[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Ulalek, Fused Atrocity

[Treamayne]

I apologize if it was unclear, but I'm like the Zedruu player. I've spent thousands of words across multiple websites gushing over the card, so I decided to betray expectations this morning and call myself dumb.

I wasn't sure what to make of @Treamayne's response to your post, but perhaps if he'd have taken a glance at your sig...

I believe the intention was to "play along" with tstorm's obviously facetious comment. At least, that's what I got out of it.

^This^
It was a case of "Merry Christmas, I see your snark, and raise you a snark..."

Suffice to say, I have often been told I am bad at humor.

[Hermes_]

Zedruu is bad, only idiots play that card.

That explains why it was my first tri color deck.

[3drinks]

Saturday, December 26th, 2020; howling mine|7ed

I can't believe this suddenly became a $5 card despite a hundred prints. Crazy covidconomy........

[Mookie]

Howling Mine is pretty bad in a vacuum - it's symmetric, but you're both the person that spends a card on it and the last person to benefit. As a result, it's arguably card disadvantage with no support. That said, there are a lot of ways to turn off the symmetry - Narset, Parter of Veils and Hullbreacher can shut down extra card draw for opponents, you could run Nekusar, the Mindrazer to punish opponents for the extra card draw, or you could run Clock of Omens or Urza, Lord High Artificer to tap it down so only you get the trigger. If you have any way to make it asymmetric, you get a personal draw engine for an extremely efficient price - two mana for this effect is a bargain.

If you're not planning to be a grinch and keep the extra cards all to yourself, it can also be worth consideration in group hug decks. Still not super exciting - as mentioned, it's generally card disadvantage - but it can make some friends occasionally. A somewhat more practical usage is in a low-curve deck with limited access to card draw. If everyone is drawing a bunch of extra cards but you're the only player that can cast all those cards, it will look better from a tempo perspective. That said, enough cheap card draw engines exist at this point that I don't think you would want to use Howling Mine.

Anyway, there are a lot of alternatives if you're looking for them - Font of Mythos, Dictate of Kruphix, Temple Bell, Fevered Visions.... None of them have Howling Mine's 'turns off when tapped' clause, which makes them a bit harder to abuse, but they also tend to be a bit more asymmetric in a vacuum.

[3drinks]

Well, I guess @Mookie touched on all points. Ha. That's a wrap folks, go home we're done. 😂😂

[MeowZeDung]

Zedruu on Christmas and Howling Mine the day after... has @tstorm823 hacked @3drinks account? What's tommorow's card, Knowledge Pool? Temporal Cascade?

[3drinks]

Zedruu on Christmas and Howling Mine the day after... has @tstorm823 hacked @3drinks account? What's tommorow's card, Knowledge Pool? Temporal Cascade?

Tbf, Zedruu and the The Tiger were very much plants in the spirit of the holiday. Howling Mine however, came up naturally this morning after a few rerolls of basic lands and tokens. I had expected Mine to come with more spirited discussion but I guess Mookie did hit on all the points.

[tstorm823]

Zedruu on Christmas and Howling Mine the day after... has @tstorm823 hacked @3drinks account? What's tommorow's card, Knowledge Pool? Temporal Cascade?

Mirror of Fate, duh.

Anyway, the idea that this is negative card advantage is a wrong idea born from too much loyalty to heuristics. Like, card advantage isnt just tallying up who has more cards, and it isnt the only resource axis to beat people on.

Like the competitive deck that classically uses Howling Mine is Turbo Fog, which fogs, which invalidates combat damage, which is a completely different form of card advantage than card draw, using one card to invalidate many.

With a howling mine going, it's not simply drawing more cards. The whole games resource balance changes, and different decks benefit more or less. Some decks are going to draw a bunch of extra weight they dont have mana for. Some decks are going to draw draw spells that they dont care to cast. Some decks fill their hand with redundancies that dont really help in multiples. Synergy based decks benefit because extra draws are less additive and more multiplicative. Decks with more lands get psuedo flooded and cant use all the extra draw.

It's not so hard to be the deck that over benefits from howling mine, and the least beneficiaries tend to be the simic goodstuff decks everyone loves, so there is that.

[3drinks]

@tstorm823 would you say that Korvold benefits then from the Mine? What if said Korvold was limiting itself to white border cards?

[materpillar]

I miss the time my home metagame was a bunch of people jamming mono-red decks full of Howling Mine variants because that was the only draw available to the color.

The deck still has plenty of homes but you can't just yolo play it like you used to be able to. Leaner more degenerate decks will take much stronger advantage of it than more durdly battlecruiser decks so you can accidentally kingmaker the table. It does help speed the game along though.

[tstorm823]

@tstorm823 would you say that Korvold benefits then from the Mine? What if said Korvold was limiting itself to white border cards?

That will depend on the build, and I dont think mines match your play style well. You definitely build with a mind for individual card quality, so I imagine you have the most success when people are on fewer cards available and it's a contest of efficiency.

Group hug elements are like the inverse of stax and prison elements. They're conceptually similar strategies, you break the normal resource rules and people's game plans become suboptimal. To be good with Howling Mines, you need to play a gameplan that is itself suboptimal without them.

[3drinks]

Sunday, December 27th, 2020; First Response



Seems solid in a monarch deck to provide a body to get it back. Four bodies/turn cycle for four is a pretty generous rate.

....maybe our administration team shouldook at why First Response displays Doomed Traveler......

[Mookie]

First!

....anyway, I'll reference this article about how WotC expected First Response to be a big player in Standard alongside painlands. It's an interesting read.

As for EDH... if you can get triggers consistently, this seems like a strong token producer. However, if you're only getting one per turn cycle, this looks way worse - four mana makes this twice as expensive as Bitterblossom, and I'd want to have at least twice as much payoff from it. Mono-white doesn't have that many enablers, but I could see this being played in a Darien, King of Kjeldor deck alongside City of Brass and Grand Coliseum. Also works with stuff like Righteous Aura.

That said, I suspect this functions best in an Orzhov deck, since there are many more ways in Black to lose life than in White. I've considered it for Teysa - this seems fun alongside Dark Prophecy in particular - but I don't have enough ways to pay life consistently. Hmmmm..... I don't think I would want to run Mana Confluence just to enable it, but could be an interesting build-around. It does face competition from a bunch of other, lower-variance token producers though.

Also:

Well, I guess @Mookie touched on all points. Ha. That's a wrap folks, go home we're done.

I had expected Mine to come with more spirited discussion but I guess Mookie did hit on all the points.

In light of this, I've intentionally left at least two gaping holes in this analysis for others to point out, to generate more discussion.

[MeowZeDung]

4 tokens per turn cycle for 3W is not a terrible deal, especially if it makes it around the board more than once and you can reliably trigger it. I would not want to rely on opponents/temporary allies for the damage though.

I think a good home for it would be in some sort of WB lifegain/value tokens build like Teysa Karlov perhaps. Pairing it with black just gives you a lot more consistency. You could trigger the response with something like Erebos, God of the Dead or Doom Whisperer, get some value off of Vilis, Broker of Blood, then eat the tokens and get the sweet Teysa value with something like Smothering Abomination (actually, not sure if the wording around "whenever you sacrifice" works with new Teysa come to think of it...), Pitiless Plunderer, or Zulaport Cutthroat.

If you aren't reliably pinging yourself and/or gaining the life back, I don't see it being worth inclusion in a deck as a four drop. I suppose it could live in a multicolor token swarm deck running multiple painlands, Mana Confluence, Ancient Tomb, etc. that already wants to be activating on-board mana sinks or playing instants. Akim, the Soaring Wind, Aryel, Knight of Windgrace, or Atla Palani, Nest Tender maybe? Combos (...sort of?) with Ephara, God of the Polis. I feel like Ghave, Guru of Spores and Breya, Etherium Shaper are too fast and combo-centered to care much about this card.

I suppose I am curious what you all think the ideal number of self-ping sources would be for this to be worth it. A token swarm take on Kykar, Wind's Fury like mine would certainly like the effect if it resulted in 4W for 8+ tokens consistently, but that's a lot of work for some 1/1 ground creatures. I run some fetches, plus Sunbaked Canyon and Fiery Islet and three talismans, and could reasonably slot some painlands back into the deck if I wanted to. There's also some good incidental lifegain effects in my maybeboard that I wouldn't mind including. Even with all of that work though, my hunch is that it would be too slow and incremental in a deck that likes to be very explosive.

EDIT: I should've read @Mookie's post first, but instead ended up just restating his points about pairing with black and including it in a Teysa deck. Party foul on my part.

[The_Hittite]

It becomes a pretty efficient draw engine with Erebos, Bleak-Hearted, Razaketh, the Foulblooded or Yawgmoth, Thran Physician. Now if only you could use it with any of those in the command zone.

[BeneTleilax]

Good in Liessa.

[3drinks]

@MeowZeDung abomination does indeed work with Teysa. All Teysa checks to see is abilities triggering upon death, and sacrifice is a death. The interaction is just the same as Teysa doubling grave pact triggers.

[pokken]

Uhh...I feel like I may need to play this in ephara.

[Wallycaine]

@MeowZeDung abomination does indeed work with Teysa. All Teysa checks to see is abilities triggering upon death, and sacrifice is a death. The interaction is just the same as Teysa doubling grave pact triggers.

This is incorrect. Smothering abomination cares about the act of sacrifice, not whether or not the creature dies. This is an important distinction when something like Rest in Peace is out, preventing creatures from "dying" but not from being sacrificed. Since Teysa is looking for things that trigger off *dying* specifically, she will not double Smothering Abomination triggers.

[MeowZeDung]

Uhh...I feel like I may need to play this in ephara.

Interesting. I thought it would be a bit too clunky for your build. I did think of Ephara when I saw it though!

@MeowZeDung abomination does indeed work with Teysa. All Teysa checks to see is abilities triggering upon death, and sacrifice is a death. The interaction is just the same as Teysa doubling grave pact triggers.

This is incorrect. Smothering abomination cares about the act of sacrifice, not whether or not the creature dies. This is an important distinction when something like Rest in Peace is out, preventing creatures from "dying" but not from being sacrificed. Since Teysa is looking for things that trigger off *dying* specifically, she will not double Smothering Abomination triggers.

This is what I thought originally. Bummer.

[pokken]

Interesting. I thought it would be a bit too clunky for your build. I did think of Ephara when I saw it though!

Sadly I think it is, but it's damn close. I play 8 fetchlands and it also turns getting chip-damaged into drawing cards. If it cost 3 so I could Sun Titan it i'd be giving it some serious consideration.

As it is, it's amazing in the lifegain ephara build. I keep wanting to build that as a more friendly version of Ephara with stuff like Resplendent Angel and Angelic Accord and what not.

[3drinks]

@MeowZeDung abomination does indeed work with Teysa. All Teysa checks to see is abilities triggering upon death, and sacrifice is a death. The interaction is just the same as Teysa doubling grave pact triggers.

This is incorrect. Smothering abomination cares about the act of sacrifice, not whether or not the creature dies. This is an important distinction when something like Rest in Peace is out, preventing creatures from "dying" but not from being sacrificed. Since Teysa is looking for things that trigger off *dying* specifically, she will not double Smothering Abomination triggers.

Source?

You're using a third ingredient to attempt to flex by creating a corner case for a "well, actually" argument. Stop that. No one is including RIP/Leyline, the question was in whole, an interaction between two cards. Full stop. That means nothing else relevant affecting the interaction, which in that case, yes, these two cards do in fact work together.

You don't get to change the scenario just to tell someone on the internet that they're wrong, so let's keep things focused on the original question poised, thanks.

[Wallycaine]

@MeowZeDung abomination does indeed work with Teysa. All Teysa checks to see is abilities triggering upon death, and sacrifice is a death. The interaction is just the same as Teysa doubling grave pact triggers.

This is incorrect. Smothering abomination cares about the act of sacrifice, not whether or not the creature dies. This is an important distinction when something like Rest in Peace is out, preventing creatures from "dying" but not from being sacrificed. Since Teysa is looking for things that trigger off *dying* specifically, she will not double Smothering Abomination triggers.

Source?

You're using a third ingredient to attempt to flex by creating a corner case for a "well, actually" argument. Stop that. No one is including RIP/Leyline, the question was in whole, an interaction between two cards. Full stop. That means nothing else relevant affecting the interaction, which in that case, yes, these two cards do in fact work together.

You don't get to change the scenario just to tell someone on the internet that they're wrong, so let's keep things focused on the original question poised, thanks.

First result for a google search of "Smothering Abomination Teysa".

Bringing up Rest in Peace was not a "well, actually", but an attempt to illustrate how the two effects are different in order to explain the rules interaction. If the two abilities were the same, then Rest in Peace would affect both abilities the same. Since they aren't the same, and have different interactions with Rest in Peace, it's worth digging further, and once you do, you find that "when you sacrifice" does not fulfill the "if a creature dying would trigger an ability" part of the card.

[3drinks]

Monday, December 28th, 2020; The Forces

I like em, the longer they stick the more crazy value they derive. I think they're roughly comparable to Titans with the upticked speed of accrual.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

The only one I'd ever play would be magmatic. The black is outdone by so many other draw options, the white is likewise exceeded by more efficient lifegain, the green is 3 mana more than Tendershoot Dryad and the blue is weird and pointless.

Magmatic Force is awesome though. UPKEEP, BOLT as they say.