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Oh wow, I've been wanting to write that post for a while, and I still feel it's missing something. Any recommendations on what to add/change? Bear in mind it was written at 1am so it could be more lucid.
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Mar 25, 2015 15:53
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"Dies to removal" is a good argument for some stuff, but terrible for others. The way I see it, in deckbuilding, the question is "Do I want to trade this guy for a piece of removal, in general?" Obviously, you aren't going to be playing cards JUST to draw removal, but there's value in having a card that says "Remove me, or I do stuff" and at the same time not having that card be your 'goal' card. In the current Standard for example, a Rabblemaster can win a game by himself, but Bill Polukranopoulos is a potent 4-drop, so even if Rabbles dies, that's one less Downfall that can hit my big guy. VV: The plural of "Keranos", presuming Greek roots, would be "Keranoi". 
Serperoth fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 16:38
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Attorney at Funk posted:Yeah, while I think a lot of people use "strictly better" to mean "better, but also you should think I'm smart", the phrase still has descriptive power if you don't get bogged down in pedantry. That's why I made the post, to have a reference for "yes this is STRICTLY better"/"This is what STRICTLY BETTER means". Glad people are liking it.  Elyv posted:Thing is, price told you whether a card is good, not why. This thread is supposed to be more about the why, I think. Price is good and all, but there's other factors in the price. Candelabra is triple digits, and I don't think it's used anywhere other than High Tide (correct me if I'm wrong though, I didn't look into it). Synergy is basically card evaluation outside a vacuum. Yes, Cursecatcher is not as good (strictly speaking) than Judge's Familiar, but one of them is a Merfolk, and synergizes with other Merfolk in the Merfolk deck.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:12
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Zoness posted:These cover a lot but they are all angles to look at, I mean it's like why siege rhino is good vs why some other fattie i can't think of (let's say butcher of the horde people love that guy for no good reason) is unplayable. Also why PLA/Aetherling own. IMO, PLA/Aetherling are inefficient (mana-wise) because it makes up for their evasiveness. Rhino is on a similar axis, but it isn't evasive at all (besides having a big butt), so he's very efficient. black potus posted:yeah if someone wants to post a finance thread go for it but i'd rather talk about why cards are good than why cards cost money 
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Mar 25, 2015 17:41
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Attorney at Funk posted:They had to essentially print nonbasic land hosers in the same way that they had to print Rest in Peace. They printed nonbasic hate because Ken Nagle hates fun?  Joke aside, evaluation in a metagame is more important than strict "better" or "worse", for deckbuilding. Meddling Mage doesn't factor into that, since it affects all spells regardless of which one you're carrying. At the same time, a prevalence of 3-toughness dudes in the metagame does make an argument in favour of Searing Spear rather than Shock. Death Bot posted:Also yeah Meddling Mage or any other card naming [cardname] is the dumbest poo poo, and on par with "Eldrazi are strictly better than every other creature just in case my opponent is trying to mill me out" See, there's an argument. If you're making a deck for a metagame, and it requires any random CMC 10+ fatty for whatever reason. Maybe a spell that says "Does 2X damage to the opponent where X is the fatty's CMC" or whatever. In that case you can say "Emrakul is better than Draco FOR THIS DECK, because it protects me from being milled, and this metagame is mill-filled"
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Mar 25, 2015 19:47
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Sigma-X posted:I actually disagree than 1CC is easier to cast than 1CD - in any multicolor deck supporting CD(EFG) deck the 1CD deck is usually easier to cast than the 1CC because it allows you to properly diversify your mana over the first few turns. That's a pretty fair argument, a good point in how deckbuilding and play mesh together. I was thinking more along the lines that the fewer colours in the deck, the harder it is to get manascrewed.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:57
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Irony Be My Shield posted:You can't call 1CC strictly better than 1CD at all though. In a situation where you only have one C available the second one is better, and that's not be any stretch of the imagination an unreasonable scenario. Yeah, that was narrow-minded of me. I was thinking along the lines of how going beyond one color is a deckbuilding cost, even though it's negligible in current times.
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Mar 25, 2015 22:27
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Irony Be My Shield posted:You can say "Judge's Familiar is strictly better than Curse Catcher, barring tribal synergies" and that would be helpful for someone considering including a Curse Catcher in a non-tribal deck. If they are building a merfolk deck then they know to ignore it. Yeah, "strictly better" is pretty narrow, and Cursecatcher/Familiar is a good example of why it isn't always true. But it still provides a good basis for a comparison of cards that do a similar thing. I feel that evaluation is more geared towards deckbuilding rather than the actual play, since play is reactive (with the exception of VERY few decks that just do their combo thing, you care about the board in some manner), whereas deckbuilding is proactive. Yeah, there are times where the opponent is at one life, but has ground blockers and no Islands, so your Merfolk army is useless, whereas a Familiar would be able to just fly over and steal victory, but that doesn't mean that Familiar is generally evaluated equally to Cursecatcher in that deck. And besides, in play you either have no choice over what you draw, making the "which one would you rather draw" argument go back to deckbuilding, or you DO have choice, and therefore can choose the best according to the circumstances. Barring stuff like Bribery, your control over what you draw goes back to what you included in your deck, and how many. Basically, what I'm saying is that, to me, card eval is much more about deckbuilding than playing (although playtesting/playing will, of course, influence stuff). It's theory, of sorts, whereas playing is practice.
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Mar 28, 2015 00:29
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I mean to go back to the original post that ignited this you could say "They won't print lands that are strictly better than basics (barring the fact that they are vulnerable to non-basic hate)". That would be fair, I don't think they're prepared to reprint the super strong nonbasic hate that would be required to make them worse than basics in realistic situations. It's pretty late here, but most (if not all) of the recent non-basics I can think of come with drawbacks. Painlands/Mana Confluence come with pain, Temples and Trilands ETB tapped, same as the lifegain duals from KTK and the Gates, Fetches ping you when you use them, Innistrad Checklands don't always come down untapped... Even besides the hate, it's still an actual choice whether to include them or not. That's not the case with, say, the OG Duals, since they were strictly better (besides the 4-of limit, obviously). Why just make U when I can make U/R? Hate does change the question, making it a metagame call as well, especially since most prominent land destruction (Tec Edge, Wasteland) is tuned to kill nonbasics, as well as the prominence of cards that reward you for playing basics (Ghost Quarter, Path to Exile). They're still generally better, sure, but there are good meta-related (as opposed to "I'm playing Hatebears/High Tide/Burn") reasons why you'd prefer basics over them.
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Mar 28, 2015 00:50
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Death Bot posted:draft Death Bot posted:Wheres your strictly better now nerds In Constructed, which is what we're talking about. 
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Mar 29, 2015 20:10
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Bubbling Muck is strictly worse than High Tide because it is a Sorcery and not an Instant. Although I imagine it has some appeal, they're similarly fetchable, and black can do good stuff with mana as well.
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Apr 6, 2015 12:09
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Wilds and Expanse also put the land in play tapped (unless my memory is faulty no Oracle access right now) so it isn't a "fair" comparison. A red green sligh ish deck doesn't want to lose tempo by waiting a turn for its drop, but a higher curving one doesn't care as much, and might also run ramp as well. Things get more complex in decks with more colours, and formats with duals/shocks of course
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Apr 9, 2015 23:01
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LordSaturn posted:Attempting to carry this out of the Eternal thread, where it was causing problems: That's a pretty good impression. Bolded the most important parts for emphasis. Now, of course, in actual play, there will be times when you'll have dead cards. A match where you mull to a crap hand and draw nothing but lands or something, that's a statistically possible thing. But, in deckbuilding, Burn isn't the kind of deck that wants to have plans for dead cards. It's why Burn runs Lava Spike instead of Flame Slash, for example. That said, I feel that randomness is what breaks Sonic Seizure. If Sonic Seizure's additional cost was "discard a card", it would be a reasonable card, comparable to Shard Volley or Collateral Damage. Unless you have just Sonic Seizure and a dead card in hand (which means you've cast all your live stuff), it's a coin toss at best. And if you do get that best-case scenario, why Seizure and not a card that's live more often? ) would be an acceptable substitute most of the time, I'd say.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:19
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Emerson Cod posted:I did mention them both originally, but considering how many other bolt effects are out there, I dropped Sonic Seizure from the discussion. Burn's game-plan is basically "It doesn't matter if I'm on an empty hand and board and at 1 life, if my opponent is at 0, I win". Considering you start with 20 life, and most of your stuff does more damage to the opponent than to you, card economy is more important than life economy. Not to say that survival is bad, and I'm sure that if there was a Flame Rift without a drawback, Burn would be playing it, just saying that the answer to "Is 6 life worth a card?" is pretty much "Apparently yes"
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Apr 14, 2015 21:15
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Kraus posted:Before anyone says "Tyrant's Choice", that does have a drawback: It opens you up to Wasteland. Yeah, needing to add a second colour of mana is a drawback in that deck. If the deck were to generally shift into RB for example, then Tyrant's Choice would have much less of a deckbuilding drawback (since they'd already be running black mana, not just for Tyrant's Choice)
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Apr 15, 2015 15:18
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I wanted to write a post about lands, but it was coming off terrible.  Anyone have any ideas?
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Jun 9, 2015 13:09
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LordSaturn posted:Lands.dec? Or just land cards in general? Lands and basic lands, not lands.dec in that regard. I was going to start with Wizards's statement that they weren't gonna print lands that are strictly better than basics. I had some ideas last night, but not much is coming.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:05
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LordSaturn posted:Once ever did we get a direct upgrade over basic lands - the original dual lands. Those still completely dominate every format they're legal in, hate or no hate, because they make it trivial to go to two colors. With fetchlands, they make it trivial to add a third color as well. Yeah. Actually, I can just do a writeup of the various types I guess? Comparing each to the basics?
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Jun 9, 2015 16:23
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The Eagle Has Landed So, LANDS! Wizards has gone out on record saying that they're unwilling to print lands which are  strictly better than basics. But, obviously, we can't live on basics alone. So why not run down the various non-basics that exist.The rule is, basically, mana. I won't be talking about Tabernacle or Dark Depths, since their primary function isn't mana. Basics have the inherent advantage of being basic, so you can have as many of them, which will be ignored (for obvious reasons), and once again we'll just talk deckbuilding in a vacuum (no Wasteland etc) Basics      Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest. We all know and love them. Art is important, but not a part of their evaluation. Original Duals  Take one basic land type, add another basic land type, here you go. Strictly better than the basics, there's basically ( ) no circumstance when you'll have the option of a dual and not want it, it does what a basic can AND MORE.Sac Lands (Fallen Empires)  "[This] comes into play tapped. T: Add C to your mana pool. T, sacrifice [this]: Add CC to your mana pool." I was going to say that they were probably good for their time, but Fallen Empires had High Tide so... Not even that I guess? Entering tapped is the biggest bummer, but if they didn't, they'd be strictly better than basics. Storage Lands (Fallen Empires)  I can't imagine playing this, other than joke formats. There's better lands that do this kind of thing, and they're just so clunky. Depletion Lands (Ice Age, also done in an almost identical manner in Tempest and Champions of Kamigawa)  A huge disadvantage, but at least you can use them immediately. And then not use them the next turn.  Cool art though.Pain Lands (Ice Age had the Allied ones, Apocalypse had the enemy ones)  Now we're talking. Nice, simple, and they don't even hurt you if you want some colourless mana. Very solid, and a clean design. Triple Lands (Homelands)  Homelands. I can't imagine a reason to play them. Aysen Abbey kinda reminds me of the hotel I stayed in my first Judge Conference. Fetch Lands (Mirage. The bad ones)  Just like the fetches we know and love, but they come down tapped. Strictly worse than fetches. Karoo Lands (Visions. Technically the bad ones, the cycle was re-done in Ravnica Block)   Grand-daddies of the Ravnica Karoos, they're similarly good. Mono-coloured, making them worse than the Ravnica ones, and they only produce 1C rather than CC or something, but playable. Tap-Pain Lands (Tempest)  Strictly worse than the Ice Age/Apocalypse ones. Not much more to say. Some cool art, especially Salt Flats and Caldera Lake. Cycling Lands (Urza's Saga)   Come tapped, tap for 1 mana of their colour, you can cycle them. Soild, but un-inspiring. Again, the ETBT effect makes them an actual choice over basics, rather than the pure-upside that would be Cycling (a Good Mechanic). Manlands (Urza's Legacy, and Worldwake)  The inspiration for Splatoon. They are lands, they turn into mans. They are still solid, most notably Treetop Village. Worldwake had them able to produce more than one colour. Still good, especially Celestial Colonnade. Serperoth fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jun 11, 2015 |
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Jun 11, 2015 10:23
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Onmi posted:You did not mention the worst lands of all. The Homelands Lands I completely missed that, I was going set-by-set and missed the tri-lands. They are terrible, like you said.
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Jun 11, 2015 12:36
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LordSaturn posted:That was a fun overview, but it kind of lacks in evaluation. I think the historical, overarching theme of mana-producing lands is that tempo = life. In nearly every case, if a land would be strictly better than a basic for a player who has infinite life, that land gets played. Lands whose drawback is tapping still get played, but only if they have other abilities, or if the tapping is conditional. Shocklands have the neat effect of being either type, depending on the situation. Yeah, and I'm not even done, I mostly posted it to get some talk going, see what lands there are, and how differently lands are evaluated compared to spells. And to revive the thread. VV: I'm going chronologically. 
Serperoth fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jun 11, 2015 |
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Jun 11, 2015 15:36
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Might as well continue. Depletion Lands (Mercadian Masques)  Surprisingly for Masques, actually... tolerable? There's a limited amount of uses, but we've seen worse. And it adds CC, so there's combo potential. Storage Lands (Mercadian Masques)  And we're back to bad. Nielsen, Guay AND Cavotta art though, so I can't hate it. Sac Lands (Invasion)  Interesting, to say the least. ETBT and tapping for just one colour isn't optimal, but it's a good design. Taplands (Invasion)  Come tapped, tap for one of two allied colours. Don't seem too good in 2015, but the same drawback has proven playable in trilands. Lairs (Planeshift)  Definitely solid I'd say. No mana advantage like the Karoos, but it's a triland that comes down untapped. And the land you return doesn't need to be untapped. Sac Lands (Odyssey)  Tap for one, or sac for any. An interesting comparison with the Invasion Sac Lands, but not as good nowadays. Filter Lands (Odyssey)  Put 1 in, CD comes out. Pretty nice cards, much like the later Ravnica Signets, and they're free. Don't even enter tapped. Tainted Lands (Torment)  Finish the cycle, Wizards. Yeah these are pretty situational, but I like them a lot. Another interesting comparison, this time with the (later) checklands. Fetch Lands (Onslaught and later Zendikar, the good ones)  We know them, we love them, they're expensive. The original intent was, presumably, to have a card that could be either of the two lands, but the choice was final. Interact very well with basic-typed duals (DUH) Artifact Lands (Mirrodin)  Play these, play Affinity. They are good. Shock Lands (Ravnica Block)  OG Duals, with the types and all, but if you don't get shocked, they come down tapped. Strictly worse than the originals, but still great. If you don't have a spell that turn, you can just not pay. Strictly better than plain taplands too. Snow Taplands (Coldsnap)  Taplands... WITH SNOW. Please, contain your excitement. Worse than shocks, unless you have a reason to play Snow stuff. Storage Lands (Time Spiral)  Still storage lands. Still not very good. Calciform Pools hasn't been reprinted for some reason. Adding counters costs mana as well so that's sloooooooow. Filter Lands (Started in Future Sight, completed in Shadowmoor/Eventide)  Much like the older ones, only more versatile Drawback is that they need one of THEIR colours, not just colourless. The rest of this Future Sight cycle will be talked about later (since they haven't each gotten a cycle) Vivid Lands (Lorwyn)  Similar to depletion lands, only these ones can always make 'their' colour, and just have limited uses of their any colour. Slow, but potent. Panoramas (Shards of Alara)  Sorta-fetches, but not particularly good. At least they can produce a colourless on their own, but costing 1 to sac isn't particularly good. [bTrilands[/b] (Shards of Alara, cycle completed in Khans of Tarkir)  They come down tapped, and tap for one of three colours. Strictly better than taplands in general, and pretty solid fixing, if not particularly exciting. Check Lands (Magic 2010, cycle finished in Innistrad)  Taplands, unless you have one of their types in, then they just come in. Definitely good, and once more, better than taplands. Amusing to see that taplands are good, but there are so many variants on them. Refuge Lands (Zendikar, cycle completed in Khans of Tarkir)  Taplands that gain you a life when they come down. Again, strictly better than taplands. Uninspiring, but draft necessities apparently. Fastlands (Scars of Mirrodin)  If you play them without many lands, they come down untapped. Good if your curve is low, or are playing a land-light strategy for other reasons. Combo with Orcish Lumberjack. (someone do this in Cube please)Gates (Return to Ravnica Block)  Taplands, with a type of their own, that had some minor play in the set. Fun for their deck, pretty much draft fixing otherwise. Scrylands (Theros Block)  Taplands that scry 1 when they come down. Not very fast, but more than decent, good card fixing, good mana fixing. And that's about it. How many cycles did I miss? Serperoth fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 11, 2015 |
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Jun 11, 2015 17:28
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Elyv posted:At the very least you're missing the legendary cycle from Legends(Tolaria, Urborg, Hammerheim, Karakas, whatever the green one was), and champions(Eiganjo, Minamo, Shizo, Shinka, Okina) Those two are mostly for their secondary abilities, rather than any kind of fixing. And yeah, you're right about the cycling lands. Might as well just move the Sandbar picture, thanks.
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Jun 11, 2015 18:00
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Zoness posted:Also ravnica guild halls although only Vitu-Ghazi was really playable (unless we're not counting utility land cycles) We're not. The cycles I posted are basically "This is a mana land", with my main criteria being "does this tap for mana?" and "are all parts of this cycle changed just in colour?" All the manlands, for example, which are the most fringe example, tap for mana and they all do the same thing, with different numbers/types/abilities. And I need to do the Future Sight "could be part of a cycle" ones (Grove of the Burnwillows etc). Hideaway was close for me, but opted not to, due to the different conditions for each.
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Jun 11, 2015 18:33
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