Djeru, With Eyes Open & The Locust God Bundles (1/18/18)

Djeru is appropriately harder to break, in my opinion.

If you think about it, there are ways to mitigate the vigilance downside.  It's not overly hard, just not a single step to use him effectively.  And with a blanket -10 damage reduction I think that's fair.

I don't have him yet, but I do see how I could make him work if I wanted to.

We already have Gideon's Intervention, which would do better than than you propose in support form.

You can grant flying to enemy creatures or tag them with skeleton key.  Additionally, a "defender" subtype will not make him a blocker as vigilance has lower priority.  One suggestion would be Oketra with Saving Grace.

There's a bunch of creative solutions to make him work.

I use Djeru, and have to say he's better than he appears. First, he doesn't fly, so any flier coming at you gets its damage reduced by 10, really handy if you're playing off against Olivia since she'll only be able to do you 1 damage. Second, even if he does block and dies, his damage reduction applies on all other creatures attacking you that turn, effectively making him about the same as Gideon's Intervention but only for you. He can potentially block you from taking any damage at all for a turn.

Emrakul is more devastating in my opinion. It net's you or AI another turn. And a turn with BfB, HUF or deploy is more than enough...
Or combine it with spot removal against GR... 

I missed getting her since I was a brand new player when she was on offer for sale, and I didn't have an idea of both her power level or the scarcity of mythic rare cards at the time, so for me, it's been over a year of playing against her without having her. I can see not wanting to have her even more wide spread than she is, but lacking her also is a bit of a handicap when it comes to trying to play legacy events to the point that now I just refuse to do it.

I really empathize where you're coming from, I too was (moderately) new then, enough to underestimated how good she was when she was offered for sale and past up on that whopper of an opportunity.

It's a tough call, the trade-off being that now you own the card, but so does many more of the opponents you'll wind up facing.

My take was it's better that opportunity not come around again, because chances are while she would be a staple in all of my black/red decks and even the playing field there, it would put the rest of my decks of other colors at a disadvantage.  Black has some of the easiest removal in legacy (2nd to blue bounce, which is less effective since Olivia has haste).

In the end, I would likely have more fun in legacy events overall if I didn't have to face Olivia more frequently then not being able to abuse her myself.  But that's just my 2 cents in the matter.

Matthew said:

Unfortunately, the only way I would buy either of these cards is if they had been completely reworked already so that they didn't suck :-/

Djeru's ability is a complete moot point because as a blocker, he's liable to get run over as soon as you cast him. I think this card would be better if they had designed it like they did Hixus. In paper, Hixus is a creature, but they converted him into a support for PQ. This card is a good example of how they could follow that pattern.

And the mana cost for Locust God is about 40% too high, rendering him pretty pointless. There are other cards that can fill the "overpowered mythic fatty" role much more efficiently than he can.

I bought Locust God the first time and it's an amazing card. I bought Djeru this time and I'm having a lot of fun with it. 

Just for reference, Locust God is in 6 of my decks -- Omni is in one -- the former is much more fun -- and considering with one decent loop you can easily get his tokens over 20 (and they have haste) I don't think the casting cost -- that's almost 30 strength in one turn -- but wait, do that with J2's ult out...

Suck is last word I would use. 

bken1234 said:

I bought Locust God the first time and it's an amazing card. I bought Djeru this time and I'm having a lot of fun with it. 

Just for reference, Locust God is in 6 of my decks -- Omni is in one -- the former is much more fun -- and considering with one decent loop you can easily get his tokens over 20 (and they have haste) I don't think the casting cost -- that's almost 30 strength in one turn -- but wait, do that with J2's ult out...

Suck is last word I would use. 

I guess I should clarify my definition of cards that "suck". Essentially, that can be summed up as any cards I wouldn't consider using in competitive events.

Regarding The Locust God, there are two other cards in particular that are much better at driving loops: Baral, and Rashmi. Their abilities allow a deck to go from theoretically to literally infinite. They also don't have to rely on other broken cards to do so (though I can't deny that cards like Rishkar's Expertise certainly do help in that regard). To further put that into perspective, let's take your proposed number of 20 tokens from the God. In the time it takes me to draw 20 cards (the requisite number to create an insect stack that large) while using Baral (or to fetch them with Rashmi), I can easily have 4 or 5 copies each of Gaea's Revenge and Samut hit the board, which deals far more than the 20 damage coming from the insect tokens. For the sake of accuracy, I tested this out prior to making this comment, so rest assured that I did not just pull those numbers out of my rear.

Now, I do love me some J2 (I don't think he gets nearly enough love), but typically I will have won the match already by the time I reach the 21 loyalty points required for his ultimate. If you're waiting around that long just to combo his ultimate with the draw loops you're talking about with The Locust God, then really you're just prolonging the match for the fun of it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But I learned a long time ago that if you want top-tier placement, you need to minimize the match length as much as possible.

As for why you choose to include Locust God over Omniscience, that baffles me, unless it's because you simply enjoy a match that's a challenge. I get that. I just choose to play those kind of matches in Training Grounds when I'm bored, or when I'm spitballing for new deck ideas. But if I had Omni in my collection, you better believe I'd be abusing the pucky out of it pretty much anywhere other than Training Grounds because I like to win, and Omni is absolutely a "win button" in the hands of an actual human.

That brings us to Djeru. As I admitted above, I hadn't thought of pairing him with Saving Grace; that does bear consideration. But even in that one case, I still don't think he's worth getting because giving him Defender with that card puts him squarely in the way of any creature that might be coming at me. At that point, you've put a countdown on his existence.

I think he would be much better if he had Regenerate and/or Hexproof. Currently though, there are only two ways to give Regenerate (Consecrated by Blood, and G1's abilities), and five very expensive ways to grant Hexproof (Sphinx of the Final Word, Sigarda, Heron's Grace, Heroic Intervention, Lumbering Falls, and the Masterpiece Trifecta of Helmet, Greaves, and Gauntlet). Invulnerability is another way that you could make him more resilient, but given the overabundance of creature removal in most decks, that's really a moot point. And on the topic of creature removal, mythic creatures tend to be the ones Greg targets first, so Djeru's also got a target on his head in addition to being a blocker.

All that being said, this has made me see how they could potentially be fun cards to play with. But I would hesitate to call them "amazing". I feel like they're more suited to dinking around in TG just to see what you can slap together. If I were to even consider getting these two offers, it would only be because of the additional currency that's bundled in with them.

Considering you an pair Locust God off with a lot of amazing draw and hand cycling spells, it's really not hard at all to draw 20 cards.

James13 said:

bken1234 said:

@Matthew Baral and Rashmi are great. They’re even better with Locust God. 

I use him in Blue HoR and in 2 levels of RotGP. 

I also have an insane legacy deck for TotP. 

Just thibk you shouldn’t judge a card so harshly if you’ve never played it. 

Rashmi is fetch, not draw.  It can be an important distinction depending on how you've built the deck.

Locust God works with fetch and draw. 

James13 said:

How odd.  Usually draw triggers don't work with fetch.  Not owning that card I didn't realize it used different logic.

If I'm not mistaken, Sage of Ancient Lore works similarly.