Sefir wrote: ↑4 years ago
I decided to try a Smothering Tithe in the deck.
Oh my....
Oh my, my.......
Saying the card overperformed is quite an understatement. With so many "everyone draws" permanents, as well as cards like Time Spiral and Temporal Cascade, one time I was able to put more than 50 Treasure tokens on the field (edit: in the end I animated them all with Marsh of the Mashines -I have stolen a Master of Etherium from my Memnarch opponent to prevent them from dying- and proceed to a True Treasure Beatdown win). And I do not believe that it is a card that makes the deck any less casual or any less fun to play. 0 Tutors and only 4-card combos are the name of the deck after all....
So, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone who every reads this comment has experienced the power of
Smothering Tithe in edh. It's very strong. And I agree that it doesn't make the deck any less casual. And I agree that mechanically this deck is a great home for a card like that. But as a matter of personal choice, I don't want to play it. I found it to be sort of a distraction. I need to stay focused on the play options I have available to play this deck smoothly and not end up staring dumbly at my hand for a minute every time it gets to my turn, and the bookkeeping aspect of Smothering Tithe distracts from that, while also pulling people's attention towards me because I'm constantly doing things on everyone's turns. As far as the mechanical impact of the card in a vacuum, it is stellar. But I don't think it makes most games more fun for me. I'm glad I went off with it a couple times when I tried it out, it's unquestionable fun in conjunction with a
Time Spiral or two, but I lived the dream and moved on. It's sort of like all the shuffling effects I cut out just so I didn't have to shuffle so much, it's really not a gameplay problem, just personal preference. Anyone who enjoys
Smothering Tithe should probably have it in a deck like this.
On the other hand, there are some cards that I realized they continued to unimpress me.
One of them was, and I am sorry to say it, Thousand-Year Storm. I was a big fan of it when it was first printed, but then, as games went by, I realised that it is perhaps the single permanent in the deck that is of that high mana-curve and at the same time does nothing on its own, requiring an entire VERY SPECIFIC chain of events (a hand full of Instants/sorceries or a game state where I am already ahead f.e. a resulted Eye of the Storm with extra mana open) to do something meaningfull in the game. I dropped it and honestly, I do not miss it at all.
I may follow suit, but only kind of, because what I'm considering is swapping back into
Bonus Round. I actually was not that excited for
Thousand-Year Storm when it was spoiled, and may not have given it a chance had it not been my prerelease promo. I thought it took too much to go off. But, when I tried it, it was pretty good even with only a couple instants and sorceries, so it won games for me. But if it only takes a couple copies to make it a winner,
Bonus Round is just as good anyways, so that may be the better pick overall. Especially with the loss of
Cowardice and my plan to cut
Riptide Laboratory for a colored mana source,
Thousand-Year Storm loses must of its potential advantages.
The other one was Firestorm. I know that it is a possible piece of the Barren Glory win AND a possible mass removal. However both cases require a big number of possible targets and most of the times, this is not applicable. I brought back Nahiri's Wrath. Yes, it doesn't hit players and it is a Sorcery, but I was never interested in using it as a winning condition on its own and it is not hard to get a Leyline of Anticipation/Vedalken Orray out. So far, I have not experienced any problems with it.
Not following suit on this one, but I think this may be a meta thing. The people I most often play with lean more towards board wipes than counterspells, so it's much, much more frequent that I have to answer someone at instant speed than wipe the board.
Firestorm is just fantastic at killing a problem creature before they can get shoes on it and cause a mess. And at a 4 person table, you need at least 6 toughness and no other creatures to dodge a
Firestorm for lack of targets. Like, I can see swapping Firestorm for
Nahiri's Wrath depending on what interaction you most need, I think I should be playing both when it comes down to it, especially with
Swans of Bryn Argoll and
Arcbond.
Unrelated comments: the loser in my testing mentioned a few posts ago is still
Archangel of Thune. It's too slow to be a non-combo win condition, even with a
Mirrorweave. It dies to removal pretty bad. It needs too many things to happen in the right order uninterrupted to combo in a meaningful way. By comparison,
Cavalier of Dawn/
Infinite Reflection combo was awesome. It's a huge boon that cloning Cavalier recurs any other piece from the graveyard, and Infinite Reflection makes any creature a clone. It's far more resilient than my other combos, but at the same time ends with infinite non-hasted vanilla creatures leaving the potential for more valid responses, and then I get to pull cards beck from graveyard post board wipe anyway. It's a sweet play pattern.
I had fun at Command Fest. I only played in the pick up games area, but I managed to win a game with
Barren Glory, get a table drawing 6 per turn on turn 4, flip
Azor's Gateway both legitimately and with
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, I would have taught bobthefunny to properly fear
Mirror of Fate except he had me dead on demand from a flipped
Vance's Blasting Cannons, I stole an
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre and ran it into a
Blightsteel Colossus for the annihilator and then donated it to a 3rd player to remove it from combat, I instant speed
Role Reversaled 3 times, I died horribly to
Hallar, the Firefletcher because I really didn't respect that card enough, and at the end of the weekend I met a young man whose name I do not know who played this deck and said winning with
Barren Glory was him peaking as a magic player. And the answer I wish I had given was that I'm confident he will find greater heights of silliness than what I've dreamed up.