Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of Sullivan’s Satchel. Someone sent me a question that’s really seven questions about how white sucks, and that’s going to eat up most of my contractually obligated word count that’s typically padded by this introduction, so here we go. Remember you can win $25 in store credit if I select your question as question of the week, blah blah blah. Sending me a question that’s really nine questions doesn’t give you nine bites at the apple, to be clear.
Hayes asks:
Hello,
I’m just going to get straight to the point – here are my questions!
1. Cats are catching back on in popularity in MTG – how would you go about upgrading Savannah lions to be (for example) a singular W costing creature that could spar with the likes of Knight of the Ebon Legion and Fervent Champion in an aggressive shell?
I don’t think Savannah Lions is short by much — Dauntless Bodyguard showed up plenty in Standard and that card was just Savannah Lions a good portion of the time. Anything with a tribal synergy or some hedge to make it more productive in the late-game (like Knight of the Ebon Legion and Fervent Champion) should be enough to get over the line assuming the metagame isn’t too hostile towards attacking in general. There are critical mass issues, too — one Savannah Lions isn’t likely to subsidize a deck, while three equally powerful Savannah Lions may be enough to make a base of something. So, three decent ones probably make more impact than one busted one.
2. When other colors get Aether Gust and other exceptional removal spells, how does it make you feel when white gets cards like Banishing Light? When do you think white will stop getting removal that has back-door ‘pitfalls’?
It doesn’t make me feel like anything at all. To answer the root of the question — I think it’s important for color pie definition for white to have some removal where you’re paying slightly above retail compared to black, with the upside of exiling a good amount of the time, and leaning heavily on enchantments to fill this role. Banishing Light shows up a bunch when it’s legal and does some good work and essentially no harm, so I’d like to keep that going. Doing slightly better than Banishing Light could be fine, too.
3. Do you think white is in a reasonable place in Standard-legal limited environments? What about holiday cube/vintage cube?
? and ???, respectively.
4. Do you think it could mechanically be fun and successfully executed (health of the game, making money, provide fun games of Magic to a wide audience) to have a Standard-legal set where almost all the cards are mono-white, in an effort to help redefine the color and it’s presence in the game?
I think it’s really important for each set to have a little something for everyone, and I think sets with a disproportionate color distribution harms a much greater percentage of the population to a much greater degree than the minority that is better served by such an execution. As a practical example, Torment exists, and I think it’s instructive that there hasn’t been another stab at that sort of execution even once in almost twenty years after the fact.
5. How high on the richter scale would Swords to Plowshares weigh if it was printed in current Ikoria standard (and thus legal in modern)?
I believe it would have significant and mostly negative impact in the formats that it would be ushered into. Path to Exile shows up a ton and has plenty of spots where it’s bad against creatures; more modest or situational cards like Chained to the Rocks or Condemn show up here and there. All would be invalidated by Swords to Plowshares, and its ubiquity would be a massive incentive for each strategy to play without creatures.
6. In EDH every color has a way it can ‘go big’. What is a new type of way that white could go big in a format like Commander, where the opportunity cost of choosing the other colors is so low?
If the opportunity cost of playing a bunch of colors is low, I’m not sure if “how is this color supposed to do something” is the best framework. But I guess blowing up all the lands, or all of someone’s lands, or something else that can get a game over with inside of three hours? I’d start there.
7. How has the effectiveness of hatecards changed over the past few years? Some people pin white as the color that is supposed to have the best ones, but I often feel like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, carries like 80% of the hatebear load, and the rest are mostly stragglers besides meddling mage (which is probably a blue card really).
In the current color pie I think Meddling Mage is significantly more white than blue; more Runed Halos and Ixalan’s Bindings get printed than analogous blue designs. Plenty of the hatebears show up in decks. Their efficacy waxes and wanes, but people play them and sometimes they win games against the stuff they’re supposed to be good against. Thalia is the best of the bunch but that shouldn’t be the baseline against which other cards are compared.
A brief video, from LizBethEden:
My favorite color “IRL” is black. If you’re one of those “black is the absence of color” pedants then I’d go with a soft blue. My favorite color in Magic is red — I like the games that are dynamic and where all the different resources matter, and I think red does the best job of consistently producing those games. And I got my first Magic product in December of 1994, so The Dark and Revised were the first sets I opened boosters of.
Kyle Talbot wonders:
hello Twitter user BasicMountain. what kind of bag is the Sullivan’s Satchel? what material is it? does it have any special ENCHANTMENTS or cool gemstones?Thank you. K TALBOT
It is made of burlap and is attached to a single stick, giving me the super power of trundling from week to week answering questions such as this without calling Cedric and telling him that I quit.
@DonPerrien asks:
Wait, DMs count? Okay, here’s my question: For a big limited tourney, do you bring your own basics? And what do you think when you sit down and play someone who did? What’s your opinion if they use Unglued lands, Mirage basics or maybe Zendikar full arts? Also, how many Beta Mountains can you get for $25 at SCG? 😉
I didn’t used to do this sort of thing, but I was the Dimir player at GP Denver a few years back (Ravnica Allegiance Team Sealed) along with Ben Lundquist and Cedric Phillips, and the lands we were provided tilted me badly enough that I purchased Beta Islands and Unlimited Swamps (Beta not available) from a dealer in the middle of Day 1. We came in sixth place, and I believe the purchase constituted more than half of my winnings. The next big Limited event I play in, whenever that may be, I’ll definitely be bringing my Beta basics with me.
As far as an opponent using them, the scrappiest, most low-gutter Limited players of all time — let’s say a Tim Aten or Adam Chambers or Craig Krempels — wouldn’t be caught dead caring so much about appearance that they would bring their own basics, so I’d feel safe that I’m not playing against the best player in the room. Still, I think that sort of faux-professionalism selects for a stronger player on the average. Mirage is the best blend of cost effectiveness, aesthetic quality, and old-school nostalgia, so that has to be the most threatening. If someone played an Unglued land against me in a high-stakes Limited match I’d probably tell them that I heard their Commander pod was ready over the PA.
And this week’s winner of a cool $25 in SCG credit, @jaymzsaint, would like to know:
Can you convey to us how what you were feeling when Cedric was discussing the, now former, pro player level system and informed you that he was at the level of Bronze?
This happened on a broadcast a few years ago, during a previous iteration of pro “benefits.” Cedric was, at the time, making an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reclaim his glory days on the Pro Tour by flying to GPs and losing three out of the last four rounds to miss cash once a month or so. Do this often enough, and you achieved the rank of Bronze, which I assumed came with at least one physical object or benefit a human being would value, but was instead of series of insults and degradations.
I was trying to tone down my response in the moment because it’s actually quite hard to make Bronze. I wouldn’t want people to assume I was mocking the actual act of getting there, or someone who aspired to but wasn’t quite at that level. But Cedric had been a fixture of the Pro Tour for many years and has played on a Pro Tour Sunday (something the vast majority of Magic players can’t say, myself included), so I know he knows what that state of affairs represented, and that he finds it funny, too.
I have no doubt Cedric could be a fixture of professional play if he set his energy towards it. The problem is that he now has way more lucrative and fulfilling ways to spend his time, and so he’s become something of a tourist, much like myself about eight years ago. There are only so many slots to go around, so unless you’re a transcendental talent, that pivot to “tourist” usually means being on the outside looking in, being stunted on by children you would have bet your life you were better than, but the delta between your results and theirs creates such a dissonance that you have no choice but to vacillate between sulking around the tournament hall and randomly lashing out on Twitter.
So, I guess I felt something like that.