Support destruction

Janosik

The printing of Demolition Field has got me thinking about supports and support destruction.

Is Demolition Field too good? That's a discussion for another time. Suffice to say that even if Demolition Field were nerfed, it'd probably still end up being far, far more powerful than the original support destruction spell from Origins, Demolish. Which is not to say there's no point playing Demolish any more (Demolish is very cheap at 3 mana, and you don't have to wait a turn for it to kill something), but in terms of raw power, Demolition Field > Demolish.

So if Webcore thinks that the ceiling for the power level of support destruction effects is so high: can we please have less cards that are less powerful than Demolish in the future?

A lot of support destruction cards are considerably less powerful than Demolish. Check out Gearbane Orangutan, or Explosive Derailment, or Over the Edge, or Dreadmaw's Ire, or Pick your Poison from recent sets. There's 2 reasons they aren't as good: they are much more expensive to cast, but they also target only a small subset of supports. Maybe they only affect enchantments, or artifacts, or Vanguards, or lands. Some supports don't even have a subtype, like Nissa's Pilgrimage, Connecting the Dots or Villainous Wealth (you could say that failing to give these cards a subtype is an oversight, but it's an oversight all the different devs have been made aware of over the years: designing a new set is a very complicated task and it's easy to overlook things like this, and chances are they will be overlooked in future sets, too, and issues like this which are not terminal bugs might remain unfixed for months, or years).

If you play a card that only kills Greg's artifacts, and Greg isn't playing with artifacts, then you've got a dead card in your deck, or at the very least a weak vanilla creature. Remember, we can't sideboard in PvP the way that players sideboard in paper MTG, because we only play one game against each opponent.

So we ignore these cards and instead play with cards which affect as many different subtypes, and indeed types, as possible. We play with Void Rend, or Molten Collapse, or Chalk Outline, or Rakdos, Patron of Chaos. I like the card Demolish but I honestly don't think it's widely played; I don't think people think it's powerful enough. You'll notice all the cards I listed there also kill creatures! Surely cards than only kill supports can afford to be at least a little more powerful than they currently are. Even more powerful cards like Fade From History go unplayed because Greg just might be not playing with the card types specified.

So in the future can we please have less cards like Ravenous Sailback, and Shatter the Source, or Yavimaya Steelcrusher, and a few more cards that are more powerful than Demolish, if not necessarily as powerful as Demolition Field? Release the Gremlins was a popular card in Standard and we haven't seen anything like that in ages.

Mainloop25

Would love to see some more cards like Release the Gremlins, Consulate Crackdown, etc. even if I would hate them played on me. The power of those cards is worth the possibility of my opponent not running enough supports sometimes.

madwren

Agreed. The problem with 10-card decks is that there isn't room for cards with an overly narrow scope. Some seem designed to be silver bullets, but those don't function the same way in PQ as they do in paper. Something like Test of Talents only succeeds because it hits a wide array of decks.

Demolition Field's held somewhat in check by the mana clause not triggering unless there is a support to destroy (which means it is, in fact, occasionally useless), but its versatility makes it 1000x better than if it were the same card but only destroyed artifacts or enchantments (or both).

Janosik

@Janosik said:
The printing of Demolition Field has got me thinking about supports and support destruction.

Is Demolition Field too good? That's a discussion for another time.

Incidentally, the answer to this question is 'yes'. Good luck recovering from a turn 1 where Greg drops a Ghalta, a Tortoise, and a Demolishing Field. And that's not above average for a turn where Ghalta is played.