I know you can't believe this is universally true because I know you don't think this of path to exile. So there is some amount of being good at different stages of the game that is acceptable. Defile never reaches the high point of PtE, obviously, and it requires you to be majority black, but it at least actually functions in the early game where PtE is probably a serious misplay.
Well, now you got me. Obviously not every one mana spell needs to be great in the early game. But Path to Exile will remove any creature no matter what and it will do it when you need it and when you want it and you know exactly what kind of drawback you will get for it. It's your decision, and sometimes even a PtE on turn 2 or 3 can be the right play (I know for sure I cast it at that point many times and didn't regret it), while a Defile on turn 2 will often not give you any option because it simply can't do anything useful at that time. And sometimes it only hits a 2 toughness creature even on turn 10 - the chance to have three swamps by that time is only about 70% in a deck with 8 swamps if you go first, which means that will happen in almost 1 out of 3 games. That's quite a lot.
Vampire Nighthawk seen as on/off switch is a good example because that's exactly why I play as few CC cards as possible and cut otherwise good cards like Consul's Lieutenant or Gifted Aetherborn from my cube. And that even though I run better mana fixing lands than most people. I still do not consider Nighthawk a great pick unless you have good fixing lands in your deck or play mono black. And Defile is worse than Nighthawk from that perspective as you absolutely need swamps to make it useful, so a City of Brass or Gemstone Mine or Thriving land or Paradise Druid or Coldsteel Heart etc won't do anything for it, while all these cards will allow you to cast Nighthawk. If you want Defile to be better than Disfigure it's like a CCC card that can only be cast from basic lands, which no one right in their mind would run if it was an on/off type card (not that anyone would run it if it was possible to cast it from any mana source...).
Last but not least your graph is a bit exaggerated when it comes to late game usage of Defile vs Disfigure vs Path. On one hand it looks as if Defile becomes way better than Disfigure very quickly after just a few turns, which just isn't true when you look at how slowly the percentage where the average case becomes better rises. And while the average case may be reached after ~3.5 turns the randomness should be taken into account as well. I'd rather have a card that does what it says it does when I want to play it than a card that sometimes does more and sometimes does nothing. What would you prefer to play? A basic swamp or a land where you flip two coins during your upkeep/etb and for each flip won you get B when you tap it?
And Defile certainly isn't closer to Path than to Disfigure on turn 8 (and apparently way closer on turns 9+ if you'd extend these lines).
Disfigure is great in the early game. Path to Exile is great in the late game. Both can be useful in all stages of the game. Defile is...good in the mid game, but worse than Disfigure in the early game and worse than PtE (or, for better comparison, something like Go for the Throat) in the late game. And while it randomly can be very good in each stage of the game it can also be randomly utterly useless in each stage of the game. All of that of course outside of mono black, where it is a great card. That's why I wouldn't run it over Disfigure unless I wanted to support mono black.
I'm a bit surprised as the Dimir version of the 'graveyard' deck is usually just called...reanimator? Because that's what it is when you combine loot effects with reanimation spells (and big(ger) creatures).
The graveyard value deck is a completely different deck, it's Golgari and a grindy, slow midrange value deck and not a fast combo deck like reanimator.
I run both archetypes in my cube. Dimir reanimator has the obvious cards - loot effects in blue, reanimation spells in black and big monsters in all colors/colorless. The goal is to resurrect a fatty by turn 3 or 4 at the latest (ideally turn 2 or 3 though) and then kill your opponent with it.
It's slow and grindy, at first it's more like a defensive control deck while you try to get cards into the yard and eventually you take over the game with all the value and 'free' stuff you get.
Also, to add my own drafting method to the list of possibilities: we usually play my 405 card cube with four players and we draft 6 packs of 15 cards. For each pack first you pick 1 and burn 1, then you pick 2 and burn 2 until only 5 cards are left, in which case you pick 2 and burn 3. That means you end up with 7 cards for your draft pool and 42 total cards once all 6 packs have been drafted.
The first pick 1 burn 1 is to prevent lucky people from picking too many highest power level cards (eg if you have Control Magic and Flametongue Kavu in a new pack you can't pick them both) and to control power level a bit as you can burn powerful cards before your opponent can get them.
I generally like hate/burn draft as it further controls the outcome of the draft and amount of removal. If you play an aggro token deck you will burn every kind of mass removal or pinger you see. If you play a ramp deck you will burn unconditional spot removal. And so on.
In our case we draft 360 of 405 cards, which gives us a bit of variance, but it still allows drafting archetypes. In your case you'd draft 180 of 200 cards, which would also be great. I can only recommend it. And once you know all the cards it doesn't take that long either.
Agreed. I've seen users comment that Leelue tries to have an even power level in his cube. If we assume that is the case, it proves that in a powered peasant cube environment, green is the worst colour as he has cut powerful cards from all other colours:
[/card]
Green
None?
As I run most of these in a 200 card cube, it's not surprising that W and B might be the strongest colours.
Almost all of these cards are removal, so while obviously it's a bit about power level it's more about the power of removal and not overall card power. I don't run Sol Ring, Skullclamp, Loxodon Warhammer, Curse of Predation and a lot of other cards for power level reasons, but I like fast removal and I don't mind a resonable 2 for 1 removal either. I haven't seen someone win solely or mainly because he had Swords to Plowshares or Go for the Throat.
Removal can be problematic if there is too much quantity, but if your cube is properly balanced around it (higher cmc creatures with either strong etb effects or resilience) it's not a problem if there is only quality removal. Even in low powered (compared to CU/be) limited environments we get cards like Cast Down or Go for the Throat - but at uncommon, not at common.
Looking at your specific cube I can say there is way too much removal. You run almost the same amount of removal as I do and my cube has 405 cards. This is where many people go wrong at first, especially in CU/be, where a lot of high quality cards are removal. I know I did this. It leads to games where player A plays a creature, player B kills it, player A plays another one, player B kills it again and so on and then player B wins because he plays a 2 for 1 eventually. But if that's how your cube plays depowering removal doesn't make games more exciting or less one-sided.
If you allow people to fill half their deck with Go for the Throat, Doom Blade, Cast Down, Fatal Push and everything else there is then aggressive and generally creature based decks will have a hard time. But if your opponent only has 3-4 removal spells in his decks, only draws 1-2 during a game and then has to decide whether he wants to remove your Llanowar Elf now or your Arborback Stomper later then green decks don't have a problem and then Swords to Plowshares isn't a source of ultimate power. In fact it would be unfair if your opponent had to play crappy 3 mana sorcery speed removal instead.
I agree with Arbor, for me being better late game (and often only very late game) doesn't make up for the lack of reliability in the early game when we talk about a one mana spell. I generally dislike spells that have a random factor to them and avoid them if possible. If I had to choose between Defile and Disfigure I'd always take Disfigure unless I had a mono black deck.
This is also why I cut Darkblast. It can be devastating against the right deck, but sometimes it's just trash. The graveyard matters support (and I support that archetype) doesn't make up for that kind of randomness.
It's all anecdotal evidence, but from my experience the lack of both trample and vigilance really limits the usefulness of Scaled Behemoth a lot. If you want to kill your opponent quickly he can block the Behemoth with tokens or cheap creatures all day long, if you need a defender you can't attack at all. I had Behemoth sit around for these reasons far too often to value him higher than the other two. From my pov they all have their drawbacks and I wouldn't be able to decide which one I like most.
If you don't go for raw power level alone it is also worth mentioning that hexproof is one of the most unfun mechanics in Magic. I personally don't mind if there are a few very high cmc creatures with it in my cube, but I try to keep the numbers as low as possible. And green has more than enough other options now, so I don't feel there is a need for Behemoth or Crusher in my cube anymore. If I had a larger cube I'd still consider them though.
I don't like Brightmare. It compares poorly to Kor Hookmaster in aggro and why would you want to tap a creature once in other decks?
It's a midrange card. You tap a creature and get in for an attack, you get life and you get a decent creature. It's also good in the blink/bounce archetype.
Certainly not a great card overall and often it will only be an overcosted Lone Missionary if it's played on turn 3, but I could need a few more white three drops so I'll test it.
I agree that Spiteful Prankster will be a staple, great card. I won't cut Hissing Iguanar though because it is stil a good card (great in any aggro deck, especially in WR go wide and BR sacrifice) and I have other cards I can cut in red.
I also like Brightmare, will add that one as well. A 2/3 creature, tapping a creature and a few points of life for 3 mana is pretty good value.
While the Thriving lands are great design, they work well in Jumpstart because those decks are often two colors and they adapt to fix your mana. In a normal Limited format, they would easily lead to five-color mishmash *and* a ton of memory issues.
Ah, ok. Though I don't really get the 'I build a five color deck because I have drafted two lands that can tap for a specific mana of my choice' idea. I wouldn't even play five colors in limited if I had 4x City of Brass at my disposal and with two of the new lands in my deck I'd be happy that I can play 2 colors with a reliable mana base or maybe, just maybe, 2.5 colors If don't go crazy with CC cards.
I wonder whether these Thriving lands will be in high demand. I guess perhaps Constructed Pauper will want them to some extent, but is that enough to be significant? I guess the big impact is whether commander players have any interest in these, and to what extent jumpstart is opened. The latter could be a very small number what with this being a somewhat nieche play experience released in the middle of a pandemic..
Ash Barrens was close to $10 due to Pauper and Commander demand before it was reprinted. Thriving lands aren't as universally playable, but if Jumpstart doesn't get openend that much I'm sure they will go into the same direction. But I absolutely expect these to get printed more often from now on as they're much better for limited than the standard taplands.
That's really only a problem if you kept a one land hand or have very high color requirements. I mean, if you're playing a dimir deck and have a swamp and an Evolving Wilds, you search for an Island. You base your turn one search on the other cards in your hand to make sure you can play them.
The problem are CC cards later on. If you play dimir, turn Evolving Wilds into an island on your first turn because you already have a swamp in your hand and later you want to play Skinrender you can run into problems if all lands you draw afterwards are islands. That's not a problem with a true dual land. On the plus side Evolving Wilds helps with deck thinning (like you already mentioned) and it helps card that benefit from shuffle effects such as Sylvan Library (or Brainstorm, does anyone run that?). But both of these side effects are very minor and I'd play a true dual over Evolving Wilds in most dual color decks.
But I would never run them over Evolving Wilds/ Terramorphic Expanse . Those fix 100% of color combos - no matter what color you are missing, they can get it. There's also the minimal effect of deck thinning, though I admit a single fetch has little effect in that area.
The problem is that you have to choose the color when you play Evolving Wilds. If you play it turn 1 (which is a great time to play an etb tapped land unless you play aggro, and in that case it's unlikely you even have such a land in your deck, at least in my cube) you often don't know what you need on turn 5. The new lands don't have that problem.
Also, like already mentioned I break the singleton rule for lands and I already run 4x Ash Barrens and will keep them for sure as they're much better than Wilds/Expanse and I don't really need 4 more lands with the same effect, only weaker.
If I would play with singleton rules I would have enough room to run all of them of course and I would agree with you that Wilds and Expanse are in no danger of being cut.
Not bad. If I wouldn't break the singleton rule for mana fixing lands I'd probably play these. And I still consider playing them instead of Evolving Wilds.
Worse in 3+ color decks than Vivid lands, but as a dual land they take almost no cube space. Probably better than trilands - how often do you really play a three or more color deck and find the appropriate triland for it during draft? Depends on the playstyle and cube, but in my cube the chance was tiny when I still ran trilands. Most often trilands are just duals that cover three (dual) color combinations and this one is a dual that covers four and thus takes less space for mostly the same effect.
stuff like Ahn-Crop Crasher, Goblin Heelcutter, or Frenzied Fugue which are all devastating against a 6 drop with no immediate impact, let alone hard removal. You do get 2 cards, but you're unlikely be out of plays at that point even without them.
Ahn-Crop Crasher or, even worse, Goblin Heelcutter are absolutely terrible against Warden unless you win the next turn, in which case Scaled Behemoth would hardly make a difference. And if you don't win disabling Warden in exchange for two cards would be crazy, though with Goblin Heelcutter the worst case would be that you have no choice.
Running past a creature is far easier than killing it with unconditional removal, which is very limited in most cubes. If you run into Warden he can still attack back and deal 5 damage each time. If you run into Behemoth he can't do anything but block.
Control decks don't gain anything if they kill the Warden and you opponent casts an Arborback Stomper and a Nest Invader the next turn. And of course you can't compare 6 mana in a control deck with 6 mana in a ramp deck. Green decks benefit a lot more from card draw than pretty much any other deck as they need to use their excess mana (which is a big part of the reason why I would never cut Harmonize, but would never consider Concentrate). You're making a very bad trade in most situations if you Doom Blade Warden.
But control decks should normally have inevitability by default just by virtue of being a control deck, no?
Sure, in an ideal world a control deck will control the game 100%, your hand will be full of counterspells and removal while your opponent has an empty board and only a Jackal Pup left in his hand. And then you slowly ping him down to zero health turn after turn. But in a non-ideal world that doesn't happen very often, especially not if you have to protect your utility creatures because they're your only win condition. The reality most often is that control decks have to fight for board control and their life total until the game ends, one way or another.
If you successfully cast a Striped Riverwinder when your opponent is weakened he is done, even if he has some board presence. If you deal 1-2 points of damage per turn with your little creatures your opponent gets 5-10 additional turns to gain board advantage and/or finish you off by other means. If you can't afford to cast Riverwinder you cycle him away, so there is hardly any cost when you add him to your deck.
And of course resilience is important as on one hand you don't always have counterspells to protect your creature and, more importantly, it takes ages until you can actually cast a 7 mana creature and still have mana left to cast a counterspell to protect it. That's easily a difference of 5 turns or more between casting the creature only and being able to protect it on top of it. And when you play a deck that has almost no creature targets and that plays the only creature truly worth removing after 10+ turns it's much more likely that your opponent has removal ready than for example against a ramp that plays tons of creatures and casts them as early as possible.
Completely missed the instant speed on Village Rites. It's a great card! A one mana combat trick or a way to turn your worst creature into card draw isn't bad. Plus obviously the synergy with sacrifice decks. Since I run both Night's Whisper and Read the Bones I will replace one of them.
I don't think Warden of the Woods compares favourably to Scaled Behemoth.[...]
From my experience pure aggro decks just run into and past Scaled Behemoth and you can't fight back with it. Usually it's turn 4 or later before you can cast him and at that point aggro decks can already afford to lose creatures. The problem is that you can't fight back to force aggro to hold back some blockers as well, because you're already on life support and can't afford to lose your most important blocker for a turn, so all you get is a 6 mana wall that can't even block flyers. Vigilance obviously makes a world of difference in that situation.
Green ramp decks don't lack creatures so replacing the creature with an equal one (or two mediocre ones) is not that much of a problem if you draw two cards + another one at the beginning of the next turn since you keep your mana advantage. There aren't a lot of removal spells that can kill a 7 toughness creature anyway, especially not in aggro.
The last thing a control deck wants is to give you card advantage. Scaled Behemoth is admittedly probably even better against control, but Warden is close behind.
Scaled Behemoth is certainly better in some situations, but I don't think it's better in more than 50% of situations. And Warden is a lot more fun to play with from my pov.
Do people still play dedicated creature based wincons in control? I've always found that they aren't enough faster than nickle and diming with random value dudes to justify including.
A true wincon like Striped Riverwinder is much more reliable than nickle and diming with the few utility creatures you may have in your deck. It's not only about being faster, it's about reliability. It may work without one, but it's far easier for your opponent to deal with 3-4 small utility creatures than it is to deal with a large hexproof creature. And the one mana cycling makes it a card with a very low deckbuilding cost. Unfortunately neither Tidal Whale nor Spiked Megalodon come close to Striped Riverwinder since they either lack the resilience or the low deckbuilding cost.
Well, now you got me. Obviously not every one mana spell needs to be great in the early game. But Path to Exile will remove any creature no matter what and it will do it when you need it and when you want it and you know exactly what kind of drawback you will get for it. It's your decision, and sometimes even a PtE on turn 2 or 3 can be the right play (I know for sure I cast it at that point many times and didn't regret it), while a Defile on turn 2 will often not give you any option because it simply can't do anything useful at that time. And sometimes it only hits a 2 toughness creature even on turn 10 - the chance to have three swamps by that time is only about 70% in a deck with 8 swamps if you go first, which means that will happen in almost 1 out of 3 games. That's quite a lot.
Vampire Nighthawk seen as on/off switch is a good example because that's exactly why I play as few CC cards as possible and cut otherwise good cards like Consul's Lieutenant or Gifted Aetherborn from my cube. And that even though I run better mana fixing lands than most people. I still do not consider Nighthawk a great pick unless you have good fixing lands in your deck or play mono black. And Defile is worse than Nighthawk from that perspective as you absolutely need swamps to make it useful, so a City of Brass or Gemstone Mine or Thriving land or Paradise Druid or Coldsteel Heart etc won't do anything for it, while all these cards will allow you to cast Nighthawk. If you want Defile to be better than Disfigure it's like a CCC card that can only be cast from basic lands, which no one right in their mind would run if it was an on/off type card (not that anyone would run it if it was possible to cast it from any mana source...).
Last but not least your graph is a bit exaggerated when it comes to late game usage of Defile vs Disfigure vs Path. On one hand it looks as if Defile becomes way better than Disfigure very quickly after just a few turns, which just isn't true when you look at how slowly the percentage where the average case becomes better rises. And while the average case may be reached after ~3.5 turns the randomness should be taken into account as well. I'd rather have a card that does what it says it does when I want to play it than a card that sometimes does more and sometimes does nothing. What would you prefer to play? A basic swamp or a land where you flip two coins during your upkeep/etb and for each flip won you get B when you tap it?
And Defile certainly isn't closer to Path than to Disfigure on turn 8 (and apparently way closer on turns 9+ if you'd extend these lines).
Disfigure is great in the early game. Path to Exile is great in the late game. Both can be useful in all stages of the game. Defile is...good in the mid game, but worse than Disfigure in the early game and worse than PtE (or, for better comparison, something like Go for the Throat) in the late game. And while it randomly can be very good in each stage of the game it can also be randomly utterly useless in each stage of the game. All of that of course outside of mono black, where it is a great card. That's why I wouldn't run it over Disfigure unless I wanted to support mono black.
The graveyard value deck is a completely different deck, it's Golgari and a grindy, slow midrange value deck and not a fast combo deck like reanimator.
I run both archetypes in my cube. Dimir reanimator has the obvious cards - loot effects in blue, reanimation spells in black and big monsters in all colors/colorless. The goal is to resurrect a fatty by turn 3 or 4 at the latest (ideally turn 2 or 3 though) and then kill your opponent with it.
Golgari graveyard value doesn't need loot effects, it mostly runs self-mill cards such as Satyr Wayfinder, Hermit Druid, Stinkweed Imp, Grapple with the Past or Nyx Weaver. The payoff is basically free card advantage from cards like Mother Bear, Chainweb Aracnir, Roar of the Wurm or Grizzly Fate plus the added benefit of more cards to choose from with Restock/Raise Dead effects such as Baloth Null, Eternal Witness or Once and Future. And of course more targets for reanimation spells, which also work quite well in that deck. The mana advantage in green allows you to cast higher cmc cards more easily.
It's slow and grindy, at first it's more like a defensive control deck while you try to get cards into the yard and eventually you take over the game with all the value and 'free' stuff you get.
The first pick 1 burn 1 is to prevent lucky people from picking too many highest power level cards (eg if you have Control Magic and Flametongue Kavu in a new pack you can't pick them both) and to control power level a bit as you can burn powerful cards before your opponent can get them.
I generally like hate/burn draft as it further controls the outcome of the draft and amount of removal. If you play an aggro token deck you will burn every kind of mass removal or pinger you see. If you play a ramp deck you will burn unconditional spot removal. And so on.
In our case we draft 360 of 405 cards, which gives us a bit of variance, but it still allows drafting archetypes. In your case you'd draft 180 of 200 cards, which would also be great. I can only recommend it. And once you know all the cards it doesn't take that long either.
Almost all of these cards are removal, so while obviously it's a bit about power level it's more about the power of removal and not overall card power. I don't run Sol Ring, Skullclamp, Loxodon Warhammer, Curse of Predation and a lot of other cards for power level reasons, but I like fast removal and I don't mind a resonable 2 for 1 removal either. I haven't seen someone win solely or mainly because he had Swords to Plowshares or Go for the Throat.
Removal can be problematic if there is too much quantity, but if your cube is properly balanced around it (higher cmc creatures with either strong etb effects or resilience) it's not a problem if there is only quality removal. Even in low powered (compared to CU/be) limited environments we get cards like Cast Down or Go for the Throat - but at uncommon, not at common.
Looking at your specific cube I can say there is way too much removal. You run almost the same amount of removal as I do and my cube has 405 cards. This is where many people go wrong at first, especially in CU/be, where a lot of high quality cards are removal. I know I did this. It leads to games where player A plays a creature, player B kills it, player A plays another one, player B kills it again and so on and then player B wins because he plays a 2 for 1 eventually. But if that's how your cube plays depowering removal doesn't make games more exciting or less one-sided.
If you allow people to fill half their deck with Go for the Throat, Doom Blade, Cast Down, Fatal Push and everything else there is then aggressive and generally creature based decks will have a hard time. But if your opponent only has 3-4 removal spells in his decks, only draws 1-2 during a game and then has to decide whether he wants to remove your Llanowar Elf now or your Arborback Stomper later then green decks don't have a problem and then Swords to Plowshares isn't a source of ultimate power. In fact it would be unfair if your opponent had to play crappy 3 mana sorcery speed removal instead.
This is also why I cut Darkblast. It can be devastating against the right deck, but sometimes it's just trash. The graveyard matters support (and I support that archetype) doesn't make up for that kind of randomness.
If you don't go for raw power level alone it is also worth mentioning that hexproof is one of the most unfun mechanics in Magic. I personally don't mind if there are a few very high cmc creatures with it in my cube, but I try to keep the numbers as low as possible. And green has more than enough other options now, so I don't feel there is a need for Behemoth or Crusher in my cube anymore. If I had a larger cube I'd still consider them though.
It's a midrange card. You tap a creature and get in for an attack, you get life and you get a decent creature. It's also good in the blink/bounce archetype.
Certainly not a great card overall and often it will only be an overcosted Lone Missionary if it's played on turn 3, but I could need a few more white three drops so I'll test it.
I also like Brightmare, will add that one as well. A 2/3 creature, tapping a creature and a few points of life for 3 mana is pretty good value.
Ah, ok. Though I don't really get the 'I build a five color deck because I have drafted two lands that can tap for a specific mana of my choice' idea. I wouldn't even play five colors in limited if I had 4x City of Brass at my disposal and with two of the new lands in my deck I'd be happy that I can play 2 colors with a reliable mana base or maybe, just maybe, 2.5 colors If don't go crazy with CC cards.
Ash Barrens was close to $10 due to Pauper and Commander demand before it was reprinted. Thriving lands aren't as universally playable, but if Jumpstart doesn't get openend that much I'm sure they will go into the same direction. But I absolutely expect these to get printed more often from now on as they're much better for limited than the standard taplands.
Just fyi, the lands you talk about are often called trilands, so that's what we already talk about.
The problem are CC cards later on. If you play dimir, turn Evolving Wilds into an island on your first turn because you already have a swamp in your hand and later you want to play Skinrender you can run into problems if all lands you draw afterwards are islands. That's not a problem with a true dual land. On the plus side Evolving Wilds helps with deck thinning (like you already mentioned) and it helps card that benefit from shuffle effects such as Sylvan Library (or Brainstorm, does anyone run that?). But both of these side effects are very minor and I'd play a true dual over Evolving Wilds in most dual color decks.
The problem is that you have to choose the color when you play Evolving Wilds. If you play it turn 1 (which is a great time to play an etb tapped land unless you play aggro, and in that case it's unlikely you even have such a land in your deck, at least in my cube) you often don't know what you need on turn 5. The new lands don't have that problem.
Also, like already mentioned I break the singleton rule for lands and I already run 4x Ash Barrens and will keep them for sure as they're much better than Wilds/Expanse and I don't really need 4 more lands with the same effect, only weaker.
If I would play with singleton rules I would have enough room to run all of them of course and I would agree with you that Wilds and Expanse are in no danger of being cut.
Worse in 3+ color decks than Vivid lands, but as a dual land they take almost no cube space. Probably better than trilands - how often do you really play a three or more color deck and find the appropriate triland for it during draft? Depends on the playstyle and cube, but in my cube the chance was tiny when I still ran trilands. Most often trilands are just duals that cover three (dual) color combinations and this one is a dual that covers four and thus takes less space for mostly the same effect.
Ahn-Crop Crasher or, even worse, Goblin Heelcutter are absolutely terrible against Warden unless you win the next turn, in which case Scaled Behemoth would hardly make a difference. And if you don't win disabling Warden in exchange for two cards would be crazy, though with Goblin Heelcutter the worst case would be that you have no choice.
Running past a creature is far easier than killing it with unconditional removal, which is very limited in most cubes. If you run into Warden he can still attack back and deal 5 damage each time. If you run into Behemoth he can't do anything but block.
Control decks don't gain anything if they kill the Warden and you opponent casts an Arborback Stomper and a Nest Invader the next turn. And of course you can't compare 6 mana in a control deck with 6 mana in a ramp deck. Green decks benefit a lot more from card draw than pretty much any other deck as they need to use their excess mana (which is a big part of the reason why I would never cut Harmonize, but would never consider Concentrate). You're making a very bad trade in most situations if you Doom Blade Warden.
Sure, in an ideal world a control deck will control the game 100%, your hand will be full of counterspells and removal while your opponent has an empty board and only a Jackal Pup left in his hand. And then you slowly ping him down to zero health turn after turn. But in a non-ideal world that doesn't happen very often, especially not if you have to protect your utility creatures because they're your only win condition. The reality most often is that control decks have to fight for board control and their life total until the game ends, one way or another.
If you successfully cast a Striped Riverwinder when your opponent is weakened he is done, even if he has some board presence. If you deal 1-2 points of damage per turn with your little creatures your opponent gets 5-10 additional turns to gain board advantage and/or finish you off by other means. If you can't afford to cast Riverwinder you cycle him away, so there is hardly any cost when you add him to your deck.
And of course resilience is important as on one hand you don't always have counterspells to protect your creature and, more importantly, it takes ages until you can actually cast a 7 mana creature and still have mana left to cast a counterspell to protect it. That's easily a difference of 5 turns or more between casting the creature only and being able to protect it on top of it. And when you play a deck that has almost no creature targets and that plays the only creature truly worth removing after 10+ turns it's much more likely that your opponent has removal ready than for example against a ramp that plays tons of creatures and casts them as early as possible.
From my experience pure aggro decks just run into and past Scaled Behemoth and you can't fight back with it. Usually it's turn 4 or later before you can cast him and at that point aggro decks can already afford to lose creatures. The problem is that you can't fight back to force aggro to hold back some blockers as well, because you're already on life support and can't afford to lose your most important blocker for a turn, so all you get is a 6 mana wall that can't even block flyers. Vigilance obviously makes a world of difference in that situation.
Green ramp decks don't lack creatures so replacing the creature with an equal one (or two mediocre ones) is not that much of a problem if you draw two cards + another one at the beginning of the next turn since you keep your mana advantage. There aren't a lot of removal spells that can kill a 7 toughness creature anyway, especially not in aggro.
The last thing a control deck wants is to give you card advantage. Scaled Behemoth is admittedly probably even better against control, but Warden is close behind.
Scaled Behemoth is certainly better in some situations, but I don't think it's better in more than 50% of situations. And Warden is a lot more fun to play with from my pov.
A true wincon like Striped Riverwinder is much more reliable than nickle and diming with the few utility creatures you may have in your deck. It's not only about being faster, it's about reliability. It may work without one, but it's far easier for your opponent to deal with 3-4 small utility creatures than it is to deal with a large hexproof creature. And the one mana cycling makes it a card with a very low deckbuilding cost. Unfortunately neither Tidal Whale nor Spiked Megalodon come close to Striped Riverwinder since they either lack the resilience or the low deckbuilding cost.