Originally Posted by
pi4meterftw
I don't understand this logic. I agree that you should be additionally scared that sphinx be removed, because you stand to not only lose the 4/4, but to lose cards drawn yet. But if you replace sphinx with efreet, you will most definitely not draw cards.
It's like someone presents like a 50/50 shot at $100,000,000, and you're like: well if I took that, then I'd be biting my fingernails, so I'll just deny it.
Discarding cards to sphinx is ~ nothing (and if it's not, you should just cash it in right away.) Sphinx is only bad when your hand is full of goodies, in which case you should win anyway. And even then, sphinx is a blue card, meaning there are 8 ways to dump it. But you don't even have to dump it. Most decks in the format fold to UWT if UWT is holding 3 or 4 threats. So you have a choice: would you like to run a 4/4 that draws cards like 80% of the time, and then gets swordsed the other 20%?
Or would you rather not draw cards, so that way when someone swords, you don't lose out on drawing cards. (But only because you decided to lose out on it by not running sphinx.)
See how ridiculous that line of reasoning is?
To make this even more accessible to anybody who failed to understand my above efforts, consider a creature 1UU: 4/4 flying with you draw 3 cards when it dies.
When someone swords it, you're obviously disappointed. It doesn't matter how much you paid for it. Even if you paid just U for it, you should be just as disappointed as if you paid 3UU. What you lose is: 3 cards and a 4/4 flying. I'd be pretty upset if that happened. But if you're going to count that as a loss, then you should definitely have counted me as getting 1UU for a 4/4 flying AND +3 cards as soon as I cast sphinx, for otherwise there's an imbalance in your counting where I lose cards that I was never counted as having. But what you shouldn't say is like: I don't want to play a massively advantageous card, because if my opponent happens to luck out an answer, then I only get ~status quo, which is scary!
Even efreet's drawback is worse when it gets swordsed. Efreet probably cost you 2-3 life in the time you're assuming either creature sticks around, and then it having 1 less power probably gave your opponent 2 extra life, and lets you gain 1 fewer life off swords, so like a 5-6 life swing. And then that's the case where sphinx and efreet are closest: when they don't really live to do that much, AND the removal removing them was an "RFG" removal. In that case, the relative change is I lose my 3 most useless cards to swing the life totals by 5-6. That's pretty close, unless I have a brainstorm.
But it's not even in the same ballpark when it doesn't get swordsed, cause then it's an extra 2 damage to the opponent's face instead of 2 damage to me, and if the opponent hasn't died, then efreet probably evens the damage score over the next two turns by dealing 1 to you, 3 to him, but vexing sphinx does everything efreet will do for the rest of the game while letting you trade 3 cards for 3 cards.
As I said, it's not even in the same ball park.
