Have Mythics Become Crutches?

RhysMarkov

Am I alone in thinking mythics have become crutches? After my umpteenth use of Exert Influence to steal my 2702nd Olivia the thought occurred to me that maybe I should try taking Exert out and try running a KLD only Dovin deck. No mythics. Considering that I've only managed a single Big Box and a single Fat Pack of KLD, my selection of cards from the set isn't stellar, but I felt it would be solid enough to be competitive.

Nope. Death by Olivia twice, once by Decimator and the last match got stalled into death by a recurring Starfield/Hixus combo.

I think this has been addressed in another post, but wouldn't it be nice to have set specific events or matches? Just saying.

buscemi

Are some mythics OP? Well, yes. quite obviously.

RhysMarkov

And while OP is kind of the point of mythics, I think what I'm trying to convey is that I feel they stifle a certain amount of creativity in deck design, and that I kinda resent the necessity of them in order to be competitive. Does that make any sense?

buscemi

Personally I think that block constructed formats in this game have been avoided by the dev team for a specific reason. When the last new set came out, most of the people I knew bought 2-3 big boxes (which crystals or cash), got 1-2 mythics out of them, 0-1 of them being playable mythics. Now, I think that buying 2-3 big boxes at the point of release is probably way above average, but I don't really have any way of knowing. But I can tell you that those of us who did would have been extremely disappointed in our ability to build anything like a playable deck out of the cards we received at the time. Cards are rationed out very slowly over a period of time in this game by design.

That said... perhaps the introduction of Aether Revolt would be a good time to introduce a new play format which is limited to cards from Kaladesh and Aether Revolt?

RhysMarkov

Makes sense. Gotta keep that carrot juuuust out of reach and all that. And as I mentioned, I'm guilty of it myself, between Exert in all of my blue decks, Ulvenwald Hydra/Oblivion Sower/Zendikar Resurgent in my Nissa deck etc...

Mechanically, I don't think I've actually enjoyed something as much as my Sorin deck, and it has no mythics. The Defiant Bloodlord/Zulaport Enforcer/Ruinous Path combo with Sorin's ultimate is just fun to watch, and it's only two rares and an uncommon.

And I think that, more than anything, is what I'd like to see more of, and less mythic reliance. That's what I'd hoped for with KLD since it's got a crafty/aritificer theme.

SeditiousCanary

RhysMarkov wrote:

And while OP is kind of the point of mythics...

Dreadwaters, and Pyromancer's Goggles exist. Just saying...

RhysMarkov

Hahaha. Yep. My first ever mythic was Bring To Light, and I'd cackle a bit when I manged to play Fathom Feeder for 10 mana. It didn't take me long to realize that the gamble wasn't worth the 10 mana though.

killwind

You asked a loaded question I will try and answer.

Depending on what color you are playing and which planeswalker you are using, the decks themselves can become dependent on those mythics.

Lets take White. For example if I am using Gideon 2. In my Gid2 deck I have no Mythics and only 2 rares. Yet, previous to the EMN/SOI block that deck was a headache to deal with it as snowballs out of control very quickly. But with current cards sets out there, the deck is totally irrelevant and no amount of Mythics will fix it. If I were to turn it into a deploy deck using Tazri ( which doesnt work with Deploy) and Hero of Goma fada it still cant compete with a another white deck that can deploy into Eldrazi or Olivia combo's.

Now white again Nahiri and Ajani, Nahiri can run Zoo or Deploy and Ajani can go creatureless and deploy ( Im sure there are other variants ) In Nahiri its built to beat you as fast as possible with both builds, so your using big fatties to dish out the damage, unfortunately all the really good big fatties are Mythics ( Yes there are some good rare fatties, Twins and some others) but Olivia,Bacon, Boomship, Emrakul, Ulrich all Mythics are definitely worth playing. Tell me one good non-rare creature you would rather play in place of the creatures I named.

I like my crutches just fine thank you!

hawkyh1

RhysMarkov wrote:

Nope. Death by Olivia twice, once by Decimator and the last match got stalled into death by a recurring Starfield/Hixus combo.

using turn against versus unbreakable hixus can
yield some surprisingly entertaining results. not
all mythics require another mythic to break.
(you need troop rotation though, and patience of
course)
(he's a lame duck now, you can have him back )

HH

RhysMarkov

Hahaha... dropping a table full of hurt in one turn definitely has its appeal. I suppose I'm more inclined to the mechanical side of things, and coming from a paper Magic background, I suppose when a Deploy combo hits I have to admit to screaming "2 blue counterspell!!!" in my head lol

octal9

killwind wrote:

Boomship

just so you know I"m adding this as a card alias for Skysovereign.

Falizar

RhysMarkov wrote:

Hahaha... dropping a table full of hurt in one turn definitely has its appeal. I suppose I'm more inclined to the mechanical side of things, and coming from a paper Magic background, I suppose when a Deploy combo hits I have to admit to screaming "2 blue counterspell!!!" in my head lol

Force spike for the win lol

madwren

RhysMarkov wrote:

And while OP is kind of the point of mythics, I think what I'm trying to convey is that I feel they stifle a certain amount of creativity in deck design, and that I kinda resent the necessity of them in order to be competitive. Does that make any sense?

To be honest, I think my deckbuilding has definitely suffered because of Deploy. It's so easy to just plug and play various sets of creatures that I almost forget what it's like not to use it.

Steeme

Until they come up with events with deckbuilding restrictions this is the going rate.

Players will play totally OP combos. Other players will face those decks and lose, forcing them to optimize their decks into other OP combos.

With the way event scoring is handled, if you want to compete for the top of the leaderboard, or if you just want to complete the progression in as few matches as possible to get back to real life, then you absolutely must not lose matches.

Given losing is not an option, you cannot risk even starting an event match without being prepared for the worst. That means using as strong a deck as possible.

This all gets compounded by the game's horrendous matchmaking. I find that if I modify my deck a certain way, perhaps **** it in order to meet objectives, the matchmaker will select an opponent that rips shreds through the specific weakness that I've just opened. This forces me to go back to my deck, undo the changes, then continue with the same old OP combo deck.

Note that none of this is actually helping D3/Hibernum, because what they've done is ramped down the power level of the KLD set (not to mention all of the new mechanics simply slow down all of the matches, making them less enjoyable). That means unless you've carefully crafted that one perfect combo by having access to all KLD cards you are going to get overrun by decks running prior sets. This once again forces players to remove KLD cards and replace them with the tried, tested, and true prior set combos that can hold their own against the toughest decks. As a matter of fact, KLD will be the first set where I did not make a single pre-purchase for one of the Mythics.

tl;dr
Players are forced to run OP combos to keep up with the other players' OP combo decks, since there are no deckbuilding or matchmaking restrictions.

khurram

Crutches?

Wings maybe.

RhysMarkov

The plug and play aspect of it why my blue mastery is ahead of the others. I just basically built a Jace2 control deck around Exert and Welcome To The Folf and swapped out pretty much every other card until I ticked over into platinum.

Tbh, I'm bored with Exert but as much as I want to take it out, it's really one of the only solid, cost effective answers I have for a lot of what's being played right now. I'm kinda suffering the same issue with my Nissa deck, in that it's half (well, a third) mythics and if I alter it away from that, my loss rate starts to creep up.

Ultimately though, it's definitely similar to an arms race haha.. we use them because they use them, and vice versa.

babar3355

RhysMarkov wrote:

Makes sense. Gotta keep that carrot juuuust out of reach and all that. And as I mentioned, I'm guilty of it myself, between Exert in all of my blue decks, Ulvenwald Hydra/Oblivion Sower/Zendikar Resurgent in my Nissa deck etc...

Mechanically, I don't think I've actually enjoyed something as much as my Sorin deck, and it has no mythics. The Defiant Bloodlord/Zulaport Enforcer/Ruinous Path combo with Sorin's ultimate is just fun to watch, and it's only two rares and an uncommon.

And I think that, more than anything, is what I'd like to see more of, and less mythic reliance. That's what I'd hoped for with KLD since it's got a crafty/aritificer theme.

Try Pious Evangelist in your Sorin deck. My favorite deck ever, and really good. Drop ult with Pious evangel out and then cast a token generator like ruinous or FUtF. Pretty quickly you can have some triple digit tokens, evangels, zombies . Bloodlord is a different win condition but I like seeing those huge glass cannons about to crash into the opponent.

RhysMarkov

Haha... I swapped out the Cutthroat for the Evangel, but it didn't have the same flow to it. Since the Cutthroat triggers on creatures and supports I may put Ongoing Investigation or Tamiyo's Journal in.

In other news, I've been going through and restructuring my decks with no mythics and as few rares as possible. The results are about what ypu'd expect lol

buscemi

SeditiousCanary wrote:

RhysMarkov wrote:

And while OP is kind of the point of mythics...

Dreadwaters, and Pyromancer's Goggles exist. Just saying...

Dreadwaters was my first mythic

Obviously, not ALL mythic cards are OP, but they tend to be where the biggest problems in the game are. [satire]all rares, including Prism Array, are definitely fine[/satire].

Pyromancer's Goggles is an interesting card, because while it's not Tier 1, it's powerful, fun, and a lot of people love playing with it. Also, I imagine a bunch of people are going to tell me now that it IS Tier 1, and dyou know, if they get more success with it in their decks than I do? Then that's great. Pyromancer's Goggles is the sort of card there should be more of, actually... big, splashy cards with powerful effects that don't break the game. There are a limit to the number of OP cards that can be printed like Season's Past, Behold the Beyond, or Deploy the Gatewatch that can be printed before the entire game breaks and falls over... in theory, there is no limit to how many cards like Pyromancer's Goggles can be printed. Cards that cost 25+ mana which create a single, powerful effect on the board that can easily be dealt with by a cheap, common/uncommon Tier 1 answer like Demolish or Grip of Desolation; that makes them generally unviable for PvP (unless you already know your opponent isn't playing the correct answer), but fun, and certainly useful in PvE. That's the major problem with Odric and Worldbreaker... not they are are too expensive, but that they don't do cool enough stuff to be that bad a card.

Rough Tonality

killwind wrote:

but Olivia,Bacon, Boomship, Emrakul, Ulrich all Mythics are definitely worth playing.

"Boomship" Dyin'! Lol

I find "Bacon" unnecessarily benevolent. I prefer "Piggy from hell."

Pestilence

Crutches? I would say more like a Mech suit. Every mythic is like an armor or weapon upgrade.
Now suit up and get into battle!