Chandra's Defeat

shteev

I really like this card.

I haven't found anywhere to play it yet. I don't think I'd ever play it in PvP, I mean, you don't lose games against Koth where he respectfully drops a Avaricious Dragon every other turn, do you? You lose games against Koth where he gets a huge cascade and drops 2 Metalwork Colossi and a Heart of Kiran on turn 2, and Chandra's Defeat is barely going to stem the bleeding in those cases. And I haven't found a good level to play it in PvE, either. In fact, short of mastering it, maybe I never will, I've got much better cards.

But I love the idea of powerful sideboard-worthy cards being introduced into the game. Cards which are literally unplayable in a majority of cases, but just sometimes are the right tool for the job and prove their worth.

Die Young is a terrible card. But I was very happy to play it against Tezzeret in RatC because it cleared all of his energize gems off the board, and he could do some damage with those things if left unchecked. Finding corner case solutions to problems like that is one of the joys of playing a trading card game.

But Die Young wasn't designed to be a corner case card... it was designed to be a general removal card which worked with the Energize mechanic. Chandra's Defeat actually does nothing against any PW who isn't red (er... excepting dual color cards, I guess....)

I'd like to see more cards like Chandra's Defeat in the game. Certainly, amoungst the commons and umcommons (Boil and Choke are probably a little over the top). I've written before about how many commons and uncommons waste everybody's time just by existing... I reckon we could expunge quite a lot of these cards from the game going forwards and replace them with something akin to Chandra's Defeat.

I'm not talking about replacing cards that are bad for me personally, but playable for brand new players in their first week of the game, like Open Fire, or Thorned Moloch. I'm certainly not talking about removing other corner case cards from the game to make room for different corner case cards, like Skaab Goliath or Paradoxical Outcome. I'm talking about those really wretched cards that no human being would look at twice, like Sunscorched Desert, or Roilmage's Trick.

Mainloop25

It's definitely gotten some use against red decks from me, but then I've screwed up by forgetting to take it out for the next fight against an Elspeth. I agree though, that cards like this are good to build discipline in deck building.