Cycling: A Postmortem of a Dominant Strategy.

Mburn7

Mainloop25 said:

It was a bad idea for people to be so reliant on cycling in the first place, knowing that it was going to rotate out of standard eventually. I did rely on Shefet a lot though  

The problem is, it wasn't even cycling as an of all end all deck.

The cycling support destroy spells were fantastic in any deck.
The cycling land supports were great for what they did, and don't have a replacement yet in standard.
Cards like Shefet, Deem Worthy...ect that were great for effects + draw

There are a lot of decks that didn't rely on cycling, but used 1 or 2 cycling cards as key hand/mana fixers.  Even just losing a good land support or counterspell is a big deal sometimes.

Mark_Tedin

The powerlevel/speed of cards after HOU is very LOW. But the bosses´life still is the same. After cycling rotation, the old bosses HP should be decreased, because this events was designed when the powerlevel was high.

IM_CARLOS

I did rely on cycling from the release day. But it gets boring after a while and I'm fine with the rotation. There new deck strategies already there, Garruk-Ghalta to just name one. 

Mburn7

IM_CARLOS said:

I did rely on cycling from the release day. But it gets boring after a while and I'm fine with the rotation. There new deck strategies already there, Garruk-Ghalta to just name one. 

I need me a Ghalta.  Only missing 7 RIX mythics, and 5 of them are the elder dinos.  Not cool game.  Not cool.

Gunmix25

Mburn7 said:

IM_CARLOS said:

I did rely on cycling from the release day. But it gets boring after a while and I'm fine with the rotation. There new deck strategies already there, Garruk-Ghalta to just name one. 

I need me a Ghalta.  Only missing 7 RIX mythics, and 5 of them are the elder dinos.  Not cool game.  Not cool.

When IXN and RIX came out... I got everything but the dinosaurs in the rare and Mythic rarities. I had to craft the dang things Grrrrrrrrrr.

babar3355

Coilbox said:

New Perspectives was the one and only card that made cycling 'The Crutch'.

How then were so many players running AJ2 cycling decks?  We must recognize the other great offender and meta-warper... Shefet Monitor.  Although, I admit... I miss Shefet more than I missed Rishkar's Expertise when it rotated out.  And I miss it far more than I do New Perspectives.

Gunmix25

babar3355 said:

Coilbox said:

New Perspectives was the one and only card that made cycling 'The Crutch'.

How then were so many players running AJ2 cycling decks?  We must recognize the other great offender and meta-warper... Shefet Monitor.  Although, I admit... I miss Shefet more than I missed Rishkar's Expertise when it rotated out.  And I miss it far more than I do New Perspectives.

@babar3355 , I agree, Shefet was a greater power to be reckoned with than New perspectives. He was all too easy to abuse.

@Coilbox The entire mechanic of Cycling was a crutch. New perspectives was one of the more problematic cards, but not the sole engine for that mechanic. Just drakes and Faith of the devoted builds. Like babar said, any PW under any player was able to use cycling cards effectively and easily.

Thuran

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Mainloop25

Thuran said:

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Yeah i run variants of that on 4.2, 5.2, & 5.3. I don't mind that so much because the game will largely do the job itself instead of cycling where you have to do everything manually. 

Quantius

Imminent Doom is also a problem card (but good thing they nerfed lotus!).

Stupid Doom deck using Bolas

Creatures:

0

Spells:

Desert of the Glorified

Desert of the Mindful

Strategic Planning

Artificer's Epiphany

Tragic Lesson

Supreme Will

Ramunap Ruins

Supports:

Imminent Doom

The Immortal Sun

Sunset Pyramid

There's probably an even better version, but w/e this one is already pretty stupid.

Gunmix25

Mainloop25 said:

Thuran said:

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Yeah i run variants of that on 4.2, 5.2, & 5.3. I don't mind that so much because the game will largely do the job itself instead of cycling where you have to do everything manually. 

Been using Naru+ID+Siren's ruse in place of the old new perspectives ID grind. Use TIS with ID on 5.2 ... quick and efficient

TheExaminer

Am I the only one who was enjoying playing with New Perspectives 'fairly'? Tezzeret with 2 deserts and NP was core for many of my cool decks (powering up your Enigma Drake/Apocalypse Demon was extremely fun using this engine). Striped riverwinder is not fantastic on its own, and so is Lay claim, but 3-6 mana bonus was usually enough to make them good. Also, Ruthless sniper was actually kinda fun to use.

Matthew

Thésée said:

Dobby said:

Thésée said:

HUF / Approach of the Second Sun was clearly much more powerful to take down bosses in PVE than cycling and it's the disparition of that combo that made the event more difficult for me (and mostly much longer)

Clearly? I'll have to take your word for that, I didn't have HUF at the time, but I can tell you that the power of cycling to find many, many copes of Gaea's Revenge, *and* produce the mana to cast them, made Nicol-Bolas, God Pharoah something of a push over... he'd kill my stack of GRs every time he got 12 loyalty with his ability, but then I'd just put some more out.

Well "clearly" was maybe not the right word :-). Cycling is insanely powerful of course. But taking the Nicolas Bolas fight for example, in the various speed contests we held the ones who could take him down faster were using Goggles/HUF/Approach or Elspeth with Goggles/Approach.

Azor was also really easy to beat fast with that. And it was clearly less tedious than with cycling :-)

The point I think you're missing here is that power =/= speed. They are two distinct things. You can win quickly, but miss objectives. It happens to me literally every single iteration of AX, because I would rather blow through four matches at 10 points apiece than risk spending more time on the event and trying to only play three matches by forcing myself to meet certain conditions that, while not mutually exclusive, are not necessarily intuitively compatible with one another.

Power, in the sense that I think Dobby and madwren are using it, means control. Cycling is the epitome of control. You can literally meet any two secondary objectives by using a Cycling-focused deck (for the record, to me, a Cycling deck is one that has a minimum of 7 Cycling cards and New Perspectives; the other two are irrelevant, and can be anything that helps you meet a particular node's objectives).

An analogy I like to use is this. In games where you can slow down time, developers wisely build in a countdown or install a short fuse into that ability. Your characters can become godly, yes, but only for so long. Cycling is taking that short fuse and replacing it one that can be as arbitrarily long or short as the user wants it to be. To illustrate this point, here's my thought process during a Cycling match where I have New Perspectives and Curator of Mysteries on the board at any point during my turn. Most of my Blue/Green Cycling decks rely on Gaea's Revenge for the bulk of my damage. I see Curator and NP on the board and think "Y'know, I could just cast this one copy of GR and finish them off on the next turn. But that might mean they'll get a chance to ruin random-objective-X for me. Screw it, I'll just Cycle a little bit more until I reach a point where I can finish them off right now, and not risk it."

That's the true meaning of power as it's used in this thread: being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, without risk of retaliation.

Mburn7

Thuran said:

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Am I the only one who doesn't have Doom?  I seriously need it now that Approach is gone

ElfNeedsFood

Mburn7 said:

Thuran said:

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Am I the only one who doesn't have Doom?  I seriously need it now that Approach is gone

Best purchased card ever. I bought it in the January back on sale sale. 

bk1234

Laeuftbeidir said:

Ajani using goggles, Huf, approach took for bolas normally 3-5 minutes to finish him

We ran a time contest in TP9 for several runs of RotGP and HUF / AotSS always won. (It was, indeed, "clearly" the best strategy for big PvE bosses -- my BoFT decks are not the same without it.)

Gilesclone

I tried an ID/IS deck on Bo4T 3.1 (because I forgot what was in there) and it was a disaster.  I got all set up and dropped IS neatly in the lower left corner.  Next turn he drops Kopala. I was relying on Bolas’ first for removal.  I never got rid of my IS and I only played about 3 cards the rest of the game.

Stormbringer0

Mburn7 said:

Thuran said:

Its OK, i simply replaced those decks with imminent doom+immortal sun. In the last b4t I ended up running it on pretty much every node, since its flexible, powerful, and fast.

Just run a bunch of cheap draw and ramp spells that get reduced to 0 cost by the sun, play doom, and watch your entire deck largely play nonstop until anything in the game dies as you cast 30+ spells in a single turn, using planning to toss enchantments to the graveyard once you don't need them

Am I the only one who doesn't have Doom?  I seriously need it now that Approach is gone

Nope, don't have it either. Or any other good cards that play well with HUF, which is an insane card nevertheless.

Kinesia

I dont have it. I don't like the playstyle, I'd probably play it twice and be amused and then get bored. So I avoided buying it. I did have the chance to get it in booster crafting and I would've been ok getting it first, but I got Hours of Promise first and stopped!

Thésée

Matthew said:

Thésée said:

Dobby said:

Thésée said:

HUF / Approach of the Second Sun was clearly much more powerful to take down bosses in PVE than cycling and it's the disparition of that combo that made the event more difficult for me (and mostly much longer)

Clearly? I'll have to take your word for that, I didn't have HUF at the time, but I can tell you that the power of cycling to find many, many copes of Gaea's Revenge, *and* produce the mana to cast them, made Nicol-Bolas, God Pharoah something of a push over... he'd kill my stack of GRs every time he got 12 loyalty with his ability, but then I'd just put some more out.

Well "clearly" was maybe not the right word :-). Cycling is insanely powerful of course. But taking the Nicolas Bolas fight for example, in the various speed contests we held the ones who could take him down faster were using Goggles/HUF/Approach or Elspeth with Goggles/Approach.

Azor was also really easy to beat fast with that. And it was clearly less tedious than with cycling :-)

The point I think you're missing here is that power =/= speed. They are two distinct things. You can win quickly, but miss objectives. It happens to me literally every single iteration of AX, because I would rather blow through four matches at 10 points apiece than risk spending more time on the event and trying to only play three matches by forcing myself to meet certain conditions that, while not mutually exclusive, are not necessarily intuitively compatible with one another.

Power, in the sense that I think Dobby and madwren are using it, means control. Cycling is the epitome of control. You can literally meet any two secondary objectives by using a Cycling-focused deck (for the record, to me, a Cycling deck is one that has a minimum of 7 Cycling cards and New Perspectives; the other two are irrelevant, and can be anything that helps you meet a particular node's objectives).

An analogy I like to use is this. In games where you can slow down time, developers wisely build in a countdown or install a short fuse into that ability. Your characters can become godly, yes, but only for so long. Cycling is taking that short fuse and replacing it one that can be as arbitrarily long or short as the user wants it to be. To illustrate this point, here's my thought process during a Cycling match where I have New Perspectives and Curator of Mysteries on the board at any point during my turn. Most of my Blue/Green Cycling decks rely on Gaea's Revenge for the bulk of my damage. I see Curator and NP on the board and think "Y'know, I could just cast this one copy of GR and finish them off on the next turn. But that might mean they'll get a chance to ruin random-objective-X for me. Screw it, I'll just Cycle a little bit more until I reach a point where I can finish them off right now, and not risk it."

That's the true meaning of power as it's used in this thread: being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, without risk of retaliation.

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that cycling is the most powerful mechanism in this game. I was just mentioning another effective strategy to take out big bosses (and others added the Immortal Sun / Imminent Doom build), but as you say cycling offers such control that it allows to fulfill ANY objective