Strange cards in M19

wereotter

Volrak said:

If you compare Sai with Slimefoot in the role that Slimefoot excels (beat-down) then Sai definitely underwhelms.  But that's not his role.  His role is card draw and mana.  If you keep him reinforced and make sure you can reliably hit those activate gems, there's half your mana problem for the whole game solved, plus extra cards to boot.  Seems great for rare.

BUT here's the thing, most people are saying run Sai with Thopter Spy Network, which is a logical pairing. If when you're doing this, you don't consistently hit the activated gems, you're actually handicapping yourself. The reason here is Thopter Spy Network has the text "Whenever a token you control deals damage to your opponent, draw 1 card"

Sai is not only not a token, but he's absorbing your thopter tokens meaning you no longer draw cards off Thopter Spy Network; cards which could have gained mana just from normal matching of gems as you play. Hence why I still say that Sai, as he currently is, is only really going to make you break even with Thopter Spy Network. But not only that, he gets weaker when he draws you said cards, which Thopter Spy Network just gives you for free.

Again, he's not bad, but I just still feel like he needs a little something extra to make it work losing your thopters.

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madwren

Brakkis said:

Mark_Tedin said:

Why not just "destroy a support"?

Because there are other types of supports; lands, for instance.

I like that they're finding ways to differentiate between different kinds of support removal, so that you might prefer using, say, Tectonic Rift over Demolish.  It's a solid strategy to stop some of the samey-ness and give things a niche as counters to particular types of supports your deck fears.

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madwren

bluemage said:

madwren said:

I like that they're finding ways to differentiate between different kinds of support removal, so that you might prefer using, say, Tectonic Rift over Demolish.  It's a solid strategy to stop some of the samey-ness and give things a niche as counters to particular types of supports your deck fears.

The problem is that running support removal in your deck is niche anyway... you wouldn't go into a PvP match with a card which only destroys a small subset of supports, would you?

I donno, I'm certainly considering using Tectonic Rift to destroy opposing Vaults instead of blowing my Demolish on something inconsequential.

In PVE, of course, it could be quite useful since the opponent deck construction is static.

Kinesia

Support destruction has gotten critical enough that running multiple now makes sense. If one has a restriction then that's fine, as long as the other option covers the rest.

Tilwin90

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Reliquary Tower here... Looking forward to people jumping through insane hoops to try and "make it work" 

Mburn7

Tilwin90 said:

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Reliquary Tower here... Looking forward to people jumping through insane hoops to try and "make it work" 

Challenge Accepted

ZW2007-

Tilwin90 said:

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Reliquary Tower here... Looking forward to people jumping through insane hoops to try and "make it work" 

Ob can make it work pretty nicely without any hoops to jump through. Other than that it seems pretty worthless but then there's StV to give me absurd mana and cast my hand most of the time anyway. We shall see...

Enygma6

Tilwin90 said:

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Reliquary Tower here... Looking forward to people jumping through insane hoops to try and "make it work" 

Angrath, Ob, G/W Huatli, Kiora, Saheeli, Jaya, Karn, the new Tezzeret, etc.
Several PWs could probably make a Loyalty-heavy focus work.  Might not be ideal, but it is plausible.

DumasAG

Enygma6 said:

Tilwin90 said:

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Reliquary Tower here... Looking forward to people jumping through insane hoops to try and "make it work" 

Angrath, Ob, G/W Huatli, Kiora, Saheeli, Jaya, Karn, the new Tezzeret, etc.
Several PWs could probably make a Loyalty-heavy focus work.  Might not be ideal, but it is plausible.

I saw someone mention this on the facebook page, but there's more than a couple cards now that prevent mana from being drained. If you run these in combination with a loyalty-hungry PW (and gilded lotus, for that extra loyalty jazz), maybe you're cooking?

Stormcrow

wereotter said:

BUT here's the thing, most people are saying run Sai with Thopter Spy Network, which is a logical pairing. If when you're doing this, you don't consistently hit the activated gems, you're actually handicapping yourself. The reason here is Thopter Spy Network has the text "Whenever a token you control deals damage to your opponent, draw 1 card"

Yeah, when I used Thopter Spy Network in my earlier post it was just an example to illustrate how the mechanics work. I'd be more inclined to run him with Hangarback Walker myself - Hangarback doesn't have card draw and significantly benefits from getting half its mana right off the bat.

FindingHeart8 said:

However the card may not work as you think it should, if he functions as it reads.

"Casting" in paper mtg only triggers when it is cast from your hand...<snip>

Right, the question of "casting" is irrelevant: the reinforcements he's getting from TSN, or Saheeli, or wherever else, have nothing to do with his printed ability, they're because he has "Leader" and that's how "Leader" works: if you would get a token of that type, you get a reinforcement of the Leader instead* of the token. There are, as it turns out, no cards with the "artifact" subtype that *also* create Thopter Tokens, so he's really very simple: cast an artifact (per definition of "cast", as you note), get a reinforcement of him and also get the artifact you cast. Create a thopter token, by any means whatsoever, and you'll get a reinforcement of him, instead of the thopter token.

*this is a minor, nitpicky point: if you create a stack of tokens, then cast a leader of that type of token, those tokens get instantly converted into reinforcements of the leader. However, if you've already got the leader in play, the tokens don't come into play and then get converted to the leader reinforcements, they come into play as leader reinforcements. This is noticeable if you run Verdant Force with Slimefoot: once you have them both in play, Verdant Force will create a Slimefoot reinforcement every turn, but it will not give itself +1/+1 because it's not producing Saprolings any more.