Wee, got the first winner. That 1R deals 3 to a creature, Scry1 is definitely the most efficient removal they've printed at common for a while and as such it should just be borderline playable in Cube.
Interesting place between Incinerate variants and Magma Jet. I think I'll still play Incinerate and Magma Jet over it, though it may be better and/or at least more interesting than the 3rd copy of Incinerate (Lightning Strike / Searing Spear).
Tbf Al's statements above were totally clear and understandable to me. He was saying that it can target up to two of yours to deal damage to one of your opponent's creatures right from the beginning as far as I can tell.
It's not that hard to understand, really. The card has up to two targets on your side and one target on your opponent's side. That's what it says and what it does. If it did what many people apparently want it to do they'd word it something like
'Target creature you controls deals damage equal to its power to target creature. Then up to one other target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to target creature.'
If the word 'target' only appears X times on a card the card will only have X targets, unless it is preceded by the phrase 'any number of' or something similar. Magic 101.
Also, you really think they would print an instant speed green 2-for-1 removal for 2G that's trivially easy to get full value of in a regular Limited format? That's like printing Ashes to Ashes as an Instant and without the lifeloss at common according to their rarity and color pie policy of recent years.
2.) Magic is not an area where expertise is very relevant. It's easy to learn and easy to master. It's even less relevant when you take someone else's cube as a start point and change from there.
So having never opened an actual pack for this game isn't relevant at all. I'm only marginally worse at this game than veteran players who have been playing MtG for 20 years.
Infracting a whole bunch of random posts on this page and this one that shows more than anything else why this whole drama even started is fine?
The most ignorant of human beings would realize that when someone posts something like that on a somewhat competitive MtG forum other people have two options: 1) react heavily offended and reply to the person, ultimately resulting in what you would call flaming, or 2) shake their head and stop bothering with this thread and forum given that people can spam tens of thousands of words of garbage without anyone acting. Both of those should not be in your interest. I know there's an ignore button, but when everyone else just c/p's back and forth it does literally nothing.
Issuing a last warning only goes so far. What do you expect to happen now? Well, either the one person who caused all of this miraculously vanishes and we'll live happily ever after, or we keep reading the same pointless discussions until people get tired and you have to lock the thread again.
I'd end my post with the generic 'back on topic' comment but I've really had enough of Tidal Wave and ... you know... *****ting on the whole competitive Magic community in the world by essentially calling them nothing but lucky and such, so if someone could bing up another one that would be much appreciated...
Just like with every single card people tend to loosely call 'op' Flood can be perfectly balanced by giving making other things stronger. Your flood won't do much against 3 aggressive creatures on turn 4 with you having like 3 blue sources in play, but it will surely dominate games in formats where people durdle around.
"You hold a controversial viewpoint that I disagree with, therefore you're a troll."
Um, okay.
See, this topic really isn't controversial in the slightest. Lab Rats is a total garbage card and Sprout Swarm is one of the strongest cards that has ever been printed with a black symbol. A controversial topic is by definition something that causes public debate. There was never any public debate on Swarm vs Lab Rats, because everyone who has ever played with at least one of them and has some experience and/or a sane mind would know how different they are.
And this is true for every statement you've made on this thread. You bring up utter garbage and defend it with totally uninformed as well as straight up wrong theories, and every time someone has a valid argument against you you play the "don't hate me just because my opinion is different" card.
I don't see how Lab Rats is significantly worse than Sprout Swarm. It's worse sure, but it's still a bomb.
Friend, you really should try and play a game of Magic first before you join discussions like that.
I'll be the bad guy and tell you that right now everyone who's posting here except you is torn between continually trying to be nice and trying to help you with your questions and requests, which is hard enough given that you have zero experience in this game and zero willingness to second-guess anything you say, and just giving up and being frustrated that this topic has been spammed with useless content for the last 10 pages or so. Literally every one of the hundreds of sentences you've written on the last pages is a testimony of the fact that you have absolutely no clue about how an actual game of Limited Magic with other human beings could play out. Pleas stop wasting our and your own time and come back once you've actually played with the cards you're suggesting.
If I ask you whether I should play X or Y in my whatever-themed cube where X and Y are cards you have never seen or heard of before, am I supposed to take anything you say seriously?
Honestly don't really understand the statement what are you trying to say with that?
That if you're evaluating cards on a different basis than anyone else you can't get any informed feedback.
What am I supposed to tell Humphrey (sorry for taking you as an example all the time, your just seems one of the longer lasting non-standard cubes I can think of) if he comes here and asks what his red 2 drop section should look like in his Medieval Cube?
If I evaluate cards with my own power based cube in mind I'd have to tell him to cut all but one (in this case Chainwalker) and play 8 completely different cards.
If I want to evaluate cards based on his own philosophy with that cube I'd have to 1) be interested enough and actually make the effort to ask him exactly what criteria he has for choosing cards and 2) probably scan the whole Gatherer to even get the slightest idea about what cards exist that fit those criteria.
Or I can just tell him I don't know and that he should choose for himself, at which point both his post and my answer were 100% useless.
Is it really that hard to understand what I mean with common ground? I have absolutely nothing against creative cubes. I'd probably have built some myself if I had the time any more, an artifact flavored one comes to mind for instance, or an old school one where only old pre-8th Edition borders are allowed. I would love that stuff, but the last thing I'd do is come to a general cube forum and ask people with completely different cubes for opinions or help. maybe I'd find a soul or two who are doing the same thing, then I could talk to them in PMs or if there's more people open our own thread or something. You have to do research and testing to evaluate cards. We may all have looked through all the existing commons, but if one guy looked only for anything that says the word artifact on the card, another guy looked only for old borders, and the third guy looked only for some medieval flavor, those three people can't really discuss much of anything together.
This is why I think we have to focus on something that is universally applicable, and that is power level. If we discuss the overall 'best' cards, people with different flavored cubes can at least participate and use the info to decide where they want to draw the line, how many slots in each sections they want to dedicate to overall goodness and how many to pure flavor, etc.
EDIT: I disagree with pretty much every part of Izor's post. I think there is plenty of room for the sorts of discussions that he is talking about, so long as we are all on the same page about the specific Cube that we are talking about. It doesn't even require the dissolution of the forum. I think the fact that that does seem necessary speaks to just how incredibly insular this forum has become. Maybe we should talk about it in other threads, I don't know (although I personally don't think this). But the idea that it is just unreasonable to talk about anything other than power when the (generally, seemingly, much more popular, friendly, and active) Peasant thread is right there seems... Pretty disingenuous. At this point I'm almost tempted to just say post off-beat Pauper cubes in the Peasant thread because they might actually be helpful, but I think that's extremely unfair to the Peasant people. We can and should be doing that work.
I don't think you understand what I meant.
How exactly would anyone comment on a card for a format he has absolutely no experience in and thus zero qualification to have an opinion on? If I ask you whether I should play X or Y in my whatever-themed cube where X and Y are cards you have never seen or heard of before, am I supposed to take anything you say seriously?
The more I read this thread the more I get the feeling that this is just people getting a little hyped for a new format and instead of listening to anything people who have played and tested that format for 10 years say we try to be the innovators by going on the Gatherer real quick and deciding that card X and Y look so interesting that they clearly must make the format better. Our previous experience from some other games that have nothing to do with MtG (at least I would assume so because I haven't heard about them ever before) will surely qualify.
I'm just curious at this point. Have you actually ever played those cards and cubes in question with 8 human beings?
Look, there's really nothing wrong with interpreting Cube as a draftable collection of cards that contains your personal favorites instead of the most powerful cards (which was originally the motivation of Cube btw).
But if you do that and you know that you've come to a forum where people have been testing the entire Gatherer up and down for what must be over 10 years now trying to find the 'better' and 'worse' cards and strategies, you can't be surprised if people disagree with your philosophy. Humphrey doesn't come out here to get feedback on his Medieval cube either. If I make a tree-flavored cube, because I like trees, I also wouldn't come here asking people how good they think Scarwood Treefolk was, expecting positive feedback on a card that is totally irrelevant in terms of power level. If you show up to a Vintage tournament with Gilded Lotus over Black Lotus just because you like gold things, do you really expect people to be open minded and accept your preference instead of turning you into the meme of the day?
The original idea behind cubes was to create a limited environment with the 'best' cards available. Soon people would figure out that 'best' doesn't mean 'most powerful' per se, because things like mana curves, deck archetypes and whatnot work their way into the equation as well, but the goal was always to facilitate the strongest possible decks.
Now, of course it may be true that this original idea has been becoming less prevalent and important over the years, however, keep in mind what the purpose of something like this forum is and how a discussion about a 'format' can only work. We've been using the power level argument for literally everything - every new set spoilers thread, every This or That thread, etc - for the past X years because that's the only common ground we have on which to discuss card choices. What's the purpose if someone opens a topic about the best blue 4-drop and answers range from 'Illusionary Forces, because I like dreadlocks' over 'Ghost Ship, because my Cube is pirate-flavored' to 'I don't run blue cards in my cube cause I'm Republican oxlol'.
Either we dissolve this entire forum and call it 'forum for anyone who has some draftable pile of cards' in which noone can share opinions on anything because there's no common ground, or we try to find the best common ground and accept that anything that is garbage on that common ground will be called garbage by other posters. Well then, if anyone can think of a more suitable common ground than power level, feel free to enlighten us. Till then, I'll be the old fashioned and outdated guy who actually enjoys trying to get the most power out of commons and try to balance the best cards out by making other things more powerful through synergies instead of banning the best cards one after the other until gray ogres bash into bears and squires. If I draft someone else's cube and the decks I'm getting will lose to an average deck from my own cube 75% of the time, I'll take that as a sign that I (in my personal cube philosophy, which is also the original cube philosophy) did a better job than that person and I'd rather draft my own cube again. Pretty sure this phenomenon is also what occurred to Humphrey when he saw say Guardian of the Guildpact alongside a bunch of tier 5 commons in the same pack. I don't fault him for that.
You should've got the memo by now... but common ground is literally everything that matters. Other formats have a common ground too, and anyone who's willing to discuss that format has to accept that common ground or sit down at that kitchen table over there and talk to someone who wants to listen.
You really should have forseen this... This may be the most embarassing thing I've seen on a forum as big as this, and that's coming from someone who's active on tons of them, including having modded and ran some myself.
If you find a way to restore accounts I'd love if you could 'PM me individually' and lmk. Later.
Goodstuff is what newer players should start off with, because it's easier to evaluate cards based on standalone power if you don't have enough experience to evaluate different archetypes.
As of what archetypes are viable or T1 or whatever, that's a very old debate that has never found any satisfying answers.
Also, apparently my account along with every single post I ever made was deleted because I was unable to see some alleged popup that was supposed to tell me to accept something because I disable all popups for obvious reasons, so don't expect to hear from me again around here.
Interesting place between Incinerate variants and Magma Jet. I think I'll still play Incinerate and Magma Jet over it, though it may be better and/or at least more interesting than the 3rd copy of Incinerate (Lightning Strike / Searing Spear).
It's not that hard to understand, really. The card has up to two targets on your side and one target on your opponent's side. That's what it says and what it does. If it did what many people apparently want it to do they'd word it something like
'Target creature you controls deals damage equal to its power to target creature. Then up to one other target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to target creature.'
If the word 'target' only appears X times on a card the card will only have X targets, unless it is preceded by the phrase 'any number of' or something similar. Magic 101.
Also, you really think they would print an instant speed green 2-for-1 removal for 2G that's trivially easy to get full value of in a regular Limited format? That's like printing Ashes to Ashes as an Instant and without the lifeloss at common according to their rarity and color pie policy of recent years.
Infracting a whole bunch of random posts on this page and this one that shows more than anything else why this whole drama even started is fine?
The most ignorant of human beings would realize that when someone posts something like that on a somewhat competitive MtG forum other people have two options: 1) react heavily offended and reply to the person, ultimately resulting in what you would call flaming, or 2) shake their head and stop bothering with this thread and forum given that people can spam tens of thousands of words of garbage without anyone acting. Both of those should not be in your interest. I know there's an ignore button, but when everyone else just c/p's back and forth it does literally nothing.
Issuing a last warning only goes so far. What do you expect to happen now? Well, either the one person who caused all of this miraculously vanishes and we'll live happily ever after, or we keep reading the same pointless discussions until people get tired and you have to lock the thread again.
I'd end my post with the generic 'back on topic' comment but I've really had enough of Tidal Wave and ... you know... *****ting on the whole competitive Magic community in the world by essentially calling them nothing but lucky and such, so if someone could bing up another one that would be much appreciated...
See, this topic really isn't controversial in the slightest. Lab Rats is a total garbage card and Sprout Swarm is one of the strongest cards that has ever been printed with a black symbol. A controversial topic is by definition something that causes public debate. There was never any public debate on Swarm vs Lab Rats, because everyone who has ever played with at least one of them and has some experience and/or a sane mind would know how different they are.
And this is true for every statement you've made on this thread. You bring up utter garbage and defend it with totally uninformed as well as straight up wrong theories, and every time someone has a valid argument against you you play the "don't hate me just because my opinion is different" card.
Friend, you really should try and play a game of Magic first before you join discussions like that.
I'll be the bad guy and tell you that right now everyone who's posting here except you is torn between continually trying to be nice and trying to help you with your questions and requests, which is hard enough given that you have zero experience in this game and zero willingness to second-guess anything you say, and just giving up and being frustrated that this topic has been spammed with useless content for the last 10 pages or so. Literally every one of the hundreds of sentences you've written on the last pages is a testimony of the fact that you have absolutely no clue about how an actual game of Limited Magic with other human beings could play out. Pleas stop wasting our and your own time and come back once you've actually played with the cards you're suggesting.
That if you're evaluating cards on a different basis than anyone else you can't get any informed feedback.
What am I supposed to tell Humphrey (sorry for taking you as an example all the time, your just seems one of the longer lasting non-standard cubes I can think of) if he comes here and asks what his red 2 drop section should look like in his Medieval Cube?
If I evaluate cards with my own power based cube in mind I'd have to tell him to cut all but one (in this case Chainwalker) and play 8 completely different cards.
If I want to evaluate cards based on his own philosophy with that cube I'd have to 1) be interested enough and actually make the effort to ask him exactly what criteria he has for choosing cards and 2) probably scan the whole Gatherer to even get the slightest idea about what cards exist that fit those criteria.
Or I can just tell him I don't know and that he should choose for himself, at which point both his post and my answer were 100% useless.
Is it really that hard to understand what I mean with common ground? I have absolutely nothing against creative cubes. I'd probably have built some myself if I had the time any more, an artifact flavored one comes to mind for instance, or an old school one where only old pre-8th Edition borders are allowed. I would love that stuff, but the last thing I'd do is come to a general cube forum and ask people with completely different cubes for opinions or help. maybe I'd find a soul or two who are doing the same thing, then I could talk to them in PMs or if there's more people open our own thread or something. You have to do research and testing to evaluate cards. We may all have looked through all the existing commons, but if one guy looked only for anything that says the word artifact on the card, another guy looked only for old borders, and the third guy looked only for some medieval flavor, those three people can't really discuss much of anything together.
This is why I think we have to focus on something that is universally applicable, and that is power level. If we discuss the overall 'best' cards, people with different flavored cubes can at least participate and use the info to decide where they want to draw the line, how many slots in each sections they want to dedicate to overall goodness and how many to pure flavor, etc.
I don't think you understand what I meant.
How exactly would anyone comment on a card for a format he has absolutely no experience in and thus zero qualification to have an opinion on? If I ask you whether I should play X or Y in my whatever-themed cube where X and Y are cards you have never seen or heard of before, am I supposed to take anything you say seriously?
The more I read this thread the more I get the feeling that this is just people getting a little hyped for a new format and instead of listening to anything people who have played and tested that format for 10 years say we try to be the innovators by going on the Gatherer real quick and deciding that card X and Y look so interesting that they clearly must make the format better. Our previous experience from some other games that have nothing to do with MtG (at least I would assume so because I haven't heard about them ever before) will surely qualify.
I'm just curious at this point. Have you actually ever played those cards and cubes in question with 8 human beings?
But if you do that and you know that you've come to a forum where people have been testing the entire Gatherer up and down for what must be over 10 years now trying to find the 'better' and 'worse' cards and strategies, you can't be surprised if people disagree with your philosophy. Humphrey doesn't come out here to get feedback on his Medieval cube either. If I make a tree-flavored cube, because I like trees, I also wouldn't come here asking people how good they think Scarwood Treefolk was, expecting positive feedback on a card that is totally irrelevant in terms of power level. If you show up to a Vintage tournament with Gilded Lotus over Black Lotus just because you like gold things, do you really expect people to be open minded and accept your preference instead of turning you into the meme of the day?
The original idea behind cubes was to create a limited environment with the 'best' cards available. Soon people would figure out that 'best' doesn't mean 'most powerful' per se, because things like mana curves, deck archetypes and whatnot work their way into the equation as well, but the goal was always to facilitate the strongest possible decks.
Now, of course it may be true that this original idea has been becoming less prevalent and important over the years, however, keep in mind what the purpose of something like this forum is and how a discussion about a 'format' can only work. We've been using the power level argument for literally everything - every new set spoilers thread, every This or That thread, etc - for the past X years because that's the only common ground we have on which to discuss card choices. What's the purpose if someone opens a topic about the best blue 4-drop and answers range from 'Illusionary Forces, because I like dreadlocks' over 'Ghost Ship, because my Cube is pirate-flavored' to 'I don't run blue cards in my cube cause I'm Republican oxlol'.
Either we dissolve this entire forum and call it 'forum for anyone who has some draftable pile of cards' in which noone can share opinions on anything because there's no common ground, or we try to find the best common ground and accept that anything that is garbage on that common ground will be called garbage by other posters. Well then, if anyone can think of a more suitable common ground than power level, feel free to enlighten us. Till then, I'll be the old fashioned and outdated guy who actually enjoys trying to get the most power out of commons and try to balance the best cards out by making other things more powerful through synergies instead of banning the best cards one after the other until gray ogres bash into bears and squires. If I draft someone else's cube and the decks I'm getting will lose to an average deck from my own cube 75% of the time, I'll take that as a sign that I (in my personal cube philosophy, which is also the original cube philosophy) did a better job than that person and I'd rather draft my own cube again. Pretty sure this phenomenon is also what occurred to Humphrey when he saw say Guardian of the Guildpact alongside a bunch of tier 5 commons in the same pack. I don't fault him for that.
You should've got the memo by now... but common ground is literally everything that matters. Other formats have a common ground too, and anyone who's willing to discuss that format has to accept that common ground or sit down at that kitchen table over there and talk to someone who wants to listen.
Back to the shadows we go.
If you find a way to restore accounts I'd love if you could 'PM me individually' and lmk. Later.
As of what archetypes are viable or T1 or whatever, that's a very old debate that has never found any satisfying answers.
Also, apparently my account along with every single post I ever made was deleted because I was unable to see some alleged popup that was supposed to tell me to accept something because I disable all popups for obvious reasons, so don't expect to hear from me again around here.