WizardMN wrote: ↑4 years ago
This seems like an odd way to put it. I mean sure, in some cases having colorless mana instead of colored is going to hurt, but that applies to literally every land that can't tap for colored mana. And let me tell you,
Diamond Valley has won me far more games than it has lost and it doesn't even tap for mana
Completely different card, completely different context. Do you put
Diamond Valley into all your decks? No, you need to consider how it functions within the deck itself.
My point is the often people slot
Reliquary Tower automatically into their deck with no actual design considerations around how their deck actually functions.
Perhaps there is some grander idea you have here, or I don't understand what you mean, but this seems to be pretty much untrue. Discarding from 8 to 7 hardly seems like a "winning position". Maybe it is only when you have 10 cards in hand? 14? What number would be considered "winning" versus "I happened to have a full hand and drew a couple cards"? I mentioned Ephara and Sygg and having more than 7 cards in hand in those decks is hardly winning; it just means I am waiting for stuff to happen and it hasn't yet. In fact, it is possible the inverse is true: if you have more than 7 cards in hand, something is preventing you from casting/playing those cards and you are, in fact, losing. In either case, I am not sure it is really a metric that a) can be measured or b) even matters.
Really the number doesn't matter. If you are discarding because you are mana screwed for example, then chances are that
Reliquary Tower is just going to be a terrible land in the first place, as you normally need colored mana to get those cards out of your hand and onto the table.
In the case that you've drawn lots of cards, you've realistically achieved some combo, which means that you've established yourself already.
It doesn't matter if you are discarding 1 card or 8 cards, you get to select 7 of your best cards that are going to line you up in a winning position more often than not. And this point is the most important thing when it comes to actually understanding how overrated having a larger hand size is.
Well then, /thread. This is definitively the end of the conversation. How can we argue about "official stats" that aren't written down anywhere or have any sort of verification?
I don't mean to be so hostile here, but this is pretty dismissive without offering any real reason for the dismissal. There is a lot of confirmation bias (on both sides) but I think there are merits to including it that go beyond "how many games did it win me?". I find the decks that are reactionary and tend to draw more are more geared towards the card simply because waiting on reaction to have to get rid of the one sweeper in hand to save the one counterspell (or vice versa) can at least keep the game going longer. Maybe you don't win because of it, but it helps you to not lose I suppose (at least, not right then).
My whole explanation of its effect is purely based off my experience playing with it and against it.
At the end of the day you can't actually plot the path of what would have happened in games had you been able to cast your spells. You might still have ended up losing. But not casting spells sure is an easy way to lose.
And
Reliquary Tower can definitely do that. I've seen it a hundred times and experienced it quite a few times myself, before of course I evolved.
That isn't to say every control deck should run it. It, to me, just seems like a pretty good home.
I do think that most midrange or aggro decks wouldn't want it. And I stand by my comment about it needing to *really* be needed in anything with 3+ colors. So I think I agree with your overall assessment, just maybe not the reasons behind or how black and white you seem to put it. I think there is a lot of gray area and if there is one format that loves gray areas, it is EDH.
Interestingly with my Ephara control deck I cut
Reliquary Tower in the end. It wasn't terrible, but I finally realized it was just better off being a colored land. My point being that once I was discarding due to hand size, I just had a grip on the game anyway. Then I'd had games where I wanted colored mana and the Tower prevented me from casting in a timely manner.
Again, I can tell you that my decision making on this card is through pure experience.
But as I say I do play it in my
Greven, Predator Captain, so I'm not just on this completely dismissive frame of mind, its all based on deck design. This is where probably realistically 50% or more people fail with
Reliquary Tower is that they included it and its actually a design flaw to their build.