I literally stumbled upon this card (it lay around here in my room on the floor and I accidently stepped on it).
Card Name: Culling Scales
Mana Cost: 3
Types: Artifact
Card Text: At the beginning of your upkeep, destroy target nonland permanent with the lowest converted mana cost. (If two or more permanents are tied for lowest cost, target any one of them.)
Looking at the card made me think, this pretty much always has a target and is less manaconsuming than Engineered Explosives. It can't hit a Goyf if there's a Hierarch, but with a little deckbuilding, this problem can be solved quite easily.
Also, it's recurring removal. Fire and forget.
Might even say, it's removal for Stax? Yep, this actually IS a way to handle permanents that have hit the field. And it's way faster than Powder Keg.
Honestly, I can see 3 different decks using this card:
1. Control. Maze of Ith stalls a board quite easily, Culling Scales can be put down and it will nibble away your opponent's creatures.
2. Stax. Stax usually has problems with resolved permanents - pretty much 80% of these are cheaper than Culling Scales. This could be the solution for resolved permanents. Problem is the dissynergy with Chalice.
3. Mono Brown Stompy. This deck uses a stompy manabase to power out huge beatsticks which are all more expensive than Culling Scales. The deck traditionally has issues with resolved permanents. Problem is the dissynergy with Chalice.
I've seen people use Powder Keg, which is incredibly slow and I honestly don't understand why they use it when there's Culling Scales available.
The card surely is no Tarmogoyf that fits into nearly every deck, but it's recurring CA and will solve stalemates very fast - in your favor.
What's your opinion on this?
This looks like a job for me.
Most of my posts will be written from my phone, so please excuse the eventual lack of proper typing.
The problem with Culling Scales is that it eats itself after a while, as well as being very slow in destroying the permanents you want to destroy. In Stax, notice that it is also dissynergistic with Mox Diamond.
The problem with this card is that it's a "slow" (not in terms of the cost) reactive card that you have to play after they have at least 2 targets for you to eat. This basically means that they'll get at least a turn for their permanent to do its job at least once since you can't play this pro-actively.
Then again I havent actually tested it yet so I could be missing something completely. If that happens, make fun of me.
It does seem interesting as a one-of for Enlightened Tutor toolbox decks though.
Well, if they have 1 target and you drop it, they have the choice to not to play something else for the next 2 turns, or they give you CA. I think this card has the chance to run an opponent dry really fast if he can't handle it.Originally Posted by sa17dk
This looks like a job for me.
Most of my posts will be written from my phone, so please excuse the eventual lack of proper typing.
I'll just point out that it also has great synergy with Sensei's Divining Top, since you can target Top and then bounce it to the top of your deck in response.
That isn't synergy. That's just bad. The idea of Culling Scales is to get rid of their stuff; not being forced to target your Top. The Top trick is only good if you want to preserve your Scales; not to be a primary use.
I think the combination of not sweeping and not going after lands hurt it.
I think it's major problems are you will always use a mox in a deck that uses it or it's just too slow and that there are more specific answers to whatever problem you want it to answer. As for creatures you could run something like drop of honey or Porphyry Nodes, which aren't as good as just having something like Ghostly Prison + Maze of Ith. If your problem is enchantments or artifacts you can run serenity, and most decks are built to stop one thing almost completely and have answers to another.
It seems like a good card because it can hit everything eventually, but it doesn't do any job well. Jack of all trades master of none as it were.
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It could never be played in Stax. You have to target both your Mox Diamonds AND your Chalice of the Void. Mox you may be able to stand to lose; Chalice, not so much. The same thing problem goes for MUD, with the same 2 permanents. Lastly, control decks generate enough card advantage through Jace or, rarely, Fact or Fiction that they're fine with just 1:1ing creatures all day with point removal.
It is most viable in a slow control deck. The card basically forces your opponent to stop playing things until it is gone, or they can try to burst you to death. With any other prison piece, it negates the latter option. It would be great in stax in theory because it buys you so much time to do other things. The problem is that stax happens to have a number of good cards that have cmc zero. It might be able to be worked into a build that forgoes things like chalice of the void and moxes. How good that deck would be I do not know. Perhaps the larger problem is that it does nothing to stop storm decks, graveyard-based combo decks, or burn, which forces it out of many maindeck lists. In a vacuum, this card is quite strong, but there aren't enough other cards that are both strong and work with it well enough in order to form a decklist that would likely out-perform a current stax build. However, I would like to see a few sample decklists that might suggest otherwise.
Looks like there is some random synergy between that and Esperzoa. Whenever your opponent plays something smaller than it, you could just hold it in hand for that purpose.
Otherwise it looks pretty bad because yeah it blows up your Chalices, Mox Diamonds, etc.
Also for the record, Stax plays, well, Smokestack, to deal with permanents. This is just an really underpowered version of Smokestack.
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4. It's used in some variants of Pox. Pox uses Culling Scales as its answer to Counterbalance and likely fast aggro.Honestly, I can see 3 different decks using this card:
1. Control. Maze of Ith stalls a board quite easily, Culling Scales can be put down and it will nibble away your opponent's creatures.
2. Stax. Stax usually has problems with resolved permanents - pretty much 80% of these are cheaper than Culling Scales. This could be the solution for resolved permanents. Problem is the dissynergy with Chalice.
3. Mono Brown Stompy. This deck uses a stompy manabase to power out huge beatsticks which are all more expensive than Culling Scales. The deck traditionally has issues with resolved permanents. Problem is the dissynergy with Chalice.
That's the problem.
That card looks incredibly powerful, but there seem to be too many things that keep it from being good in the meta.
I'd like to come up with a decklist and I already thought about one for hours, but the card seems to fit into no deck and I can't seem to find a way to build around it.
This looks like a job for me.
Most of my posts will be written from my phone, so please excuse the eventual lack of proper typing.
That's what I meant. Obviously you wouldn't do that if there was something to remove with Scales. Not that this is worthy of playing in Legacy, but it is an interaction nonetheless.
That being said, yeah, the card is pretty weak.
The only thing that I really like about it is that you can destroy counterbalance with it, but even then it would only ever deserve to be in the sideboard if anywhere.
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