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| La_Sin_Grail |
![]() Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 8:48 pm |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 806
Location: Maryland
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--- description ---
I actually wrote an article! I’ve studied the fundamental principles of what makes cards good and I’m sharing the wealth as best I can!
--- end description ---
What makes cards click?
I know you guys have a pretty good idea of how good remand is. Why? The same with shining shoal…. What makes that any different? Jitte? Sure, lots of people thought it was rigged. But what do these three cards have in common?
They all break the mana curve. Each one of these cards in fundamentally amazing because of this simple idea.
Remand- Everybody knows remand costs two for counter an opposing spell and put it back into their hand with draw a card. The reason this is special is a couple reasons. First off, remand is (sort of) a hard counter. This depends on your definition of a hard counter, but a standard one is a counterspell that has to way for your opponent to get past it. Soft counters, like mana leak and rune snag, are found good early game but not late, and most hard counters are better late than early due to a normally increased mana cost. However, consider the situation.
You’re playing snakes. You have a sakura-tribe scout, a patagia viper with his buddies, and a coiling oracle staring down at your opponent. It’s your turn four and your mana is open. Your opponent is playing flare. Because of that, you expect him to have wrath of god, and he’s not played anything except a signet so far. His life total is 12 after you attack. The question is, what can you possibly do to win? You suspect he has a counter in hand for the likely coat of arms, which is why it wasn’t thrown into play before you attacked. The answer is you’re happy you have remand. You pass the turn, and he does his only logical defense, he casts something. More than likely, that something is wrath of god, but it could be anything else of large mana cost. You remand it. You proceed to play coat of arms and swing for the win the next turn.
Ok, that’s just a counterspell, you could argue, and even mana leak could do that. I would agree. However, for the same effect, remand has you draw a card. When your opponent is playing spells with massive mana costs (as in Solar Flare), remand is a trade of 2 mana for 6 or more, without any card loss. That means your opponent is delayed a full turn, while you’re delayed only a fraction of one. That’s a good deal, but even more so when you’re playing agro against control. This amazing trade is a large part of why snakes, simic agro, and sea stompy are three of the top ten decks- as blue agro decks in standard, a thing not really seen since madness.
Now let’s push the situation along a little. In a different game (same decks), say your opponent wrathed the board twice already and is sitting around 5. It’s very, very late game, and you’ve both high on mana and in an almost exclusively topdeck war. Your opponent has ten mana, including a miren, the moaning well. He chuckles as he peeks at his card. He’s seen you mana leak things before, and counts down his mana. Tapping six, he says “mana leak this.” You’re down to just seshiro and a coiling oracle, so it’s enough to push lethal without yosei on the board, but not with him. This is where remand shines. At 6 mana, he can throw down his bomb for the win. At just a pair more, rune snag will fail. But with a remand, you can fully double the cost of his bombs, keeping them off the board more surely than any other non- specific counterspell in standard (remove soul could pull the trirck here, but it would fail against wrath). Without a counterspell, you’re forced to let him down. If you were playing Gruul, you could burn him, or in Orzhov, you could mortify him, but in both cases, you end up letting them sac Yosei to Miren, giving them 5 extra life and tapping you down for a while. Remand is the only playable card for two mana that takes you out of this situation with a win, because it wins you a full turn for a mere part of one.
How about shining shoal? Shining shoal everybody loves for because it doesn’t cost anything, you know? It’s fast! But that’s not all. Shining shoal does something no other card in standard can do. It can be a 0 damage burn spell, a removal spell, a last-resort-to-save-yourself spell, or even an omfg-I-have-to-save-my-dude spell. The reason shining shoal is better than the other shoals is it gets you card advantage.
Picture this. You have a simic sky swallower against a stinkeed imp, a fettered keiga, and a tidesprout tyrant. Your opponent is sitting at 7 life (curses!) and you’re at 3. What outs do you have? You could always bounce something… except you had to tap out to fetter their keiga and pay the mana for mana leak, which they knew you would pay and knew it would mess you up for removaling the imp. If you didn’t pay the mana, though, they would swing for the win next turn. Your out is, of course, shining shoal. With shining shoal, you can attack, use no mana to pitch a card from your hand and bounce to imp’s damage not to the player, but to the tyrant!! That means the tyrant takes imp damage in combat and dies, you kill the imp without your SSS dying, and you get to put your opponent to two with an effectively empty board.
Of course, shining shoal is good because it’s free. The problem with being free is it can take out things like tidesprout tyrant. Shining shoal has so many “outside the box uses” the possibilities are almost unimaginable. Your 2/2 could kill a 5/5 pitching a wrath of god and live. Or, better yet, you could pitch a shining shoal to burn your opponent when he thought a suicidal attack would kill you, or use the damage you reflected from that 5/5 to throw a burn spell to their face and regenerate your creature. You could also just pay for it, if you want, or use it as a bluff attacking. Such bluffs are hard to call and harder to counter because you can play it for free and do any number of things once it’s played.
Jitte is great for a slightly different reason, also attached to mana curve and card advantage. Jitte is a two-drop. You can attack with a jitte attached turn three. But why is that so good? Well, if you manage to get two counters on a jitte, he turns the equipped creature (if you choose pump) into basically a drop three higher than he is. Good creatures usually run about X for an X/X outside the first two mana costs, where X for X+1/X or X+1/X+1 is more common. So if you have a 2/1 one drop with a jitte, he gains as much power as a decent six drop! Having that down turn four means you will control the largest creature on the board. The other thing jitte can do is take out many cards. If you attack with a jitted creature and damage gets dealt, you’ll almost surely be seeing their one or two drops go down the drain. Or, you could wait another turn and have your 2-drop jitte take down a 4-drop. The reason jitte is broken is it has the potential to do the most powerful things in standard- break the mana curve and provide card advantage. As if that weren’t good enough, it’s colorless.
So in your next decks, I hope you realize that raw power isn’t always the answer. Try to make decks that revolve around breaking the mana curve and causing massive card advantage, and you’ll end up with some strange looking decks that can go places (see French Weenie!). Playing enough cards that are fundamentally broken in one of these ways is an easy way to take a deck and push it to the top!
La_Sin_Grail
P.S. Sorry it took me so long getting an article up. Between a car accident and 9-9 rehearsals for just over two weeks, I’ve been a little busy. I should be back more shortly, and fully after November 11th (the end of my season). |
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| Felipe Musco |
![]() Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:18 pm |
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Joined: 18 May 2006
Posts: 2434
Location: Florianópolis, SC, Brasil
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Nice article, Grail! Good to see my Coldsnap article caused some ruckus ’round here, so different (and good, of course) articles are poping up this month!
La_Sin_Grail wrote: It’s very, very late game, and you’ve both high on mana and in an almost exclusively topdeck war. Your opponent has ten mana
La_Sin_Grail wrote: At 6 mana, he can throw down his bomb for the win. At just a pair more, rune snag will fail.
Sorry, my friend, but Rune Snag in late game IS better than Remand, or pretty much any other soft counter (IMO, Remand IS a soft counter, since they can just play the spell again). What if he played the third Wrath? You Remand it, he plays it again, and plays Yosei down next turn. A fourth Rune Snag could prevent him from Wrathing the board, playing Yosei, actually, playing anything short from a 2-drop or lower. Or course, it’s a FOURTH Rune Snag, but still, it IS "very, very late game"... Other than that, I think you should mention Jitte a little more, like the "staying alive" function and the "Bob killer" function. And, in Shining Shoal, you could delve a little deeper in the raw power that the reflection ability provides you, out of thin air.
But still, nice article!  |
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| The First |
![]() Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:35 pm |
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Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Posts: 195
Location: Anderlecht, Belgium
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Hmmm... Jitte is far more than that. It it pump, card/creature advantage, attack advantage...
Cost is low but for a creature heavy deck, it is actually high. But if you look at what it does  It is just amazing.
The good thing about Jitte - and all equipment - is that it does not get discarded when the creature dies. That’s primo.
Secundo; creature advantage. After the match-ups are created and you have some tokens on Jitte, you can rule which creatures will die or not. The -1/-1 ability is very powerful to gain creature advantage -and thus card advantage- very fast.
Tertio; Pump. After the main blockers are removed thanks to Jitte, you strike once or twice for the win thanks to the pump ability. Or save those tokens for a trample creature and give all that you have got. Jitte is so good that it makes little to no difference what creature is wielding the Jitte.
Quatro; aggro vs aggro. You will win the "who’s the beatdown" mini-match because you can kill their creatures, but also, you could use it to gain 4 lives each turn instead. If both players go out for full attack, the one with the Jitte has most advantage, and he can even choose how to use that advantage.
The power of Jitte is its versatility, the easy way to get tokens (even better with double or first strike creatures) and the fact that it will stick around for a long time without other Jittes, artifact removal or cards like Fetters, Counters etc. Ravnica gave a lot of answers to minimize the influence of this one artifact.
Shining Shoal is good but not nearly as good as Jitte. Remand is nice but does not come close to the two others. Remand can even be bad late game - when it just reads; double the cost of target spell and draw a card.
BTW: Shining Shoal does not provide card advantage when you play it for free, only tempo advantage, just like Sickening Shoal. That’s the main reason why the shoals are so good. |
Great minds bleed alike.
Do not copy media. Support creativity. |
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| La_Sin_Grail |
![]() Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 4:43 pm |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 806
Location: Maryland
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shining shoal can provide card advantage.
2/1 first strike blocking 2/2. Opponent has a 2/2. You can shining shoal to save your creature, to kill their blocker with your creature’s damage, and shove the damage at the oppoisng 2/2. That’s three for two card advantage.
As for jitte as bob killer, I could have mentioned that, but that was implied by my eyes under the taking out one and two drops chat. I could have spent more time discussing jitte, but I thought a more in-depth discussion of remand and shining shoal would be more necessary- everybody knows jitte is the best equipment ever made, not to mention the second most valuable card in standard for over a year. Also, the lifegain use is not what makes the card fundamentally good. While lifegain is useful, it did not further my points that tinkering with mana curve and card advantage are two of the most powerful elements in the game.
Remand IS a hard counter. A hard counter counters a spell no without optional cost (such as mana leak, rune snag, force spike, and many others), and is non-specific. Just because it doesn’t send the card to graveyard doesn’t make it less of a counterspell. Hinder doesn’t put the card to the ’yard either, but I’ll bet you don’t doubt that as a hard counter. Also, don’t forget that late game, when they have a couple extra mana floating (like they should against a blue deck with mana untapped), they’ll pay for rune snag, unless you got lucky and drew at least three copies over the course of the game. Otherwise (for yosei, anyway), the remand is better.
Another note: remand can own heartbeat of spring. Rune snag can’t, seeing as heartbeat usually grabs around 30 mana. Because of the principle of doubling the mana cost, it makes a bigger impact on bigger spells, making it very good. |
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| r2d2quino |
![]() Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:12 pm |
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Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Posts: 49
Location:
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Now, this article is interesting, but I think you could have gone a long way, but stopped right on the beggining! This article shows nothing new to more experienced players, so it is more for newer ones. And, if this is the case, show’em why those cards are so good! Tell them, from the most popular builds these days, which ones use’em? Which ones side-board them? Which decks can get toasted real badly by them?
Also, what other broken cards are there? Are broken cards broken only because they break the mana curve? (Necropotence?) You could have discussed a whole lot more cards, since this is an article for begginers, and begginers usually start by playing casual (meaning they don’t care for format restrictions), instead of keeping it to Standard. But I liked the idea, though, stands out than most other articles I’ve checked around here before.
Oh, and Remand rules Rune Snag any day, any time. |
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| Felipe Musco |
![]() Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:49 pm |
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Joined: 18 May 2006
Posts: 2434
Location: Florianópolis, SC, Brasil
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Hum... I think he’s on to something... Hey, Grail, would you mind if I wrote an article on this article, broading it a little bit?
PS: Ok, you won, I won’t mention Rune Snag ever again. Mental note: do NOT mention Rune Snag OR Booby Trap in posts.  |
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| Cobra |
![]() Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 1:01 pm |
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Joined: 12 Jul 2005
Posts: 1202
Location: Austin, TX, USA
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Nice article Grail.  It seems to me there’s a gap between your opening idea and the rest of the article, though. You state that what makes good cards good is that they’re above the mana curve, but don’t talk about the curve all that much. (I liked your discussion of Umezawa’s Jitte, which is the exception since you talk about attacking early with more power than you should have or taking out a big creature with a small one.) |
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| La_Sin_Grail |
![]() Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 10:46 pm |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
Posts: 806
Location: Maryland
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| Yeah... I guess I got a little carried away with them. I guess my point was they can do all the stuff I ranted and raved about and they can tinker the mana curve all in one card. |
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