Ode to a terrible card: Aerial Volley

knthrak

We've all been there. You've just started playing the game, and you're playing Nissa. You play a story mode mission and you get thrashed by some fliers. You look to see what options you have to shore up your weaknesses and you come across a spell that is custom made to help deal with fliers, Aerial Volley.

Aerial Volley (5)
Spell
Green Common

Target creature with Flying takes 3 damage.

So you use up one of your one or two spell slots to play with Aerial Volley. You shortly discover that this card is trash. As it turns out, there are very few creatures in the game that this can outright kill, and almost all of those cards are terrible too.

Full kill:
Aven Battle Priest (the only reasonable creature in the full kill list)
Charging Griffin (likely going to die anyway as a 1/1 defender)
Faerie Miscreant
Rabid Bloodsucker

Half kill:
Aspiring Aeronaut (kill the creature or the Thopter)
Ghirapur Gearcrafter (kill the Thopter)
Thopter Engineer (kill the Thopter)

Lucky kill:
Stalwart Aven (better kill it before it gets renowned)


So what are you likely to see in story mode?
Gold-Forged Sentinel
Whirler Rogue
Demon Tokens
Gold-Forged Sentinel
Kothophed, Soul Horder
Gold-Forged Sentinel
Thunderclap Wyvern
Gold-Forged Sentinel
Gold-Forged Sentinel

So most of the creatures that you need to deal with require two copies of Aerial Volley, or require a reach blocker to go with the Aerial Volley. The reach creature will stole lose a lot of toughness in the process.

Here are some ways things could be improved without going nuts...
* Make Aerial Volley deal 4 damage to a flier. Even if you need to increase the cost a bit, an 8 mana do-something is better than a 5 mana do-nothing. Honestly, I think 5 mana is still fine for such a situational card.
* Make Aerial Volley just destroy a flier. Paper MtG has this card (Plummet). I would definitely expect an increase in cost for this though.
* Make Aerial Volley give a permanent -3/-3 to a flier. This would be a strange card in paper MtG, but given that damage doesn't heal in MtGPQ, it might not be so strange here.
* Reduce the toughness of several fliers so that Aerial Volley can kill them.

The_Leftist

I can see what you are saying.

Perhaps make it a support that says, "Activate/Trap 3 Green: Deal 2 damage to target creature with flying"

So, every turn, you have a chance at dealing up to 6 damage to a flyer, but it wouldn't be so strong as to completely obliterate someone who played mainly flying creatures. And someone playing against it has the opportunity to either destroy the support, match green to avoid the damage if it were an activate support, or avoid green to avoid the trap support.

I think 6 damage is decent considering not everyone has flyers, and while giving an advantage for story missions with flyers, wouldn't be overpowered by any means.

I think if it were to downright destroy a flier, being a green spell, it would have to be upgraded to rare, and mana cost increased to 8. This would put it on par with Unholy Hunger, but still being situational to fit Greens theme.

Unknown

Yo green needs a plummet.

Meto5000

pandabear wrote:

Yo green needs a plummet.

Sounds like a 21 cost Mythic rare to me

Unknown

Mantle of webs ftw

EDUSAN

75% of the black cards want to talk to you

Unknown

EDUSAN wrote:

75% of the black cards want to talk to you

If you mean me, then I don't know what you mean.
Black is almost never a problem for green because of greens first ability. The worst color to run into while using a mantle of webs deck is blue because of the bounce.

EDUSAN

i was refering to all the black cards that are terrible, but nvm

knthrak

I need to play more black before I do one of these on a black card. The lack of good cards makes me not really want to play that color though... go figure.

fruithead

although black is very underpowered cardwise atm, the few good cards actually more than make up for it. i think if you have the right cards black should easily outperform most other colors. most of the cards are terrible though.

The_Leftist

Agreed. I particularly enjoy getting hangerback walker out, then using cards to destory him (which generally destory an opponents card or make him discard) and then reviving him with dark petition, necromatic summons, or 3rd ability. Also works by discarding him from my hand by either card or ability and then reviving him. I can get a lot of thoptors out really quick, and then I still have creature control cards to help my massive thoptors and walker do a lot of quick damage without a threat.

paralistalon

Just like in paper Magic, they have to make a few terrible cards in order to reward the skill of players who recognize how bad certain cards are!