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"What would happen if you replaced a self-insert powerhouse with a well-written Ridiculously Average Guy without changing the plot?"
From Unlikely Hero, on tvtropes.org
There have been at least 14 instants printed at one and a Blue with effectively the text:
"Return target nonland permanent to its owner's hand."
These range from the boring-est:
... to cross-format staples like...
Which is not even to say that Echoing Truth is even always the right answer! Though it's awfully good against anyone with shenanigans on the brain, I think you'll agree.
Mathematically, there are like... a dozen in the middle. Admit it. You tried to make Cyclonic Rift work. Consign // Oblivion is a cool one that really feels like it should have been a stud in Standard. Even if we both know it never got close.
I guess I was always dimly aware that there were a ton of cards in this class. But somehow didn't realize how often I had played them, and their close cousins, in my own big tournaments and important decks over the years.
I'm perhaps being generous talking about the 1U versions; which are across the board less flexible than Boomerang, even if they sometimes force the opponent into an unanticipated interaction. Moreover there have been a ton that are even less flexible, while still costing the same... More than one has managed to have been beloved by, and victorious alongside, Yours Truly.
Interlude 1 - August 2005
"My Top 4 matchup against Black Hand was actually my most exciting match of the day. I won the first game easily; the second game I had a Threads of Disloyalty on the draw and a couple of Tendo Ice Bridges... and lost without ever seeing an Island.
"In the third game I went to six and had only an Umezawa's Jitte for action. My opponent Tim Gilliam worked me with Manriki-Gusari so I basically started two cards down on the play (nice odds). I had Sakura-Tribe Elder into Meloku; he killed it and smashed me with Ink-Eyes, stealing my Meloku. It looked pretty bad for me, but I ran out Keiga and Isao, which slowed him down. I deuced Meloku with my own, and Tim came across with an Ogre Marauder with two Manriki-Gusaris, playing sundry additional weenies of the two power for two mana variety. I just sacrificed my Isao and traded with Keiga, stealing his Ink-Eyes. The top of my deck let me Threads a Hand of Cruelty so the big, bad, Rat Ninja came back at his master, and traded for two more weenies. All of a sudden it was my Hand and a newly-cast Kodama against nothing, and Tim made all his lands go away with enough mana to attach a Manriki-Gusari. He had exactly enough damage to race me in two turns... but the top of my deck gave me Consuming Vortex on the last possible turn and that was all she wrote for Urami's last gasp... Who needs Top when you can rip like that?"
From Critical Mass, by YT
If you're not Splicing Onto Arcane, Consuming Vortex is essentially an Unsummon that costs twice as much. It doesn't have a cool flashback, draw a card, or even scry for one (let alone more than one). Weirdly, I added two overcosted instants to my Simic deck in place of two copies of Gnarled Mass the morning of. And thank goodness I did! Playing for the Pro Tour slot, my opponent had sacrificed all his permanents to this Saviors of Kamigawa legendary land:
(Which is presumably where you go to buy a Blade of the Oni.) ... So even if I had drawn a permission spell, it wouldn't have saved me.
The Difference That Made the Difference: Nothing Else Would Have Done the Job.
I liked Consuming Vortex so much after this I kept trying to put it into Standard decks, which required my friends and teammates to remind me that both Boomerang and Repeal were legal in that format at the time.
Interlude 2 - May 2011
"At least five times in the Swiss, my opponent played a second-turn Stoneforge Mystic, and I had Had HAD to immediately Into the Roil. One of those games, I had already been Duressed.
"You have no choice from the Twin side, but it feels awful.
"I won all five games, BTW. But it still sucked at the time."
From Ten Facts About the End of the World, by YT
If you think that at 1U Into the Roil is about the best of breed... Keep reading, I guess.
In 2011 I played four copies of that card in the first ever Blue-Red Splinter Twin deck. Longtime readers probably both remember that I beat Dave Shiels, Reid Duke, and (then somehow more famous than both) Edgar Flores to win the $5k that put the Twin archetype on the map and that CawBlade was The Deck to Beat at the time.
What you might not remember were the three copies of Mana Leak to four copies of Into the Roil, which probably seems weird now that you're reading it in hindsight. But Mana Leak was not going to save you from one of CawBlade's eight-pack of spectacular two-drops if you were going second, whereas you could juke the opponent into a fourth turn kill with a horrifically un-kicked Into the Roil. Bouncing a card that just found a Batterskull (or maybe drew three cards) is depressing from a card advantage perspective, but sometimes you just needed time to set up. When your endgame is the strongest in the room, the surest way to win is to just prevent the opponent from winning before you can overwhelm them.
The Difference That Made the Difference: "Sacrificing card advantage for time."
In the absence of a repeatable engine, essentially discarding a card is probably not a winning game plan. But if you can make infinite 1/4 creatures (or somehow otherwise gain massive leverage on comparative mana usage) giving up just one card for a lot of time might be something you want in the range, in the arsenal.
Interlude 3 - April 2015
"I am not sold on the Voyage's End, a pet card of Flores's. I understand why one might be right since it can buy you some time early, and if it's bad (which it often will be), you can use it to save your own Dragon from a removal spell. I suspect we can do better, but want to try it before dismissing it."
From Five-Color Blue Dragons, by Patrick Chapin
Weird that I didn't notice how much I like these two-mana Consuming Vortex types, right? I apparently played them in every deck I've ever won with.
Even in a deck that Patrick really drove, I managed to cram a Voyage's End into the starting 60. I didn't play four Dig Through Time, but I would sure pay two for an Unsummon and a terrible scry.
In my defense, there was only one copy. And this was a deck that played Dragonlord Atarka and Dragonlord Dromoka (and both Silumgars) instead of just boring Dragonlord Ojutai. At five, Icefall Regent was the presumably cheap and easy-to-cast Dragon.
While pulling down the curve relative to so many enormously expensive spells was the main reason I paired Voyage's End alongside the more famous weirdo inclusion Encase in Ice, Patrick makes an important point, even while objecting to its presence.
The Difference That Made the Difference: "You can use it to save your own Dragon from a removal spell."
Interlude 4 - December 2019
"2 Brazen Borrower"
From How I Won a PTQ with Simic Flash, by YT
Brazen Borrower (or I guess Petty Theft, given today's theme) may someday grow up to become a cross-format Staple like Echoing Truth. Certainly it was a Standard superstar.
That said, while undoubtedly very widely played, Brazen Borrower was kind of underrated. Or at least people didn't do a good job explaining what made it good.
Look at Into the Roil. Everyone gets that sometimes you have a slightly inefficient Unsummon; but it's great because sometimes you draw an extra card for an extra two mana.
Compare that to Petty Theft a second. On its face, Petty Theft is a more restrictive slightly inefficient un-kicked Into the Roil type. But instead of paying two extra for an extra card some of the time you actually pay zero mana for an extra card... all of the time.
"Hold up," some of you are saying. "Don't you pay three for an extra card?"
No!
When you cast Petty Theft you automatically gain access to the extra card. You have every bit the extra card that Into the Roil would give you if and only if you invested two additional mana. It's just in a weird exile zone instead of in hand. Into the Roil doesn't deploy the extra card for two mana. It just gives you access to it. When you pay three mana to pull Brazen Borrower out of exile you're deploying the card, not drawing it. At that point it's not that different from summoning ye olde Faerie Rogue from hand.
The Difference That Made the Difference: Underrated, Brazen Borrower's adventuresome half let you draw an extra card... For free! It's just that that card is always a 3/1 flashy high flyer.
Thank you for being patient.
There really is a 2022 point to all this.
Apparently, there is a card that costs 1U.
That is the difference that can make the difference.
It does, effectively, something nothing else will do. In a pinch it can help you trade card advantage for time. While it has many functions, it might be at its best when saving your Dragon, actually. And underrated, it can draw an extra card for free.
It's really underrated.
As far as I'm aware, essentially no one plays it!
That card is:
Interlude 5 - February 2022
"LIFEISRISK7's build has two copies of Burn Down the House... and supplements them with a single Battle of Frost and Fire. Five versus four. Devils option versus two more chapters to the story. Forget all that noise and ponder a second on the difference between a sorcery and an enchantment.
"Might you perchance consider implementing Plan B on Otawara, Soaring City? Ever? Not only is "bounce my own sweeper" kind of sexy in the old The Meathook Massacre + now-banned Divide By Zero way... a spell-like ability that doesn't trigger Hullbreaker Horror (or potential new wrinkle pairing the Horror with sweepers RECURSION) are opening all kinds of doors we never had need to open in the past."
From The Mana Base Implications of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, by YT
I said a couple of weeks ago that, despite having fun with some new Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Red Beatdown action, that nothing had moved me from concluding that Azorius Hullbreaker Horror continued to be the best deck in Standard.
That's still mostly true. Azorius is arguably the best instant speed Control deck, and the presence of Cemetery Protector as a secondary -- yet still meaningfully synergistic -- threat gives the color combination a unique game plan against specifically other Hullbreaker Horror decks.
But there is, in my recent experience, a deck that is very close to Azorius. It is Izzet Control with four copies of Geistwave. This is the deck I've been testing for the back half of the last week:
Geistwave Standard | NEO Standard | Mike Flores
- Creatures (6)
- 4 Goldspan Dragon
- 2 Hullbreaker Horror
I haven't been so excited to play a deck in some time. I just keep jamming events. Typically get my seven, and jump right into another one. The games are cerebral; while starting as puzzles, most end up inevitable; but when Geistwave comes up they're simply rewarding to pilot.
I based it off of the Standard Challenge winner discussed last week. It all started by imagining how cool bouncing my own Battle of Frost and Fire with Otawara, Soaring City might be; combined with the pretty basic realization that we can do better than Fading Hope.
I mean Fading Hope is fine. Strictly better than my beloved Voyage's End, certainly! But in the current Standard where a top dawg White opponent might just be attacking you with Wedding Invitation tokens or a flipped The Restoration of Eiganjo instead of Thalia, Who Ruins Everything... Fading Hope really only excels at two things: One is if you're playing Lier, Disciple of the Drowned*. Defending yourself with the same hyper-mana efficient Fading Hope over and over, along with the possible Lier Counterspell combos is pretty cool. But if you're not playing Lier, it's mostly just a card that gives decks on the back foot some interplay against Hullbreaker Horror.
But the dominant Izzet shell is not currently playing Lier. And while I'm not going to try to convince you that one mana and two mana are the same thing, at the point that you're fighting Hullbreaker Horror, Geistwave probably isn't going to break the bank.
The popular decks right now are Selesnya or Naya enchantment beatdown decks based on Jukai Naturalist, other Hullbreaker Horror decks, and Black-based control, whether Blood on the Snow descendants or the consensus** Deck to Beat: Orzhov Control.
Geistwave is awesome, or at least refreshingly effective, in a lot of those matchups. A Fading Hope might seem better against a Naturalist deck on its face. After all, bouncing a creature and making all its Runes fall off smells pretty card advantageous. But sometimes what you really want to do is bounce a Rune off a lifelinking Naturalist and devouring the now-smaller Human Monk in combat. Or it might be an even bigger headache to let the opponent re-cast their Runeforge Champion. Making their Dwarf smaller and chomping it with a seven power Simian Grunts really is often preferable.
What should be not controversial at all is how much more flexible Geistwave is against Standard's more exotic permanents. "Bounce your Hallowed Haunting?" Wow everyone just lost flying. Kill you with Goldspan Dragon. Screw up the opponent's The Meathook Massacre math. Just forcing the opponent to pick up The Celestus -- and discard -- after a smug Expressive Iteration can be its own reward.
In some games, the difference between one and two mana can be a big deal, even when you're in the Horror phase of the game. Unexpected Windfall takes you from four to six to presumably seven with your next land drop. If you're going to tap out for your Horror, Geistwave and Fading Hope are effectively the same on mana; but in those weird games where you're sacrificing a ton of double Treasure to Goldspan Dragon to get tricky during combat, every mana might count. It depends.
But none of those things is the reason Geistwave drove me to deck design.
It's this guy:
... And this fellow five:
Goldspan Dragon is already so tricky to beat with point removal. Even if you're tapped out with no Treasure at all, the opponent will often give you the 1U (or UU, really) you need to ruin their day with Geistwave.
Obviously if you are successful in bouncing your own Goldspan Dragon, it's not just that you just saved this insane threat from the opponent's removal spell, you both get to draw a card and profit via an additional double-mana Treasure. I probably don't have to convince you how backbreaking a cascade this can be.
Just this morning, I cast the same Battle of Frost and Fire five times against a hapless Rakdos Vampires opponent. It was great! Thanks for asking.
Since you probably don't need to be told how an Izzet Hullbreaker Horror deck works in general, I'll address maybe the only really interesting question there is once you've bought into Geistwave...
Should we still be playing Burn Down the House?
The Standard Challenge deck that I started from played two copies of Burn Down the House. I dropped one for a Geistwave, along with both Fading Hopes and a Disdainful Stroke. The Disdainful Stroke largely on the "4 Into the Roil / 3 Mana Leak" thought process I discussed from the 2011 Age of CawBlade.
Clearly Battle of Frost and Fire is better than it's ever been before in this kind of deck. But does that mean there is no room for Burn Down the House? There are two problems for me:
- I've played an absolute ton of events without changing a card, and more than two-thirds have resulted in 7-0 performances. Nothing is underperforming, other than the stuff you would expect to suck sometimes like Cinderclasm and Crush the Weak.
- I've made Devils at least once in every event where I got six or more wins. It's probably the case that we should make the swap, but surprisingly, hasn't been a slam dunk. To the best of my recollection four versus five has never mattered (which doesn't mean that it might not matter at some point).
Well, there you have it.
Geistwave is our Unlikely Hero.
What do you mean "By definition, the villain can't be any kind of hero"?
LOVE
MIKE
*And even if you are playing Lier, given that you will often be targeting your own Disciple of the Drowned in order to turn permission back on, there's a dialectical counter argument for Geistwave.
*Not actually the consensus. No idea why people think that deck is better than either Azorius or Izzet Hullbreaker Horror Control.
