Magic Grab Bag #10 - Exploring Exploring Exploring

My typing has been lazy recently. See, I recently started a new job wherein I process data, and the application we use for processing data puts everything in all caps all the time, so I’ve gotten lazy with my shift key usage. As such, I keep finding myself backspacing when I do typing elsewhere now because I keep forgetting to hold the shift key. As if I needed another bad habit. Just a random aside and all.

Still, it beats working retail or fast food by a long shot. But even with all the typing involved, it just isn’t quite the same as writing. Let this be a catharsis.

This week shall be about exploration; exploring old mechanics, exploring new formats, and probably an exploration of my opinions on something or other at some point, ’cause I’ve always got to open my yap about something, amiright? Speaking of which…

The Burning Issue

For reference on this issue, please read Aaron Forsythe most recent Latest Development article if you haven’t already. The Burning Issue here is in regards to Echo (cookie for you if the article title tipped you off). I’d like to examine some of Aaron’s comments and offer my personal opinions, or dare I say insights, on the nature of Echo. For example, Aaron states:

“I imagine the words, “I love that this thing has echo” have never been uttered.”

There’s an easy answer to this, if one wished to take the route to do it – simply put Echo on something with a leaves play / goes to graveyard trigger at least conditionally as good as its effect on the game made by staying in play. Putting a useful effect on a small creature would probably be the ideal path – if you’re at a point in the game where the small creature is probably useless, go ahead and fail to pay the Echo cost and instead get the leaves play effect. For your perusal, I offer this little trinket from the joint design files of Talen Lee and I:

Crypt Keeper
1B
Creature — Banshee
Uncommon
Haunt, Echo 1B
When Crypt Keeper comes into play, or the creature it Haunts is put into a graveyard from play, remove target card other than a basic land in an opponent’s graveyard from the game. Then search that opponent’s library for all cards with the same name as that card and remove them from the game.

2/1

There’s a lot going on for this little guy. First, he’s a reference to the Crypt Creeper card of days gone by. Secondly, he illustrates just the kind of point I was making above – with Haunt, there’s a viable reason to simply choose not to pay the Echo cost; in this case, you simply want to use the Haunt trigger. Third, his first line is “Haunt, Echo” so we decided to give him a mini-Haunting Echoes effect, because we’re clever sods like that. Note this was something we cooked up in late November or early December, but I went back and templated Echo to match the current templating.

Another possibility is to have an ability trigger when an Echo cost is paid which is more interesting / powerful / useful than the body of the creature in question, for example something along the lines of:

Reminiscing Warden
1G
Creature – Human Shaman
Uncommon
Echo GG
When Reminiscing Warden’s Echo cost is paid, return target card from your graveyard to your hand.
2/1

Yeah, yeah. I know you spotted the Eternal Witness knock-off. But there’s a twist on both the original Witness and Echo here; this attacks a turn sooner than Witness, and this makes moot one of Echo’s drawbacks – people waiting until you pay the Echo cost on a creature before killing it, just to stymie your development. With this, they kill it before you pay the Echo cost, or you get the effect you really wanted anyhow – not to mention in this case, if they kill it with the trigger on the stack, you can just get it back and try again. Oops. That’ll learn ’em good.

Aaron goes on to say, “Whereas I was ambivalent to negative keywords a year ago, I think they are a pretty bad idea in general now.”

See, I think Aaron’s throwing in the towel too soon here. And he shouldn’t, because then he might risk not knowing where his towel is. Beyond that, there’s a lot of places Echo could still boldly go (admittedly, most of them in places where other mechanics have, in fact, gone before) that would make it fresh, interesting, and possibly even good or well-liked. In fact, pretty much any negative keyword could probably do the same thing – so long as there are a sufficient number of situations in where the drawback can be negated, turned positive, or give interesting interactions with other cards or odd strategies, there’s a chance for them to thrive.

Furthermore, I rather like negative keyword in Limited, as they spice up the playing field quite a bit – how highly do you place a negative keyword creature, especially if that keyword dooms it from the turn it comes into play? Do you consider it a full creature, even though it won’t stick around long? How many can you stuff in your deck before you’re not getting enough guys who actually stay around? Even a negative keyword card (at least in the cases of Echo, Vanishing, or Cumulative Upkeep) is elevated to “tension” status within the bounds of Limited play. I sincerely hope R&D doesn’t try to sell these kinds of mechanics short; I think there’s a lot of unmined potential here that could be harvested.

Jotun Grunt is a great example of what happens when R&D thinks outside of the box when it comes to negative keywords – things like non-mana Echo costs could also help alleviate the bad perception such a mechanic gets. Consider an Echo cost of “Pay 3 life” or “Discard a card” or something along those lines, where the Echo cost makes the creature harder to keep around, but in a way that doesn’t slow your actual board development to a crawl in exchange. Remember, even when Pandora’s Box was opened, letting loose all misfortune into the world, even hope still remained, and I don’t think negative keywords are quite on par with “all misfortune.” Give ’em another chance, coach. Don’t keep these mechanics warming the benches forever; R&D just needs to find ways to make the drawbacks themselves more interactive or appealing.

Ze Decklist

As promised, we’re going to explore something of a new format this week – one that was new for me, even. It’s not entirely new, but it’s more of a mish-mash of a few other variant formats all tied into one big stew of oddball play. It might not be the most diverse format ever – in fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a certain core of cards in the format that would (or should) be in every legal deck, but I thought it’d be fun to take a look at. Plus, it tied in with some of the out-loud musing I did at the end of last week’s article anyhow (how fortuitous!) so I figured hey, why not? Let’s prep this patient for an exam, shall we?

Post Post Script

Rivien Swanson

Test deck on 03-25-2007

Casual

Creatures (74)

Lands (90)

Spells (86)

Folks, I give you Pauper Prismatic Singleton. Yep, 250 cards, 20 cards in each color, no more than one copy of anything that’s not a basic land, and yep, all commons. Whoddathunkit? Since I don’t usually play Pauper formats, I don’t know what the ruling is on Timeshifted cards that were originally commons, so I avoided them (for example, you’ll note Piracy Charm is present, but Funeral Charm is not). And yep, a few negative keyword cards wormed their way into here as well, although admittedly not many. There’s a few cards up in dis hizzouse that could probably be reconsidered, but I haven’t played enough games with the deck yet to be entirely certain. If you want to drop the cost of the deck considerably, ditch Skred and the attendant snow basics – they aren’t necessary, it’s just that Skred was one more good common to run and I had the snow basics, so might as well. I’m sure you could find another common Red burn spell if you really wanted, no? Yeah, I thought so.

What the deck does: You go on a wild ride through a massive deck of one-ofs, which is fun in and of itself, just to see what you draw. There are a lot of staple cards from normal Prismatic here as well, such as Brainstorm, Terminate, and Deep Analysis. One interesting shift is that when you go Pauper, a lot of the better removal spells end up being Auras as opposed to burn or destruction effects. I included a smattering of control cards and not much in the way of burn, so your win will probably be with creatures. I think I could stand to run a few more creatures, draw spells, or removal spells here, but I like more or less most of the cards in the deck and I’m not sure what I’d cut to include more of these kinds of things. Flashback sees somewhat heavy play here as well, because not only do Flashback cards tend to involve card advantage, but if you end up forced to discard because of a Karoo, an opposing discard spell, or because of big, burly mana screw fiends, Flashback cards are usually a good choice to dump.

Who the deck is for: People who like creative restrictions on their deckbuilding, players of Singleton and / or Pauper style games, but perhaps most importantly, it serves as a (fairly) budget introduction to the Prismatic format, which is a blast of a format to play, but can often be overwhelming to people not named Bill Gates. Even my “good” Prismatic decks are still missing a few Paycheck For A Playset cards like Fact or Fiction. And somehow, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the acronym for that would be PFAP – I’m pretty sure that whenever someone shells out for those kinds of cards, the word “fap” is involved with the seller’s reaction in some fashion. Not to get grisly or anything. This deck is also for people who like one game to be quite different from the next without a need to switch entire decks. It’s a fun little stack of cards, overall. Well, not so little, but you get the idea.

What to watch out for: Mana flood, color screw, draws where nothing you get seems to work together. Alas, when playing with so many one-ofs, it can be difficult to form a cohesive strategy between five colors. Treasure your draw spells when you get them – Prismatic games tend to run for awhile, so running out of gas tends to be a worse sign than it usually is. It can be rather difficult to come back from a losing position, especially if that position involves being massively overwhelmed on creatures due to bad draws on your behalf, good draws for your opponent, or simply being overwhelmed by a deck that runs a much more dense creature base. I will probably provide an update to this deck in the future after either more testing or more set release cause it to change.

And with that, allow me to say…b-dat, b-dat, b-dat, b-dat’s all, folks! Tune in next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel, and we’ll reach into the grab bag and see what else Magic has in store for us together.

Signing off,

Rivien Swanson
flawedparadigm a(aye Carumba!)t gmaSPAMSUCKSil d(.)ot co[SPOON!!!]m
Flawed Paradigm on MTGO (when I actually log in)