Please do read other people's stuff, like this and this and especially this, because it's good information that I won't be saying below.
Card of the Day
I like Those Who Serve a lot for Limited. That's your tease, and we'll come back to it.
Trial of Errors
Misplaying -1/-1 Counters
Green, black, and, to a lesser extent, red put -1/-1 counters on things. In most cases, they put those counters on your own creatures! This should be obvious when it's a creature that does it, because the creature will be otherwise overpowered for its casting cost. Read the text carefully, and don't make the mistake of casting a creature thinking it puts -1/-1 counters on an opponent's creature when it only hits your own. And even more important, don't let your opponent do it to you!
But wait, there's more to get wrong with -1/-1 counters! When a card puts more than one counter on a creature, it usually requires that all the counters go on the same creature. Soulstinger and Stinging Shot don't allow you to spread counters around. Splendid Agony does. Again, read the cards you play and the cards your opponent plays. Soulstinger is pretty complicated for a common, so just read it now and memorize it, because people will be playing it and they might be playing it wrong!
Misplaying Sorcery Speed Effects
The second half of an Aftermath split card is always a sorcery. The first half is often (but not always) an instant. For example, Start to Finish would be nice to cast all at instant speed. It's still good, but read the card before you play it wrong.
Stir the Sands has the opposite thing going on. The card is a sorcery, but it has a cycling effect that can be played at instant speed. You can use the cycling mode as an ambush.
And finally, Embalm is a sorcery speed effect. It says so on the card, but make sure your opponents aren't trying to flash embalm things.
Monuments are Legendary
There are plenty of individual cards with misplay potential, especially at rare and mythic where the complexity goes up, but those above are the ones that stuck out most to me. Since embalm and aftermath both involve graveyard and exile, you'll also want to make sure it's clear which cards are where.
Trial of Value
Reading some of the embalm and cycling cards reminds me of megamorph from Dragons of Tarkir.
These don't play exactly the same, but they can be compared. The Skirmisher is a 2/1 for 1U, which is not great. Then, when it dies, you can play it again as a 2/1 for 3U, which is horrible. But it's free value, you might say. No, it's expensive value. Consider a game where you draw an average hand, and one of those cards is the Skirmisher. How often will you also want that hand to contain a free 8th card that's a 2/1 for 4 mana? You definitely don't want to play it on Turn 4, or 5, or probably 6. A 2/1 for 4 mana is a card that you will only play when you have absolutely nothing else in your hand worth playing. Yes, there will be an occasional game where you just keep drawing lands and this ability is what saves you, but there will be many more games where you played a 2/1 for 1U and never even thought about embalming it because the game ended too soon or you kept having better things to do with your mana.
And that's how it's like Guardian Shield-Bearer. You might play the Shield-Bearer as a 2-drop or as a barely better 3-drop, but many are the games where megamorphing it is never the best use of your mana (although the megamorph is probably slightly better because it's an instant speed trick).
Why does this happen? Because you have other cards in your deck with embalm, aftermath, and cycling. I've played plenty of games where I got stuck with cards in my hand that I truly wanted to cast but never had the mana math work out before the game was over. A 2/1 for 3U is not a card I ever really want to cast, but the fact is that the Skirmisher is still strictly better than the same creature without embalm, and we do see that creature in a fair number of Limited environments.
Now the devil's advocate argument against cycling. In Kaladesh and Aether Revolt, we played a lot of Prophetic Prisms in decks where they usually cycled and didn't do a lot else. That wasn't so bad, because the other cards in our decks were cheap and we got occasional use out of it for mana fixing, artifact synergies, and improvise costs.
Now, can you say the same for Floodwaters? Floodwaters is pretty cool if you can cast it. It even kills embalmed zombies and other tokens. But you probably don't want too many copies of expensive cycling cards like Floodwaters in your deck, because sometimes you're going to have nothing in your hand but cycling cards you can't cast, and you'll wish you had just played some cheap cards with less flexibility like your opponent, who is beating down on you every turn while you just spin your wheels trying to cast things that are slightly overpriced because they have cycling. Don't let cycling make you think you don't need a normal mana curve, or that cards with Cycling 2 count as 2-drops.
Cycling alone probably won't get you in too much trouble (and with certain enablers it becomes very good to just cycle things), but once you add embalm and aftermath to the mix, you can easily build a deck that value floods itself.
Trial of Shiny New Things
Are these good commons?
Spearmaster can attack for 4 sometimes. He can also die to any of the -1/-1 counters cards, or various other common removal like Magma Spray. Play him if you want to attack a lot early, but 3/1 for 3 mana is often just asking to trade down.
Unwavering Initiate has the innate value of sometimes coming back from the dead. Vigilance is nice, but less relevant on a creature that dies easily in combat. Magma Spray takes him out and stops him from coming back. Even if he dies normally, we again have the situation of an embalm creature that is quite overcosted, so I probably don't have to worry about seeing him again until the board is cluttered or dominated by larger creatures.
And then you have my card of the day, Those Who Serve. For the same cost as the two above you get a creature that has better stats than you ever get on a common white 3-drop, plus it's a zombie, which is relevant. It sucks up -1/-1 counters like a champ, and it wins combat straight up against both of the above creatures (excluding exert). The only thing it doesn't do is have extra value, because the extra value is built into the creature's stats.
That's not to say that Those Who Serve is some kind of amazing creature. It's just a pretty good common that I'd be happy to play.
Trial of Aggression
A pretty good aggressive opening play is Bloodlust Inciter on Turn 1 followed by Exemplar of Strength Turn 2. But where do you put the -1/-1 counters? With correct timing, you can put them on the Inciter and still give the Exemplar haste, so that's not an issue.
If you put them on the Exemplar, you still have the Inciter for future haste and you get incremental value as you attack with Exemplar. But the downside is that the Exemplar can be stonewalled by a blocker pretty easily. You wouldn't want to attack it into a worse creature that trades with it, and when it's 2/2 or 3/3 there are plenty of common on-curve answers.
On the other hand, if you put the counters on the Inciter, you have a 4/4 that's really hard to block for a couple turns, with the downside of losing your haste source (and saving your opponent the trouble).
I think this is a really tricky puzzle that isn't always answered the same way. It depends what is in your hand, what creatures your opponent has, and what kind of removal your opponent might have. My answer, in a vacuum, is to put the counters on the Exemplar unless the opponent can block it immediately with something like the 2/1 embalmable Tah-Crop Skirmisher we discussed earlier. I might even put the counters on the Exemplar anyway and just hope to attack later, depending what else is in my hand, although having two 1/1's in play doing nothing is not a great place to be if your deck is trying to be aggressive.
Wrap Up
Let me know what you think about the Bloodlust Inciter/Exemplar of Strength puzzle, and any other thoughts you might have.
Have fun!
It seems like WotC was trying to promote the Trials/Cartouche synergy in Limited by making them U/C. Do you think there is enough value there to try it out or is it a "trap"?
ReplyDeleteI definitely think they're intended to be playable in Limited (rather than Constructed), but like any cycles, you have to look at each card individually to see if they're good.
ReplyDeleteThe most obvious best ones are straight removal or create a creature/card.
Red Trial you will always play as a slightly expensive Incendiary Flow. Green Trial is Alpine Grizzly, which is medium good. Any Cartouche becomes immediately playable if you have a couple red or green trials (especially because Green Trial gives you a Cartouche target).
Black Trial as Diabolic Edict is ok but not always great the first time you cast it, but if you have good Cartouches it gets much better. If you can get a couple of these first three Trials on the board together, casting any Cartouche later is insane value.
White and Blue Trial are less generally good and need to be built around a bit more.
As for the Cartouches, the Green Cartouche is a cheaper Hunt the Weak, so you will always play as many as you can.
White, Blue, and Black Cartouches give value and a good ability, so you can play a couple in any deck or a bunch with the better trials.
Red Cartouche is the only one that feels like it is actively bad in non-aggressive decks. But at 1 CMC and in the same color as the best Trial, you might play it sometimes just as buyback with a little upside.
These all get more value the more you have in your deck, but like any spells, you should make sure you're playing enough creatures and removal before you go too heavy on the Trials and Cartouches that aren't creatures or removal.