Maybe I'm missing it, but how does palinchron go off, exactly? Every time you ninjutsu you need to bounce another unblocked attacker?Wallycaine wrote: ↑2 years agoSneak attack for 4 mana per activation is a vastly different card than sneak attack at 1 cost activation. This puts me more into the mindset of Impromptu Raid than sneak attack. By the time you're "cheating" a creature into play, you've invested at least 8 mana (1 for unblockable duder, 3 for Umezawa himself, 4 for the Ninjutsu ability). At that point, you're not getting much more of a discount than you would off something like Thran Temporal Gateway, which is not exactly tearing up things, even if it was printed as a commander. Personally, I'd look at playing him as a proper ninjutsu lord, with only a few fatties and the occasional combo piece (Palinchron and 7 lands that tap for 9 goes off, for example). Won't be a high power deck, but I'm skeptical that the sneak attack plan would be either.
There's only 18 cards on scryfall with ninjutsu at the moment, and some of those are pretty trash. I'm not sure what the point of including most of them would be anyway - unless you want to capitalize on a cheap ninjutsu cost, you might as well be putting a legitimate threat into play instead of Okiba-Gang Shinobi or whatever, considering the cost is the same with umezawa out. Unless you think he's going to be dying a lot, but then a lot of the ninjas are just pretty crap.
Not sure what the right split is between evasive dudes and fatties is, but probably more towards fatties. You only need 1-2 evasive dudes total, whereas more fatties is always good. Idk that it's a deck that grabs me, though. If there was motivation to choose clever targets instead of the biggest dumbest crap, then it'd be interesting, but alas there is not.