I wish I could write a tournament report about last weekend, but I honestly have no recollection of what occurred most of the relevant portion of the time. The rounds of Standard were all the same. Play spells; some of them cost two white mana to play. Most of the time my opponents were completely cold to those ones. A couple they weren’t.
Legacy was a comedy of errors, including a loss to Goblins while playing Storm without him playing hate. I would recommend Steel still, but not Storm. Tempered Steel is still blatantly overpowered as a card and maximizes the value of Hero of Bladehold as a plan B by drawing early removal and sideboard Shatters, but Storm is in a rough spot where you can beat Dazes and Wastelands or Stifles and Spell Snares, but not really both at once. Until things settle in one direction or another, I think I might take a break from the Dark Rituals.
Instead, I’m going to run back last week and steal tricks from a Seattle-based ex-writer: Cedric Phillips. He would call overrated and underrated cards every set, then see where he stood the next set. It was cool, but I figure it was too high variance the way it was set up. Set reviews are cool and all, but it’s easy to blow a call just based off another deck interacting with the card in a way no one expected.
Far better is calling the shots as you see them in practice. Let’s take a look at Innistrad draft as of about now.
Overrated
Armored Skaab
Don’t get me wrong. If you want to aim your deck for it, the dredge-four can easily be worth a card. But when it isn’t, this card is fairly lackluster. Darkthicket Wolf is the card you need to brick wall, not your normal assortment of bodies. Even those bodies are more on the Bear side than the Piker one, making this just a way to stem damage, not stop a team. I can’t hate too hard on a Horned Turtle, but the matchup against that one card really brings it down in this format.
Cloistered Youth
Yes, this is a 3/3 for two. That means it should be very, very good at attacking. The card is however not much better than a Grizzly Bear at racing. You only net two damage a turn counting the life loss, and that’s not even counting the times you get chumped, or Claustrophobia-ed, or Bonds of Faith-ed, or anything else. I’m not saying you should necessarily take the card lower, but maybe be more cautious when flipping it.
Battleground Geist, Moon Heron, Falkenrath Noble, Gallows Warden
The same general problem befalls all of these cards. See, people now know about GW thanks to Brad Nelson, or at least more so than they did before. That deck is on Zendikar levels of aggression, and imagine how you would feel in that format playing these cards. They are fine… assuming you remain stable long enough to cast them. These cards are all powerful, but you have to prioritize your early game over them more. It is very easy to accidentally stumble into a deck flooded on fours and fives with no real early game in blue and black. Be careful and curve conscious in this format, more so than usual, or you will be haumphed by Werewolves.
Gavony Township
Clunky is the operative word here. The card is absolutely insane when it gets going, but don’t expect that to be the standard over just generating more board presence from hand. Once you realize that, realize the card is also still a land. It doesn’t cost you much to have, but it isn’t going to be shredding opponents the way you would expect it to be based on the sealed games I birded with it in play. I would still take it very highly, but it won’t just kill people like Kessig Wolf Run does.
Makeshift Mauler / Stitched Drake
If you are actual Dredge, ignore this section. If you aren’t, it’s actually a chore to play these guys. Too often the UB control style decks are starved for bodies to begin with. Not only does this mean you have to lean more heavily on those guys to fight, but you are more likely to have to make poor trades or even straight up not be able to cast these guys. There’s a lot more to drafting these guys than you would expect. If you want the benefit of undercosted fatties, expect to have to work for it.
Under
Fortress Crab
Blocks down the standard green crew. Howlpack of Estwald? NBD. Darkthicket Wolf? Not pumping through this. This guy is well above the new critical power of the format and outperforms expectations every time I see him in play. I’m not sure I would take him above late-mid picks, but he gets cut far too often.
Grizzled Outcasts / Kindercatch
Ahh, real monsters! Ignore how biased I am towards Dinosaurs for a second. Remember what I said about Crab a minute ago? Imagine if he attacked. Despite how tempo-oriented my review has been; the games don’t really end early the same way Zendikar did. It’s mostly about the difficulty of reversing from being significantly behind. These have both been a great way to not only reverse directions if you are remotely in it in a way most other commons can’t, just based on sheer size. They both beat a Howlpack of Estwald heads up and are good enough to stop Darkthicket Wolves. On the flip side, they are outside the realm of most double blocks. This not only means your control threat is near impossible to easily fight, but in a beatdown deck they are never going rebuild a board to fight it after an early assault. Obviously value two-drops highly in GW, but your curve doesn’t have to end early.
Moment of Heroism
Theory time.
Combat tricks are good in Limited for one of two reasons: tempo or card advantage. As obvious as it sounds, people often just don’t realize this. Either your trick should let you exchange one of your cards in hand for their guy on board at a net gain of mana, or it should let you turn a double-block into a two-for-one there, and then again later if they ever want to kill the guy in question.
Let’s look at the first for a minute. There’s a reason Giant Growth is miles better than Titanic Growth; most notably it’s far easier to jam with a guy, Giant Growth on their trade attempt, then play another guy. Moment of Heroism has this sweet spot in the GW decks where you are going to curve two, three, and pump plus two fairly easily, and in this format tempo like that is hard to reverse because of the relatively flat size of creatures up the curve until fives.
Spidery Grasp doesn’t get the same kind of respect here, as it simply doesn’t fit as well. If you can’t play that extra guy on four, it’s the same as you trading your four mana for their guy, which is not actually getting you anywhere. Decks on the defensive WANT to just tread water until their endgame gets online. You need ways to profit on board presence over a turn cycle, and this card does just that.
Now let’s look at the second. A ton of the GW guys are secretly monsters. You have two common low drops that are actually 4/4 or bigger, not to mention the endgame drops I mentioned above. Double blocks will occur a ton, and this card not only makes them awesome for you on the basic level, but the lifelink is a massive swing.
On that last note, good luck winning a race if this card gets involved. Whether it’s just a straight up 6-8 point swing or “only” 4-6 and Abyssing a guy on the block, it gets real bad.
Selhoff Occultist
As much as I talk about Darkthicket Wolf, there are enough Goblin Pikers and Grizzly Bears that being a 2/3 is a bonus. Just ask Villagers of Estwald. This happens to be a 2/3 with an upgrade. Even if it is a fraction of a card every time a guy dies, it is enough to help a control deck to grind out a long-term advantage. Something that I’ve learned the past few years is solid bodies like this guy help you keep removal in hand to use on real threats as they hold off “that guy that was going to kill you,” filling in as removal for the Disfigure that instead kills a flier or Dead Weight that takes out their Darkthicket Wolf. He is much more than just filler and even helps turn on Skaabs.
Walking Corpse and Diregraf Ghoul
See above, only these guys fuel the Skaab Zombies in a slightly different way. Takes a Zombie to make a Zombie, right? Trade these off early and watch their remains Frankenstein into game enders. Also, see below.
Silent Departure
Let’s go back in time to probably one of the most obnoxious Standard cards ever: Moment’s Peace. For those of you fortunate enough to not remember that, running aggro decks into Moment’s Peace was just jamming your head against a wall. They would Time Walk you twice, then use their extra mana those turns to find another copy of the card, then use the mana those turns to play a Mirari’s Wake, which then meant they could do anything they ever wanted.
(Aside: Oh wait, remember Squadron Hawk? It’s kinda like that.)
Silent Departure in draft is Moment’s Peace for blockers. The first time it removes your one relevant guy, they play another, and bash. They then send the same guy packing once again and bash, only instead of that time having been used to find another copy, you are just dead.
People clearly recognize the card is powerful, but I have it on the same tier as Bonds of Faith and Brimstone Volley. Obviously you have to be turning guys sideways to make it truly insane, but how hard can that be?
Sensory Deprivation
You liked Guard Duty, right? If no, why not? Their guy could still block and trade? Fear no more. Their random 2/2 is now relegated to single-chump realm with this guy. Chapel Geist is now a lowly Wall of Vines. This card is a very legitimate removal spell on both offense and defense and deserves better than the 11th to 14th pick I’ve seen it be at times lately. It doesn’t kill the bombs, but it takes out the annoying early guys more than well enough.
Lumberknot
Let’s go back in time a bit more recently. Shards of Alara draft is the format this time, and we are looking at a card called Algae Gharial. That was a scary guy. Once he hit the board, you knew it was a matter of time. They just had to tread water, and all of a sudden you would be brick-walled by a 6/6 that got to a 9/9 that just kept growing and growing as it Abyssed your team and eventually your life total. Definitely a first pick.
Sure, the format is faster, and being a 1/1 to start is a bit worse. Sure, there aren’t as many random tokens to fuel it. You still have the same effect. Just get the ball rolling a little, and Unkillable Oak here will carry it home for you.
Hanweir Watchkeep
1/5. 5. Huh, how about all them 4/x’s?
5/5. Jeeeeeez. That is huge. That’s three 2/2s blocking it to kill it instead of just two, essentially faltering an extra guy. That’s way bigger than the common large-guy standard of 4/4. Must attack if able? Thanks for making the decision for me, can’t screw it up now.
Rage Thrower
So, part of the problem of most of the red guys is they get brick-walled very easily. There are the standard options like Nightbird’s Clutches, but this guy is the real winner. They can’t block without taking a million. If there is any reasonable stalemate on board (common with red), they just die on the spot. If you want to complain about the cost, how much does Clutches with flashback cost? Also six? Sure, cheaper base costs for more utility, but does it also attack? How often do you just need to Falter their entire team (in my experience, the answer to that one is “very often”)? Another one that just makes laps of the table for no good reason.
Make a Wish
I’ll preface this card with one thing: I wouldn’t play fewer than 17 creatures in any GW deck and could easily see playing twenty. That leaves little room for random spells like this. I wouldn’t play this over most pump spells either unless I already had a couple.
That said, this is the pattern I’ve noticed.
In GW, the guys that die most of the time are the ones you want to keep in play. Your opponent goes through a bunch of extra effort to kill your good ones and holds the bad ones at bay with other bad guys that are marginally bigger.
So, either you are getting back the good creatures, or you are getting back your other pump and removal (notably Prey Upon). Not too shabby. It isn’t great as random two-for-one value because you often have more guys to cast than you have mana to do so with, but if there are one or two that just break the game open, running them back isn’t a bad plan.
There are even more I could argue marginal plus or minuses on, but these cards are the big ones. I’ll close today on an artifact I have no idea how to categorize and leave the discussion up to you.
Sharpened Pitchfork
I’ve seen both sides of this. On one hand, it’s just first strike and just a conditional marginal boost. On the other hand, the creature size in this format is fairly flat and this card can hold off all sorts of horrors. Where do you see this card? Solid playable, borderline, deck-specific, garbage, or somewhere else?