Sorin, Grim Nemesis: Official Thread

Morphis

Beside him being overall pretty bad....

Where the hell second skill design come from?

I am not a magic lore follower but does make any sense for Sorin to get a skill based on supports(artifact/enchantments)?

ShawnP1

Yeah it doesn't make sense, he always makes tokens destroys creatures and gains you life in paper. And lore wise he does next to nothing with artifice or enchantments the only things I can think of is creating the helvault and destroying Ugin's stasis chamber. Also I think Ugin might (keyword might) be interesting on here although he'd be colorless could be cool though if done right.

alextfish

Uhh. Both his first and second abilities have *negative* impact on the board? What the...?
I had been so looking forward to Sorin. Planning to actually pay money for something in this game for the first time this year. And now... what is this pile of poo?

shteev

alextfish wrote:

Uhh. Both his first and second abilities have *negative* impact on the board? What the...?
I had been so looking forward to Sorin. Planning to actually pay money for something in this game for the first time this year. And now... what is this pile of poo?

I feel a whole lot better about having blown my cash on Avacyn now

But, yeah, my hopes were high that Sorin might be somewhere in the ballpark of Kiora power levels. When will I learn to set my expectations as low as possible for this game?

Jazzpha

It takes a fair number of mythics, but I think I found a fairly insane Sorin deck.

Also, it has the upside of finally making Inverter of Truth viable!

No, I'm not joking.

Observe!

Inverter of Truth
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
Caves of Koilos
Felidar Sovereign
Linvala, The Protector
Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
Unholy Hunger
Grip of Desolation
Behold the Beyond
Tamiyo's Journal

So basically, the goal is to use Kalitas and Felidar to offset Inverter of Truth's per-turn damage, while using Inverter's ability to ramp up into ability 3. Once that support hits the board, you win the game 3 turns later because you're putting an extra 24 attack on the board permanently per-turn. Grip of desolation also synergizes with Inverter's conversion ability nicely, as well.

Linvala also solves the Runaway Carriage problem.

I was skeptical of sorin's abilities and mana gain at first, but black/white as a card pool balances those out quite nicely.

It's just unfortunate that he suffers from The Sarkhan Problem: unless you have a critical mass of a certain type of good card (dragons for Sarkhan, powerful life gain cards for Sorin), you can't quite unlock his true power.

But this deck is pulling its weight in heroic encounters quite well so far in testing. It's only lost to an absurd Chandra cascade opener.

I'll test it in QB tomorrow and report back, though!

Note: you could also run Avacyn over Inverter if you have her, as an option for another strong defender, at the cost of losing ramp potential.

Hibernum_JC

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

We'll keep a close look at how he performs in the real world and we can always readjust if necessary.

alextfish

Hibernum_JC wrote:

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

But really no synergy at all with a mainly Origins / BFZ cardpool So basically no reason for those of us who've not got a vast SOI collection to buy him. (Okay, the fact I've not managed to open Serene Steward or Grip of Desolation in dozens of BFZ boosters doesn't help either.)

I'd been so looking forward to a 'walker, but this really does nothing at all. It'd literally be like playing a planeswalker with no first or second abilities.

We'll keep a close look at how he performs in the real world and we can always readjust if necessary.

I guess I'll be saving my crystals for when the inevitable tweaking comes. But even so, that first and second ability don't want "tweaking", they want wholesale redesigning.

Such a pity. Especially because Sorin as a character does much more than just gain life by draining your other resources. He burns/destroys opposing creatures, summons tokens, pumps your own creatures, gives your own creatures lifelink, and drains life from opponents. This is a bizarre uncharacteristic take on him.

Mcjordan

Initially I'm a little bummed at the lack of a token-creating ability and his second skill doesn't seem worth it, but it is a bit early to call for a buff considering he's only been out a few hours. I can think of a few good deck ideas, and I like his mana gain.

I wish he had more health, since his abilities require you to have cards in play in order to heal at all. I could imagine a bad draw could mean you die quickly more than other planeswalkers, but I haven't played with him much yet.

I like the Inverter of Truth idea! Also Alhammarret's Archive and Orbs of Warding are immediately more playable. Sorin could make many older cards more useable actually.

Jazzpha

alextfish wrote:

Hibernum_JC wrote:

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

But really no synergy at all with a mainly Origins / BFZ cardpool

I dunno, apart from Behold the Beyond, the other core cards in my deck are all from Origins or BfZ (Felidar Sovereign, Kalitas, Grip of Desolation, Unholy Hunger, Inverter of Truth [not 'core', per se, but eh], Linvala).

If you wanted to make a zombie deck, yeah, you'd need SoI rares/mythics for days, but I think a lot of the strong lifelink cards exist outside of SoI.

The real issue is that most all of them are mythics, and thus much harder to get than other potential useful cards.

@McJordan -- Thanks! I was honestly surprised at myself for thinking of it hahaha. I started a fight against Heroic Liliana at 60 health just to see how it went and ended up at 77 when I won, even with Inverter leeching from me per-turn. Wish I had Alhammaret's Archive, though!

Being able to essentially auto-cast removal and Felidar Sovereign off of one white or black match it super, super helpful.

Rootbreaker

Hibernum_JC wrote:

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

We'll keep a close look at how he performs in the real world and we can always readjust if necessary.

So, the life gain is a combo with... these?

http://decktester.com/cards?cardText=wh ... Name%20ASC

How exciting -_-

Hibernum_JC

Rootbreaker wrote:

Hibernum_JC wrote:

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

We'll keep a close look at how he performs in the real world and we can always readjust if necessary.

So, the life gain is a combo with... these?

http://decktester.com/cards?cardText=wh ... Name%20ASC

How exciting -_-

Combo with that and his 3rd ability, which all end up stacking. Once you have 3 creatures with Lifelink on the board and his 3rd ability running, each creature gets +12/0 every turn, which you can convert to even more with his first and using white spells/abilities that give you life. That alone is 36 damage *per turn*.

That's the idea behind it. We wanted to have a 3rd ability that would end up snowballing into being ridiculously powerful, but we might have missed the mark.

As I said before, we'll let it run for a little bit, and I will gladly readjust (this definitely *can* mean redesigning his abilities, btw) so his power level is more in line with what we wanted.

Morphis

Rootbreaker wrote:

Hibernum_JC wrote:

The design intent for Sorin is to have large synergy with Vampires (with the Lifelink and his 3rd ability) as well as having synergy with Investigate, which White has plenty of.

We'll keep a close look at how he performs in the real world and we can always readjust if necessary.

So, the life gain is a combo with... these?

http://decktester.com/cards?cardText=wh ... Name%20ASC

How exciting -_-

To be fair you also need stuff to gain life in the first place to support the thene(skills are nowhere near spammable).

But yes overall not that much to play with.

johnnyde76

Maybe I am not understanding it correctly but won't his 2nd ability destroy his 3rd?

madwren

Honestly, I'm fine with his 1st and 3rd abilities. Just using the 1st with Bloodbond and Steward on the board makes for a nice aggressive ally deck.

The 2nd ability, however, puzzles me. It has Nahiri syndrome, in that it's so inferior to abilities 1 and 3 that you won't wind up using it. It would have been nice to generate vampire tokens or something instead.

Jazzpha

madwren wrote:

Honestly, I'm fine with his 1st and 3rd abilities. Just using the 1st with Bloodbond and Steward on the board makes for a nice aggressive ally deck.

The 2nd ability, however, puzzles me. It has Nahiri syndrome, in that it's so inferior to abilities 1 and 3 that you won't wind up using it. It would have been nice to generate vampire tokens or something instead.

Agreed. The only tweaks I see potentially being made are shifting around Ability 2 to something more useful, and re-costing ability 3 so you can start bringing the pain just a bit earlier.

HomeRn

Jazzpha wrote:

madwren wrote:

Honestly, I'm fine with his 1st and 3rd abilities. Just using the 1st with Bloodbond and Steward on the board makes for a nice aggressive ally deck.

The 2nd ability, however, puzzles me. It has Nahiri syndrome, in that it's so inferior to abilities 1 and 3 that you won't wind up using it. It would have been nice to generate vampire tokens or something instead.

Agreed. The only tweaks I see potentially being made are shifting around Ability 2 to something more useful, and re-costing ability 3 so you can start bringing the pain just a bit earlier.

Same here with the ability tweaking - Sorin's 3rd is usually too expensive to be played reliably unless you're already way ahead. The second ability just doesn't make any sense usually... ESPECIALLY after playing Sorin's 3rd ability!! Then again, Regenerate does have some really interesting ideas regarding some supports that I don't usually see - Blighted Fen suddenly turns into a ticking time bomb instead of being a deterrent.

glggwp

need this card so bad

Jazzpha

glggwp wrote:

need this card so bad

Oh.

Oh maaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnn.

That's going to be absolutely bonkers.

chispito

Has anyone posted the deck options yet? (creatures/spells/supports)

He seems solid, if slow. The only real complaint I would have is... destroy my precious white supports?

Plastic

chispito wrote:

Has anyone posted the deck options yet? (creatures/spells/supports)

He seems solid, if slow. The only real complaint I would have is... destroy my precious white supports?

10/3/3