How bad is white?

[brattin]

Which would you rather play with in Legacy as it stands now:

A) Ancestral Recall

or

B) a white instant, costing WW, target player draws five cards?

I'd rather play the blue card. Am I stupid?


EDIT: This should probably be in format discussion, shouldn't it? Anyone wanna move it for me?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Are you high?

[Getsickanddie]

Which would you rather play with in Legacy as it stands now:

A) Ancestral Recall

or

B) a white sorcery, costing WW, target player draws five cards?

I'd rather play the blue card. Am I stupid?


EDIT: This should probably be in format discussion, shouldn't it? Anyone wanna move it for me?

ummm, both?

[Jaynel]

It's terrible. I don't understand the whole Ancestral recall business though.

[KillemallCFH]

Are you high?

[brattin]

I was talking with my roommates about how the color of a card dramatically affects its play value. My roommate posed the question, and I thought "white is so bad I'd rather play Ancestral." My other roommates proceeded to ask me if I was high, so I thought I'd get the Source's opinion.

I think it's a legitimate question.

Clearly blue Ancestral is better than white Ancestral. I think it's also clear that Ancestral is better than "WW, instant: target player draws 4." So how about 5?

[socialite]

Am I stupid?

Yes.

[Mordel]

I am, so I picked white...maybe I'll regret it later, but right now I am crazy-stoked on $keg$tax, which has absolutely no use for AR and even if it was in the format, I would still be playing said deck.

here is where me being high comes in though: if you put gush instead of AR, I would be clicking gush because that means that I could play my old stasis deck again. No gush killed it.

[bigbear102]

White decks don't do insanely crazy good things with 5 cards in hand. Blue decks can do insanely crazy good things with 3 cards instantly, especially if unrestricted. Blue as a color is better than white, so WW is always worse. Also being 2 mana hurts a bit. I think a better question that could get the same information would be:

U: Target player draws 2 cards
or
W: Target player draws 3 cards

[Phoenix Ignition]

White decks don't do insanely crazy good things with 5 cards in hand. Blue decks can do insanely crazy good things with 3 cards instantly, especially if unrestricted. Blue as a color is better than white, so WW is always worse. Also being 2 mana hurts a bit. I think a better question that could get the same information would be:

U: Target player draws 2 cards
or
W: Target player draws 3 cards

Bad change, obviously the extra card is worth a splash in white, I doubt anyone would argue that.

[Bryant Cook]

White has Orim's Chant and... Nothing else. I'd play the WW draw 5 in TES!

[J.V.]

White has Orim's Chant and... Nothing else.

Swords to Plowshares.

[Bryant Cook]

Swords to Plowshares.

Nothing else.

[AngryTroll]

I almost voted before I read the poll explanation...I thought it was, "How bad is white" and the options were "Ancestral Recall" vs "A White Card".

The white card would certainly be interesting. If it cost 1W, then it would be easy to splash into everything already running Swords, and then you'd have an interesting question. If that was the question...I'm not sure how I'd vote. Both.

[Aggro_zombies]

When I saw the thread title, I thought it was a thread about affirmative action. With that logic, the white card would be better as a black card because then you'd have to include it in your decks to meet your color diversity quotas.

[frogboy]

I would obviously play the white card, but you obviously play it in your blue deck.

[FoolofaTook]

White is under-explored at the moment, basically because it *was* much weaker than the Legacy meta as a whole until recently, and also because people see it as primarily a splash color more than anything else.

It's still not a powerhouse, but there should be more effort made to find solid mono-white decks with artifacts at this point. Death and Taxes is a good deck, if not top tier certainly very solid and capable of creating problems for the majority of top tier decks in the meta.

The other thing that seems to be true is that the white-black axis hasn't been re-explored much recently. Adding Thoughtseize and Cabal Therapy to a white creature based theme is an idea that has a lot of merit, since it begins to resolve one of the main weaknesses in mono-white - which is vulnerability to storm combo.

[Aggro_zombies]

The other thing that seems to be true is that the white-black axis hasn't been re-explored much recently. Adding Thoughtseize and Cabal Therapy to a white creature based theme is an idea that has a lot of merit, since it begins to resolve one of the main weaknesses in mono-white - which is vulnerability to storm combo.

This sounds like Homebrew, which is a terrible deck with access to arguably better creatures (guys with useful abilities and evasion even though they're smaller on average). Suicide Black or the splash variants like Eva Green don't use white because black creatures are better, and there are stronger splash options.

[FoolofaTook]

This sounds like Homebrew, which is a terrible deck with access to arguably better creatures (guys with useful abilities and evasion even though they're smaller on average). Suicide Black or the splash variants like Eva Green don't use white because black creatures are better, and there are stronger splash options.

I don't know Homebrew so I can't comment on that deck. The idea that I think would be interesting would be a white control deck with 15-18 creatures, splashing black just for Thoughtseize, Cabal Therapy and maybe Vindicate as a supplement to Swords to Plowshares. The creatures could actually be fairly vanilla white creatures, pardon the pun, with Savannah Lions and Figure of Destiny as the 1 drops and Jotun Grunt and Serra Avenger as the two drops. White has access to enough interesting creatures in the 3cc, 4cc and 5cc range that I think it wouldn't be hard to fill out the 4 spots or so remaining in the creature roster. And Elspeth and Ajani both create interesting problems for the opponent, assuming they're not invalidated by having the game go over in the first few turns to combo.

Note that it'd be really easy to have all but one land (a basic swamp) provide white mana, assuming that you were willing to play 8 to 10 fetches - which I think this kind of deck might well want to do. I don't think the deck would be tier 1 but I think it would create a problem for the opposition in any meta it showed up in. I've played against turn 1 Thoughtseize, turn 2 drop a second land and Cabal Therapy and then drop a cheap creature and therapy again if the situation warrants and there are very few decks that just smile and keep on rolling when that happens.

[morgan_coke]

There was a time when Green was the worst color in Legacy, then it was black, and now it's white. It'll rotate again. White's been getting some good cards lately, stuff like Ethersworn Canonist comes to mind. Plus Death and Taxes is only a few cards away from making the shift from - really annoying deck - to really good deck.

Also, white has Slide, so it can't be that bad of a color.