Greg not playing cards

Pantagruel

This is an old topic that's been brought up before, generally in the context of TOTP and Legacy 1 turn combo decks.

Sometimes Greg doesn't play any cards out of his hand, choosing instead to give you an easy ride. It's possible, of course, that he's drawn 6 cards which he's unable to cast, even though you both have creatures in play and there are supports on the board, but it's generally incredibly unlikely. More likely is that Greg is playing some kind of obscene combo deck which would wipe the floor with you, and Oktagon has told Greg to pretend he can't play any cards because killing you like that would annoy you.

Today, however, I've had this happen once in the Awakened Inferno event, and once in DoM. Twice in a day, in uncompetitive, Standard events, is very rare!

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed an increase in instances of this happening? Or is it just RNGesus giving me his blessing?

jtwood

I've noticed it a bit and have started coming to the conclusion that it's just stuff that can't be cast. Assure, for example, requires a creature to target. If Greg draws 3 of those, they're going nowhere.

Stormcrow

Yeah, I tend to find that these cards are either buffs for their own creatures when they don't have any creatures out, or removal for stuff that I don't have out. I think the increases in seeing it happen are mostly due to a shifting standard environment - it's an unprecedentedly Aura-heavy environment, and there's also more finicky type-specific support removal, both of which make it easier for Greg to end up with a hand of dead cards (or the player for that matter, but we're supposed to be smart enough to exile the garbage and keep drawing). Also there's a lot of buggy cards that have two effects that counter-intuitively can't be cast if either of the effects is a no go (see like a million threads over in the Bugs forum) and I imagine lots of players still don't realize they're bugged.

Also, if you've been running the Karn Vanguard, he does appear to be fixed so he's properly preventing artifacts from getting cast.

thesmallesthuman

Along with the obvious removal and buff cards, there's at least a few widely used utility cards that rely on specific circumstances (namely, controlling a creature or the ability to flip a card in hand) that are often completely useless in poor Greg’s hands:

Quasiduplicate
Thrash/Threat
Connive/Concoct
Gravitic Punch
Response/Resurgence

Like, I personally stuff concoct into every deck I can which is part of why anyone running to my decks in the wild will generally always have a grand old time

madwren

jtwood said:

I've noticed it a bit and have started coming to the conclusion that it's just stuff that can't be cast. Assure, for example, requires a creature to target. If Greg draws 3 of those, they're going nowhere.

Not always. We've run into Greg playing the decks of coalitionmates, where we know that there aren't any cards with those type of dependencies. Sometimes, he just won't cast things.