Kokusho came out, but I still play rock with spiritmonger, that thing if off the scale even compared to most of the cards you see here. 6/6 for 5 that regenerates and gets thru color effects and protection. So for some reason you say he isn't included? Check out extended deck archives, the title ROCK basically FOLDED to spiritmonger as its trump card along with pernicious deed.
Go on Starcity and use their decklist search for all "The Rock" and "B/G Control" extended decks in the last year and a half. Out of all the first-place decks, Spiritmonger is present in exactly one of them. Two if you count the deck that has one in the sideboard.
Morphling pretty much attacks and blocks (its untargetability is pretty much to ensure it will stay around to attack and block). Serra Angel and Mystic Enforcer attack and block.
Serra Angel has not been played in constructed since like 1998. What control deck was Mystic Enforcer in? Armageddon-based decks are not control decks. Regardless, Mystic Enforcer doesn't count because it has protection from black and therefore dodges a lot of removal. Rock decks will often play Phantom Centaur for same reason. (really hard to remove)
Exalted Angel and Blinding Angel's effect trigger when they attack.
Ok, now you're really reaching. Gaining life and shutting off the opponent's attack step are definetly abilities other than "attacking and blocking."
Decree of Justice and Meloku tokens attack and block. You just have the tricks of forming them at EOT and being a small group has some advantages against protection from a single source.
Decree of Justice cantrips, is uncounterable, and creates SEVERAL creatures in addition to attacking and blocking. Meloku (and Morphling) both have the ability to attack and block at the same time, as well as the ability to dodge removal. Morphling becomes untargetable and a removed Meloku still leaves a bunch of tokens behind. This new creature can do none of these things. If it had vigilance maybe I'd consider it playable.
Bribery or Vedalkened creatures pretty much attack and block.
...and Bribery got sided out against anything that wasn't Tooth and Nail because it sucks ass if you're not fetching Darksteel Colossus or Sundering Titan. Vedalken Shackles doesn't even apply to this argument.
The Vulture's pump ability is more permanent than Fallen Angel, and less situational than Sengir Vampire's.
...when was the last time Sengir Vampire or Fallen Angel saw play in a constructed deck? I'm thinking never, because these cards are awful.
Exalted Angel, Blinding Angel, Morphling, Decree of Justice, and Meloku are all good control creatures because it's very difficult to alpha strike around or though them when they come down. This new creature has none of those possibilities. Go ahead and run this in your Rock deck, I'll either attack with five goblins after you spend five mana on it, or just kill it with my Visara which BTW is a far better card for a G/B deck than this ever will be.
How many decks have you played against that never have a creature die for any reason, and never play an instant or sorcery? How many black/green decks have you played that never destroys any permanents or killed any creatures?
This guy could be a vanilla 7/7 or 8/8 for five mana and control decks wouldn't want it. See also: Spiritmonger. The good Rock decks never played him. He costs too much for aggro, and control decks can not use their few creature slots on creatures that do nothing but attack and block!
Also, Wildfire? Wildfire is a good deck, but you don't put it into a deck with Birds and Llanowar Elves. You're got to be kidding. Wildfire plays stuff like Elder, Kodama's Reach, and Wood Elves. Sticking Birds and Elves into a deck with Wildfire is just stupid, you'll wrath them off your own board and now since you are playing less lands to accomodate these accelerators, your opponent is going to recover faster than you are. Wildfire is inherent card disadvantage to begin with, you don't make it worse for yourself by playing mana creatures that die to it.
Some of you need to retake basic deck construction 101. You design your deck to do one thing well, not a bunch of things average. If you want to play mana control with Wildfire, then you build your deck around controlling your opponent's mana and getting more of your own. You play stuff like Kodama's Reach to get more lands than your opponent while destroying his. You don't put beatdown cards like Burning-Tree Shaman or Slum in this deck, you put in versatile finishers like Arashi. You play Divining Top to find what you need. You are a CONTROL deck, not an AGGRO deck. Your aim is to erase all your opponent's mana and THEN win the game, not do both at the same time. Trying to do two things at the same time ALWAYS fails.
Now, if you want to play an aggro deck, you play an aggro deck. You want to drop a Shaman turn 2 and start the pressure, not stall the game a turn. A longer game will always go to the control deck. You destroy their land on turn 2, they're just going to play another one. That lets you get out a threat on turn 3 because they can't counter, yes, but you could have had a threat out on turn 2 if you weren't playing awful LD spells. The games you win by mana screwing your mana-heavy control or combo opponents will be far less than the games you lose because you didn't have enough threats in your deck to overwhelm that control opponent.
If you want to play LD in your aggro deck, play Thoughts of Ruin. Now that's a good card. If that resolves when you're ahead on the board, you win. But Wreak Havoc, Stone Rain, etc? Bad. Awful. No.
Ponza is BAD, people. It has always been bad. It requires a god draw to win and does literally nothing when you don't get that god draw. Much better LD was available when Fires was around and they didn't play that ****, neither should you.
I still say a Gruul deck will be much, MUCH improved by adding blue. Electrolyze and Mimeofacture are amazing. Mimeofacture eats Jitte and a lot of control finishers. Electrolyze is also death to Boros decks, and not bad against Glare, either. Mimeofacture becomes absurd in the late game, and you can also play Ninja of the Deep Hours. I think Train of Thought also deserves testing as an uncounterable late-game card drawer.
You see, R/G Beats decks have many fundamental problems:
1. Not enough threats. Since R/G wants to play 4-mana creatures like Giant Soilfuge and Rumbling Slum, that means they have to play mana accelerators and can't cut down to really low land counts. So you're starting with a base of, say, 22 lands, 4 elves, and 4 birds. That's 30 cards right there. Now you have to add 4x Jitte, because it's Jitte. 34 cards. Now you've got 26 cards left to add actual threats AND removal. Compare this to Boros aggro, which generally has 22-24 creatures, 8 removal spells, PLUS Jitte and Anthem. Some cut Anthem to run more creatures or removal. After you add removal spells in R/G, which you'd be an idiot not to play, you only have 16-18 actual THREATS in your deck. This is simply not enough to assault a control deck packed with answers that either don't care about the size of the creature, or actually get BETTER the larger the creature is. Mana Leak is a piss-poor answer to Lantern Kami, but it's damn good against Rumbling Slum.
2. Inferior game plan. R/G Beats gives up speed in order to play far superior threats. The problem is, speed is EVERYTHING to an aggro deck. With the current format, you MUST either win by turn 6 through some disruption or disrupt your opponent enough to buy you more time to win. R/G can do neither. Turn 6 is when they untap with a Meloku in play and shut off your attack phase. Meloku doesn't care how fat your creatures are, they don't get in for damage. Turn 6 is when Greater Good combo locks you out infinitely. Turn 6 is when Heartbeat wins the game or when Ideal casts Ideal.
3. Inconsistent draws. Boros aggro can run off two lands. It's very consistent and is unlikely to get mana screwed or flooded, or have cards stranded in hand. Control/combo decks have high land counts, land search, and card drawing. Gruul has none of these. Gruul needs to draw land AND mana acceleration AND threats in the correct proportion to win. Drawing too many of any of the three is a loss.
4. Large, easily exploited weaknesses. For one, you have the problem that a significant part of your mana base is composed of creatures. Cheap, early removal will slow you to a crawl, and something like Pyroclasm or Wrath of God will probably strand cards in your hand. Glare of Subdual means you can basically scoop your cards up right there. Oh, you'll side in enchantment removal? Great, now you're down from 16 threats to 12 and can't actually KILL the GhaziGlare player after you've killed their Glare. Take out some removal and replace with Savage Twister for their token army? You just destroyed your own mana base.
5. The Jitte factor. Jitte is the most important card in the format. R/G Beats really doesn't want to play a card like Jitte. It's a tempo hole for a deck that wants to drop a large threat followed by an even larger one and doesn't have the mana to spare like a deck where all of its creatures cost one or two mana. R/G's best creatures (North Tree and Soilfuge) can't even equip the thing. The combat-altering effects of Jitte are of far less value in R/G because its creatures are already much bigger than everything else. However, Jitte is so broken that R/G MUST play it or lose to it, which is a huge detriment. Even Boros aggro, the deck's best matchup, will still easily win if they draw a Jitte and R/G doesn't.
It does survive Wildfire, but if your deck is designed to generate six mana for Wildfire you're MUCH better off just playing something like Arashi which is both a fatty and mass removal.
As far as enabling Bloodthirst goes, we will of course have to see the entire set to know for sure, but it sure seems like an awful Constructed mechanic to me. It's very draw-dependent and mana-inefficient. You have to draw damage spells, your Bloodthirst creatures, and then you have to play them both on the same turn, so your creature effectively costs a lot more and the whole plan is extremely vulnerable to counterspells.
You don't know that Wrath of God is unplayable. Granted, I don't know if it is, but I do know it would see a LOT of play in block constructed if it were legal.
Green-based decks will not require painlands at all. They have the awesome power of Sakura-Tribe Elder. In KBC Gifts decks are running three colors with ZERO painlands. Some of the new lands will probably be played, but only because you can drop them into play tapped. Green-based control isn't going to have much in the way of one-drops, they can drop them into play tapped turn 1 no problem.
R/W also has the problem of not enough deck slots. First you add the creatures. You need at least 24 for consistency. Now you have to run 4x Jitte, because it's Jitte. Thoughts of Ruin is also way too good not to run in this kind of deck, so you need at least three of those. Assuming 22 lands you only have 7 slots left for burn. That's nowhere near enough to burn someone out.
ALL the RW creatures are 2 or less toughness. Wrath of God, Hideous Laughter, Kagemaro, Plague Boiler, Pyroclasm all just destroy you, and with all this acceleration these spells will consistently always be cast on turns 3-5. Control decks will hit you with mass kill on turn 3 or play the spell that searches it up on turn 3, then kill you on turn 4. The few spells that enable you to resist this type of mass kill all have RR or WW in their costs. (Adamaro, Glorious Anthem, Thoughts of Ruin, Hokori) Combine this with the fact that most of your vanilla creatures like Hand of Honor also cost double colored mana and you have massive consistency issues.
Next, you have to deal with the absolutely insane stalling cards that Green gets. Thundersong Trumpeter would normally be a great card for this type of deck.....except for the fact that Sakura-Tribe Elder is also in Type II, which makes all X/1s suck almost by itself. Green also gets the 2/5 cantrip wall that you are pretty much guaranteed to have to expend two cards to get through, while it costs them no cards.
Finally, if a GW deck ever becomes even Tier 2 quality, it's going to create even more problems for RW because their two-drop 3/3 is bigger than every creature you have.
I also wouldn't underestimate milling decks. Any green-based control, especially green-based with Gifts or decks with Dredge, will do a lot of the work for them with their multiple land search and cantrip effects.
EDIT - The Rock was not named for Pernicious Deed. The Rock got its name from Phyrexian Plaguelord, and it kept that name long after Plaguelord stopped getting played.
Go on Starcity and use their decklist search for all "The Rock" and "B/G Control" extended decks in the last year and a half. Out of all the first-place decks, Spiritmonger is present in exactly one of them. Two if you count the deck that has one in the sideboard.
Serra Angel has not been played in constructed since like 1998. What control deck was Mystic Enforcer in? Armageddon-based decks are not control decks. Regardless, Mystic Enforcer doesn't count because it has protection from black and therefore dodges a lot of removal. Rock decks will often play Phantom Centaur for same reason. (really hard to remove)
Ok, now you're really reaching. Gaining life and shutting off the opponent's attack step are definetly abilities other than "attacking and blocking."
Decree of Justice cantrips, is uncounterable, and creates SEVERAL creatures in addition to attacking and blocking. Meloku (and Morphling) both have the ability to attack and block at the same time, as well as the ability to dodge removal. Morphling becomes untargetable and a removed Meloku still leaves a bunch of tokens behind. This new creature can do none of these things. If it had vigilance maybe I'd consider it playable.
...and Bribery got sided out against anything that wasn't Tooth and Nail because it sucks ass if you're not fetching Darksteel Colossus or Sundering Titan. Vedalken Shackles doesn't even apply to this argument.
...when was the last time Sengir Vampire or Fallen Angel saw play in a constructed deck? I'm thinking never, because these cards are awful.
Exalted Angel, Blinding Angel, Morphling, Decree of Justice, and Meloku are all good control creatures because it's very difficult to alpha strike around or though them when they come down. This new creature has none of those possibilities. Go ahead and run this in your Rock deck, I'll either attack with five goblins after you spend five mana on it, or just kill it with my Visara which BTW is a far better card for a G/B deck than this ever will be.
This guy could be a vanilla 7/7 or 8/8 for five mana and control decks wouldn't want it. See also: Spiritmonger. The good Rock decks never played him. He costs too much for aggro, and control decks can not use their few creature slots on creatures that do nothing but attack and block!