Scour from Existence

BassMuffinFIve
BassMuffinFIve Posts: 231
edited May 2016 in MtGPQ General Discussion
Love this card! Thank you devs for putting this in the game!! Now I don't have to auto-concede when my white or green deck gets behind on the board in the early game thanks to a lucky cascade or whatnot. My question is this, though- is it too good?

It seems like it is an auto-include in every deck. Even red and blue get a lot of value from it. Why run bounce in blue when you can just run this and Turn to Frog? It kinda feels like the Sword of the Animist of the set. Except that Sword was just a fun card to include that added some explosiveness to your deck, Scour from Existence feels mandatory.

Don't get me wrong, I love the card and play it in all my decks, I was just wondering if the devs had anticipated it being so prolific?

Comments

  • Meto5000
    Meto5000 Posts: 583
    Question
    BassMuffinFIve wrote:
    My question is this, though- is it too good?
    Answer
    BassMuffinFIve wrote:
    Now I don't have to auto-concede when my white or green deck gets behind on the board in the early game thanks to a lucky cascade or whatnot.

    I think is the crux of it; previously, certain decks had no way to come back from an opponent's fast start or a lucky cascade and now they can. This card is/was needed to keep the meta in check.
  • shteev
    shteev Posts: 2,031 Chairperson of the Boards
    Well, they had to print at least one common that was worth playing, amidst all the Courier Griffins and Blisterpods and Benthic Infiltrators...
  • EDHdad
    EDHdad Posts: 609 Critical Contributor
    In paper Magic, it's always been possible to destroy or exile a creature for a modest amount of mana. Cards like Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile will remove a creature from the game for 1 mana. Cards like Doom Blade or Terror will kill a creature in for mana.

    It isn't that Scour from Existence is too good. It's that so far, decent removal in this game has totally sucked. Scour from Existence is completely fair. It's 12 mana and takes up one card slot in your deck. It doesn't advance your own board state. It might take 2-4 turns just to power it up. And against some cards, you're still going to take a beating. Some creatures have hexproof. Some automatically return from the grave if they are destroyed. Some creatures spawn other creatures, which you might still have to deal with.
  • BassMuffinFIve
    BassMuffinFIve Posts: 231
    EDHdad wrote:
    In paper Magic, it's always been possible to destroy or exile a creature for a modest amount of mana. Cards like Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile will remove a creature from the game for 1 mana. Cards like Doom Blade or Terror will kill a creature in for mana.

    It isn't that Scour from Existence is too good. It's that so far, decent removal in this game has totally sucked. Scour from Existence is completely fair. It's 12 mana and takes up one card slot in your deck. It doesn't advance your own board state. It might take 2-4 turns just to power it up. And against some cards, you're still going to take a beating. Some creatures have hexproof. Some automatically return from the grave if they are destroyed. Some creatures spawn other creatures, which you might still have to deal with.

    It's not that removal in this game has sucked, it's that only 1 class had access to removal. Now every class does.
  • Meto5000
    Meto5000 Posts: 583
    BassMuffinFIve wrote:
    It's not that removal in this game has sucked, it's that only 1 class had access to removal. Now every class does.

    Only 1 color had access to an "unconditional removal" spell (Black), but 2 other colors had reliable ways to remove problem creatures (Blue and Red)

    Green and white had to rely on removing creatures with their own creatures, but if they got behind there was almost no way to come back

    Scour from Existence being colorless means that Noyan Dar decks can be held in check. Otherwise a deck like that could almost always run over white and green decks since how do you kill a 40/40 creature without removal?
  • EDHdad
    EDHdad Posts: 609 Critical Contributor
    Every color SHOULD have access to removal. The fact that they didn't until now is an anomaly. Magic is a game of threats and answers. When designing your deck and playing the game, you should ask yourself if you want to be the problem or the solution. If you over commit to the board, laying down creature after creature after creature, you could get punished by an opponent who plays removal after removal after removal. If your deck has nothing but removal and no way to hit the opponent in the face, then you could wind up losing the game.

    Suppose you were allowed to fill your 10 deck slots with the same card. Now suppose Nissa, Gideon 1 or Jace played a deck where Scour from Existence was the ONLY card in their deck. They would have no way of winning, because they can't damage the opponent.
  • Hibernum_JC
    Hibernum_JC Posts: 318 Mover and Shaker
    We agree, in general, that every single color should have access to some form of removal, although their removals aren't all the same and aren't all at the same efficiency.

    Red has direct damage and Berserkers
    Green has Defenders and Reach (which is indirect removal, and we intended for Green's weakness to be it's direct removal)
    White has Defenders and First Strike (similarly to Green, White's weakness is very conditional removal)
    Black has direct removal
    Blue has temporary removal and one very strong direct removal spell (Turn to Frog).

    Now that every color has access to Scour from Existence, every color can technically do Black's favored method of removal. It does come at a cost, however - 12 mana for that spell is pretty high (the equivalent in pure Black is much cheaper!). It also lets us print very strong creatures because we know for a fact that they can be removed, if players have decided to slot Scour from Existence. Seeing as it takes a deck slot we find it pretty balanced.

    Also to note is that when putting in a new set of cards, we usually take what paper Magic has and integrate them, then figure out what we need from that. The reason why Green has no direct removal was that there is no direct Green removal in paper Magic, but since creature combat is determined by the defending player the game plays much differently.

    Anyway, this is a bit long-winded, but the gist of it is we actually like that every color now has access to universal removal.
  • Fiddler
    Fiddler Posts: 251 Mover and Shaker
    Just mentioning that Smite The Monstrous is a pretty decent 8 cost removal spell for white. Actually the only common card I consider a must have for any white deck.
  • shteev
    shteev Posts: 2,031 Chairperson of the Boards
    Hibernum_JC wrote:
    Now that every color has access to Scour from Existence, every color can technically do Black's favored method of removal. It does come at a cost, however - 12 mana for that spell is pretty high (the equivalent in pure Black is much cheaper!).

    Sorry, what's this removal in black that is much cheaper? Grip of Desolation, at 11 mana? Complete Disregard? Or are you talking about Unholy Hunger and Ruinous Path, which are both rare? Are we going to start comparing common card power levels to rare card power levels now? Because if we are, I'd really like to talk about Hitchclaw Recluse and Skysnare Spider. Or maybe Lightning Javelin and Exquisite Firecraft.
    Hibernum_JC wrote:
    We agree, in general, that every single color should have access to some form of removal, although their removals aren't all the same and aren't all at the same efficiency.

    ...although every deck will now have the same removal spell at the same efficiency.
  • Morphis
    Morphis Posts: 975 Critical Contributor
    @shteev: when comparing stuff it is normal to compare to the best thing a color has to offer. So in fact the best black removal is better than he beat colorless removal. The fact that scour is easy to obtain is not a bad thing and does not unbalance things.
    If that was the case I would rate snit the monstrous as the most OP CARD cause while conditional(the condition make it unusable to a very limited pool of card almost all being not a threat) is both efficient at 8 mana and easy to obtain being common.

    @hibernium: green has no removal in this game.
    Having reach is not removal.
    Having berserk is not removal.
    In paper magic the remova green has is the fight mechanic like in the paper version of wild instinct that you translated into berserk.
    The result is not absolutely comparable.
    In paper version you do not lose the chance to attack.
    In paper version you choose the target.
    In paper version you can cast both the creature and the wild instinct together and get benefit. Here you need to have it out from a turn already making come backs quite unlikely to happen.
    The only deck that really got benefit from scour is green and this is the reason.
  • shteev
    shteev Posts: 2,031 Chairperson of the Boards
    Morphis wrote:
    @shteev: when comparing stuff it is normal to compare to the best thing a color has to offer. So in fact the best black removal is better than he beat colorless removal.

    I don't know, that seems a dangerous road to go down. Firstly, we'd have to acknowledge that blue's removal is much better than black's... bounce in Paper MTG is worse than destruction because in the late game your average card has a mana cost less than the amount of mana available to you each turn, which just isn't the case in this game.

    Then we'd have to move onto the fact that if we're comparing commons to rares, that this set is absolutely full of commons that literally no-one will ever play for any reason. I mean, paper MTG has different formats, Modern, Standard, Draft, Sealed, Pauper, EDH... I'd guess that maybe only 30% of the commons printed in any given set are completely worthless and should be set fire to as soon as you open them in boosters. In MPQ BFZ, I'd wager that percentage is sitting at around 95%. Opening a BFZ booster pack is an unbelievably depressing experience.
  • XehutL
    XehutL Posts: 22
    Scour from Existence is too good for what it does even compared to most of black removals. And it is accessible to all colors. Too bad, this is IMO quite cheap way how to balance things.

    As I have been pointing here https://d3go.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=43144
    ...the effect should been swapped with Complete Disregard.

    These two spells are - as it stands now - completely out of sense.
  • shteev
    shteev Posts: 2,031 Chairperson of the Boards
    Hey, I wonder if we email WOTC about this and tell them they've broken the MTG color pie they'll do something about it? They're usually quite precious about their IP. I'll have a go, anyway, see what happens. Feel free to join me!
  • nexus13
    nexus13 Posts: 191 Tile Toppler
    I agree that Scour seems anti color pie and that the puzzle quest translation of cards is sometimes off compared to the paper version (I'm looking at you Pilgrims Eye) this one seems pretty reasonable. It's the paper version of Scour that is the original problem so don't expect WOTC to have an issue with it here.
  • shteev
    shteev Posts: 2,031 Chairperson of the Boards
    nexus13 wrote:
    It's the paper version of Scour that is the original problem so don't expect WOTC to have an issue with it here.

    Well that's not true... Scour in Paper MTG costs 7 mana. It's a pretty bad card even in low powered formats like Sealed and Draft.

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