Quote Originally Posted by FTW View Post
The thing is, RUG Delver and BUG Delver aren't really new decks. RUG Tempo and BUG Tempo have been around forever (Canadian Thresh and Team America). It wouldn't be a stretch to take the spell base and game plan of those decks and try splashing a green 3/2 flyer. Those archetypes certainly don't exist only because of Delver, they've just adapted a bit because of it. Stuff like UR Delver is different, but RUG has always been a deck.

Sure, maybe some aggro players would have tried it in green decks like Goyf found its way into burn-heavy Goyf sligh. People would be brewing. But green decks don't want to run lots of instants and sorceries. The mechanic just wouldn't be as conducive to designing competitive green decks, with the exception of maybe some kind of Goyf Sligh deck still existing with 20 Lightning Bolts + Green Delver + Goyf + GG + Fireblast, but that might just be worse than straight burn or Zoo.

People eventually figured out Goyf was really blue and was amazing in blue decks. And since then, it seems like people have figured out that sort of thing sooner. Blue decks had no problem finding Stoneforge Mystic, again easy to splash. I think a 3/2 flyer for G that synergizes with spell-dense decks would have easily found its way into RUG right after printing. Most blue decks that run Goyf would love green Delver for the same reasons. Especially when Delver's best friend is Brainstorm/Ponder.
I can't tell if you're implicitly agreeing with me or not, heh.

I think the whole "green decks don't want to run instants/sorceries" bit is more or less in line with where I was ultimately driving to here. I guess we could go to an extreme comparison place and like… think about what "mono-Blue Delver" versus "mono Green Delver" would look like, and which one is ultimately more potent. But I think that just skews the gist of the conversation to a series of ever-tunneling thought experiments that just becomes tedious after a while, and that's very specific functionality compared to a more general concept of displacing cards and seeing if their environment is still conducive to the same level of busted-ness as current.