Bounty of Skemfar is not as strong as Collected Company (even because it isn't an instant) but the CMC redeems this.
It helps to play additional lands directly from your deck and an Elf card in your hand regardless of the CMC.
In my humble opinion this card is still quite strong card and board advantage. Unluckily it is a sorcery.
Is it strong enough for Legacy or Vintage though? In EDH, it's probably fine, but there are already tons of options for Elf decks so I don't think it will make the cut.
First, if you wanted a kor cartographer effect in your deck, you probably wouldn't mind a 2nd. Secondly, I don't know - this is like saying that light up the stage is bad because jeska's will exists. Both sets of cards have a similar place in the decks that want those effects, but situationally each comparable card can be better than the other. This isn't comparing grizzly bear to scavenging ooze. Finally, in a 1-2 color deck, where this card would be played - I run maybe 4 2cc rocks if that many even. That gives a roughly 35% chance that you will have a turn 2 rock play - hardly excluding the use of that mana for foretelling.
How many ramps cards would you play in a typical mono-white EDH deck? Let's say I want 12:
And that's without even including stuff like Land Tax, Tithe or Verge Rangers. Kor Cartographer already does not make the cut anymore, why would a sidestep from it be any more useful? Even if you don't have a turn 2 and you can foretell the card, do you also not have a turn 3? If you do, Cartographer's Hawk is still better. The card is not bad per se but it's far from what white needs, I could understand if this was a Standard-legal card, but it's only legal in Legacy and Vintage outside of EDH, so why couldn't it cost 3? Or at least make you ramp every time? Or allowing you to fetch Mistveil Plains?
That Stoic Farmer is a joke, it's worse than Kor Cartographer, it's only upsides are Foretell and being 3/3 but still... what a let-down.
Foretell is a BIG upside. You can cast Stoic Farmer with only 2 lands, where you can only cast Kor Cartographer once you're at 4 mana. In *most* formats, if you're at 4 mana in white, you should have better things to do. In those other formats such as Commander, Farmer isn't an Either/Or with Cartographer, it should be an And.
Yeah, but on Turn 2 in EDH, you are more than likely to just cast a mana rock and not foretell a card. Foretelling this will cost you your turns 2 and 3 to just ramp once, that's almost worse than Cartographer's Hawk. I understand that you want consistency but beyond Solemn Simulacrum and Kor Cartographer, do you need a third 4-drop that ramps? There is also Keeper of the Accord at 4 mana. This could easily have been a functional reprint of Knight of the White Orchid and it would have been great.
That Stoic Farmer is a joke, it's worse than Kor Cartographer, it's only upsides are Foretell and being 3/3 but still... what a let-down. Also why is Tales of the Ancestors blue and not white? This card would fit in White both thematically and mechanically, what a waste.
If I read this correctly, the Immersturm Predator can attack, exile a creature from the graveyard to get a +1/+1 counter, then you can sacrifice a creature in response to the declare blockers step to give the vampire dragon indestructible until end of turn.
Is it really working this way? I read it that the dragon always get the counter no matter if a card is exiled or not.
If you don't target anything, the dragon gets the counter. If you target something and that target is gone by the time the ability starts resolving, the ability is countered and the dragon gets nothing.
OK, I've seen the video now and I can see what you're talking about. I don't play competitive so I can't say for sure, but it seems to whiff a bit too often, not counting occasional mana screw and your opponents trying to interfere. Also, you don't have anything to deal with what your opponent is doing. That seems incredibly glass-cannony and not very stable. I like the idea but I don't know how far this deck can go (also it might get boring real quick).
EDIT: It also reinforces the argument that a simple "Counter target spell you don't control" would have achieved a better result with way less text on the card.
But it's a polymorph spell. You're supposed to point this at yourself more than anyone else.
Do you count Chaos Warp as a polymorph spell? Also, Blessed Reincarnation is a card
I'm just still angry at the useless random milling part that accomplishes nothing
I don't count Chaos Warp as a polymorph spell, because sometimes it whiffs and the opponent gets nothing back. The milling part is there so you don't stack your deck and stick an Emrakul somewhere in the top 3 cards of your library. Of course, you're supposed to have Emmy buried somewhere in your deck as the sole creature like every polymorph deck in the past ten years.
I'm just still angry at the useless random milling part that accomplishes nothing
Turn 2 Taigam's Scheming to arrange the top 5 cards of your library in just the right order.
Turn 3 won't even need a land drop--any 0-cmc or 1-cmc spell will do, Tibalt's Trickery your own spell, then mill/exile down to the Ulamog you tucked away, exile your opponent's two lands, then accept their scoop.
The mill/exile is probably to prevent abuse like this, but you know someone somewhere will find a way to manage to abuse it.
Sure, I know why they did that, but it's still a bad way to do it IMO. Just either shuffle or restrict it to opponent's spells only. They did it this way to prevent abuse and it appears that it can still be abused, which makes it even worse because now the card feels complicated for no reason.
OK, I've seen the video now and I can see what you're talking about. I don't play competitive so I can't say for sure, but it seems to whiff a bit too often, not counting occasional mana screw and your opponents trying to interfere. Also, you don't have anything to deal with what your opponent is doing. That seems incredibly glass-cannony and not very stable. I like the idea but I don't know how far this deck can go (also it might get boring real quick).
EDIT: It also reinforces the argument that a simple "Counter target spell you don't control" would have achieved a better result with way less text on the card.
But it's a polymorph spell. You're supposed to point this at yourself more than anyone else.
Do you count Chaos Warp as a polymorph spell? Also, Blessed Reincarnation is a card
I'm just still angry at the useless random milling part that accomplishes nothing
OK, I've seen the video now and I can see what you're talking about. I don't play competitive so I can't say for sure, but it seems to whiff a bit too often, not counting occasional mana screw and your opponents trying to interfere. Also, you don't have anything to deal with what your opponent is doing. That seems incredibly glass-cannony and not very stable. I like the idea but I don't know how far this deck can go (also it might get boring real quick).
EDIT: It also reinforces the argument that a simple "Counter target spell you don't control" would have achieved a better result with way less text on the card.
Turns out that Tibalt's Trickery can let you cast random fatties from your deck (or whiff) through 3-mana Cascade spells in an Extended Hypergenesis-like shell.
Sure, but you'll just end up getting a spell at random from your deck. This can already be achieved by cards like Unexpected Results or polymorph effects.
The main advantage of Cascade Tibalt's Trickery is that you can cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, and casting it/her lets you speed up the clock by one valuable turn - possibly enough to outrace Oops All Spells, say.
Cascade spells costing 3 mana also means that a Turn 2 Emrakul (or other fatty) is not unrealistic, at the cost of putting in 4 more whiffs into your deck (Simian Spirit Guide).
Is Simian Spirit Guide the only nonland card in the deck other than the cascade spell, Emrakul and Tibalt's Trickery? What if Tibalt's Trickery ends up letting you cast another Tibalt's Trickery? It seems clunky to me, but maybe there is something I don't see.
Turns out that Tibalt's Trickery can let you cast random fatties from your deck (or whiff) through 3-mana Cascade spells in an Extended Hypergenesis-like shell.
Sure, but you'll just end up getting a spell at random from your deck. This can already be achieved by cards like Unexpected Results or polymorph effects.
Because Wizards loves their randomness. See Haktos the Unscarred or Crystalline Golem. The randomness is supposed to be fun. And to an extent it is from a casual point of view. On average your looking at 1.5 cards milled. This can also screw over btw cards that tutor and put that card on top of their library such as Vampiric Tutor.
I love randomness and I do play those two cards. But in Haktos and Crystalline Golem's cases, that randomness has a purpose. Here, it is just used in the middle of a paragraph to basically act like a shuffle. It makes the card harder to read and to understand, which is not good for the casual crowd.
If they wanted to prevent abuse, they could have just prevented you from targeting your own spells, or just made the spell's controller shuffle their library (there is already 9 spoiled cards that make you shuffle after all, so why not this one too?). At worst, you can even just exile 4 or 5 cards rather than a random number, I don't think many cards can let you plan past that number. The card is fun though, don't get me wrong, it's just needlessly complex.
The random mill is almost certainly a way to prevent using it to cheat in a fatty/expensive spell. While a shuffle ala Chaos Warp could accomplish the same thing, I believe they've been trying to cut back on shuffle effects in standard, as they represent a "loading screen" in competitive paper play. It can't just mill a set number of cards, because then you'd be able to just set up your spell that far down. By milling 1-3 cards, though, there's uncertainty and inconsistency that prevents it from being a reliable way to cheat out (if you put your spell 4 cards down, you might only mill 1 and one of the other two cards could be a spell you hit first. Any higher, and you risk milling it out). So basically they were trying to solve the "how can we make this random without shuffling" puzzle, and milling a random number between 1 and 3 (easily determined using a d6) seems like the best solution.
Just mill a higher number then, like 5? If you don't want the caster to abuse it, you can also make it so that it can't target your own spells. This is an inelegant and overly complicated way to solve a problem that might not even exist (tournament play of a random card?).
The randomness clause on Tibalt's Trickery is obviously a way of preventing from countering their own spell and putting a scried Emrakul straight into play, but it seems like they're leaving the door open for a bit of manipulation.
Yeah, that's what I'm also thinking but still ... why not just shuffle or mill a fixed number of cards? As a fervent defender of randomness, it pains my heart to see needlessly complicated design like this one depreciate the already not so great opinion of players about randomness.
Agreed that the mill part of Tibalt's Trickery feels pretty pointless and just makes the card more complicated. However it's a funny card, and even if it's not that powerfull I'm glad it exists x)
There's also Spellshift if you like that kind of effect.
Is it strong enough for Legacy or Vintage though? In EDH, it's probably fine, but there are already tons of options for Elf decks so I don't think it will make the cut.
How many ramps cards would you play in a typical mono-white EDH deck? Let's say I want 12:
- Sol Ring
- Wayfarer's Bauble
- Arcane Signet
- Marble Diamond
- Mind Stone
- Pearl Medallion
- Knight of the White Orchid
- Worn Powerstone
- Boreas Charger
- Solemn Simulacrum
- Smothering Tithe
- Keeper of the Accord
And that's without even including stuff like Land Tax, Tithe or Verge Rangers. Kor Cartographer already does not make the cut anymore, why would a sidestep from it be any more useful? Even if you don't have a turn 2 and you can foretell the card, do you also not have a turn 3? If you do, Cartographer's Hawk is still better. The card is not bad per se but it's far from what white needs, I could understand if this was a Standard-legal card, but it's only legal in Legacy and Vintage outside of EDH, so why couldn't it cost 3? Or at least make you ramp every time? Or allowing you to fetch Mistveil Plains?
Yeah, but on Turn 2 in EDH, you are more than likely to just cast a mana rock and not foretell a card. Foretelling this will cost you your turns 2 and 3 to just ramp once, that's almost worse than Cartographer's Hawk. I understand that you want consistency but beyond Solemn Simulacrum and Kor Cartographer, do you need a third 4-drop that ramps? There is also Keeper of the Accord at 4 mana. This could easily have been a functional reprint of Knight of the White Orchid and it would have been great.
The other cards are cool though.
If you don't target anything, the dragon gets the counter. If you target something and that target is gone by the time the ability starts resolving, the ability is countered and the dragon gets nothing.
Sure, I know why they did that, but it's still a bad way to do it IMO. Just either shuffle or restrict it to opponent's spells only. They did it this way to prevent abuse and it appears that it can still be abused, which makes it even worse because now the card feels complicated for no reason.
Do you count Chaos Warp as a polymorph spell? Also, Blessed Reincarnation is a card
I'm just still angry at the useless random milling part that accomplishes nothing
EDIT: It also reinforces the argument that a simple "Counter target spell you don't control" would have achieved a better result with way less text on the card.
Is Simian Spirit Guide the only nonland card in the deck other than the cascade spell, Emrakul and Tibalt's Trickery? What if Tibalt's Trickery ends up letting you cast another Tibalt's Trickery? It seems clunky to me, but maybe there is something I don't see.
Sure, but you'll just end up getting a spell at random from your deck. This can already be achieved by cards like Unexpected Results or polymorph effects.
I love randomness and I do play those two cards. But in Haktos and Crystalline Golem's cases, that randomness has a purpose. Here, it is just used in the middle of a paragraph to basically act like a shuffle. It makes the card harder to read and to understand, which is not good for the casual crowd.
If they wanted to prevent abuse, they could have just prevented you from targeting your own spells, or just made the spell's controller shuffle their library (there is already 9 spoiled cards that make you shuffle after all, so why not this one too?). At worst, you can even just exile 4 or 5 cards rather than a random number, I don't think many cards can let you plan past that number. The card is fun though, don't get me wrong, it's just needlessly complex.
That seems awfully specific, why not just mill the top 3 or 4 cards immediately then?
Just mill a higher number then, like 5? If you don't want the caster to abuse it, you can also make it so that it can't target your own spells. This is an inelegant and overly complicated way to solve a problem that might not even exist (tournament play of a random card?).
Yeah, that's what I'm also thinking but still ... why not just shuffle or mill a fixed number of cards? As a fervent defender of randomness, it pains my heart to see needlessly complicated design like this one depreciate the already not so great opinion of players about randomness.
There's also Spellshift if you like that kind of effect.