Is Winter Orb Playable in Legacy?

[Koby]

Just so we're all on the same page:



Winter Orb

Artifact
Players can't untap more than one land during their untap steps.

FINIS. No other rules text or explanation. You cannot disable the ability by tapping it anymore.

[Finn]

Winter Orb is pretty good against mana hungry blue-based control (Counterbalance, Lingering Souls, Stoneblade etc). And that's about it.

RUG can operate on 1-2 mana easily.
Maverick can either ignore the effect or destroy it.
Combo kills you before Winter Orb can become effective.

I think the better uses of it include combining with Tabernacle. However, Tabernacle is good on its own independently, so Winter Orb is superfluous.

The errata to make it work no matter what also didn't help.

This is entirely true. It WAS a powerful card - in a completely different time. It is not anymore.

BTW, you can sub in Aether Vial, Hokori, Dust Drinker and Karakas to approximate the effect of tapping your Orb with Icy Manipulator back in the day. But, to give you an idea how effective that strategy is, it was used and then discarded by Death and Taxes players at a time before there were sufficient good disruptive white creatures to fill out the deck. It is only effective against board control. And there just aren't a lot of those in Legacy.

The ship on Winter Orb has sailed.

[sco0ter]

So with Eternal Masters they finally reprinted Winter Orb and they took the opportunity to change the wording to the original behavior:

As long as Winter Orb is untapped, players can't untap more than one land during their untap steps.

Does that change anything for the playability?

One good interaction I can see is in some Stax-like artifact control deck with Ghirapur Aether Grid with Sol lands.

[nedleeds]

This is old news, its discussed in another thread. Its good vs. Lands and Miracles, a bad joke vs. Daze decks and FuckElves. I built a red artifact deck around it and a Mana Breach deck aroud it when they fixed it. I lost to the internet.

[sco0ter]

This is old news, its discussed in another thread. Its good vs. Lands and Miracles, a bad joke vs. Daze decks and FuckElves. I built a red artifact deck around it and a Mana Breach deck aroud it when they fixed it. I lost to the internet.

Where is this thread? The only relevant, but very short discussion I've found is here in the Eternal Master spoiler thread.

I couldn't find any discussion about a red artifact deck and/or one with Mana Breach.

Yes, it's still bad against Daze decks and Elves, but maybe combined with Tangle Wire and Trinisphere and some way to make it one-sided, it could work.

[Sidneyious]

The main problem with Orb right now is that it punishes primarily fair decks by keeping them mana starved. That will not do much at the moment because the best tempo deck can operate on 1 mana, orb does not stop that, the best combo decks ignore their manabase pretty much, and yeah as a general tool, it does not do a lot right now, not without a lot of help. Chalice Stompy could be fun, but you do need a lot of pieces to make it work well, I would be more apt to play say Tezzeret Affinity than anything else, and Winter Orb does not fit the bill there. Right now, it is just not in a good position in the meta, if decks like Maverick, the older Natural Order decks, and mana hungry control lists were more prevalent, it would be very good, but very often it will not be even noticed, much less crippling.

Actually a buddy was building modern affinity and was sans a few cards for a legacy night so he used winter orb in place of a few cards and wrecked house.

I can't recall all the decks that played that night but I remember a few saying"who the hell plays winter orb in affinity!".

That same guy also tore apart and sold his affinity deck that was identical to my affinity deck. He got salty in a mirror match because I used hurkys recall in the side against the mirror and other decks that frequent with many artifact's.

"Who the hell uses recall in affinity!" Well I do in response to a board wipe among other things.

He had all the money but couldn't buy how to play, I lost to another player so I never goy to see how orb would of done against me as I was on some pile of 75 I was working on.

[tescrin]

Pros of winter orb:
* Good against Midrange; especially if they're lacking GB
* Good with Wasteland
* your curve can be low enough that it doesn't effect you
* good against Miracles/Lands

Cons:
* It doesn't do anything, so an opp doesn't *have* to remove it.
* It's hot garbage against D&T, Delver, and combo
* It makes opponent's Dazes *REALLY* good

Basically, it's a sideboard card because when it's good, it's pretty good. But it's also complete garbage against a host of decks that are very popular. I think if I were to run it main, I'd run it in Delver as a 1 or 2-of. You ignore most of the card and you get to make your dazes more relevant for a long time. Also, being in blue with only 1-2 copies means you can toss it to Brainstorm when it's bad.


EDIT: Also, keep in mind that DRS is probably the most used creature in legacy and that the Orb doesn't normally hold you at 1 Mana, but 2-Mana because your op can play a land. This is part of why it makes Daze so good; allowing you to make another land drop that is untapped.

Note: Winter Orb got a slight legacy buff with Thalia 2.0; but would've been *WAY* better with a Root-Maze color shifted card.