[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Xander's Pact

[DirkGently]

Ugh I hate this card so much. It pays to be aware of, though, especially when fetching.

Makes total sense in mono-red, but I hate multicolour decks running this. Sure, it can be great, but every game you don't draw it your fixing sucks for no benefit.

[3drinks]

Cards like these would encourage me to fetch basics when getting duals is not strictly necessary.... just in case.

Always a good plan. Since moving to a 3c, 10fetch base, I've actually migrated non type duals out of my deck, replacing them with basics because fetches are by far the most efficient mana fixing.

And this is coming from the Ruination player. I will make no qualms stealing games with this that I had no business winning while reminding them "you did this to yourself..."

[3drinks]

Ugh I hate this card so much. It pays to be aware of, though, especially when fetching.

Makes total sense in mono-red, but I hate multicolour decks running this. Sure, it can be great, but every game you don't draw it your fixing sucks for no benefit.

I've run this in 2c decks, alongside moons (you just need proper fetching, i.e. know when you actually need a dual or if a basic can suffice). But 3c ruination is tricky when a From the Ashes is usually better. But, yes, it's always a great play to be mindful of this card overall.

[onering]

Its pretty good in 2 color. You can just load up on fetches and the typed duals. Unless you have extremely tight mana requirements, you can safely start fetching basics after one or two duals, and you don't need to come out completely unscathed to make Ruination great, losing a land or two to it while everyone else loses 5-6 is still great. It depends on the color pair and archetype though. A low curve and I'm more likely to include because im more able to afford losing a land or two, so that's most of my Boros decks, while Izzet likes it because if it's draw heavy (same for Rakdos) since it will draw enough lands to quickly replace any that you lose to Ruination, though less draw heavy builds avoid it. Gruul meanwhile always wants it because since you can run plenty of green ramp that fetches out basics my Gruul decks tend to be very basic heavy.

[toctheyounger]

No problem with this, among the fairest of LD options. Similarly, I really enjoy Wave of Vitriol in green variants. If it screws your deck that's on you, not me.

[hyalopterouslemur]

I love this card. Yeah, it hoses nonbasic lands, but you can't help but feel you did it to yourself.

[Mookie]

I played it in my Samut deck for a while, but eventually cut it - running a 3-color manabase of almost entirely basics felt terrible, even with all the land ramp I was running. It may be viable to do so if you're running a full suite of fetchlands (and Magus of the Moon and Blood Moon as additional payoffs), but required more investment than I was willing to put in.

Speaking more broadly, while I hate Armageddon and other forms of MLD, I'm generally fine with Ruination / Back to Basics / etc. There is a huge incentive in EDH to run more colors so you have access to more cards, and I'm in favor of anything that pushes in the other direction - there are enough options for color fixing these days that the inconsistency for adding extra colors isn't enough of a counterbalance.

I'm also a huge fan of Wave of Vitriol. Haven't been as impressed by From the Ashes though.

[DirkGently]

Speaking more broadly, while I hate Armageddon and other forms of MLD, I'm generally fine with Ruination / Back to Basics / etc. There is a huge incentive in EDH to run more colors so you have access to more cards, and I'm in favor of anything that pushes in the other direction - there are enough options for color fixing these days that the inconsistency for adding extra colors isn't enough of a counterbalance.

I hate ruination and I'll tell you why. Blood moon I am totally fine with - it's not unreasonable to expect you to be able to function at least decently with only basics and artifacts for fixing in the late-game. That, to me, is a fair price to pay for relying on nonbasics for fixing purposes. Plus, if you can kill it, then you're fully unlocked and good to go. B2B is kinda similar, although it can be more or less damaging depending what's going on. Either way, if you have mostly basics, or you have enchantment removal, you should be ok.

Ruination is basically uninteractable except with counterspells exactly when they cast it, and having a couple of basics mixed into your manabase in no way saves you - even if you have half basics it can still be devastating. If you're playing a 3+ color deck, what exactly is your counterplay to this card except actual counterspell? Play craptacular mana JUST IN CASE someone is playing exactly ruination?

I also just generally hate this all-or-nothing approach to counterplay in magic. 97% of games, having zero basics will be totally fine with no consequences except that your manafixing kicks ass. And then every once in a while you get completely locked out of the game by one card. Wow, great counterplay, such fun.

If they wanted to make 3+ color manabases more fragile, the more satisfying structure imo would be to have many cards with more minor consequences, but that's hard to do and so wotc rarely prints hate cards like that. Instead they print nuclear weapons that either utterly decimate your opponent for playing X, or do absolutely nothing because they aren't playing X. It's rock paper scissors and it sucks.

BM and B2B are way more ok because you don't need to have an answer RIGHT THEN, you can pack a few answers in your deck with a decent number of basics to prepare, and if you have enough basics you can potentially play through it, especially with BM. You can take them into account with your deckbuilding and playing. For ruination your counterplay options are extremely limited, especially outside of blue, and the consequences are enormous and essentially permanent. Screw this card.

[3drinks]

Basics =/= bad mana. Hell, oftentimes it's more correct to fetch into basics anyway, unless you actually need the dual. Basic lands are good, powerful even. They come in untapped and provide a colour of mana with no circumstance or conditions on it.

Bad fixing is those %$#% tap duals that WotC insists on putting in every prebuilt. There's far greater science that goes into mana base crafting than jamming every untapped land that makes 2+ colours - don't take that out on the best tools us mono-R decks have to keep the playing field level. Either pay the...price of progress...or suffer quietly.

[DirkGently]

Basics =/= bad mana. Hell, oftentimes it's more correct to fetch into basics anyway, unless you actually need the dual. Basic lands are good, powerful even. They come in untapped and provide a colour of mana with no circumstance or conditions on it.

I think that's absolutely how BM functions, as a punishment for greed. Play some basics. Fetch basics when you can afford to. Don't be too greedy.

Ruination is not that. I'd argue that a 3-colour manabase with half basics is making a HUUGE compromise in its mans reliability, but it still gets massively set back by ruination. Ruination is the only card that's so punishing and so hard to interact with, which makes it even more frustrating when it gets played,

[Mookie]

Sidenote: on a meta level, the reactions people have to different flavors of nonbasic hate always interest me:

Blood Moon is [okay because it has no effect once you remove it] / [terrible because it can't be removed, because red can't kill enchantments]
Back to Basics is [okay because you still have access to your mana] / [terrible because you can play it when your opponents are tapped out and it makes ETBT lands useless]
Ruination is [okay because it doesn't affect any future lands so you can recover from it] / [terrible because it destroys the lands and you can't recover from it]
Wasteland is [okay because it's a one-shot effect that only kills problems lands] / [terrible because it sees play with recursion and extra land drops, so it never goes away]

[DirkGently]

I think it depends what kind of game you're playing. T3 or earlier bm can be tough since you often can't fetch yourself to safety.

I think ruination is the hardest to recover from and interact with late-game, which is why I'd say it's the biggest problem in fair games.

Really I think the biggest issue with ruination is that it's almost impossible to build around without making huge sacrifices. You can give yourself a fighting chance against the others with relatively little sacrifice, and worst case you can just pack removal for it. Ruination is the one card that you really can't truly mitigate without crippling sacrifices.

[3drinks]

I think it depends what kind of game you're playing. T3 or earlier bm can be tough since you often can't fetch yourself to safety.

I think ruination is the hardest to recover from and interact with late-game, which is why I'd say it's the biggest problem in fair games.

Really I think the biggest issue with ruination is that it's almost impossible to build around without making huge sacrifices. You can give yourself a fighting chance against the others with relatively little sacrifice, and worst case you can just pack removal for it. Ruination is the one card that you really can't truly mitigate without crippling sacrifices.

When you complain about nonbasic hate...do you complain about Shatterstorms the same way, since they spoil your rock development. Do you get angry at Pyroclasms for utterly annihilating your mana dorks?

1) sounds like your colour commitments are too deep. Might be worth a look at altering the basic functions so that you don't feel so railroaded into land bases that are this victimized by nonbasic hate.

2) do you not sandbag lands? If you're playing every land as soon as you draw it, then this too is an opportunity cost and a vulnerability to not just be the target of Ruination - Armageddon would hurt the same way.

3) if it's really such a huge issue, you might just need to play more Sacred Ground, since this is clearly a huge issue for your decks to get over. Aside from this, it may be time to recognize that this is a very real weakness that you have to accept as a game loss. No deck is without flaws, and to expect such a sweeping invincibility against any and all archetypes is not only sad, but also childish.

Playing 3c and being unable to accept a natural flaw to the allure of more options in the deckbuilding phase is like playing reanimator decks and complaining about well timed grave hate blowing you out.

[3drinks]

Thursday, November 21st, 2019; Sword of the Animist

How good is this really? I am always underwhelmed and generally happy I sold mine back in the summer.

[FoxOfWar]

If I am in non-green and still want a lot of lands (as opposed to a lot of mana), I use it. Which is to say... I think my monoblue and monoblack, that actually care about their respective basic land counts at few points.

[Rumpy5897]

Yeah, that's a pretty good description. This is one for a very specific subset of deck - one that can chase out creatures early so this can be carried into battle ASAP, one that's slow and grindy, one that's fixated on getting as much mana as possible. My Daxos checks all these boxes, and Sword of Rampant Growth does a decent job of offering land ramp in there.

[DirkGently]

Sword of the animist appeals to my desire for value, and to throw five or six swords onto the chosen hero. Pretty much guaranteed to go into my twice-yearly voltron deck (always followed by remembering why I hate voltron, and hasty disassembly).

When you complain about nonbasic hate...do you complain about Shatterstorms the same way, since they spoil your rock development. Do you get angry at Pyroclasms for utterly annihilating your mana dorks?

1) sounds like your colour commitments are too deep. Might be worth a look at altering the basic functions so that you don't feel so railroaded into land bases that are this victimized by nonbasic hate.

2) do you not sandbag lands? If you're playing every land as soon as you draw it, then this too is an opportunity cost and a vulnerability to not just be the target of Ruination - Armageddon would hurt the same way.

3) if it's really such a huge issue, you might just need to play more Sacred Ground, since this is clearly a huge issue for your decks to get over. Aside from this, it may be time to recognize that this is a very real weakness that you have to accept as a game loss. No deck is without flaws, and to expect such a sweeping invincibility against any and all archetypes is not only sad, but also childish.

Playing 3c and being unable to accept a natural flaw to the allure of more options in the deckbuilding phase is like playing reanimator decks and complaining about well timed grave hate blowing you out.

I mean...it's a mighty rare situation where a shatterstorm is going to destroy more than half your mana (although my kaervek might get there sometimes). Same for pyroclasm. Virtually every 3+ (or even 2+ tbh) deck will have more than half its mana destroyed by ruination EVEN IF IT'S BUILT TO PROTECT AGAINST NONBASIC HATE.

More to the point, dorks and artifact ramp are easier to rebuild since you'll still have lands to fall back on to cast whatever recover spells you need, and you can also rebuild quickly if you've sandbagged some in hand. You can sandbag lands for ruination, but you're still only playing 1 per turn, so you might not even be getting much benefit from playing around it, even if you know it's coming. That's the root of the wrongheadedness of any argument for MLD that starts with "but other spells reset you (grave/rocks/creatures/enchantments/hand/whatever)." Those things don't have a limit of how many you can play per turn.

My manabases in general work fine against everything except specifically ruination. I'm all for nonbasic hate being a limiter on the efficiency of nonbasics, that's as it should be. BM and B2B both have fine counterplay. If I suspect BM I can fetch basics or be prepared to float into removal, if I suspect B2B I can avoid tapping nonbasics out, and in both cases I can run enchantment removal. For Ruination my play-around is...hold up a counterspell forever?

Maybe your more recent decks look different, but looking at your kaalia and alesha lists on sally, you're running about the same number of basics as I run in most of my 3+ color lists - which is to say, a couple per color. That's usually enough to function under BM, and enough to struggle through B2B until removal is found, but for a long game there's no way you're happily tanking a ruination.

The number of games I've actually lost to ruination is probably...idk maybe like one or two? Maybe some a long time ago, but none in recently memory. I usually have the counter when playing Phelddagrif, but it does absolutely force the counter. I remember someone wiping most of my lands out with one in Kaervek recently, but since no one killed Kaervek after that it actually didn't matter and I won anyway. Kind of insane considering I was one STP away from being (much) worse than square one. I don't complain about cards because they've actually lost me games - well, sometimes I guess I do, but mostly I complain about cards that I think are unhealthy for the metagame in principle, and I think ruination is unhealthy for the metagame. Please don't assume I'm whining about my personal losses when I'm arguing for or against cards. It's dismissive and insulting, not to mention flat-out wrong.

Comparing ruination to grave hate is ridiculous. You CAN play around grave hate. It's a crucial part of the counterplay of ALL grave-based decks. Decks can, and do, quickly recover from bojuka bog, relic of progenitus, etc quite easily, especially if they've planned around the eventuality. You don't have the restriction of "you can only put 1 card into your graveyard per turn", for one thing. Discard, dredge, sac a couple things, bam, grave restored. How exactly is that comparable to someone having 80% of their lands destroyed? Grave hate is also all basically the same. Exile your grave. Plan around that, and you're fine. If you want to plan around ruination, you need to do things that no one other card would force you to do. It would be like if there was a card that made you lose the game if half your cards came before "M" alphabetically. You suddenly have to make massive concessions just to appease ONE card. Honestly it would almost be better if there were more than one ruination. I mean, no one would ever play nonbasics, but at least you wouldn't just get every-once-in-a-blue-moon blindsided by an unfair hate card.

I would rather live in a world where there were 10 functionally-similar-to-BM/B2B hate cards for nonbasics, and no ruination. Those cards are fair obstacles to the efficiency of nonbasics with reasonable counterplay. Ruination's counterplay is basically nothing. The card is just "oh, you're playing a fair deck with 3+ colors and don't have a counterspell RIGHT NOW? You lose." I fail to see how that contributes anything positive to the metagame.

You know what Ruination reminds me of? Iona. Another card that creates incredibly un-fun situations, and demands extreme requirements for effective counterplay. It took a long time to get Iona banned, but maybe one day Ruination will meet the same fate. Wouldn't be the least bit sorry.

[Sinis]

Thursday, November 21st, 2019; Sword of the Animist

You need two swings to make it on par with an Explosive Vegetation. That's not a tall order, and it's not bad. I have personally lived the dream of T1 Khalni Garden, T2 land->Sword, T3 equip to plant token, swing and get land.

I play this in decks that have aggressively costed creatures or generals. Colour is not usually a factor; it can be found in my green decks as well.

[lyonhaert]

People underestimate this Sword of Rampant Growth. Or at least the folks in my group do. They should kill it with fire, especially in Chainer, but I can usually get a small handful of triggers on it.

[Serenade]

Wrath, animate land, equip, attack

I had an Ishai/Kraum deck with a decent artifact theme. This card did work as it got me in a good place before the inevitable artifact-wrath/CRift.

[Mookie]

I've generally been happy with Sword of the Animist. It's somewhat slow, but it's a fantastic source of ramp for decks that otherwise may not have access to it. I run it in my Teysa deck as a way to turn on Emeria, the Sky Ruin. Also a consistent source of landfall for decks that care about that. Very good with extra combat steps. Triggers on attack (not combat damage), which makes it trivial to enable, especially if you have expendable tokens. Can definitely be worth consideration if you want to diversify your ramp package (such as if all you ramp is artifact mana).

[MeowZeDung]

This card plays like a dream in my wife's Drana, Liberator of Malakir deck. Drana is already looking to beatdown, so equipment is more than welcome, and there are so many swamps matter cards that Sword of the Animist is great early or late game. Cabal Coffers, Cabal Stronghold, Magus of the Coffers, Strata Scythe, Nightmare Lash, Lashwrithe, Crypt Ghast, Nirkana Revenant, Guul Draz Overseer, Mutilate, Liliana of the Dark Realms, Defile, and Quag Sickness all get better with the sword doing its thing.

I could see it being decent fixing, but there are better options for sure. I wouldn't run it except in a mono color deck with relevant "land type matters" cards, or maybe in a landfall deck.

Edit: Oooh, I forgot about Emeria, the Sky Ruin! I ran Sword of the Animist just to get plains for Emeria in a Saffi Eriksdotter deck that was all about recursion.

[hyalopterouslemur]

A Rampant Growth a turn is insanely powerful. I don't know why people keep underestimating it. I guess because Rampant Growth isn't played as much. (Sakura-Tribe Elder is strictly better.) But if I gave you a Divination a turn, that would be insane. People are dumb sometimes.

[DirkGently]

I think it's more about how slow and conditional it is. Usually t4 is the earliest you'll get to trigger it, so it's not until attack 3 that it's doing better than explosive veg, which itself is pretty medium. As a grindy value over time card I love it, but it looks pretty weak compared to, for example, traverse the outlands which can just dump 8 lands into play in one shot instead of setting up a bunch of pieces and slowly grinding up value. In a format of big splashy plays this sort of thing has fallen out of favour.

[pokken]

It's one of those effects that often flies under the radar; usually if you cast traverse the outlands or boundless realms you're obviously public enemy #1. I've stacked up 4 or 5 lands in a game over turns with this and it's deceptive.

I do think these kinds of incremental value plays have kinda fallen by the wayside in a format where the format has gotten significantly heavier on "game winning bombs."

Hell, cards like smothering tithe, mystic forge and even rhystic study and necropotence gaining more casual acceptance, and manifold insights, etc. There's just a lot of ways to spend 3 or 4 mana that are closer to the bomb plays these days.