Re: [mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Remember the Titans™
Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 7:47 pm
Magic the Gathering Resources, Tools, Previews, and Community.
https://www.mtgnexus.com/
I don't have hard metrics. is more based on experience and what i have played. I can agreed with Graveyard Titan been overrated(even tough i like the card) sicne there are strong options on the vaccum. But saying that Grave and Inferno are unplayable in a msotly casual format very harsh. They still do their jobs quite well as big beaters than can take over the board. They can even have synergies in different types of decks like Grave for sac/token decks or Inferno for burn style of decks.
While I agree with you for the most part, I think you forgot that this card appears fun to build around. It was insanely popular in Brawl for a long time. But also people would refuse to play against it.Igzex wrote: ↑1 year agoThe sheer number of things the card designers unlearned when making this card boggles my mind. She encourages a strategy that the common Magic the Gathering player does not enjoy at all and has an EDHREC page that makes Nekusar, the Mindrazer yawn. On top of all that, she's not even good in cutthroat metas. She costs a lot to cast, the resources the player is attacking are easily replaced by what's in the opponent's command zones alone, and the things you're gonna steal are going to be small archetype specific things with plenty of redundancy left in the opponent's deck. Her only place in commander is to genuinely grief slower less efficient pods.
It is amazing to think that this is an actual card that people got paychecks to design and not something submitted to MTGCardsmith by an edgy young man.
My metrics are very simple.RedCheese wrote: ↑1 year agoI don't have hard metrics. is more based on experience and what i have played. I can agreed with Graveyard Titan been overrated(even tough i like the card) sicne there are strong options on the vaccum. But saying that Grave and Inferno are unplayable in a msotly casual format very harsh. They still do their jobs quite well as big beaters than can take over the board. They can even have synergies in different types of decks like Grave for sac/token decks or Inferno for burn style of decks.
I just disagreed with the notion that they are unplayable since i believe that they are very playable in our format.
Popularity doesn't always reflect viability. Lifegain is the third most popular archetype on EDHrec and it's, generally, not very good.DirkGently wrote: ↑1 year ago@TheGildedGoose Honestly I'm with @RedCheese on this - the titans have, respectively, 133K (W), 33K (B), 23K (R), and 5K (U) inclusions on EDHrec. So at least for the mardu ones, they're definitely getting played, especially sun titan. Even 23K isn't "it's only good in one deck" numbers (and as someone who's played Shirei, chimney imp isn't good enough there either).
There's no accounting for taste. If you want to play with suboptimal cards, that's fine, but knowing they're suboptimal is an important part of the card analysis process. For example, in the grand scheme of EDH, I acknowledge that mono-black control is a suboptimal strategy, even outside of cEDH. I still play it because I love it, though.Are they perfectly optimal? Well, how do you even count that? Are they getting played in cEDH decks? Probably not, but who cares. Few of us play cEDH, and for good reason - because we'd like to play suboptimal strategies like beating people to death with grave titan.
What decks are suited to them?But I don't think the titans are anywhere close to that level. Are they optimal om a vacuum, no. Are they still pretty good, yes. Should you play them in cEDH, no. Will they be just fine at a 75% table in a deck that's suited to them, yes. I think that makes them clearly playable within normal EDH.
To be clear, a and b are requirements to me for a card to be "playable" outside of thematic or aesthetic reasons. C is what elevates a card from either good to great or great to format all-star. In this case, Counterspell is good and Mana Drain is great. Obviously, you're almost certainly going to play both, but in cEDH Counterspell proper doesn't really see play. Just as an example. Another example is Grim Tutor versus Demonic Tutor. I think Grimmy is good, but the gulf between it and Demonic is vast.I also really don't think the existence of better cards (Does this card have any unique advantages over other options?) is a good metric. It's a 100 card singleton format. Redundancy is valuable. Does the existence of Mana Drain mean Counterspell is a bad card? obviously not. For a deck that only has a couple slots for 6-drop value-generating beaters, maybe the titans don't make the cut. For a deck that has a dozen or more slots, though, there's a pretty good chance that they do. I don't think there are many direct obvious upgrades to them anyway. Within a specific enough context they could be the best choice.
How EDHrec breaks down archetypes is kind of arbitrary, so being the third most popular doesn't really mean that much imo.TheGildedGoose wrote: ↑1 year agoPopularity doesn't always reflect viability. Lifegain is the third most popular archetype on EDHrec and it's, generally, not very good.
Well, shooting from the hip, Maelstrom Wanderer is pretty good with them (though it doesn't intersect the best ones). Looking at EDHrec, Saffi Eriksdotter runs sun titan the most (makes sense, it's a combo with her). Duke Ulder Ravengard makes a lot of sense for the big myriad value. Quintorius, Field Historian gets a 3/2 whenever you recur something. As far as inferno, Aegar, the Freezing Flame makes a ton of sense. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker is a nice fit too. Feldon of the Third Path...mostly mono-red commanders by the look of it, because with more colors there's usually better options, but with decks that want a fairly high density of largish bombs (especially reasonably-castable bombs, i.e. not eldrazi) and/or care about etbs and attack triggers and haste, they still fill a decent role. Inferno titan is among the less popular and he's still got over a dozen commander that are playing him 1/3 of the time or more, so clearly there's still a demand.What decks are suited to them?
I don't even think A and B are good metrics either. Is what Serra Ascendant does good in EDH (i.e. attacking with evasion and lifelink?) Well, despite what some other forum members might say, I think we can both agree that a creature that just has a few keywords and attacks is, typically, not effective in commander. But serra ascendant breaks the pattern because it's so stupidly efficient at what it does, even though the thing it does broadly sucks.To be clear, a and b are requirements to me for a card to be "playable" outside of thematic or aesthetic reasons. C is what elevates a card from either good to great or great to format all-star. In this case, Counterspell is good and Mana Drain is great. Obviously, you're almost certainly going to play both, but in cEDH Counterspell proper doesn't really see play. Just as an example. Another example is Grim Tutor versus Demonic Tutor. I think Grimmy is good, but the gulf between it and Demonic is vast.
Also Renegade Rallier