Dunadain wrote: ↑2 months ago
Even with loam, you're spending two mana at sorcery speed to replace your draw for turn with 3 lands, then you're spending 4 mana at sorcery speed to put two of those lands into play, saving the last one to be discarded to buy back Jadzi.
The result is you're spending 6 mana a turn to skip your draw step and get +2 lands each turn. Not to mention Jadzi perpetually sits in your hand as a "your hand size is reduced by one" emblem.
You could make it more efficient by only casting it every other turn, that way your putting 5 lands into play every other turn, but that also means that the majority of your 7-card hand is full of lands, loam, and Jadzi.
If you're going all-out, you'd be pairing loam with cyclers to put many lands into hand and then dumping them all at once. Potentially you could accelerate yourself massively if it was something you wanted to do.
Say you have 7 mana, loam, a 1-mana cycler, and jadzi. Loam for 3 lands, jadzi to dump them, cycle to recur loam, loam again, 10 lands in play.
Next turn, loam cycle loam cycle, jadzi dumping ~7 lands, loam cycle loam, 17 lands in play and a grip ready to go even harder next turn (or mana up for interaction if you prefer).
Obviously you'll run out of fetch targets (or possibly life, or cards in library) but at that point you can pivot to using multiple cyclers (which you've definitely milled into) to draw tons of cards, hit infinite turns with nexus, etc.
I'm just saying, there's definitely some power there that isn't offered by other means. Not sure if it's something we want, but I think it merits consideration.
TheGildedGoose wrote: ↑2 months ago
Well, a) have you played with randoms lately? and b) they would likewise need brain damage to assume you're just drawing useless spells you're not playing, so that's a nonargument. Cantrips are sandpaper. They smooth things over and bind the deck together, let you lower your land count slightly for even more business, make opening hands much better, reduce densities since they can find what you need to improve flexibility...
I don't have to tell you these things.
I'm just genuinely surprised you're so resistant to trying them.
a) why, did they get a patch update?
b) It's a matter of degrees. It's not black and white - I'm not saying "sculpting your hand = people attack you, no sculpting = people don't". I'm saying that the more we sculpt, the greater the likelihood and degree of aggression against us.
People react in different ways - if someone decides our passivity is threatening that's okay, we can unload some removal spells to quell their aggression until our threat level has lowered and someone else becomes a bigger problem for them, or we can ally with their enemies and boost them up until the conflict becomes unmanageable for our antagonist. But it's kind of a zero-sum game. The more we sculpt our hand, the more we're forced to use our sculpted hand to answer aggression caused by our hand sculpting. I don't see the point in starting the cycle in the first place. And to your point - with exceptions (wipes, mostly), I think you can basically tell people the contents of your hand. If you're drawing naturally it sounds like bad beats that you're only drawing lands and answers and nothing proactive. Whereas if everyone can see that you're sculpting your hand to intentionally be those answers, it's obviously intentional. That's not to say that people won't still potentially consider a naturally-drawn answer-heavy hand to be threatening and come after you, but I do think it lessens the likelihood and degree of their ire. Again, it's that zero-sum situation imo. The same situation presents itself in lots of ways, of course, notably with stronger draw engines drawing more ire which requires stronger draw engines to keep up. But while I do think some amount of CA is necessary, I don't think filtering has nearly the same positive impact because of the extremely heavy redundancies in the deck.
The classic control mindset wants guarantees and certainty. But if we demand certainty for ourselves, we remove our opponents hope. And we need that hope for the deck to operate properly. You need to walk the line between chaos and control, and count on the deck to provide just enough to win, without expecting to have a perfect answer to every situation.
And yes in early iterations I did have some single-shot small-scale draw/filtering cards - I found they tended to clog up my hand because I didn't have a clear goal for them. Say it's turn 4, I draw
Preordain or whatever. My hand is a board wipe, a counter, 2 removal spells, and a land, pretty typical. I cast preordain and see a counterspell and a removal spell. Do I want those? Sure. What if it's a land and a board wipe? Do I want those? Sure. Value engine and telepathy? Sure. Because we have no proactive plan, our needs are too nebulous to get much value from filtering most of the time. And our densities are so high that it's pretty impossible to miss out on something important. If you need a way to destroy an enchantment or whatever, any given draw is practically a coin flip that you'll find a way to do it, and getting moreso all the time as we add more flexible answers to the deck. This isn't exactly a deck with a lot of moving parts. So while they weren't bad per se, I didn't see much utility in them and so they got weeded out over time.
