Originally Posted by
Marke
jeez you keep making this stupid mistake.. It's not as simple as saying that since both halfs of the card are good on it's own that thus this card is good as well...
A card where the opponent can choose is not as good as some average in between the two halfs which you are sort of assuming. It's worse then the worst part of the card as a competent opponent will always choose the option that is worst for you..
Yes R for 4 to the dome is ALWAYS good (but not spectactular) in this type of deck. R for a 4/3 is however NOT, there are tons of situations for a burn deck where affecting the board is completely irrelevant and not being able to affect their life total is terrible. Those situations WILL come up often and make it much worse then it looks at first hand.
This card will VERY rarely do more then 4 damage, afterall if it would why would your opponent let it be a creature? The cases this does more then 4 damage are those where doing so will be irrelevant, ie your opponent was at really low life and let this resolve as a creature where it might do more then 4 but you would have won either way... The cases where this does 0 will happen quite frequently though because either you topdeck it too late (they let it be a creature and ignore it) or they simply have removal for it.
Simply put most times this will be 4 damage for R, let's say 70% of the time. Some times it will do more then 4 (maybe 2% of the time) but that will be irrelevant. The other times it will simply do 0 though because you're opponent can interact with it.. On average this will likely just be worse then lavaspike which might still be playable but barely so. The worst thing also is that this has more variance which is usually bad for a card. Doing 3 dmg all the time is better then 4 most times and occasionally 0 because, with the first card you always win when resolving 7 damage spells. With the latter you still win with 7 damage spells (rarely 6) but often you need 8 because you're devil didn't do it's damage, 1 extra card for burn is terrible because it the finishing spell is often the last spell in hand. Needing 1 extra card can easily equal to giving your opponent 2 extra turns..
