Almost every time I see Thragtusk across the board I pretty much have to spend two cards to take him out. Every time I play him I feel like I've taken a big lead.
The complaint is what I said in my previous post: he's always a 2for1 in this format. Countering is the only 1for1, and that is skirted around entirely with Cavern of Souls. There's almost nothing that stops Thrag in its tracks. Rakdos Keyrune, Tamiyo? That's about it and those are hardly hard-counters.
"Leaves play" instead of "dies" is my complaint. It's an overpowered clause on a card that does too much for its very lenient cost.
Zombies are a lot of fun in pauper. I am surprised they have not made a bit more of a splash, but always feel one powerful card away from becoming a tiered deck. Have you considered nameless inversion? With it counting as a zombie can be very good to be able to get it back. This is my Zombie list, but it is a bite different as focused on winning wars of attrition through a lot of 2 for 1's instead of bringing the life total down to 0 fast.
It is definitely a strong card but Format warping? Are we playing the same game? I mean sure planning on how to deal with Thragtusk is a good thing but if you deck has any merit it shouldn't be only worried about that. I think you and I come from such disproportionately different points of view on this though. I really just don't see the complaint.
Yeah I'm trying to qualify on drafts right now and it is tough. I'm at 8 atm, so I'm on a decent pace. I'm thinking about doing some pauper to get a point or two, but my pauper discard deck seems to have fallen out of the metagame from what I've seen.
-Lifegain is hard to work around. It forces you to play a stronger deck. This means that rogue builds are less successful than they have been in times past.
-His mana cost is easily to manage. You only need one colored mana, instead of two or three.
-He leaves creatures behind when he dies.
For five mana, this is what you get:
+5 life
+A 5/3 creature
+A 3/3 creature
To me, Thragtusk feels like one of the cards from Zendikar that was a very poor design. You either play Thrag or you play to beat him. He has warped standard to a very disproportionate degree, and that is not a good thing. People might complain about control, but, for me, what I never liked was that control warped the format. If we're going to have non-blue cards do the same thing...well, what's the point?
Nothing aside from Detention Sphere, and Oblivion Ring?
Realized that it says "leaves" not "dies." Yet I have never felt like Thragtusk was unbeatable on the other side of the board and have won vs him and his friends many times. And when he has been on my own side I've never felt my odds of winning were overwhelming just because of him.
Also via the Prices comment: When so many cards are high priced this does indicate an overall balance no? No one deck has dominated afaik. Certainly nothing with Thragtusk.
On another note:
So if the format isn't stale what IS the complaint?
No, and honestly I don't think I'll ever qualify with drafts. I need 15 in a month and you only get 1 for going 3-0 in drafts. I'd have to grind a constructed format to get in like I did with pauper before, but that's no fun for me.
My problem with Thragtusk is there's no removal out there that trades for it 1for1. The only way you go 1for1 (ignoring the 5 lifegain) with Thragtusk is to counter it, but Cavern of Souls nulls that option. There's no effective option against it. If it simply made a token when it DIED it wouldn't be OP. Heck, if they introduced a removal 1for1'd it then it would be fine. But they haven't.
I can't really think of any other "OP" cards in Standard. Maybe Restoration Angel? None really compare though.
Also, I wouldn't call the format stale. Far from it. BR Aggro, Bant Control, America Control, GW Aggro, Jund Midrange, UW Flash, Rites decks, all these are making the top 8's, and we're still seeing new lists come up like 4color Humans, it's great.
As for price.. who the heck knows? Why has Bonfire of the Damned been sitting at over 30tix when it hasn't been making much of a showing in top decks for MONTHS? I just don't know. But a card's price isn't always indicative of how OP it is.
I love Thragtusk. I really don't get all the hate directed at his wooly rear end. Listen up! It isn't one card that defines a format. There are PLENTY of OP cards in print in standard right now (If not why are so many cards so damned PRICY???). People are just sheep and don't want to work at the game. If the format feels stale it is the PLAYERS who are at fault imho. I have plenty of fun concocting brews that attack the format from different angles. Granted I am no pro but I have my fair share of wins.
I really don't think it is fair to heap all this negativity on one excellent card. Viva la Beasts!
Hmm yeah Knightly Valor I'd value a little higher since it gives you a bit more flexibility, but I guess in power-level they're roughly equal. I'm not sure about your evaluation of Wayfaring Temple. I agree with you it's usually not first pick (especially in your pack), but I think it has some merit in that it puts you in arguably the best guild and can make an impact at any point of the game. But I do think it was the worst of the 3 mentioned cards.
But like I said, nice draft. Have you qualified for the MOCS this season yet?
I agree, WOTC is getting better but at the same time they make terrible mistakes that I just can't understand.
Thragtusk should never have been made. WOTC themselves said they want a break from Titans in Standard, yet Thragtusk is pretty much the same thing, a creature that will always 2for1 no matter what. And this is no Delver of Secrets, the card is so straightforward that no one should be shocked it's as vital to decks as it currently is. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway, because they reeeeeally wanted a hard answer to the old UW Delver decks and didn't have the foresight to realize that deck would no longer function a few months later with the exodus of phyrexian cantrips and ponder. It's just dumb.
The last time we had an interesting standard was when they pushed the power level in Shards of Alara block. Many people inaccurately remember this only as the era of jund, but there were a whole host of powerful cards in every color and all shards were playable, although esper (and blue in general during the reign of the elf) was a bit weak.
Some of the available cards during alara standard for those of you who don't remember,
Path to Exile
Knight of the Reliquary
Jund - the Deck
Lightning Bolt (m10/11)
Noble Hierarch
Cruel Ultimatum
Elspeth, Knight Errant
Maelstrom Pulse
A little something for everyone, and with the exception of Cruel Ultimatum and BloodBraid Elf all of these cards were/are LEGACY staples.
Yeah Jund was a bit too good, but generally speaking I think you are best off making strong, powerful cards across multiple colors and letting everyone get something powerful.
Current standard is pretty boring, since you basically have Revelation and Thragtusk as the two defining cards of the format, and everyone trying to play cards that go under or over them.
I know I'll do Dark Depths at some point, because that's one of the rare Spike/Timmy combos in existence. I believe what stopped people to do it is that you only own Dark Depths if you already played that deck at some point in the past (and possibly, you sold them when you stopped playing it, they were quite expensive until recently). So in order to play DarkDepths.dek you should bother buying a playset of a card that does nothing by itself and you'll never play elsewhere, and realistically you can't expect to play it every week in TribAp. It might be worth the investment if it will end unbanned in Modern at some point, because that would easily mean netting 40-50 tix out of it. (I just sold my barely used playset of Scapeshift for 64 tix. I had bought them while Valakut was banned for 0.5 each. God, I love this market.)
I built a Vampire Omniscience deck recently, because that's one of the best tribes for sacrificing Academy Rector, but it was more of a theoretical exercise than something I'll actually play, I think. Like a good 80% of everything I build. :)
Btw, romellos' deck lacks a few cards that I would definitely add to help turning Drana into the massive removal factory that she is. Namely Cabal Coffers, Nirkana Revenant (who was in-tribe!), Caged Sun, and maybe even Magus of the Coffers.
On the plus side, that was the only deck where Vampiric Tutor felt flavorful and not just a staple. :)
:)
Not to mention, you won some tix with it. That's a good loot for Trollface Von Useless. Still, Sisay will never go out with him. Tell him to stop texting her.
WotC's efforts to appeal to the casual crowd are horribly misplaced, since the kitchen table players can make any house rules they like to discourage or forbid things they don't view as fun. Those folks buy a pack here, a pack there, but it's the competitive players who are regularly playing tournaments and drafting every week who really drive sales. And the more homogenized the standard environment gets, the less depth there is to the game to drive people to explore competitive constructed. It almost seems that they are making draft for the Spikes with some interesting Johnny fringe archetypes, and standard exclusively for the Timmies.
They talk about how some big dragon or angel that poor little 13-year-old Billy thinks should be powerful because it looks badass needs to actually BE a good card, so Billy doesn't feel bad at FNM if his Dragon turns out to be unplayable. They have been spelling that out in articles on DailyMTG for awhile now, very clearly.
I remember playing the Decipher Star Trek game that came out in '94, and there was a concerted effort by the developers (through Decipher's legendarily powerful "magic bullet" style hoser cards) to strip away all strategies from the game that did not involve rather vanilla mission-solving game play. There ended up being several flavors of exactly the same deck: would you like your generic mission-solving deck to come in Cardassian or Klingon? That's what is happening to Standard in MTG right now.
The way MTGO designs nowadays, that would never happen Cow. Their mandate is pretty simple: The casual crowd makes up the vast majority of the game, and so they design for it. Those people do not appreciate permission or finesse at all. And that's working - at least on the ledger sheet.
With that in mind, I think R&D still does a fantastic job under that mandate of creating sets. My sole beef being that the current lasting focusing on paint-by-numbers deck construction that comes with over key-wording every set I feel plays down too much the thrill that comes with looking for interactions, as opposed to having them spelled out for you. Even then, the vast majority of the time, the keyworded decks often aren't that powerful, which at least leaves room for construction tactics.
Although there are technically lots more decks in standard today than there were back in the old days, 80% of those standard decks are basically different versions of the same deck. They all seek to do more or less the exact same thing: play some creatures and removal and cast something big around turn 6 or so. That is not terribly interesting and I think decks have lost a lot of their identity because of it.
Back in the old days the test of a good player versus a newbie was when you asked them "what does your deck do?". If they could not answer that question in a couple of words, they were probably bad players. Now very few of the current std. decks could answer that question. None of them really DO anything other than durdle around, stay alive, and hope to land a big unanswered threat. They all have slightly-different ways of accomplishing that goal, but they are at their core the same deck. Heck, base-green decks are playing 7-mana triple-white angels for cripes sake. 7-mana angels used to be Timmy cards, not high-end competitive threats.
The death of permission and land destruction has taken a lot of the finesse out of deck building. There is no tension in designing a deck. If no one is going to be able to do much of anything to stop you...why not just cram all the best high-cost high-powered mythics into your deck? That, to me at least, is not interesting. There should be choices in standard other than turning creatures sideways.
To be fair, WotC has done a much better job today than they had done there for a while. The Madness-Affinity days were much worse than our current state of affairs, and there is nothing completely necropotence-level broken going on in std., but we still have a long way to go before we can declare victory.
Speaking of the vampire tribe as a combo-enabler, if there's one thing I can say in favor of the ludicrous volume of one-mana white exilers in this event, it's that StP/PtE certainly have kept Hexmage/Depths from becoming a thing around these parts.
That Dark Rit into Buried Alive into Bloodghasts play actually NETS you a card, amazingly. So that passes my "would I be willing to Dark Rit this" test. Bloodghast has so much potential and so many super sweet synergies. I've played around with Intuition for Bloodghasts before, and I've tried to make Bloodghasts work with Standstill and Nether Void, most of those seemed like better ideas in my head than they turned out to be.
I've hunted for a way to run Vengevines in this event for awhile, it was one of my two or three favorite cards from that whole Standard season and just doesn't seem to have a home, what would think of something like buried alive for Vengevines along with some other self-mill and the unearth elementals? Only prob would be triggering the Vines, since Unearth won't count as "cast".
I've been playing around with Standard quite a lot recently and have found it enjoyable. There are a lot of decks and creativity going around which is fun.
The Control decks of Magic past were pretty oppressive but I still like Control decks to exist. Creatures may be more interactive but when everyone is doing the same thing it's pretty dull. I like that Control decks can still exist in Standard, like UW/R Flash, but not be overly oppressive.
I agree with Kara though that my least favourite card in Standard right now is Thragtusk. It's a card that is basically always a 2 for 1 with no effort, it also gains you a considerable amount of life and that's before you get into decks that are recurring it with Unburial Rites or blinking it with Restoration Angel.
Despite Thragtusk, Standard is still a fun environment and there a lot of different decks not all of which play Thragtusk. Ultimately, I think Wizards has done a good job and we have a pretty well balanced format.
Almost every time I see Thragtusk across the board I pretty much have to spend two cards to take him out. Every time I play him I feel like I've taken a big lead.
The complaint is what I said in my previous post: he's always a 2for1 in this format. Countering is the only 1for1, and that is skirted around entirely with Cavern of Souls. There's almost nothing that stops Thrag in its tracks. Rakdos Keyrune, Tamiyo? That's about it and those are hardly hard-counters.
"Leaves play" instead of "dies" is my complaint. It's an overpowered clause on a card that does too much for its very lenient cost.
Zombies are a lot of fun in pauper. I am surprised they have not made a bit more of a splash, but always feel one powerful card away from becoming a tiered deck. Have you considered nameless inversion? With it counting as a zombie can be very good to be able to get it back. This is my Zombie list, but it is a bite different as focused on winning wars of attrition through a lot of 2 for 1's instead of bringing the life total down to 0 fast.
4 Dregscape Zombie
2 Gempalm Polluter
4 Carrion Feeder
4 Rotting Rats
4 Barren Moor
2 Duress
2 Festering Goblin
4 Ghoulcaller's Chant
4 Ghoulraiser
4 Nameless Inversion
2 Viscera Dragger
4 Cry of Contrition
2 Barrow Ghoul
Sideboard
2 Last Rites
4 Innocent Blood
1 Duress
1 Duress
3 Choking Sands
3 Echoing Decay
It is definitely a strong card but Format warping? Are we playing the same game? I mean sure planning on how to deal with Thragtusk is a good thing but if you deck has any merit it shouldn't be only worried about that. I think you and I come from such disproportionately different points of view on this though. I really just don't see the complaint.
Jace had cohorts. :) Go check your magic history. Caws + Batterskull and Mystics want words with YOU!
Yeah I'm trying to qualify on drafts right now and it is tough. I'm at 8 atm, so I'm on a decent pace. I'm thinking about doing some pauper to get a point or two, but my pauper discard deck seems to have fallen out of the metagame from what I've seen.
"it isn't one card that defines a format"
Jace would like a word with you.
Reasons I don't like Thragtusk:
-Lifegain is hard to work around. It forces you to play a stronger deck. This means that rogue builds are less successful than they have been in times past.
-His mana cost is easily to manage. You only need one colored mana, instead of two or three.
-He leaves creatures behind when he dies.
For five mana, this is what you get:
+5 life
+A 5/3 creature
+A 3/3 creature
To me, Thragtusk feels like one of the cards from Zendikar that was a very poor design. You either play Thrag or you play to beat him. He has warped standard to a very disproportionate degree, and that is not a good thing. People might complain about control, but, for me, what I never liked was that control warped the format. If we're going to have non-blue cards do the same thing...well, what's the point?
Bonfires price is high because AVR is awful to play, if more people were playing limited it would be much lower.
Nothing aside from Detention Sphere, and Oblivion Ring?Realized that it says "leaves" not "dies." Yet I have never felt like Thragtusk was unbeatable on the other side of the board and have won vs him and his friends many times. And when he has been on my own side I've never felt my odds of winning were overwhelming just because of him.
Also via the Prices comment: When so many cards are high priced this does indicate an overall balance no? No one deck has dominated afaik. Certainly nothing with Thragtusk.
On another note:
So if the format isn't stale what IS the complaint?
No, and honestly I don't think I'll ever qualify with drafts. I need 15 in a month and you only get 1 for going 3-0 in drafts. I'd have to grind a constructed format to get in like I did with pauper before, but that's no fun for me.
My problem with Thragtusk is there's no removal out there that trades for it 1for1. The only way you go 1for1 (ignoring the 5 lifegain) with Thragtusk is to counter it, but Cavern of Souls nulls that option. There's no effective option against it. If it simply made a token when it DIED it wouldn't be OP. Heck, if they introduced a removal 1for1'd it then it would be fine. But they haven't.
I can't really think of any other "OP" cards in Standard. Maybe Restoration Angel? None really compare though.
Also, I wouldn't call the format stale. Far from it. BR Aggro, Bant Control, America Control, GW Aggro, Jund Midrange, UW Flash, Rites decks, all these are making the top 8's, and we're still seeing new lists come up like 4color Humans, it's great.
As for price.. who the heck knows? Why has Bonfire of the Damned been sitting at over 30tix when it hasn't been making much of a showing in top decks for MONTHS? I just don't know. But a card's price isn't always indicative of how OP it is.
I love Thragtusk. I really don't get all the hate directed at his wooly rear end. Listen up! It isn't one card that defines a format. There are PLENTY of OP cards in print in standard right now (If not why are so many cards so damned PRICY???). People are just sheep and don't want to work at the game. If the format feels stale it is the PLAYERS who are at fault imho. I have plenty of fun concocting brews that attack the format from different angles. Granted I am no pro but I have my fair share of wins.
I really don't think it is fair to heap all this negativity on one excellent card. Viva la Beasts!
:D
Hmm yeah Knightly Valor I'd value a little higher since it gives you a bit more flexibility, but I guess in power-level they're roughly equal. I'm not sure about your evaluation of Wayfaring Temple. I agree with you it's usually not first pick (especially in your pack), but I think it has some merit in that it puts you in arguably the best guild and can make an impact at any point of the game. But I do think it was the worst of the 3 mentioned cards.
But like I said, nice draft. Have you qualified for the MOCS this season yet?
I agree, WOTC is getting better but at the same time they make terrible mistakes that I just can't understand.
Thragtusk should never have been made. WOTC themselves said they want a break from Titans in Standard, yet Thragtusk is pretty much the same thing, a creature that will always 2for1 no matter what. And this is no Delver of Secrets, the card is so straightforward that no one should be shocked it's as vital to decks as it currently is. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway, because they reeeeeally wanted a hard answer to the old UW Delver decks and didn't have the foresight to realize that deck would no longer function a few months later with the exodus of phyrexian cantrips and ponder. It's just dumb.
The last time we had an interesting standard was when they pushed the power level in Shards of Alara block. Many people inaccurately remember this only as the era of jund, but there were a whole host of powerful cards in every color and all shards were playable, although esper (and blue in general during the reign of the elf) was a bit weak.
Some of the available cards during alara standard for those of you who don't remember,
Path to Exile
Knight of the Reliquary
Jund - the Deck
Lightning Bolt (m10/11)
Noble Hierarch
Cruel Ultimatum
Elspeth, Knight Errant
Maelstrom Pulse
A little something for everyone, and with the exception of Cruel Ultimatum and BloodBraid Elf all of these cards were/are LEGACY staples.
Yeah Jund was a bit too good, but generally speaking I think you are best off making strong, powerful cards across multiple colors and letting everyone get something powerful.
Current standard is pretty boring, since you basically have Revelation and Thragtusk as the two defining cards of the format, and everyone trying to play cards that go under or over them.
I know I'll do Dark Depths at some point, because that's one of the rare Spike/Timmy combos in existence. I believe what stopped people to do it is that you only own Dark Depths if you already played that deck at some point in the past (and possibly, you sold them when you stopped playing it, they were quite expensive until recently). So in order to play DarkDepths.dek you should bother buying a playset of a card that does nothing by itself and you'll never play elsewhere, and realistically you can't expect to play it every week in TribAp. It might be worth the investment if it will end unbanned in Modern at some point, because that would easily mean netting 40-50 tix out of it. (I just sold my barely used playset of Scapeshift for 64 tix. I had bought them while Valakut was banned for 0.5 each. God, I love this market.)
I built a Vampire Omniscience deck recently, because that's one of the best tribes for sacrificing Academy Rector, but it was more of a theoretical exercise than something I'll actually play, I think. Like a good 80% of everything I build. :)
Btw, romellos' deck lacks a few cards that I would definitely add to help turning Drana into the massive removal factory that she is. Namely Cabal Coffers, Nirkana Revenant (who was in-tribe!), Caged Sun, and maybe even Magus of the Coffers.
On the plus side, that was the only deck where Vampiric Tutor felt flavorful and not just a staple. :)
:)
Not to mention, you won some tix with it. That's a good loot for Trollface Von Useless. Still, Sisay will never go out with him. Tell him to stop texting her.
I've got a few ideas for Vengevine, but it just in a lot more synergestic tribe than Bloodghast or Gravecrawler for pulling off those sort of tricks.
WotC's efforts to appeal to the casual crowd are horribly misplaced, since the kitchen table players can make any house rules they like to discourage or forbid things they don't view as fun. Those folks buy a pack here, a pack there, but it's the competitive players who are regularly playing tournaments and drafting every week who really drive sales. And the more homogenized the standard environment gets, the less depth there is to the game to drive people to explore competitive constructed. It almost seems that they are making draft for the Spikes with some interesting Johnny fringe archetypes, and standard exclusively for the Timmies.
They talk about how some big dragon or angel that poor little 13-year-old Billy thinks should be powerful because it looks badass needs to actually BE a good card, so Billy doesn't feel bad at FNM if his Dragon turns out to be unplayable. They have been spelling that out in articles on DailyMTG for awhile now, very clearly.
I remember playing the Decipher Star Trek game that came out in '94, and there was a concerted effort by the developers (through Decipher's legendarily powerful "magic bullet" style hoser cards) to strip away all strategies from the game that did not involve rather vanilla mission-solving game play. There ended up being several flavors of exactly the same deck: would you like your generic mission-solving deck to come in Cardassian or Klingon? That's what is happening to Standard in MTG right now.
The way MTGO designs nowadays, that would never happen Cow. Their mandate is pretty simple: The casual crowd makes up the vast majority of the game, and so they design for it. Those people do not appreciate permission or finesse at all. And that's working - at least on the ledger sheet.
With that in mind, I think R&D still does a fantastic job under that mandate of creating sets. My sole beef being that the current lasting focusing on paint-by-numbers deck construction that comes with over key-wording every set I feel plays down too much the thrill that comes with looking for interactions, as opposed to having them spelled out for you. Even then, the vast majority of the time, the keyworded decks often aren't that powerful, which at least leaves room for construction tactics.
Although there are technically lots more decks in standard today than there were back in the old days, 80% of those standard decks are basically different versions of the same deck. They all seek to do more or less the exact same thing: play some creatures and removal and cast something big around turn 6 or so. That is not terribly interesting and I think decks have lost a lot of their identity because of it.
Back in the old days the test of a good player versus a newbie was when you asked them "what does your deck do?". If they could not answer that question in a couple of words, they were probably bad players. Now very few of the current std. decks could answer that question. None of them really DO anything other than durdle around, stay alive, and hope to land a big unanswered threat. They all have slightly-different ways of accomplishing that goal, but they are at their core the same deck. Heck, base-green decks are playing 7-mana triple-white angels for cripes sake. 7-mana angels used to be Timmy cards, not high-end competitive threats.
The death of permission and land destruction has taken a lot of the finesse out of deck building. There is no tension in designing a deck. If no one is going to be able to do much of anything to stop you...why not just cram all the best high-cost high-powered mythics into your deck? That, to me at least, is not interesting. There should be choices in standard other than turning creatures sideways.
To be fair, WotC has done a much better job today than they had done there for a while. The Madness-Affinity days were much worse than our current state of affairs, and there is nothing completely necropotence-level broken going on in std., but we still have a long way to go before we can declare victory.
Speaking of the vampire tribe as a combo-enabler, if there's one thing I can say in favor of the ludicrous volume of one-mana white exilers in this event, it's that StP/PtE certainly have kept Hexmage/Depths from becoming a thing around these parts.
That Dark Rit into Buried Alive into Bloodghasts play actually NETS you a card, amazingly. So that passes my "would I be willing to Dark Rit this" test. Bloodghast has so much potential and so many super sweet synergies. I've played around with Intuition for Bloodghasts before, and I've tried to make Bloodghasts work with Standstill and Nether Void, most of those seemed like better ideas in my head than they turned out to be.
I've hunted for a way to run Vengevines in this event for awhile, it was one of my two or three favorite cards from that whole Standard season and just doesn't seem to have a home, what would think of something like buried alive for Vengevines along with some other self-mill and the unearth elementals? Only prob would be triggering the Vines, since Unearth won't count as "cast".
2 cent commander ... but I got him from penny bot that is a 1 cent profit Woot
I've been playing around with Standard quite a lot recently and have found it enjoyable. There are a lot of decks and creativity going around which is fun.
The Control decks of Magic past were pretty oppressive but I still like Control decks to exist. Creatures may be more interactive but when everyone is doing the same thing it's pretty dull. I like that Control decks can still exist in Standard, like UW/R Flash, but not be overly oppressive.
I agree with Kara though that my least favourite card in Standard right now is Thragtusk. It's a card that is basically always a 2 for 1 with no effort, it also gains you a considerable amount of life and that's before you get into decks that are recurring it with Unburial Rites or blinking it with Restoration Angel.
Despite Thragtusk, Standard is still a fun environment and there a lot of different decks not all of which play Thragtusk. Ultimately, I think Wizards has done a good job and we have a pretty well balanced format.