May your day or evening be a great one where ever in the world you may live. Lets all try to be kind to one another its always refreshing I think :)
KIMBERLY
TV REALITY MOM
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http://www.tcgunity.net/magic-the-gathering-card-evaluation-is-tricky-how-to-avoid-scrub-bait/
March 8, 2016
Magic The Gathering, Trading Card Games
One of the key selling points of Magic: The Gathering is that there’s a huge pool of cards to choose from to build a deck, and a wide variety of strategies to attempt. OK, you knew that. But with this great liberty and creative freedom, this power comes with a great responsibility (and not just for Spiderman). That lies in picking the cards and deciding what to run.
It’s a notorious stumbling block for new players. There are certain cards that come out in a set, which often get denigrated as “scrub bait.” These are cards which look really good at first glance. But in practice, their play value turns out to be disappointing. It’s a tribute to WotC that they can do this; it shows how deep a game is when you can’t tell how good a card will be until you’ve tested it.
So, let’s look at some scrub bait. This will be a practice test for the new to intermediate player. Before we move on to the verdict, take a glance at the card and try to imagine if it’s workable and why or why not. We’ll also be ranking these cards in the context of Modern format, since other formats may have more leeway for what qualifies as playable.
Soul Tithe
In theory: It appears to be a Death & Taxes type card. It makes you pay for the permanent in order to not sacrifice it. For two mana, being able to tax ANY nonland permanent on the board appears to be a pretty decent deal. It’s one mana less than Oblivion Ring (which also exiles any nonland permanent), after all, which is a staple.
In practice: Opponents will either cheerfully sacrifice the permanent if it’s not important to their strategy, or cheerfully pay the “echo” cost and go on using it anyway. The worse the permanent is for you, the more the opponent will be willing to pay to keep it around. To say nothing of the same enchantment hate that would fix the problem anyway.
Verdict: It’s not just worse than Oblivion Ring, it’s many times worse. For two mana, white has a ton of other removal and hate for every strategy. While I do have a soft spot for cards that encourage my opponent to make bad strategy decisions, and this card is OK in a casual setting, it’s just too situational. Even if it were a common, it would be questionable in Pauper format.
Castigate
In theory: Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek are both well-played cards across formats. Both of them have a downside: paying two life or restricting the mana cost of the chosen card. For just one mana more, this lets you exile any card out of their hand! In addition, Tidehollow Sculler is also a well-played card, and for the same mana it gives you a 2/2 bear, but the opponent gets the exiled card back as soon as Sculler dies. This gives you a guaranteed exile of the card – it’s gone forever before your opponent ever got to play it! That has to be good, right?
In practice: For a hand disruption effect, two mana isn’t just one mana more than one mana. Two mana is about a million mana more than one mana for hand disruption. It’s worth it – barely! – if you get a 2/2 bear to beat them with until they draw removal, since they have to trade removal to kill Sculler and get their preferred card back. But two mana, in two colors yet, just to trade one-to-one cards with nothing to show for it is a huge tempo loss.
Verdict: Too slow! Even in Pauper format, two mana hand disruption such as this and Distress never see play. The point with one-mana hand disruption is that you can play it turn one, which means if you’re on the play you get to edit their hand before they even got a chance to use it. Two mana for any hand disruption effect is too much, unless you get a bear with it. This is one of those cases where the card seems good in a vacuum, but in the metagame, there’s just too many alternatives that are better.
Lone Revenant
In theory: This is obviously a control-deck finisher. He wants to be the only creature, and he’s hexproof. Whenever he connects, he casts a free Impulse! Once he gets rolling, he’s unstoppable!
In practice: Combat veterans will quickly point out the problem with this card: It has no evasion. Aetherling, another popular control-deck finisher, has a way to make himself unblockable, so it has evasion. Dragonlord Ojutai, which made control decks a thing in Standard recently, also has flying, which is also evasion, so even at less hexproof and only casting a free Anticipate instead, it works better.
Verdict: Whenever a creature needs to deal combat damage in order to be good and it has no evasion, it’s gonna hurt. Without connecting, it’s just a 5 mana 4/4 hexproof, which puts it more in the class with Conifer Strider. True, in a control deck you should be able to ensure that your opponent has nothing to block with. But this guy is a catch-22: If your control deck is working well enough that your opponent’s mat is clear, then you’re already ahead and can win with a Grizzly Bears. If you’re behind, this guy doesn’t help you catch up. The added clause that he only works when he’s your only creature makes him too much of a build-around black hole. Many frustrated brewers have latched onto this budget card and tried to build a working deck around him, only to be defeated by his being not worth it most of the time. Consider also that his evasive cousin, Dragonlord Ojutai, sees no eternal format play beyond EDH.
Spite of Mogis
In theory: It can do a lot of damage for one mana. We play a lot of burn in red, so having a graveyard full of instants and sorceries is something that happens quite often. Oh, and it has scry one.
In practice: Sorcery speed instead of instant. Situational burn damage. Only hits creatures. Scry one is cheap, we get it on land.
Verdict: About a million times more terrible than most other one-mana spells in red. If only it added those two magic words “or player” to its effect, this card would be marginally better, since you could zap away with bolts and then finish with this. But as it stands, Flame Slash deals enough damage to creatures at the same mana to be enough in most cases. The situation where this card is better than Flame Slash is when you have to kill a creature with toughness 5 or higher, and you have five or more instants and sorceries in the bin. That’s about 0.00001% of the time, and Flame Slash barely sees play in any format as it is.
Turn to Frog
In theory: Mono blue is short of non-bounce removal. This is a sweet combat trick for defensive blocking or turning what would have been a devastating opponent’s block into removal, as long as you attacked with anything bigger than a 1/1.
In practice: The situations where this is a good card are just too few. Add to that that the opponent might have an answer to it, such as any pump effect, and the card gets negated and you lost your creature anyway.
Verdict: This is right on that edge of almost being playable. But for a two mana instant, blue’s bounce spells are just so much better. Vapor Snag gets played over this. Nevertheless, it’s one card where the fun value almost tempts you into running it as a one-of.
Skaab Ruinator
In theory: A FLYING 5/6 for three mana? Are you kidding me? AND it can be cast from your graveyard? Come on, exiling three creatures from your graveyard is peanuts – Gurmag Angler sees play, and it makes you delve to cast it, it’s smaller, it doesn’t have flying, and it can’t be cast from the yard!
In practice: Try it! It turns out that being picky about what cards to exile from the graveyard really hurts.
Verdict: While this card isn’t hard to build around and pays a handsome reward, it’s a glass cannon strategy. There’s too many things that can go wrong with it: Your opponent’s graveyard hate hurts it, whatever mill plan you were using may backfire, and there’s no way to save it. Gurmag Angler is more flexible; you could even hard cast it for full mana if you just had to. While Skaab Ruinator has seen fringe play in a few Dredgevine decks, and it’s arguable that you could make it work with something like Tasigur, the Golden Fang, its balance between upside and downside make it a risky card at best.
Demon of Death’s Gate
In theory: Hey, we were just talking about Big Kahuna guys with alternate casting costs! Paying six life and sacrificing three creatures isn’t too bad if you’re running tokens or Bloodghast or something. And unlike Ruinator, you can still hard cast this if you had to, so this has to be better, right?
In practice: You’d be right except for one thing: This format has removal.
Verdict: While anybody who goes around saying “it dies to removal” is on my short list for people to tar and feather, this time it’s too much of a factor. If you paid six life and sacrificed three creatures to get this guy out and it then got hit with Path to Exile, you are now in a world of pain. Nine mana to hard-cast it is unthinkable in any format but EDH, too. And if you’re talking reanimator with something like Unburial Rites, you have better options. However, kudos for being one of the most flavorful of demons ever printed. Playing this guy really feels like a contract with Old Scratch!
Waste Not
In theory: This is the latest of hype cards. Like #OccupyWallStreet, this card is a populist issue which will draw scores of Liberal Arts major students with infected piercings to rave and flame at you whenever it gets mentioned, thanks to the fact that it was a crowd-source designed card through the final “You Make the Card” contest. There are numerous current attempts to make it work in 8Rack decks.
In practice: It does nothing by itself. It’s worthless late game, when your opponent’s hand is empty. Best case scenario, it starts activating on turn three, since most discard effects are at sorcery speed and take mana to cast, and then it will only keep working about three to five times before again becoming useless. Unlike Shrieking Affliction, it doesn’t do anything once your opponent’s hand is empty. Finally, the payoff is just too weak – 2/2 zombies aren’t good enough when it takes so much work to make them, two mana is useless when you have nothing to spend it on, and the draw is worthless because you had to spend a card and mana to trigger it.
Verdict: The hype train for this card has been a hilarious spectacle. It has proven to be the single best argument for why direct democracy doesn’t work. This card sucks, and it’s also king of all scrub bait because scrubs designed it. Already, I have enraged a whole crowd of Waste Not fans who will be happy to provide the rest of us with some amusement in the comments section. BRING IT ON, HIPPIES!
So, this concludes our little tour of card evaluation. Take away: It’s hard. I, myself, bought into some of these cards earlier on because they were dirt-cheap anyway, only to test them and find out why. So if you think these cards are underrated, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger (oops, I mean Revenant).
But also remember, as per the advice of my last article, that what cards you run don’t matter as much as your match-ups, format savvy, and plain dumb luck. So you could still argue any one of these cards wouldn’t do too much damage as a one-of in an otherwise strong competitive deck. And if you’re the next Travis Woo, keep on brewing that jank anyway!
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