Dragoon wrote: ↑2 years ago
If they wipe the board, it's probably because it's filled of creatures anyway. Keeping three mana open should not be too difficult for a reactive deck. And my hand has to be very good if drawing eight cards is not an attractive option, not to mention setting up graveyard shenanigans. Again, not an auto-include, but far from a bad card IMO.
I misread BftBGT as 8BBRR, so it's not as bad as I thought, but I'd still say it fits into niche and/or low-power lists.
Speaking off the cuff here, but I think a willingness to discard your hand for a new one is a signal that your deck and/or play is not strong. A deck should be able to keep its hand reasonably full most of the time, and a player should be using the tools in their hand to maneuver towards a win, especially in longer games like casual commander where you'll usually have plenty of time to sculpt your plan. Personally I think drawing a whole new hand - even +1 card - would frequently be disruptive because the cards I've kept in my hand are the ones I'm saving for the right opportunity - the wincons I'm saving for when people are tapped out, the counterspells to protect my crucial value engine, the removal to disrupt an enemy plan. Not always true, of course, but it's just another conditional layer around the card being good. Of course, most people playing commander aren't really working from a strong plan, so at a casual skill level the card will probably play okay, though the other conditions still need to be met. Personally I've found cards that rely on an enemy board wipe to not be worth it.
Connecting with Yidris is in my experience difficult if you don't have some kind of voltron package. Abaddon can just let you play a normal deck for the most part. If you intend to win through combat or life drain or anything of the sort, Abaddon is probably a better choice, unless you want to go full voltron.
Full voltron? All you need is
Shizo, Death's Storehouse and you're probably good. It can be difficult insofar as Yidris is a powerful scary commander that people want to kill, but if Abaddon is good (and despite being weaker than Yidris, he's still pretty good) he'll draw a similar degree of hate.
Even if a deck is planning to win via incremental combat (i.e. not all at once at the end, usually the more reliable choice), I don't like having my wincon and my value tied together in that way. If the time isn't right to attack, I don't want to be forced to attack in order to advance my board state, because if I'm making bad attacks I'm more likely to fall further behind. Running unblockables and direct damage can largely circumvent this by avoiding situations where attacks are bad, but then you're doing a build-around - and not one that can be achieved by simply having any single one of a thousand different evasion-granting effects.
