darrenhabib wrote: ↑4 years ago
I put quite an emphasis on cards that can reset the game state, so that you can make effective use of Rankles abilities further into the game if things have slipped away. If an opponent has drawn a bunch of cards, then the discard just gets worse. Same with a board full of creatures.
That's why I have
Bontu's Last Reckoning,
Damnation,
Toxic Deluge, and even
Biting Rain for the go wide strategies. These allow you to rest the game part way through if things have gotten too wide to make use of Rankles ability.
The same goes for cards in hand, and
Mindslicer I'd rank as the best card in the deck. A constant source of tutoring. The fact that Rankle can sacrifice it means that you can guarantee the effect.
Rankle puts quite a bit of pressure on people pairing edicts with hand hate. I haven't played him at all yet myself but he seems like he might pressure people to run dry on hands and boardstates unless they have a lot of interaction or heavy draw.
I can see the idea of mass hand hate given if someone is pushing hard on draw and light on board state we might not do much to them. I was more going down the line of pressuring those player's life totals via some of the big pump equipment myself but I guess I can see going deeper on the hand hate stuff. I have always found going deep on hand hate to be a little odd as once people are playing off topdeck those effects tend to lose a lot of power as you draw more of them. Its part of why I was thinking of running a little lighter on them as a whole and just picking up a minor taxation here and there with the commander on that front.
As a whole, I don't see a ton of decks that just power draw constantly. I see a few of them still but generally speaking those strategies tend to bring attention to themselves and need to defend to some degree given the attention they bring to themselves.
Catchup mechanics - honestly, I don't know that I love the number of wraths you have.
Plague Engineer /
Bile Blight /
Echoing Decay are all fairly versatile cards that can answer swarms in a lot of ways as well as present versatile removal effects in alternate situations. I even added
Umezawa's Jitte as a means to potentially remove 1-2 chaff creatures before forcing my opponents to edict. If a lot of people are running faster than you then I guess I can see it but I guess I am kind of ok just seeing how things go for now. If someone is running a higher ter deck that goes off super fast I think it might be necessary but I also don't know that I want to be in mono black against that.
Mindslicer - I want to see how the deck plays and how my opponents play against it first. It does look spicy though but my own discard theme is a bit shallower than yours appears to be offhand. I think in a lot of cases my opponents will have a hard time keeping up with Rankle on his own and I just sprinkled in a few extras to work alongside him. I want to see how it is to just tax things a little, I don't necessarily have to hit everything as a lot of the cards I am possibly worried about tend to not be things people can just curve in as their hands get low. I will get them to commit that lab man to play or cast that X mana spell / mass resurrect spell before they are ready to do so and that is sort of where I am at on my thoughts on Rankle. I am not trying to stop people from having cards as a whole just to tax them if they are slow playing things to try to assemble combos in hand or whatever. I do think slicer is a great card but I want to see how the deck plays first before I commit to him.