[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Jetfire, Ingenious Scientist

[Mookie]

It's impressive that despite all the time that has passed, Garruk Wildspeaker - one of the original cycle of planeswalkers - is still one of the best-designed. I feel like a lot of planeswalkers that see play in EDH are kill-on-sight - stuff like Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon will dominate a game if they stick around... which means they rarely do, and often end up as fancy sorceries. If you want to actually have your planeswalkers stick around, that usually requires additional support and leads to building a superfriends deck.

...but Garruk, at a baseline, is a fancy Ur-Golem's Eye - not bad, but not kill-on-sight either. Your opponents will generally want to keep him off the table on principle, but not so much that they're forced to commit a bunch of resources to getting rid of him. On the flip side, Garruk can protect himself with 3/3s. Both the +1 and -1 are valid choices... and while he reaches the Overrun ultimate reasonably quickly, it isn't as game-winning as many other ultimates (which often up as mere flavor text due to how rare they are to pull off, barring Doubling Season shenanigans), which, again, means your opponents aren't forced to kill him.

Anyway, great design - strong but fair. I suppose the proliferation of ramp options has meant that he doesn't see as much play as he used to, but still very solid if you have Lotus Field or other strong lands to untap.

[3drinks]

Friday, March 18th, 2022; Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive

[BeneTleilax]

She's fun in my experience. Lots of weird saboteur triggers to build from, and an increasingly viable ninja/rogues tribal element. If you want to be dull, you can also play her as Edric-lite.

[Dunharrow]

The funny thing is the poor synergy with anthems. weenie decks want anthems, so this ends up being a nonbo in the 99.
Takes a deck that doesn't want to win with combat damage.

[Mookie]

Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive is an interesting card - granting evasion to all your creatures is a powerful ability, even if it is a bit limited in which creatures it affects. The builds of Tetsuko that I have seen have been very heavy on saboteur effects, like an inverted Edric, Spymaster of Trest deck. Tetsuko provides the evasion (instead of Edric's Flying Men having flying), while the creatures like Mischievous Catgeist // Catlike Curiosity provide the draw. Edric is probably stronger overall, but Tetsuko will generally draw less attention.

...of course, one issue with this strategy is that killing opponents with 1-power creatures is... extremely slow, which generally makes for a fairly miserable gameplay experience.

[Venedrex]

Or you could just put it in Arcades and whallop people with unblockable walls.

[folding_music]

god I wanna use Tetsuko in some sort of sultai deck based around Eldrazi Scions so you can attack with impunity on the turns you don't wanna spend 'em. not quite enough useful scion cards though and it's unlikely they'll be revisited for a very long time

[rogerandover]

The funny thing is the poor synergy with anthems. weenie decks want anthems, so this ends up being a nonbo in the 99.
Takes a deck that doesn't want to win with combat damage.

That's not true, for my build at least. Sure, it not at all consistent but it can quickly take over games if not dealt with. We play all the Scroll Thief's paired with Coastal Piracy, you can end up drawing so many cards that you can maintain control of the game. Game enders is usually Notorious Throng or Master of Waves.

As a side note, MVP card of the deck is Teferi's Veil.

[hyalopterouslemur]

As one of the 99, you get access to Blood Lust and Ogre Menial, both of which are just great with her.

[Serenade]

Charix loves her!

EDIT: I always pictured her on Charix like Tatsunari is on Keimi…or more like any of the larger summons in Naruto.

[lyonhaert]

I built her recently as combat wincon oriented. There's a little infect in it but not much, so things like Scytheclaw (Quietus Spike is also common but I don't have one), Notorious Throng, Stolen Identity, and Psychosis Crawler can speed things up. The very first time I played it, Throne of the God-Pharaoh did a lot of good work. I also got to put Umezawa's Jitte on her and make use of it.

[3drinks]

Saturday, March 19th, 2022; Eldrazi Displacer

[hyalopterouslemur]

Hey, let's take blink and make it lenticular. The great thing is, it doesn't require a tap. The bad thing is, if it does get tapped, it's also vulnerable to Meekstone.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Eldrazi Being.

Seriously good and equally boring. Displacer is some low-hanging fruit on the great combo tree.

[3drinks]

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Eldrazi Being.

Seriously good and equally boring. Displacer is some low-hanging fruit on the great combo tree.

"At least it's not Palinchron" question mark

[pokken]

Man this thing was the scourge of standard. Once you got to a certain point in mana generation things were just bananas.

I had this in Ephara for a long time and it was always hilarious watching it combo off with other people's creatures and Faerie Artisans. That interaction is quite absurd.

Ultimately the mana demands just made it too hard to keep supporting, but it's a very cool card.

[Neptune]

re: Tetsuko: She's amazing in Arcades, the Strategist.

Eldrazi Displacer: I have a korean one and I'm just waiting for the right list. I might have to re-build Rasputin Dreamweaver, as previously mentioned.

[hyalopterouslemur]

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Eldrazi Being.

Seriously good and equally boring. Displacer is some low-hanging fruit on the great combo tree.

I mean, Village Bell-Ringer and mana dorks (at least four mana, and at least one colorless; Palladium Myr is great here) is probably the one most of us use.

You can use it from there to tap all your opponent's creatures (except ones with entry triggers, since you don't want to risk that) and swing.

Or recycle your own entry triggers.

Easy stuff. You can also use it to exploit Meekstone, as I mentioned. Yeah, it's boring and lolcombo, but as I said, blink is a lenticular mechanic, and this even more so.

[Mookie]

Eldrazi Displacer makes me feel awkward. Not due to the card itself - it's a fantastic example of lenticular design - but because I ended up cutting it from my Brago, King Eternal deck, which feels wrong. When Brago can blink my entire board for free, it felt difficult to justify blinking a single creature for three mana, but.... ultimately it felt a bit too mana-hungry, particularly since I'm deliberately excluding Peregrine Drake and other combo pieces from my build.

...that said, Eldrazi Displacer is a very powerful card. It's not quite as easy to combo with as Deadeye Navigator, but it is much cheaper and easier to use. It can also be used offensively to tap down your opponents' creatures - it's quite brutal against voltron strategies in particular. The colorless mana requirement can be somewhat annoying though - it's not difficult to fit in colorless mana sources, but it can be a bit counterproductive if your deck has heavy color requirements.

[duducrash]

I used to play Allies in modern and bant eldrazi was a popular deck, we could split for first, opponent said no and made a snarky comment about allies as an deck, something like "its a casual deck" I lost a super long G1 and then I sided in Hagra Diabolist. I always knew that card would eventually be relevant! Opponent got twitchy and visibly mad since the whole plan was to keep my things with counters from attacking via blinking. G3 I got to protect diabolist with a ETB trigger giving protect to white against path and then cloudshifted against the second path. Opponent stood still for a couple seconds, grabbed his card, his bag and left. He had still prized, but just dropped. Its one of my most prized mtg memories

[folding_music]

re: Rasputin, was trying to build that deck and someone recommended this Displacer card along with Deadeye Navigator and a few other similar cards and it made me think, uh, why would you wanna play against a deck which includes two-card infinites where one cards starts in the command zone... you got somewhere to be?

I prefer abilities like this to be tied to attacking or tapping so they're not so blatantly loopable, make the goldfishers work for it.

(ended up turning Rasputin into a cycling control deck with a few profilerate sources to try n win with inevitability and stop other people's infinites instead)

[3drinks]

Sunday, March 20th, 2022; Arcades, the Strategist|tsr

[pokken]

I had a budget arcades deck online for a while and found it to be really unpleasant. Since all the stuff you want to play with it is horrible alone, if people kill arcades a couple times the deck is done, and he's quite easy to kill. I've tried to avoid that kinda deck ever since -- my Breena, the Demagogue deck really wants Breena on the battlefield, but has a half-dozen ways to keep her there and other people are incentivized to leave her there. Ephara is very hard to kill, and I can fairly easily gameplan without her. In Varina, I'm usually OK with Varina dying since mass reanimation is my gameplan.

Ultimately, arcades is a fairly strong combo commander but suffers from some gameplay issues as a fair deck I think.

Oh the other thing was sequencing with Arcades, you really wanted to play walls like Wall of Omens and Wall of Blossoms to help bridge you to 4 mana but the walls you play like that you didn't get his draw off of. Overall I think the design leaves a lot to be desired as a commander. The signposts steer you so hard toward blink that it ends up just being "blink deck with walls" whee?

[Jemolk]

Arcades is one of those commanders that really needs redundancy in the 99 to make it so you can still play the game even if he gets removed repeatedly. High Alert and Assault Formation are the bare minimum requirement, and it's probably a good idea to have other options besides, both for attacking with defenders and dealing damage with toughness. Ultimately, he's a much more swingy version of Doran, the Siege Tower -- higher upside when he works, but the deck is forced to be much more dependent on him because he fills two functions that are both absolutely required, rather than one that can be merely a very large advantage. Good for more casual tables, but he falls off fast.

[Neptune]

So funny. A few days ago, we had Tetsuko and I thought about my Arcades defender deck. Today, here we are. Like above, you do need redundancy. But you get to use super weird asymmetrical board wipes like Retribution of the Meek, Wave of Reckoning, Slaughter the Strong, Dusk//Dawn, and Fell the Mighty.