Depowering removal wasn't for helping aggro. Good and bad cheap 1 mana removal kills old and new 1 drops equally. If anything, the change is better for midrange creatures. The idea was more to flatten out the draft order.
What I removed to un-oppress aggro were the cheap 2-for-1-on-board cards (Fire Imp, dividable burn, etc). I also don't run all the best creatures. E.g. no Mother of runes or Gut, True soul Zealot.
And yes, if a midrange deck has a bad matchup against aggro, then the first card to move to the sideboard should probably be the one that's very bad on tempo. That's not a problem with aggro or removal, the opposite being acceptable (being happy with bad tempo cards against aggro) sounds like a problem instead. Bad matchups are normal. But I don't see many good matchups either. Long gone are days where cubes are Seraph of dawns/penumbra spiders, which crystal shard preyed upon.
"">I haven't seen Icy manipulator as good in years. If midrange can cap out reasonably with a fistful of 4 drops and a lone 5, and the power level of the cards are not very disparate, when are you getting your investment back? If I just copy-paste all of my 4s:
We also are looking at more 1s and 2s with power > mana cost than ever. Or with evasion. Or both. The cost for skipping turns is just higher now.
Shard has always been mana inefficient, but so were the decks it went up against. You had time to eventually loop mulldrifters. It could buy you that time not even by bouncing value-less seraph of dawns/penumbra spiders but by bouncing some 5 drop (or Sentinel of the eternal watch), leaving those mediocre 2/4s in play. Nowadays even if you get lucky with an opponent playing Radiant, Archangel to bounce on your next turn (Great, we livin') the previous turns' ravenous giant/Halana, kessig ranger are still in play (Bad, we dyin').
It's not like I think the card is bad. But things are different now.
Haven't played hypnotic specter in many years. As discussed earlier, I avoid 1CC cards a lot and use that slot on the more omni-useful nighthawk.
I don't see Phyrexian ingester as very good, at least not since the first week it was out. I am reconsidering lay claim right now and I think that would be an easy swap without thinking about it.
When I flattened my power level and removed redundancy, I pulled heelcutter because of being bad Ahn-crop crasher
I didn't realize until you mentioned it, but yeah... wickerbough elder isn't really necessary anymore. Since I'm de-snowing my cube and thus losing blizzard brawl, the plummet attached to atraxa's fall makes this card pull double duty. This was the kind of realization I was hoping to find in this thread.
We've gotten so many good blue card draw options that compulsive is not needed at all.
I tried bond-kin this year, and might again in the future, but yeah it's base form is bad enough that I should put it on the bench.
Sentinel of the eternal watch was a house in the Obama admin, but 6 mana is such a huge opportunity cost for something that does nothing at all if it's removed even by a sorcery. You gotta get something, anything, for that much mana for a card without a land on the other side of the card.
In a literal 1 on 1 matchup, yes about 2/3s of them trade and some fraction of them might get extra value in. But all of them die to things that blastoderm will never die to. Comparing them by which wins in a strict head to head is not a fair way to measure it.
Even still, in that list, Gonti is the only one to trade and put you ahead with any amount of reliability, which is why I said it's an extreme outlier.
I would add at least 10 more dual lands in your cube.
I'm aware that I have less mana fixing than most cubes. (EDIT: I think I haven't noticed this much since I draft mostly 1v1). But one way that I have dealt with this is with drastically reducing the number of CC and 1CC cards.
If we don't count Capsize, Eternal Witness, and Kitchen finks, you have a little over triple the proportion of those cards in your list compared to me. Plus some more like Beast attack and Frilled mystic. One really only needs a single Aerial Responder in their pool for the stress on the manabase to go up dramatically. Going from a 1CC drop to 2DD with a weak set of lands is almost as hard as casting frilled mystic with no fixing at all. But without those kinds of costs or play patterns, I only really have to care about having one candidate of each color in the opening hand.
Ignoring 1, 2, and 5 land hands which are somehow keepable, the math looks like this:
For 3-land hands, assuming there's even only one fixer in the deck and an 8/8 split otherwise, only 16.5% of those hands will be monocolored. For 4-land hands, that number is 5.9%. If I jumped up to where you are, a point where the expected number of fixing lands was something like 3(?), then those numbers drop to 10.3 and 2.9%.
We can roughly estimate that 3 and 4 land hands exist at about a 3:2 ratio, which means I am seeing unkeepable hands about 12% of the time, compared to you at about 7%. So I'm only getting bad hands 5% more than you are.
Moreover, I include all the landcycling 1 and MDFCs that were fit to print. 13 altogether, which helps bump up the number of 18 land decks.
All in all, I don't think it's that big of a difference. Not so much that I would want to inject another 10 cards into my cube that are dead air for most drafters that see them. In a perfect world, they'd print another cycle of lands that are unique to the vivids and thriving lands which etb untapped at least some part of the time and I'd play those. In the meantime I'm waiting for prismatic vista's price to drop, or for me to feel comfortable with cryptic spires. Or another 4 copies of ash barrens.
Possibly made a mistake, but this is what I did to calc those for an 8/8/1 mountain/plains/vivid split and a 3 land hand:
1) First calculated the odds that at none of the three lands was the nonbasic. This was 82.4%.
2) Then, using just the basic lands in the deck and assuming an even split, I calculated the odds of getting a hand full of all one color. That was 10%, which has to be doubled because you could get a hand with all the other color.
3) Multiply step 2's percentage by step 1's. That's about 16.5
I mean, whirler rogue is one of the silliest uncommon 4s of all time to be fair. And if you're gonna pick out a direct 1v1 matchup, it isn't exactly fair to find the one combination of deathtouch and draw a card and line it up in front of the 5/5 grounded guy on a timer. Going through my cube's 4s printed in the last 10 years, gonti is an extreme outlier vs them. Even whirler rogue is about to be 10 years old.
If there was something systematic at play, I would have assumed it's something like more incidental tokens for blocking, or a lengthening of games which makes the impact of getting in for 5 or even 10 not as important. But the former is hard to really argue for (we used to run Squirrel's nest for goodness sake) and I think the latter is also unlikely even though I can't really tell. The smell test would say that cubes are getting cheaper and that turning-sideways type cards have gotten better more than any other kind.
Yes, we didn't have a Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma or Bannerhide Krushok back then, but blastoderm demands that it gets answered by different kinds of cards than those two or else you take 10 and still lose some portion of a card. There's still mileage in that.
Seeing that Mat's list has a bunch of cards that look like cards that beat 'derms (Jade mage, sprout swarm) I naively assume that his format plays a lot more like mine did a long time ago. That, combined with competition from amazing green fours printed over the last 2 years probably leads to his impression. If I am on the highly tempo sensitive side and he has games where Capsize is regularly a good plan, our disconnect is understandable.
Oh that's right... Wizards was in a weird situation where they could reasonably expect most people would relearn it in limited or in standard, but the people I play with got off the ratwheel of rotating sets long ago. And I can't expect everyone else to have a perfect memory of these things...
Hm...
It's not quite as bad as the %@&!@$*#^$ing role tokens (Wizards dropped the ball so badly with that jesus christ...) and it's not like I am going to not play Spyglass siren so unexplained explore will be around in my cube regardless... I think we have to assume that this is going to be a running problem with magic for the foreseeable future.
//
I'm not very heavily invested in aristocrats so that's not a large consideration. And a "value card" is something I would have expected drafters to see gameplan-relevant, proactive value in. But I'll consider what was said.
It looks you have a good cube, with some outdated cards, like Blastoderm and Calciderm. But it's the same situation I could have with Sprout and Capsize. Each one of us thinks they are still good cards and need more opinions to see the reality of those cards. I would add at least 10 more dual lands in your cube.
What about the 'derms do you think is outdated? Without yet having heard your answer, I would say that the conditions for them being nullified for very little investment (mogg war marshal for example) are not any higher than they were in the past. If anything, with things like sprout swarm and reassembling skeleton out they might have more chances to get 4 mana's worth of value.
Or maybe you're just saying that it's outclassed by many of our new 4 drops like halana, kessig ranger. Which I would agree with. But I think Blastoderm and Calciderm are still some of the best aggro curve top toppers we have available, especially if your goal is something like Llanowar elves + dump your whole hand in overwhelming fashion + turn sideways.
//
What other cards might you say are outdated in my list?
On a different note, what sort of physical set up do you all use for managing lands and tokens during deck construction and game play? Do you keep everything in the cube box? A separate box? Does anyone have a land station like this one? Do you just pass stacks of lands / tokens around and let people take what they need?
I have recently switched to this system: I have 2 different kinds of 1/1 grounded tokens, 2 different kinds of 1/1 flying tokens, and then one of everything else. It's pretty rare for there to be multiple things on the same side of the board makings larger tokens, and I having two of the 1/1 varieties means that something like sever the bloodline or cloudgoat ranger can keep track.
Wow I forgot I did include renaissance downshifts a few to many years ago. I don't remember if I cut it for being bad or because I didn't like that technicality, but either way it's gotta be bad by now
So that's really interesting to me. How you described Capsize and Guardian of the Guildpact is how I felt about both of those cards but in like the mid 2010s. In my current environment, the guardian would be just too slow to matter vs control and too short to stop an army of spectral processions, triarch praetorians, charging monstrosaurs, and Troll of Khazad-dûms.
Not that it can't still 1v1 blastoderm to death or stymie jhessian infiltrator, but it is inconsistent the more evasive our cards become, less obstructive the more they print 3+toughness creatures to attack into it, and less efficient the more they print large control finishers to outrace with.
I haven't played with it in many years now, but I assume the things that made me think it had become too weak have only gotten worse. How fast are your aggro decks? How much evasion do you have? Can you compare our cubes to see? I have to assume there's some middle ground between where you are and where I am such that you don't have to *ban* it based on it being warping
Mother of runes is a crazy magic card. I think I banned it for being out of line compared to other white 1 drops. But capsize still being that strong for you is not something I thought I'd hear. Would you say your boards are frequently gummed up with grounded tokens or grinding into long topdeck wars?
I have been more than happy with wraths being 6 mana, and I would find the jump up to 4 mana for what is a wrath 95% of the time on turn 4 (Languish) to be very very jarring.
Also, what is the flavor on lizard blades?
I would also imagine that triskelion is unplayable without some way of reloading it repeatedly. If it were to be downshifted, it needed to be a few to many years ago.
When planning to make a big "What I've learned in 2023" post, I realized that there was a tangent worth going into.
In the banner for the peasant thread, I tried to choose cards that would stand the test of time. Most are still common includes, and while I think Shriekmaw is distasteful it's certainly at least ok. But Sprout swarm has gone from a one-card win-con to nearly unplayable. Never would have thought.
Probably the biggest shift in how our cubes operate since then is that the slow+inevitable cards are almost all gone. Capsize, Guardian of the Guildpact, Squirrel Nest, Jade Mage..
..and then yesterday for the first time in my life I added to the "potential cut" pile crystal shard.
I didn't go through with it, but by this time next year....
I guess nothing outside of alpha is immune to time.
Now, I did force a P1P1 of crystal shard last night, got it alongside priest of the blood rite in a couple games, and felt better about keeping it in. Then again, my opponent was the kind of guy who plays skymarcher aspirant in the same deck as ornithopter of paradise despite having played magic since Onslaught so who knows if those games can even be used as data.
But all this to say: what cards have you played for a long time that you think might be gone given one more year of entropy and power creep?
There are two more (stalking vengeance and siege of towers), but they are cards so bad I won't even put the card tags on them.
Either Fear, fire, foes! or meteor blast is the best X spell, and they're both cheating.
Honestly I doubt I would run blaze at instant speed, and being an instant buffs a card by a whole mana. All that extra text on demonfire isn't worth a half a mana.
I doubt we'll ever get a playable, true X spell at this point. Not unless they go mad and power creep rolling thunder, or maybe add card-advantage in a set specific mechanic or something.
Since you can't cast woebringer demon on too many board states, and since your opponent could do some silliness to clear one side of the board or the other that you couldn't foresee, I don't see it happening. Too inconsistent.
What I removed to un-oppress aggro were the cheap 2-for-1-on-board cards (Fire Imp, dividable burn, etc). I also don't run all the best creatures. E.g. no Mother of runes or Gut, True soul Zealot.
And yes, if a midrange deck has a bad matchup against aggro, then the first card to move to the sideboard should probably be the one that's very bad on tempo. That's not a problem with aggro or removal, the opposite being acceptable (being happy with bad tempo cards against aggro) sounds like a problem instead. Bad matchups are normal. But I don't see many good matchups either. Long gone are days where cubes are Seraph of dawns/penumbra spiders, which crystal shard preyed upon.
We also are looking at more 1s and 2s with power > mana cost than ever. Or with evasion. Or both. The cost for skipping turns is just higher now.
Shard has always been mana inefficient, but so were the decks it went up against. You had time to eventually loop mulldrifters. It could buy you that time not even by bouncing value-less seraph of dawns/penumbra spiders but by bouncing some 5 drop (or Sentinel of the eternal watch), leaving those mediocre 2/4s in play. Nowadays even if you get lucky with an opponent playing Radiant, Archangel to bounce on your next turn (Great, we livin') the previous turns' ravenous giant/Halana, kessig ranger are still in play (Bad, we dyin').
It's not like I think the card is bad. But things are different now.
I don't see Phyrexian ingester as very good, at least not since the first week it was out. I am reconsidering lay claim right now and I think that would be an easy swap without thinking about it.
When I flattened my power level and removed redundancy, I pulled heelcutter because of being bad Ahn-crop crasher
I didn't realize until you mentioned it, but yeah... wickerbough elder isn't really necessary anymore. Since I'm de-snowing my cube and thus losing blizzard brawl, the plummet attached to atraxa's fall makes this card pull double duty. This was the kind of realization I was hoping to find in this thread.
We've gotten so many good blue card draw options that compulsive is not needed at all.
I tried bond-kin this year, and might again in the future, but yeah it's base form is bad enough that I should put it on the bench.
Sentinel of the eternal watch was a house in the Obama admin, but 6 mana is such a huge opportunity cost for something that does nothing at all if it's removed even by a sorcery. You gotta get something, anything, for that much mana for a card without a land on the other side of the card.
Even still, in that list, Gonti is the only one to trade and put you ahead with any amount of reliability, which is why I said it's an extreme outlier.
I'm aware that I have less mana fixing than most cubes. (EDIT: I think I haven't noticed this much since I draft mostly 1v1). But one way that I have dealt with this is with drastically reducing the number of CC and 1CC cards.
If we don't count Capsize, Eternal Witness, and Kitchen finks, you have a little over triple the proportion of those cards in your list compared to me. Plus some more like Beast attack and Frilled mystic. One really only needs a single Aerial Responder in their pool for the stress on the manabase to go up dramatically. Going from a 1CC drop to 2DD with a weak set of lands is almost as hard as casting frilled mystic with no fixing at all. But without those kinds of costs or play patterns, I only really have to care about having one candidate of each color in the opening hand.
Ignoring 1, 2, and 5 land hands which are somehow keepable, the math looks like this:
For 3-land hands, assuming there's even only one fixer in the deck and an 8/8 split otherwise, only 16.5% of those hands will be monocolored. For 4-land hands, that number is 5.9%. If I jumped up to where you are, a point where the expected number of fixing lands was something like 3(?), then those numbers drop to 10.3 and 2.9%.
We can roughly estimate that 3 and 4 land hands exist at about a 3:2 ratio, which means I am seeing unkeepable hands about 12% of the time, compared to you at about 7%. So I'm only getting bad hands 5% more than you are.
Moreover, I include all the landcycling 1 and MDFCs that were fit to print. 13 altogether, which helps bump up the number of 18 land decks.
All in all, I don't think it's that big of a difference. Not so much that I would want to inject another 10 cards into my cube that are dead air for most drafters that see them. In a perfect world, they'd print another cycle of lands that are unique to the vivids and thriving lands which etb untapped at least some part of the time and I'd play those. In the meantime I'm waiting for prismatic vista's price to drop, or for me to feel comfortable with cryptic spires. Or another 4 copies of ash barrens.
Possibly made a mistake, but this is what I did to calc those for an 8/8/1 mountain/plains/vivid split and a 3 land hand:
1) First calculated the odds that at none of the three lands was the nonbasic. This was 82.4%.
2) Then, using just the basic lands in the deck and assuming an even split, I calculated the odds of getting a hand full of all one color. That was 10%, which has to be doubled because you could get a hand with all the other color.
3) Multiply step 2's percentage by step 1's. That's about 16.5
//
Unrelated, how is icewrought sentinel?
If there was something systematic at play, I would have assumed it's something like more incidental tokens for blocking, or a lengthening of games which makes the impact of getting in for 5 or even 10 not as important. But the former is hard to really argue for (we used to run Squirrel's nest for goodness sake) and I think the latter is also unlikely even though I can't really tell. The smell test would say that cubes are getting cheaper and that turning-sideways type cards have gotten better more than any other kind.
Yes, we didn't have a Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma or Bannerhide Krushok back then, but blastoderm demands that it gets answered by different kinds of cards than those two or else you take 10 and still lose some portion of a card. There's still mileage in that.
Seeing that Mat's list has a bunch of cards that look like cards that beat 'derms (Jade mage, sprout swarm) I naively assume that his format plays a lot more like mine did a long time ago. That, combined with competition from amazing green fours printed over the last 2 years probably leads to his impression. If I am on the highly tempo sensitive side and he has games where Capsize is regularly a good plan, our disconnect is understandable.
Hm...
It's not quite as bad as the %@&!@$*#^$ing role tokens (Wizards dropped the ball so badly with that jesus christ...) and it's not like I am going to not play Spyglass siren so unexplained explore will be around in my cube regardless... I think we have to assume that this is going to be a running problem with magic for the foreseeable future.
//
I'm not very heavily invested in aristocrats so that's not a large consideration. And a "value card" is something I would have expected drafters to see gameplan-relevant, proactive value in. But I'll consider what was said.
What about the 'derms do you think is outdated? Without yet having heard your answer, I would say that the conditions for them being nullified for very little investment (mogg war marshal for example) are not any higher than they were in the past. If anything, with things like sprout swarm and reassembling skeleton out they might have more chances to get 4 mana's worth of value.
Or maybe you're just saying that it's outclassed by many of our new 4 drops like halana, kessig ranger. Which I would agree with. But I think Blastoderm and Calciderm are still some of the best aggro curve top toppers we have available, especially if your goal is something like Llanowar elves + dump your whole hand in overwhelming fashion + turn sideways.
//
What other cards might you say are outdated in my list?
vs
Fanatical Offering
vs
Village Rites
I have recently switched to this system: I have 2 different kinds of 1/1 grounded tokens, 2 different kinds of 1/1 flying tokens, and then one of everything else. It's pretty rare for there to be multiple things on the same side of the board makings larger tokens, and I having two of the 1/1 varieties means that something like sever the bloodline or cloudgoat ranger can keep track.
Not that it can't still 1v1 blastoderm to death or stymie jhessian infiltrator, but it is inconsistent the more evasive our cards become, less obstructive the more they print 3+toughness creatures to attack into it, and less efficient the more they print large control finishers to outrace with.
I haven't played with it in many years now, but I assume the things that made me think it had become too weak have only gotten worse. How fast are your aggro decks? How much evasion do you have? Can you compare our cubes to see? I have to assume there's some middle ground between where you are and where I am such that you don't have to *ban* it based on it being warping
https://www.cubecobra.com/cube/list/leeluepeasant
//
Mother of runes is a crazy magic card. I think I banned it for being out of line compared to other white 1 drops. But capsize still being that strong for you is not something I thought I'd hear. Would you say your boards are frequently gummed up with grounded tokens or grinding into long topdeck wars?
Also, what is the flavor on lizard blades?
I would also imagine that triskelion is unplayable without some way of reloading it repeatedly. If it were to be downshifted, it needed to be a few to many years ago.
In the banner for the peasant thread, I tried to choose cards that would stand the test of time. Most are still common includes, and while I think Shriekmaw is distasteful it's certainly at least ok. But Sprout swarm has gone from a one-card win-con to nearly unplayable. Never would have thought.
Probably the biggest shift in how our cubes operate since then is that the slow+inevitable cards are almost all gone. Capsize, Guardian of the Guildpact, Squirrel Nest, Jade Mage..
..and then yesterday for the first time in my life I added to the "potential cut" pile crystal shard.
I didn't go through with it, but by this time next year....
I guess nothing outside of alpha is immune to time.
I know some people have started removing the 'derm brothers. I know I was surprised to see a few people still running one or both shrine of burning rage/shrine of loyal legions.
Now, I did force a P1P1 of crystal shard last night, got it alongside priest of the blood rite in a couple games, and felt better about keeping it in. Then again, my opponent was the kind of guy who plays skymarcher aspirant in the same deck as ornithopter of paradise despite having played magic since Onslaught so who knows if those games can even be used as data.
But all this to say: what cards have you played for a long time that you think might be gone given one more year of entropy and power creep?
Either Fear, fire, foes! or meteor blast is the best X spell, and they're both cheating.
Honestly I doubt I would run blaze at instant speed, and being an instant buffs a card by a whole mana. All that extra text on demonfire isn't worth a half a mana.
I doubt we'll ever get a playable, true X spell at this point. Not unless they go mad and power creep rolling thunder, or maybe add card-advantage in a set specific mechanic or something.
Since you can't cast woebringer demon on too many board states, and since your opponent could do some silliness to clear one side of the board or the other that you couldn't foresee, I don't see it happening. Too inconsistent.