Personally, I don't like any of those options, which is why I'd rather explore a color splash. Red seems like the most promising, with white then black behind it.
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Personally, I don't like any of those options, which is why I'd rather explore a color splash. Red seems like the most promising, with white then black behind it.
What we all have to keep in mind for this slot is that we'll only be running 1-2 of these max, and that it doesn't have to be a 4-drop. But as for the 4 Drops, here's my thoughts.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illissius
Extravagant Spirit: I've looked at him, actually. He does have a little promise. Especially since his cost is colorless.
Illusionary Forces / Phantasmal Forces: Cumulative Upkeep U is not supportable. Big flying tanks with upkeep costs that die to Mogg Fanatic suck.
I can just see us getting Plagued for Phantasm.:cool:
Serendib Djinn: Very solid, but hard to consistently cast and keep casting other things unless you opened with a Mox and draw land. Risky. Very Suicide Blueish.
Waterspout Djinn: Awful, considering you have to have the Island itself and not any other land.
Breezekeeper: Not listed, and probably not playable, but a 4 for 4/4 with no real cost to keep him, and a single blue. The fact that he's MIA half the time sucks, though.
Thought Devourer: Now here's someone I hadn't seen or looked at. Devourer's incredibly intriguing, as his drawback is barely a drawback at all. You just don't want two in play at once. I'mma try him.
Troublesome Spirit / Phantom Monster / Possessed Aven: Meh, Meh, and Meh.
Chronozoa: Alright, but his little ability rarely if ever triggers. Maybe if I ran like, Chisei, Heart of Oceans, too. But meh Chisei.
Kronichler and Tacoscape, you missed the point. My point was that it's SOFI NOT Cloud of Faires that you were relying on to apply the pressure in that example. Technically you're not neccesarily even dealing damage with SOFI a turn faster. A City of traitors next turn could just as easily equip SOFI on to whatever threat you played the previous turn.
Where did I say or even imply that SOFI is bad. My point was that dumping the rest of your hand just to play 1 actual threat, one prone to tons of removal, isn't always smart and certainly not the ideal god play that you guys were making it out to be. Because if that SOFI is countered or killed, and you have no back up threat, you're likely not going to be able to apply enough pressure to win.
If anything that example accentuates my point, which was that the majority of the games this deck loses, it loses precisely because it doesn't run enough actual threats that apply pressure.
7-8 out of the 10 games that I lose, I lose precisely because my Sea Drake or Efreet or Jitte or SOFI or whatever card that my entire gameplan was forced to be reliant upon because this deck runs so few of them, was killed. And thus upping the number of these threats improves this deck. My testing has supported this again and again. I can't count the number of games Juggernaut has saved my butt by acting as the backup threat this deck so desperately needed.
Cloud of Fairies is an incredible card, and it's a card that I very much don't want to have to cut. It's perfectly plausible that was a bad decision on my part and that the cards I should have cut are the 2 Shoreline Rangers I run or Weatherseed Fairies or something else.
My argument isn't that Clouds should be cut or that Juggernaut needs to be run. My point is that some card that doesn't apply significant pressure needs to be cut and replaced with another card that applies a lot of pressure on your opponent. I would love nothing more than for that card to also be 3U and have evasion. I tried a number of options including Djinn and haven't found anything that was better than Juggernaut. Djinn may sound good on paper, but it has too many draw backs, the double blue casting cost, the nuking your own lands, the dealing self damage and the dying when you run out lands. Has anyone here tested Djinn, are you still running it. I don't think so, because I have yet to hear someone say they're running it, and I am all too familiar with the reasons why. I would say thought, if the card costed 3U, I would run it in a heart beat, as it's a great threat good enough to justify some of the drawbacks, just not so many of them.
But Extravagant Spirit seems like there's a chance it might work as a finisher. Props on the find. I will have to give it a whirl.
As for the color splash? I thought the main reason we were exploring blue cards instead of Juggs or Synod Centurion or the like is so they can occasionally power FoW and Chrome Mox. And why do we want to make the manabase even more unstable and more vulnerable to wasteland than it already is?
Criticize Juggernaut all you want, but I know what my testing of the
deck both with and without the card demonstrates. I am testing Cloud of Fairies some more though to see if it earns a spot. Here's my current list for reference...
8 Island
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Chrome Mox
1 Seat of Synod
1 Shoreline Ranger
4 Sea Drake
4 Serendib Efreet
4 Trinket Mage
4 Cloud of Fairies/Weatherseed Fairies ? Testing Both Intermittently
3 Looter il Kor
3 Juggernaut
3 Jitte
4 SOFI
1 Pithing Needle
4 Chalice of the Void
4 Force of Will