Those are essentially effects that already existed before, except weaker. Why would anyone use a demonic consultation when he has another card doing the same without exiling half his deck?
Pyroclasm especially is very good now, because infestation decks are far more efficient now and direct damage decks have been strongly nerfed. But at the time ? It wasn't a very impressive card.
[OSSR]Magic: the Gathering: Ice Age
Moderator: Moderators
What the hell are you smoking that you think Necropotance is a nerfed version of anything?GâtFromKI wrote:Those are essentially effects that already existed before, except weaker. Why would anyone use a demonic consultation when he has another card doing the same without exiling half his deck?
Pyroclasm especially is very good now, because infestation decks are far more efficient now and direct damage decks have been strongly nerfed. But at the time ? It wasn't a very impressive card.
-
RadiantPhoenix
- Prince
- Posts: 2668
- Joined: Sun Apr 11, 2010 10:33 pm
- Location: Trudging up the Hill
-
Whipstitch
- Prince
- Posts: 3660
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:23 pm
Pyroclasm eventually had its day in the sun but it's also true that it couldn't quite fit into most decks at first since both Sligh and U/R control preferred spells with finer targeting. That's because Sligh couldn't really afford the tempo loss that came with nuking their own dudes while control decks were usually resilient enough to get away with using Earthquake and a handful of fliers instead. Then, just when some of Pyroclasm's competition was otherwise thinning out Cursed Scroll came along and promptly skull fucked the meta by giving everyone and their uncle enough cheap renewable faux burn to get by without it.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Nov 13, 2015 10:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.
bears fall, everyone dies
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors
Blue
Yeah, I dunno either.
The thing that differentiated Ice Age from all previous expansions is that in addition to adding new cards to expand on or add additional tracks to a color's arsenal, it also had to provide cards to cover the basic tricks you'd expect to see in a core set. So you're going to see a lot of a color's regular functions, and then you're going to see some Ice Age specific mechanics, and those sometimes cross over and those sometimes don't. It's not quite as well integrated as you might think, though of course this was the first time they were getting into it. So you have stuff that is very clearly supposed to be Ice Age's equivalent to a 4th edition card, and it might be a little better or worse, but it's supposed to occupy the same basic function in a deck.
This is somewhat ironically the basic mentality that players would go on to adopt in approaching subsequent sets: keep the same strategy, but adopt it to the new legal cards. So for example:
The Polar Kraken is Ice Age's equivalent for 4th edition's Leviathan. They're not identical by any means, but they occupy the same basic card space: the Big Blue critter. Big Blue was a really odd concept with deep roots in Magic, but it occupies relatively little playspace. The heart of Big Blue thinking is the classical Magic idea that you summoned creatures and attacked your opponent with them, whales were the biggest critter, and the bigger a critter was the more it should cost. That's really it, it's pre-Control deck thinking. It goes straight back to when Blue and Red had some direct counter cards like Water Elemental and Air Elemental to Fire elemental and Earth Elemental.
...and the thing is, even by Ice Age Big Blue was a dying concept. You can see it in the other cards in this set. But huge blue critters with ridiculous costs still persisted.
We bitched about this last time, and for much the same reason.
Blue is the color which took the longest to find its footing. It's the color of “magic” but the game is literally called “Magic.” Blue could plausibly do anything, and at various times it did. Many of the most powerful cards ever printed have been Blue. There are more Blue cards on the Legacy restricted list than there are cards from all other colors combined (that's not even a joke). But... mostly Blue cards just sort of durdled around being dumb.
While you could say roughly speaking what a Red Deck was supposed to do or what a good Green card might look like, the designers didn't give a good description of what made a Blue card Blue for the first ten years or so of the game. What was there instead was a weirdly scattershot pile of dissonant themes, with power levels all over the map. Of course, this being a collectible card game with hundreds of cards of every color, that was a pretty good place to be. At least, in constructed deck. This “pile of weird cards, some of which were very powerful and a lot of which were bullshit flavored bullshit” was really hard on sealed deck players who wanted to play Blue. Chances are in any kind of limited format that you were not going to be able to make a Blue deck that wasn't a pile of ass. But if had access to all the cards, you could do ridiculously powerful things.
One of the things the original designers were pretty sure the color of wizardry should do in a card game about wizards dueling was to fuck around with the cards themselves. Sometimes that meant quite literally line editing text on the cards, but mostly it meant drawing and/or looking at cards from the deck. But the designers weren't super creative about that. Most of those effects were just shitty versions of durdle spells that came with a card replacement effect. Of the 56 Blue cards in Ice Age, eight of them are Cantrips.
Mostly Cantrips you would give your left nut to not have to use.
With so many cards dedicated to “fucking around” there isn't a lot of room for much of anything that might count as meat or potatoes. There is a grand total of one common creature that has a Power greater than 1, and it has cumulative upkeep.
Also it's terribad and drawn by the justly maligned Justin Hampton.
So while almost every Legacy deck has a copy of Brainstorm in it, and thus Blue has made more of a splash on the future than most other colors, that was an aberration. You couldn't make a blue deck out of this shit, and mostly people didn't try. Blue existed to be a splash in other decks.
It's a lot like Fallen Empires in that way, in that while there are a lot of ideas evident in Blue for Ice Age, it's not any sort of consistent or complementary sort of mechanic that has an endgame. For example, you have cards like this guy:
This isn't a bad ability - he's a highly specialized Llanowar Elf, but if you're running a deck where artifacts are critical, as a mana source he has some potential. The problem comes when you look at the artifacts available in Ice Age, and most of those with an activation cost are either 1 or 3+. And this is back in the day when mana burn was still a thing. So if you play this guy, you're generally looking at only getting a discount on using a Rod of Ruin or Basalt Monolith or something, or maybe putting a counter on a Mana Battery.
The one Ice Age mechanic Blue went in for in a big way was cumulative upkeep - there are 14 Blue cards with CU in the Ice Age set. By comparison, Black had two. Most of them were absolute rubbish. The thing about cumulative upkeep isn't just that it fucks your mana curve, but by it's very definition unless you have an infinite-mana hack going, they're cards that are only going to be around for two or three turns before you can't afford to keep them around, even if you cripple yourself just to keep one card in play. There are just very limited contexts in which you're going to want to put yourself on a 3-4 turn limit to win the game. Case in point:
This might be a decent sideboard card to counter a weenie rush...provided you can get it out fast enough and provided you can keep it going long enough to win the game within 3-4 turns. Those are two very big Ifs. I've only seen somebody use this card once, and that was a weird Green Blue combo deck where the finishing move was Channel/Hurricane.
I don't really understand the rationale behind this CU nonsense, because even if the CU wasn't a cardkiller, the cards were generally far too expensive for their cost even if it was regular upkeep. Granted, Breath of Dreams is an okay sideboard against Green...
...but the critters are terrible.
Maybe they thought Blue needed something to do with all of its mana.
One of the strangest things about this era is the fact that someone on the design team thought we should be playing mono-Blue ramp. This was completely non-viable, because Blue had nothing good to ramp to. It didn't matter if you could get 15 mana in a pile on turn 5, because honestly what were you gonna do with all that mana? The previously mentioned Polar Kraken is bad, and it would be bad if it cost five mana. Ramping to double digits to bring that crap into play is just puzzling. Your opponent chump blocks it for a couple turns and then it eats all your lands and goes away. There are reanimator decks that don't pay for their creatures at all, and they don't use Polar Kraken. Nevertheless, the ramp cards that Ice Age brought in for Blue were pretty intense:
Yeah, that bad boy lets you save almost 100% of your mana from one turn to the next and subsequently lets you save some of your mana onto your opponent's turn to threaten counterspells and then save it at 1:3 if you end up not using it. For some reason this gets no respect, and I'm unaware of there having ever been an Iceberg ramp deck. Mostly because as previously noted: Blue had nothing good to save up a shit tonne of colorless mana to spend on when this card was being opened in packs.
Not as powerful as this, but Iceberg is single color and gets you to 8 mana a turn earlier. And Kruphix is a five dollar card while you can get a play set of Icebergs for a dollar.
But Iceberg really stands out. Most cards in Ice Age have been hit with the nerf stick until they are unrecognizable. There is a ridiculous amount of text on these things, and while much of it is flavor text and stories about Kjeldorians, a lot of it is weird caveats to prevent cards from being “too good.” For whatever low ass balance point the designers were going for.
Holy shit that's a lot of mana! Wait... only spendable for WHAT?!
That card has 47 words in very tiny type. And what it does is to double or even triple your mana production if and only if you spend the excess mana on cumulative upkeep cards. You could potentially see 15 mana on turn 5 just from this card and a snow island per turn. But you can't spend it on anything good. In fact, since this card is cumulative upkeep as well, it doesn't even really extend the life of your cumulative upkeep cards very much. Your available mana doubles but you have twice as many things to spend cumulative upkeep for. This is a card that must have been envisioned as being part of a whole cumulative upkeep thing, where you had lots of cumulative upkeep cards and it really mattered whether you could keep all the balls in the air for four turns or five. And you know what? No. Cumulative Upkeep was dumb, and at no point in the history of the world has it been important how many turns you could shovel mana into those shitty ass cards to keep them going.
But the designers don't seem to know this. They seemed to think Cumulative Upkeep was totally going to happen.
There are 15 cards in Ice Age Blue that fuck around with Cumulative Upkeep. And I think there's like one that isn't a pile of ass.
The key here is you don't even give a shit about the cumulative upkeep. You just pull creatures out of your graveyard as suicide bombers.
I will say this: the best Blue things in Ice Age are the very small spells. The set offered both hard counters in the form of a reprint of Counterspell and soft counters in the form of Deflection and Force Void. It even, for reasons I don't understand, includes a retitled Blue Elemental Blast called Hydroblast.
It also included what I like to call complementary cards; these aren't complementary in the sense of one card supporting another, but that the designers at Wizards of the Coast managed to split a single concept into two different cards, each of which fulfilled half the functionality.
It's a cheap way to make two cards out of what was one card, and to separate out the functions so that you can then create a series of cards with various mechanical shenanigans based on those cards. You see a lot of that kind of thinking in Ice Age, and in Blue in particular a lot of the cards only really make sense when you understand that they are thematically based on some 4th edition or "core" card, with an Ice Age nerf or twist. This goes a bit beyond the "fulfill the same function" thing I mentioned above with the Polar Kraken, to cards that are clearly intended to just be variations on existing cards.
Case in point. If you're used to Phantasmal Forces, Illusionary Forces is the Ice Age equivalent. Neither is a good card, but you can see how if you're paying 3U for a 4/1, paying the same amount for a 4/4 might look attractive...for a turn or three. Similarly, Zuran Spellcaster is just Prodigal Sorcerer under a different name - and that was one of the big attractions of Ice Age, being able to effectively double-up on certain cards or effects, which wasn't really possible with earlier expansions.
56 cards for one color is big for an expansion, but Ice Age was supposed to be an entire game. And with so many of the cards given over to esoteric bullshit and just plain terrible cards, there just wasn't enough meat to make playable decks. Sure, you could make ricockulously powerful decks that splashed Blue or used Blue as card engines to let their real color shine, but a “Blue Deck” just wasn't happening. In a sealed deck game, if you traded for Blue it was because you were a god damn idiot. But beyond that, a deck that was all Blue or even half Blue just wasn't going to pull its weight.
The Wind Spirit is a bad card. 5 mana for 3 power is a crummy deal. But it has two complementary forms of evasion and you aren't actually embarrassed to cast it. This is as good as creatures get for Blue in Ice Age.
Where Blue comes out OK is in denial. Back then it was considered acceptable to hand out spells that straight up took your opponent's creatures for four mana, which is pretty fucking intense.
These cards are intended to be weaker than Control Magic – and they are – but they are still ridiculously powerful.
Most of the Ice Age decks I knew with Blue were heavy in artifacts - Icy Manipulator is basically made for Blue Control - or as a flavor for a deck that used Blue cards from earlier sets. If you combine 4th edition and Ice Age, you have a lot of hard and soft counters available, and you can tap and untap damn near anything. It won't win you the game by itself, but it makes a good basis for a millstone deck. Blue/Black was very popular due to Necropotence, and the fact that Blue had all those little cantrips for added card draw.
The bottom line is that while the “Blue Deck” in Ice Age is unplayably bad, there are enough cards that are good enough that the “Decks With Blue In Them” were the best decks of the period. Of course, this was already true because crap like Time Walk and Ancestral Recall were street legal at the time, but even the watered down versions that WotC trotted out in Ice Age were still good enough to make for a very dominant side suit. That probably sounds like an oxymoron, but that's how it worked. No deck worth a shit relied on Blue to do the heavy lifting of actually winning the game, but Blue was so good at delivering card advantage that you were a damn fool to not include some Blue in whatever the fuck it was that you were doing.
I'd like to finish off this section by looking at what might be the weirdest Blue card in the set:
Reality Twist is the only CU card I can think of where you're probably not going to be able to meet the first turn's upkeep. It's just plain weird. It's like it was designed for those chess-problem-esque challenges in issues of InQuest, where you had a bunch of weird cards on the board and you were tasked to figure out how to accomplish such-and-such a thing before the end of the turn. It's one of those cards you wonder what the designers were high on, not because it's overpowered but because it's bonkers. Ironically, I think in certain formats it would be a really fun item to lay on the table, but I can't imagine anyone actually playing it.
Yeah, I dunno either.
AncientH:
The thing that differentiated Ice Age from all previous expansions is that in addition to adding new cards to expand on or add additional tracks to a color's arsenal, it also had to provide cards to cover the basic tricks you'd expect to see in a core set. So you're going to see a lot of a color's regular functions, and then you're going to see some Ice Age specific mechanics, and those sometimes cross over and those sometimes don't. It's not quite as well integrated as you might think, though of course this was the first time they were getting into it. So you have stuff that is very clearly supposed to be Ice Age's equivalent to a 4th edition card, and it might be a little better or worse, but it's supposed to occupy the same basic function in a deck.
This is somewhat ironically the basic mentality that players would go on to adopt in approaching subsequent sets: keep the same strategy, but adopt it to the new legal cards. So for example:
The Polar Kraken is Ice Age's equivalent for 4th edition's Leviathan. They're not identical by any means, but they occupy the same basic card space: the Big Blue critter. Big Blue was a really odd concept with deep roots in Magic, but it occupies relatively little playspace. The heart of Big Blue thinking is the classical Magic idea that you summoned creatures and attacked your opponent with them, whales were the biggest critter, and the bigger a critter was the more it should cost. That's really it, it's pre-Control deck thinking. It goes straight back to when Blue and Red had some direct counter cards like Water Elemental and Air Elemental to Fire elemental and Earth Elemental.
...and the thing is, even by Ice Age Big Blue was a dying concept. You can see it in the other cards in this set. But huge blue critters with ridiculous costs still persisted.
We bitched about this last time, and for much the same reason.
FrankT:
Blue is the color which took the longest to find its footing. It's the color of “magic” but the game is literally called “Magic.” Blue could plausibly do anything, and at various times it did. Many of the most powerful cards ever printed have been Blue. There are more Blue cards on the Legacy restricted list than there are cards from all other colors combined (that's not even a joke). But... mostly Blue cards just sort of durdled around being dumb.
While you could say roughly speaking what a Red Deck was supposed to do or what a good Green card might look like, the designers didn't give a good description of what made a Blue card Blue for the first ten years or so of the game. What was there instead was a weirdly scattershot pile of dissonant themes, with power levels all over the map. Of course, this being a collectible card game with hundreds of cards of every color, that was a pretty good place to be. At least, in constructed deck. This “pile of weird cards, some of which were very powerful and a lot of which were bullshit flavored bullshit” was really hard on sealed deck players who wanted to play Blue. Chances are in any kind of limited format that you were not going to be able to make a Blue deck that wasn't a pile of ass. But if had access to all the cards, you could do ridiculously powerful things.
One of the things the original designers were pretty sure the color of wizardry should do in a card game about wizards dueling was to fuck around with the cards themselves. Sometimes that meant quite literally line editing text on the cards, but mostly it meant drawing and/or looking at cards from the deck. But the designers weren't super creative about that. Most of those effects were just shitty versions of durdle spells that came with a card replacement effect. Of the 56 Blue cards in Ice Age, eight of them are Cantrips.
Mostly Cantrips you would give your left nut to not have to use.
With so many cards dedicated to “fucking around” there isn't a lot of room for much of anything that might count as meat or potatoes. There is a grand total of one common creature that has a Power greater than 1, and it has cumulative upkeep.
Also it's terribad and drawn by the justly maligned Justin Hampton.
So while almost every Legacy deck has a copy of Brainstorm in it, and thus Blue has made more of a splash on the future than most other colors, that was an aberration. You couldn't make a blue deck out of this shit, and mostly people didn't try. Blue existed to be a splash in other decks.
AncientH:
It's a lot like Fallen Empires in that way, in that while there are a lot of ideas evident in Blue for Ice Age, it's not any sort of consistent or complementary sort of mechanic that has an endgame. For example, you have cards like this guy:
This isn't a bad ability - he's a highly specialized Llanowar Elf, but if you're running a deck where artifacts are critical, as a mana source he has some potential. The problem comes when you look at the artifacts available in Ice Age, and most of those with an activation cost are either 1 or 3+. And this is back in the day when mana burn was still a thing. So if you play this guy, you're generally looking at only getting a discount on using a Rod of Ruin or Basalt Monolith or something, or maybe putting a counter on a Mana Battery.
The one Ice Age mechanic Blue went in for in a big way was cumulative upkeep - there are 14 Blue cards with CU in the Ice Age set. By comparison, Black had two. Most of them were absolute rubbish. The thing about cumulative upkeep isn't just that it fucks your mana curve, but by it's very definition unless you have an infinite-mana hack going, they're cards that are only going to be around for two or three turns before you can't afford to keep them around, even if you cripple yourself just to keep one card in play. There are just very limited contexts in which you're going to want to put yourself on a 3-4 turn limit to win the game. Case in point:
This might be a decent sideboard card to counter a weenie rush...provided you can get it out fast enough and provided you can keep it going long enough to win the game within 3-4 turns. Those are two very big Ifs. I've only seen somebody use this card once, and that was a weird Green Blue combo deck where the finishing move was Channel/Hurricane.
I don't really understand the rationale behind this CU nonsense, because even if the CU wasn't a cardkiller, the cards were generally far too expensive for their cost even if it was regular upkeep. Granted, Breath of Dreams is an okay sideboard against Green...
...but the critters are terrible.
Maybe they thought Blue needed something to do with all of its mana.
FrankT:
One of the strangest things about this era is the fact that someone on the design team thought we should be playing mono-Blue ramp. This was completely non-viable, because Blue had nothing good to ramp to. It didn't matter if you could get 15 mana in a pile on turn 5, because honestly what were you gonna do with all that mana? The previously mentioned Polar Kraken is bad, and it would be bad if it cost five mana. Ramping to double digits to bring that crap into play is just puzzling. Your opponent chump blocks it for a couple turns and then it eats all your lands and goes away. There are reanimator decks that don't pay for their creatures at all, and they don't use Polar Kraken. Nevertheless, the ramp cards that Ice Age brought in for Blue were pretty intense:
Yeah, that bad boy lets you save almost 100% of your mana from one turn to the next and subsequently lets you save some of your mana onto your opponent's turn to threaten counterspells and then save it at 1:3 if you end up not using it. For some reason this gets no respect, and I'm unaware of there having ever been an Iceberg ramp deck. Mostly because as previously noted: Blue had nothing good to save up a shit tonne of colorless mana to spend on when this card was being opened in packs.
Not as powerful as this, but Iceberg is single color and gets you to 8 mana a turn earlier. And Kruphix is a five dollar card while you can get a play set of Icebergs for a dollar.
But Iceberg really stands out. Most cards in Ice Age have been hit with the nerf stick until they are unrecognizable. There is a ridiculous amount of text on these things, and while much of it is flavor text and stories about Kjeldorians, a lot of it is weird caveats to prevent cards from being “too good.” For whatever low ass balance point the designers were going for.
Holy shit that's a lot of mana! Wait... only spendable for WHAT?!
That card has 47 words in very tiny type. And what it does is to double or even triple your mana production if and only if you spend the excess mana on cumulative upkeep cards. You could potentially see 15 mana on turn 5 just from this card and a snow island per turn. But you can't spend it on anything good. In fact, since this card is cumulative upkeep as well, it doesn't even really extend the life of your cumulative upkeep cards very much. Your available mana doubles but you have twice as many things to spend cumulative upkeep for. This is a card that must have been envisioned as being part of a whole cumulative upkeep thing, where you had lots of cumulative upkeep cards and it really mattered whether you could keep all the balls in the air for four turns or five. And you know what? No. Cumulative Upkeep was dumb, and at no point in the history of the world has it been important how many turns you could shovel mana into those shitty ass cards to keep them going.
But the designers don't seem to know this. They seemed to think Cumulative Upkeep was totally going to happen.
There are 15 cards in Ice Age Blue that fuck around with Cumulative Upkeep. And I think there's like one that isn't a pile of ass.
The key here is you don't even give a shit about the cumulative upkeep. You just pull creatures out of your graveyard as suicide bombers.
AncientH:
I will say this: the best Blue things in Ice Age are the very small spells. The set offered both hard counters in the form of a reprint of Counterspell and soft counters in the form of Deflection and Force Void. It even, for reasons I don't understand, includes a retitled Blue Elemental Blast called Hydroblast.
It also included what I like to call complementary cards; these aren't complementary in the sense of one card supporting another, but that the designers at Wizards of the Coast managed to split a single concept into two different cards, each of which fulfilled half the functionality.
It's a cheap way to make two cards out of what was one card, and to separate out the functions so that you can then create a series of cards with various mechanical shenanigans based on those cards. You see a lot of that kind of thinking in Ice Age, and in Blue in particular a lot of the cards only really make sense when you understand that they are thematically based on some 4th edition or "core" card, with an Ice Age nerf or twist. This goes a bit beyond the "fulfill the same function" thing I mentioned above with the Polar Kraken, to cards that are clearly intended to just be variations on existing cards.
Case in point. If you're used to Phantasmal Forces, Illusionary Forces is the Ice Age equivalent. Neither is a good card, but you can see how if you're paying 3U for a 4/1, paying the same amount for a 4/4 might look attractive...for a turn or three. Similarly, Zuran Spellcaster is just Prodigal Sorcerer under a different name - and that was one of the big attractions of Ice Age, being able to effectively double-up on certain cards or effects, which wasn't really possible with earlier expansions.
FrankT:
56 cards for one color is big for an expansion, but Ice Age was supposed to be an entire game. And with so many of the cards given over to esoteric bullshit and just plain terrible cards, there just wasn't enough meat to make playable decks. Sure, you could make ricockulously powerful decks that splashed Blue or used Blue as card engines to let their real color shine, but a “Blue Deck” just wasn't happening. In a sealed deck game, if you traded for Blue it was because you were a god damn idiot. But beyond that, a deck that was all Blue or even half Blue just wasn't going to pull its weight.
The Wind Spirit is a bad card. 5 mana for 3 power is a crummy deal. But it has two complementary forms of evasion and you aren't actually embarrassed to cast it. This is as good as creatures get for Blue in Ice Age.
Where Blue comes out OK is in denial. Back then it was considered acceptable to hand out spells that straight up took your opponent's creatures for four mana, which is pretty fucking intense.
These cards are intended to be weaker than Control Magic – and they are – but they are still ridiculously powerful.
AncientH:
Most of the Ice Age decks I knew with Blue were heavy in artifacts - Icy Manipulator is basically made for Blue Control - or as a flavor for a deck that used Blue cards from earlier sets. If you combine 4th edition and Ice Age, you have a lot of hard and soft counters available, and you can tap and untap damn near anything. It won't win you the game by itself, but it makes a good basis for a millstone deck. Blue/Black was very popular due to Necropotence, and the fact that Blue had all those little cantrips for added card draw.
FrankT:
The bottom line is that while the “Blue Deck” in Ice Age is unplayably bad, there are enough cards that are good enough that the “Decks With Blue In Them” were the best decks of the period. Of course, this was already true because crap like Time Walk and Ancestral Recall were street legal at the time, but even the watered down versions that WotC trotted out in Ice Age were still good enough to make for a very dominant side suit. That probably sounds like an oxymoron, but that's how it worked. No deck worth a shit relied on Blue to do the heavy lifting of actually winning the game, but Blue was so good at delivering card advantage that you were a damn fool to not include some Blue in whatever the fuck it was that you were doing.
AncientH:
I'd like to finish off this section by looking at what might be the weirdest Blue card in the set:
Reality Twist is the only CU card I can think of where you're probably not going to be able to meet the first turn's upkeep. It's just plain weird. It's like it was designed for those chess-problem-esque challenges in issues of InQuest, where you had a bunch of weird cards on the board and you were tasked to figure out how to accomplish such-and-such a thing before the end of the turn. It's one of those cards you wonder what the designers were high on, not because it's overpowered but because it's bonkers. Ironically, I think in certain formats it would be a really fun item to lay on the table, but I can't imagine anyone actually playing it.
Last edited by Ancient History on Sat Nov 14, 2015 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
-
GreatGreyShrike
- Master
- Posts: 208
- Joined: Tue Feb 18, 2014 8:58 am
Re: Illusions of Grandeur.
There was some sort of combo deck for a while based on the (post-Ice Age) spell Donate, where you cast Illusions of Grandeur then gave it to your opponent to let them deal with it. I don't recall all the details, but I think it saw some tournament success?
Used as 'intended', the card is pretty garbage, but with a card printed 4 years later it finally had a purpose.
There was some sort of combo deck for a while based on the (post-Ice Age) spell Donate, where you cast Illusions of Grandeur then gave it to your opponent to let them deal with it. I don't recall all the details, but I think it saw some tournament success?
Used as 'intended', the card is pretty garbage, but with a card printed 4 years later it finally had a purpose.
Impressively, Donate was in Urza's block. So that combo was up against a tough environment.GreatGreyShrike wrote:Re: Illusions of Grandeur.
There was some sort of combo deck for a while based on the (post-Ice Age) spell Donate, where you cast Illusions of Grandeur then gave it to your opponent to let them deal with it. I don't recall all the details, but I think it saw some tournament success?
Used as 'intended', the card is pretty garbage, but with a card printed 4 years later it finally had a purpose.
As to Reality Twist, how would you ever be unable to pay its upkeep for the first turn? It doesn't affect Islands, so the three blue you used to cast it will still be there next turn.
virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.
FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Because of the way multilands worked at the time. While thematically a Tropical Island could be tapped for blue mana because it was a forest and could be tapped for green mana because it was a forest, game mechanically it was both a forest and an island that could be tapped for two different kinds of mana. While Reality Twist is in play, it taps for 1 black mana because it's a forest.As to Reality Twist, how would you ever be unable to pay its upkeep for the first turn? It doesn't affect Islands, so the three blue you used to cast it will still be there next turn.
Non-island multilands have two choices because they are converted into two things and you can do it in either order. But since nothing happens to islands at all, there's no replacement effect for you to choose. All your island multilands become basic lands of the wrong color.
-Username17
https://www.wizards.com/sideboard/artic ... b20010801aGreatGreyShrike wrote:Re: Illusions of Grandeur.
There was some sort of combo deck for a while based on the (post-Ice Age) spell Donate, where you cast Illusions of Grandeur then gave it to your opponent to let them deal with it. I don't recall all the details, but I think it saw some tournament success?
Used as 'intended', the card is pretty garbage, but with a card printed 4 years later it finally had a purpose.
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/lega ... egacy.html
http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/blue-bla ... ur-donate/
I also remember seeing it put in InQuest Magazine.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
]I want him to tongue-punch my box.
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
You could say that. Mike Flores called it "the scariest deck in the history of Magic" and it lead to a number of bannings after dominating the tournament scene. Interestingly the deck is pretty Ice Age block heavy, running Brainstorm, Contagion, Demonic Consultation, Force of Will, Illusions of Grandeur, Hydroblast and Necropotence.GreatGreyShrike wrote:Re: Illusions of Grandeur.
There was some sort of combo deck for a while based on the (post-Ice Age) spell Donate, where you cast Illusions of Grandeur then gave it to your opponent to let them deal with it. I don't recall all the details, but I think it saw some tournament success?
BEB and Hydroblast (and their mirror images REB and Pyroblast) differ in one important way. BEB specifies "target Red spell" or "target red permanent" whereas Hydroblast states "target spell if it is Red" or "target permanent if it is red". A red & blue spell is not "a red spell" but it is partly red, therefore Hydroblast & Pyroblast can target it whilst the Elemental blasts can't. Because of this Pyroblast is a common include in Vintage decks as a 1 mana counter to many of the best cards in the format.Frank Trollman wrote:I will say this: the best Blue things in Ice Age are the very small spells. The set offered both hard counters in the form of a reprint of Counterspell and soft counters in the form of Deflection and Force Void. It even, for reasons I don't understand, includes a retitled Blue Elemental Blast called Hydroblast.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Derp. So it is. I was mixing up the fact that Hydro and Pyro can target any permanent and only check the colour on resolution, whereas BEB and REB can only target permanents including the specified colour.FrankTrollman wrote:This is totally wrong.Red Rob wrote:A red & blue spell is not "a red spell" but it is partly red, therefore Hydroblast & Pyroblast can target it whilst the Elemental blasts can't.
-Username17
So there is a slight difference between the wordings, just not the one I was remembering. That'll teach me to post just after waking up...
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
The fact that Pyroblast can be cast to no effect targeting and inappropriate target makes it noticeably better for Storm decks.
A Storm deck needs to get a critical threshold of cards cast in a turn and then instantly wins. Every card in the deck that can reliably be played for 1 mana, even if it does nothing at all, is valuable.
-Username17
A Storm deck needs to get a critical threshold of cards cast in a turn and then instantly wins. Every card in the deck that can reliably be played for 1 mana, even if it does nothing at all, is valuable.
-Username17
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors
Black
About one step away from busting out the electric guitars.
Black is one of the winners of the Ice Age block in general, and Ice Age set in particular. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of the same nonsense going on as in Blue. There are, for example, many Ice Age card clones and equivalents:
...in addition to which, many crowd favorites like Dark Ritual, Fear, and Terror Dark Banishing were reprinted, and you even had a couple upgrades:
And on top of that, Ice Age gave Black many very good new cards, like Necropotence. However, while Black in Ice Age is very good, many of its cards are also very shit, and many of them don't quite...work together.
Black is more of an attitude than it is a set of mechanics. Is Black supposed to be big creatures? Small creatures? Life gain? Life loss? Card draw? Mana ramp? Removal? Resilience? Combo? Tempo? Aggro? Control? Black is all of those things. Like Necromancy in Dungeons & Dragons, you can justify absolutely any effect so long as you put a skull on it somewhere. What Black doesn't have is a particularly deep bench. In any particular format, Black is going to be shoehorned into whatever corner its good cards happen to be in. When Black has good aggro cards you play aggro, when Black has good control cards you play control. You don't get a lot of variants of cards that fulfill similar functions in any set, so if a card isn't good in a particular archetype that archetype is probably bad for Black.
The obvious comparison is Red. Red always gets burn cards in every set. So when Burn is Good, Red is Good. By contrast, when Black gets a burn effect, they usually only get one or two. So Black decks do burn if and only if the burn effects they have are good. Black is almost always good, but what it is good at changes seasonally.
From the very beginning, the authors of Magic tried to say that Black wasn't necessarily the bad guys. In the latest set, one of the main protagonist heroes is mono-Black. But at the time, the writers were fairly bad at painting a picture of Black that was even arguably morally neutral.
In Ice Age, they dropped the pretense of even trying.
Black in Ice Age are the bad guys. They don't fuck around or pretend to be misunderstood or something, they are just the capital-E Evil of the set. There are various Black factions (Stromgald, Lim-Dul, Leshrac, and Tevesh Szat), and there are the factions that are part-Black like the Krovikans and Marit-Lage. But there are only 56 cards in Black. I honestly can't tell what the fuck any of these assholes want to do other than “be evil.” There's world building in here, but it pretty much gets as far as giving you a list of villains.
The Stromgald Knights appear to be a faction in Kjeldor that wants to genocide... somebody. I'm actually not sure who they want to commit genocide on, but I'm guessing it's the Elves.
The goals of Leshrac and Lim-Dul are even less well explained, and they mostly just seem to be bad for the sake of being bad. Leshrac seems to want to eat the sun, maybe? And Lim-Dul has text all over the fucking place but he seems to just be an all-purpose evil necromancer who pledged to Leshrac. Maybe he betrayed Leshrac afterward? I can't even tell. The cards in this set have a lot of text in tiny print, but the flash fiction storytelling isn't well done.
Compare to the latest set, where Drana's story is told rather effectively in 16 words.
The tie-in comic books and things don't really help much. However, Ice Age is when the game was starting to really tie its setting together, with its explicit references to Urza and Mishra from Antiquities, with references that would get even more explicit in the sequel set Alliances. Indeed, a large part of the storyline for many years was that the Brothers' War had actually caused the Ice Age, like a kind of nuclear winter.
For me, though, one of the things I appreciate about Black are some of the artistic references:
Richard Thomas had a good gig for a while.
The constant desire to make shittier versions of basic set cards is here for Black just as it is for Blue. Ice Quake is shittier than Sinkhole. The Abyssal Specter is worse than the Hypnotic Specter. Mind Warp is weaker than Mind Twist. And so on. But sometimes those weaknesses were used by later inane combo decks as strengths. Demonic Consultation is infinitely more likely to cause you to accidentally lose the game than Demonic Tutor was, but...
“I name 'Throat Wolf'.”
Some of the same complaints as Blue apply here. Big Black was a thing just like Big Blue was a thing, and for much the same reason. However, Big Black's archetype is:
And as we pointed out in Fallen Empires, they tried to follow that up with Praetor of the Ebon Hand (with its weird rabbit tribunal). Ice Age doesn't have anything quite as big as the Lord of the Pit and Cosmic Horror, but they have several critters in the same vein:
The main thing about these is that they're overpriced, underpowered for the price, and liable to bite you if you don't keep them fed. That's Big Black for you. And the downside of Big Black is that as big as its critters are, they generally aren't as big as you can get from Green or Red or even Blue, and and they often cost more on a point-by-point basis than their other equivalents, in addition to having whatever horrible downside the design team dreams up.
It's characteristic of one of the design shortcomings of Black in general: while Black has often been ahead of the game in treating any card as a resource, it often requires substantial costs to achieve many effects. Black players are almost necessarily placed into a much different mindset than other players, and can't get sentimentally attached to the idea of just summoning a big critter and attacking with it. Or sentimentally attached to anything, really.
On the other hand, Black actually has several cards designed to work with its "allied colors":
These individually aren't enough to make a Red/Black or Blue/Black deck. They are, in fact, not enough to even entertain the concept. But they're not bad cards in general; Burnt Offering in particular has a good bit of potential.
We can't really talk about Black in Ice Age without talking about talking about Necropotence. It's in many ways the most insane card of the set.
At the time, it was pushing a rock uphill to get people to realize that this card was balls to the wall awesome. The WotC message boards of the time were full of mouth breathers declaring that Necropotence was like casting Underworld Dreams on yourself.
It kinda is. Except for the part where you also get to draw as many cards as you fucking want.
What this goes down to is that over the course of the game you see a finite number of cards and a finite number of life points. If you spend half your life to get an extra ten cards you put yourself at a huge advantage. Sure, a life gain deck can gain life much more easily than a card draw deck can draw cards and could plausibly spend some its life gain to draw more cards to get more life gain effects, but the truth is that you didn't have to do any of that shit.
The only life point that actually matters is the last one, while cards are always worth something and worth more the earlier you get them. Even a deck with no life gain potential at all would do well to draw three cards a turn for four turns and then stall out and win or lose based on the giant card advantage they'd accumulated. The simple fact is that your deck should probably be able to win with some finite number of draws from itself. And if that number is less than your life total – which it fucking well should be – Necropotence just makes you win the game.
As opposed to its companion card the Oath of Lim-Dul, which just makes you lose.
What the hell was up with Oath of Lim-Dul anyway? It's just a kinda ok card draw engine, there's no universe in which that's worth the drawback of giving your opponent a free Desert Twister for every point of damage they get through to you.
There's a few odd cards in Ice Age Black. In fact, if you look at it, there's a lot of just sort of competent low-level 2-and-3 mana guys like Legion of Lim-Dul and Lim-Dul's Cohort, and some spells that you might fill out a deck with but aren't...great. Mind Ravel is no Hymn to Tourach, Mind Warp is just expensive. Then you have things like Pox, which is just "Fuck the world, lol":
I kinda love Pox because it's one Dark Ritual away from being cast. It's something you can use to royally fuck up somebody's early game. And, if you're sufficiently clever about it, there's plenty of ways to take advantage of it - notice that it doesn't say anything about artifacts or enchantments.
Some cards in Ice Age Black you never hear about, even though they're relatively good. These two come to mind:
Both of which are great, provided no-one's playing a dredge deck, and work well when you have limited lands but a good-sized graveyard (yours or someone else's).
Black tried to play nice with its neighboring colors.
This is almost all of the backstory these Black/Blue organizations get.
There's certainly some stuff you can do with this. BU was probably the strongest deck of the time, it just didn't rely on the explicitly Black/Blue combo cards for much. The deck was a pile of Black threats and Black answers powered by Blue card advantage so that you had more threats and answers than your opponent did.
Marit Lage was revisited in Cold Snap, which gave us some of the dumbest things ever. You can bring a 20/20 avatar of Marit Lage into the world by putting on a play for 3 mana and two special lands, which is... not an infinite loop but still obviously nonsense. Krov was similarly revisited in Coldsnap and apparently it was supposed to be in Kjeldor, which sort of ruins pretty much everything. I mean, if Stromgald and Krov are both inside Kjeldor, then there isn't much use in labeling anything as “Kjeldorian” because fucking everything is Kjeldorian at that point.
Anyway, the color cooperation cards in this set don't rise to a particularly high bar. I mean, you can use Blue mana to do shitty flight effects with the Elementalist or you can use Red mana to do shitty firebreathing effects with him. But if you have Blue mana, why not just use a Blue spell that's actually good at that? If you have Red mana, why not just use a Red spell that's actually good at that?
It took a long time before WotC was able to make cards that used multiple types of mana that felt like they belonged in multiple colors. It was many years after Ice Age came out that a card actually used both Black and Blue mana and felt like it was both Black and Blue.
Let's talk about bad cards. Ice Age Black has them. Anything with CU. There aren't many of them, but you seriously don't need this or this:
Every single critter is overpriced. That sounds bad, but it's true. And you might actually find yourself dipping into Fallen Empires for thrulls, because so many cards require sacrificial lambs to grease the wheels but there's a distinctive lack of cheap chaff in Ice Age Black. That's no joke: there is only a single critter that costs B to play, and it's Kjeldoran Dead, which requires you to sacrifice a critter to play it. And that brings to mind one of the major problems of a straight Black Ice Age deck: the early-mid game. You basically need three mana to do practically anything worth doing in this deck; it raises Dark Ritual from a handy tool to an absolute necessity to get anything off the line in the first couple turns at all. A lot of Ice Age monoblack decks' first turns consist entirely on playing a Snow-Covered Swamp and saying "Pass."
Black doesn't interact with Snow-Covered things very well. In Cold Snap they tried to do ridiculous things with "Snow permanents," but for here it's less silly but also less prevalent. Seriously, a lot of these cards just look like afterthoughts:
Black also wins the Tiny Text award for some of these cards:
This is undecipherable. You might as well play the Korean version.
Black in Ice Age gets some pretty brutal speed cards. Dark Ritual and Burnt Offering let you trade cards for mana. Necropotence lets you trade life for cards. Spoils of Evil lets you trade cards for Life. The circle goes round and round, and no matter what you need to get things in hand or in play well ahead of the curve, Black can get you there. The thing is that since winning before your opponent does is literally the only thing that matters in the game, this made Black better than you.
What it was missing was decent midrange creatures. You were not going to play a Hyalopterous Lemure or a Dread Wight.
Seriously, you were not going to play these.
It brought up the very real question of what the hell Black was supposed to be ramping to. You could very quickly put a third of your deck into your hand and produce enough mana to power your weirdest fantasies. But what did the designers think you were going to put into play as your master stroke? As Ancient mentioned, Big Black was a pile of smelly smelly ass. Hell, big anything was a pile of smelly ass back then because the designers hadn't had it driven into their skulls that anything with a CMC over 4 needs to have an upside rather than a downside because Red Deck Wins is going to eat your face before you pay 7 mana for anything. In actual tournaments, the correct answer was Hypnotic Specters, Juzam Djinns, and Juggernauts, because the basic set and Arabian Nights were still tournament legal. But if you didn't have those, you were stuck drawing a shit tonne of cards and using them for black weenies. Which also worked. But it left you staring at the Dark Rituals and shrugging for the most part.
If you have Necropotence up and just draw all three of these cards every damn turn for four turns straight, you're probably going to win the game. But the swamps won't have much to do but pump your knights after a bit.
Basically, you were ramping up to Drain Life. Sorry, but that's the truth. You couldn't mill your opponent fast enough with anything Black had on hand, and nothing in Ice Age is really going to get you there either. While nominally stand-alone, Black needed too many things from 4th edition just to have goals to play to.
And to go further than that, Ice Age doesn't replicate a lot of staples of the black deck. Nobody plays Dance of the Dead if they have Reanimate Dead.
No one plays Mind Warp unless they're out of Mind Twist.
Hell, no-one plays Withering Wisps if they have Pestilence.
So it really is the case that Black in Ice Age just has more expensive/shittier cards than 4th edition had. In a weird way, Wizards of the Coast proved that sometimes "ancient magics" were a lot more powerful than some of the SOTA stuff in the latest set.
I have absolutely no idea how this card is supposed to work. You set the cost based on how many cards your opponent has in their graveyard. But it resolves with the same X, that might now be a different number? I don't know! I mean, it's a marginal card (which I could see something with clearer writing being played in a modern Hardened Scales deck), but I genuinely have no idea what's supposed to happen when someone responds to its casting with a Dark Banishing.
Ice Age cards are not written for clarity. Like, at all.
To sum up: Ice Age Black is very very good at some things. But it's really hard to see it stand on its own. It plays better with others, but not...completely. You can definitely see how Blue/Black was a strong Ice Age deck. If you had a solid strategy to ramp up to, you could ramp up to it very fast. But if you were new to the game, and just wanted to deploy zombies and stuff, you were going to struggle during the early game and the end game involved critters that were too expensive for their power.
Next up, I think, is red.
Black
About one step away from busting out the electric guitars.
AncientH:
Black is one of the winners of the Ice Age block in general, and Ice Age set in particular. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of the same nonsense going on as in Blue. There are, for example, many Ice Age card clones and equivalents:
...in addition to which, many crowd favorites like Dark Ritual, Fear, and Terror Dark Banishing were reprinted, and you even had a couple upgrades:
And on top of that, Ice Age gave Black many very good new cards, like Necropotence. However, while Black in Ice Age is very good, many of its cards are also very shit, and many of them don't quite...work together.
FrankT:
Black is more of an attitude than it is a set of mechanics. Is Black supposed to be big creatures? Small creatures? Life gain? Life loss? Card draw? Mana ramp? Removal? Resilience? Combo? Tempo? Aggro? Control? Black is all of those things. Like Necromancy in Dungeons & Dragons, you can justify absolutely any effect so long as you put a skull on it somewhere. What Black doesn't have is a particularly deep bench. In any particular format, Black is going to be shoehorned into whatever corner its good cards happen to be in. When Black has good aggro cards you play aggro, when Black has good control cards you play control. You don't get a lot of variants of cards that fulfill similar functions in any set, so if a card isn't good in a particular archetype that archetype is probably bad for Black.
The obvious comparison is Red. Red always gets burn cards in every set. So when Burn is Good, Red is Good. By contrast, when Black gets a burn effect, they usually only get one or two. So Black decks do burn if and only if the burn effects they have are good. Black is almost always good, but what it is good at changes seasonally.
From the very beginning, the authors of Magic tried to say that Black wasn't necessarily the bad guys. In the latest set, one of the main protagonist heroes is mono-Black. But at the time, the writers were fairly bad at painting a picture of Black that was even arguably morally neutral.
In Ice Age, they dropped the pretense of even trying.
Black in Ice Age are the bad guys. They don't fuck around or pretend to be misunderstood or something, they are just the capital-E Evil of the set. There are various Black factions (Stromgald, Lim-Dul, Leshrac, and Tevesh Szat), and there are the factions that are part-Black like the Krovikans and Marit-Lage. But there are only 56 cards in Black. I honestly can't tell what the fuck any of these assholes want to do other than “be evil.” There's world building in here, but it pretty much gets as far as giving you a list of villains.
The Stromgald Knights appear to be a faction in Kjeldor that wants to genocide... somebody. I'm actually not sure who they want to commit genocide on, but I'm guessing it's the Elves.
The goals of Leshrac and Lim-Dul are even less well explained, and they mostly just seem to be bad for the sake of being bad. Leshrac seems to want to eat the sun, maybe? And Lim-Dul has text all over the fucking place but he seems to just be an all-purpose evil necromancer who pledged to Leshrac. Maybe he betrayed Leshrac afterward? I can't even tell. The cards in this set have a lot of text in tiny print, but the flash fiction storytelling isn't well done.
Compare to the latest set, where Drana's story is told rather effectively in 16 words.
AncientH:
The tie-in comic books and things don't really help much. However, Ice Age is when the game was starting to really tie its setting together, with its explicit references to Urza and Mishra from Antiquities, with references that would get even more explicit in the sequel set Alliances. Indeed, a large part of the storyline for many years was that the Brothers' War had actually caused the Ice Age, like a kind of nuclear winter.
For me, though, one of the things I appreciate about Black are some of the artistic references:
Richard Thomas had a good gig for a while.
FrankT:
The constant desire to make shittier versions of basic set cards is here for Black just as it is for Blue. Ice Quake is shittier than Sinkhole. The Abyssal Specter is worse than the Hypnotic Specter. Mind Warp is weaker than Mind Twist. And so on. But sometimes those weaknesses were used by later inane combo decks as strengths. Demonic Consultation is infinitely more likely to cause you to accidentally lose the game than Demonic Tutor was, but...
“I name 'Throat Wolf'.”
AncientH:
Some of the same complaints as Blue apply here. Big Black was a thing just like Big Blue was a thing, and for much the same reason. However, Big Black's archetype is:
And as we pointed out in Fallen Empires, they tried to follow that up with Praetor of the Ebon Hand (with its weird rabbit tribunal). Ice Age doesn't have anything quite as big as the Lord of the Pit and Cosmic Horror, but they have several critters in the same vein:
The main thing about these is that they're overpriced, underpowered for the price, and liable to bite you if you don't keep them fed. That's Big Black for you. And the downside of Big Black is that as big as its critters are, they generally aren't as big as you can get from Green or Red or even Blue, and and they often cost more on a point-by-point basis than their other equivalents, in addition to having whatever horrible downside the design team dreams up.
It's characteristic of one of the design shortcomings of Black in general: while Black has often been ahead of the game in treating any card as a resource, it often requires substantial costs to achieve many effects. Black players are almost necessarily placed into a much different mindset than other players, and can't get sentimentally attached to the idea of just summoning a big critter and attacking with it. Or sentimentally attached to anything, really.
On the other hand, Black actually has several cards designed to work with its "allied colors":
These individually aren't enough to make a Red/Black or Blue/Black deck. They are, in fact, not enough to even entertain the concept. But they're not bad cards in general; Burnt Offering in particular has a good bit of potential.
FrankT:
We can't really talk about Black in Ice Age without talking about talking about Necropotence. It's in many ways the most insane card of the set.
At the time, it was pushing a rock uphill to get people to realize that this card was balls to the wall awesome. The WotC message boards of the time were full of mouth breathers declaring that Necropotence was like casting Underworld Dreams on yourself.
It kinda is. Except for the part where you also get to draw as many cards as you fucking want.
What this goes down to is that over the course of the game you see a finite number of cards and a finite number of life points. If you spend half your life to get an extra ten cards you put yourself at a huge advantage. Sure, a life gain deck can gain life much more easily than a card draw deck can draw cards and could plausibly spend some its life gain to draw more cards to get more life gain effects, but the truth is that you didn't have to do any of that shit.
The only life point that actually matters is the last one, while cards are always worth something and worth more the earlier you get them. Even a deck with no life gain potential at all would do well to draw three cards a turn for four turns and then stall out and win or lose based on the giant card advantage they'd accumulated. The simple fact is that your deck should probably be able to win with some finite number of draws from itself. And if that number is less than your life total – which it fucking well should be – Necropotence just makes you win the game.
As opposed to its companion card the Oath of Lim-Dul, which just makes you lose.
What the hell was up with Oath of Lim-Dul anyway? It's just a kinda ok card draw engine, there's no universe in which that's worth the drawback of giving your opponent a free Desert Twister for every point of damage they get through to you.
AncientH:
There's a few odd cards in Ice Age Black. In fact, if you look at it, there's a lot of just sort of competent low-level 2-and-3 mana guys like Legion of Lim-Dul and Lim-Dul's Cohort, and some spells that you might fill out a deck with but aren't...great. Mind Ravel is no Hymn to Tourach, Mind Warp is just expensive. Then you have things like Pox, which is just "Fuck the world, lol":
I kinda love Pox because it's one Dark Ritual away from being cast. It's something you can use to royally fuck up somebody's early game. And, if you're sufficiently clever about it, there's plenty of ways to take advantage of it - notice that it doesn't say anything about artifacts or enchantments.
Some cards in Ice Age Black you never hear about, even though they're relatively good. These two come to mind:
Both of which are great, provided no-one's playing a dredge deck, and work well when you have limited lands but a good-sized graveyard (yours or someone else's).
FrankT:
Black tried to play nice with its neighboring colors.
This is almost all of the backstory these Black/Blue organizations get.
There's certainly some stuff you can do with this. BU was probably the strongest deck of the time, it just didn't rely on the explicitly Black/Blue combo cards for much. The deck was a pile of Black threats and Black answers powered by Blue card advantage so that you had more threats and answers than your opponent did.
Marit Lage was revisited in Cold Snap, which gave us some of the dumbest things ever. You can bring a 20/20 avatar of Marit Lage into the world by putting on a play for 3 mana and two special lands, which is... not an infinite loop but still obviously nonsense. Krov was similarly revisited in Coldsnap and apparently it was supposed to be in Kjeldor, which sort of ruins pretty much everything. I mean, if Stromgald and Krov are both inside Kjeldor, then there isn't much use in labeling anything as “Kjeldorian” because fucking everything is Kjeldorian at that point.
Anyway, the color cooperation cards in this set don't rise to a particularly high bar. I mean, you can use Blue mana to do shitty flight effects with the Elementalist or you can use Red mana to do shitty firebreathing effects with him. But if you have Blue mana, why not just use a Blue spell that's actually good at that? If you have Red mana, why not just use a Red spell that's actually good at that?
It took a long time before WotC was able to make cards that used multiple types of mana that felt like they belonged in multiple colors. It was many years after Ice Age came out that a card actually used both Black and Blue mana and felt like it was both Black and Blue.
AncientH:
Let's talk about bad cards. Ice Age Black has them. Anything with CU. There aren't many of them, but you seriously don't need this or this:
Every single critter is overpriced. That sounds bad, but it's true. And you might actually find yourself dipping into Fallen Empires for thrulls, because so many cards require sacrificial lambs to grease the wheels but there's a distinctive lack of cheap chaff in Ice Age Black. That's no joke: there is only a single critter that costs B to play, and it's Kjeldoran Dead, which requires you to sacrifice a critter to play it. And that brings to mind one of the major problems of a straight Black Ice Age deck: the early-mid game. You basically need three mana to do practically anything worth doing in this deck; it raises Dark Ritual from a handy tool to an absolute necessity to get anything off the line in the first couple turns at all. A lot of Ice Age monoblack decks' first turns consist entirely on playing a Snow-Covered Swamp and saying "Pass."
Black doesn't interact with Snow-Covered things very well. In Cold Snap they tried to do ridiculous things with "Snow permanents," but for here it's less silly but also less prevalent. Seriously, a lot of these cards just look like afterthoughts:
Black also wins the Tiny Text award for some of these cards:
This is undecipherable. You might as well play the Korean version.
FrankT:
Black in Ice Age gets some pretty brutal speed cards. Dark Ritual and Burnt Offering let you trade cards for mana. Necropotence lets you trade life for cards. Spoils of Evil lets you trade cards for Life. The circle goes round and round, and no matter what you need to get things in hand or in play well ahead of the curve, Black can get you there. The thing is that since winning before your opponent does is literally the only thing that matters in the game, this made Black better than you.
What it was missing was decent midrange creatures. You were not going to play a Hyalopterous Lemure or a Dread Wight.
Seriously, you were not going to play these.
It brought up the very real question of what the hell Black was supposed to be ramping to. You could very quickly put a third of your deck into your hand and produce enough mana to power your weirdest fantasies. But what did the designers think you were going to put into play as your master stroke? As Ancient mentioned, Big Black was a pile of smelly smelly ass. Hell, big anything was a pile of smelly ass back then because the designers hadn't had it driven into their skulls that anything with a CMC over 4 needs to have an upside rather than a downside because Red Deck Wins is going to eat your face before you pay 7 mana for anything. In actual tournaments, the correct answer was Hypnotic Specters, Juzam Djinns, and Juggernauts, because the basic set and Arabian Nights were still tournament legal. But if you didn't have those, you were stuck drawing a shit tonne of cards and using them for black weenies. Which also worked. But it left you staring at the Dark Rituals and shrugging for the most part.
If you have Necropotence up and just draw all three of these cards every damn turn for four turns straight, you're probably going to win the game. But the swamps won't have much to do but pump your knights after a bit.
AncientH:
Basically, you were ramping up to Drain Life. Sorry, but that's the truth. You couldn't mill your opponent fast enough with anything Black had on hand, and nothing in Ice Age is really going to get you there either. While nominally stand-alone, Black needed too many things from 4th edition just to have goals to play to.
And to go further than that, Ice Age doesn't replicate a lot of staples of the black deck. Nobody plays Dance of the Dead if they have Reanimate Dead.
No one plays Mind Warp unless they're out of Mind Twist.
Hell, no-one plays Withering Wisps if they have Pestilence.
So it really is the case that Black in Ice Age just has more expensive/shittier cards than 4th edition had. In a weird way, Wizards of the Coast proved that sometimes "ancient magics" were a lot more powerful than some of the SOTA stuff in the latest set.
FrankT:
I have absolutely no idea how this card is supposed to work. You set the cost based on how many cards your opponent has in their graveyard. But it resolves with the same X, that might now be a different number? I don't know! I mean, it's a marginal card (which I could see something with clearer writing being played in a modern Hardened Scales deck), but I genuinely have no idea what's supposed to happen when someone responds to its casting with a Dark Banishing.
Ice Age cards are not written for clarity. Like, at all.
AncientH:
To sum up: Ice Age Black is very very good at some things. But it's really hard to see it stand on its own. It plays better with others, but not...completely. You can definitely see how Blue/Black was a strong Ice Age deck. If you had a solid strategy to ramp up to, you could ramp up to it very fast. But if you were new to the game, and just wanted to deploy zombies and stuff, you were going to struggle during the early game and the end game involved critters that were too expensive for their power.
Next up, I think, is red.
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors
Red
Red as it sees itself.
Red, as seen by Blue.
If Black is the clear winner of Ice Age, and Blue has a lot of great cards with a lot of chaff, Red is...interesting. It has enough stuff to basically stand alone, as Red usually does, but it also appears to still be caught up in some leftover Fallen Empires thinking. That is to say, it has a lot of stuff carried over or slightly modified from 4th edition standard burn spells, which is Red's bread and butter, and it has a lot of weird Orcs and Goblins which don't quite go together in any real sense, but are...well, they just are.
Presumably, the reason Ice Age includes an Orgg on a diet is because they couldn't think of a way to ruin Red standards Ball Lightning, Fire Elemental, Earth Elemental, Dragon Whelp, or Shivan Dragon.
Some of these cards are very useful and interesting. Others are just bizarre. Still, Red at least has some game in the 1-2 mana range.
...and this is basically where Goblins finally overtake Orcs. Because while you have critters like Orcish Librarian and Orcish Lumberjack which are interesting, Goblin Ski Patrol at least can attack pumped, do its damage, and then you blow it up with a Goblin Grenade because it's going to die anyway.
Hi Mike!
More than any other color, Red found its footing early. It gets rid of your opponent by doing damage to them, and it gets rid of your opponent's creatures by doing damage to them. You can beat Red by going bigger than their removal spells and creatures or by stopping damage. You can lose to Red by trying to go too big and having them beat you to death with a rock before you put together your death laser. We know what a good Red deck looks like, and thus what a good Red card looks like. Red cards are good if they burn out the creatures that people are actually using or if they can help kill your opponent before they can pull off whatever tricky shit they are attempting. More than any other color, Red plays by the rules. You can keep Red from killing your creatures by having more toughness, Red can kill you faster by having creatures with more power. Red cares about attackers and blockers and all that shit. White had a “Circle of Protection” that negated incoming damage from a color targeted at each color, but the one people actually played was the Red one. Because every other color might be pulling some kind of tricky bullshit while Red was just counting down your life points by swinging in for damage.
Red sometimes wants to go big and sometimes wants to go small, depending on what other decks are doing. There are times that Red wants to save up for big 5/5 Dragons because enemies are fielding 4/4 fliers. There are times that Red wants to throw down a lot of 1/1 Goblins... because enemies are saving up for 4/4 fliers. Red is happy when the dominant creature paradigm has creatures of a size that Red can kill one for one with the cheap burn spells they have. Red is sad when the dominant creature paradigm requires it to spend two cards or save up a lot of mana to remove enemy threats. It's all very simple, and you can explain the metagame evolution to an eight year old.
So going into Ice Age, Red pretty much knew what it wanted. It wanted aggressively costed aggro critters in whatever size categories happened to be available – be they big, small, or mid range. It wanted burn spells that could affordably kill the creatures that could be expected to be on the board.
That's kinda shit. But it's not completely shit.
What's really missing here is anything big that you'd want to use.
Believe it or not, the Goblin Mutant was considered a playable card at the time.
Red plays most like a football game of any of the colors. Cards are evaluated by how easy they are to get through and how many points they score when they succeed. Also what resources of your opponent that they can tie up. The Goblin Mutant does five damage, so if it gets through twice, he's given you half the game. He is difficult to get through, because he won't attack if the enemy has any mid-size blocker available. But if you can burn out the enemy blockers and run him through a couple of times, you're a long way towards victory.
That's actually pretty shit. Sorry, that's really shit. But at the time it was considered “kinda OK” because that's what there was to work with. And hey, if your opponent only has 2 power creatures, the Goblin Mutant could trade 2:1, and that's actively good.
Ice Age Red has critters with some interesting design in them. Not, y'know good, necessarily, because it's generally overpriced for whatever the effect is. For example:
This is basically an overpriced Lightning Bolt. But, for the extra 1 mana, it prevents regeneration. It may not be a first-turn cast, but it's a legitimate addition to your burn potential.
For Red, this is a joke card. It's not a bad card - the mechanics are interesting - it's just not a Red card. This should be a White card. And it should be 1W. But it isn't, so you're probably never going to play this. By a similar logic:
Frank and I both enjoy the design on this card. It's too expensive to boost, and you're unlikely to ever play it because it doesn't have trample. But it's a really nifty design, and Red doesn't often get interesting design.
"Chaos" is one of Red's sub-suits. It usually involves some random or pseudo-random schtick, which could be awesome or terrible. Doesn't come up very often these days, because people got tired of flipping coins and shit. And you almost never see a focus on these kind of decks outside of constructed, because Red never includes enough cards in a given set to build, say, a Red Control deck.
Red Control is kind of bizarre, and pretty much exists less as "Red is a counterpart to Blue" than "Red occasionally likes to play with mana and untap things too." Control just doesn't come naturally to Red, because it's easier to burn stuff.
We would be remiss if we didn't discuss Red's one and only power card in this set:
In case you can't read the incredibly tiny text on this bad boy, what he does is go on a suicide mission to make your opponent explode. When he attacks, all your other creatures get +x/+x, where x is the number of non-Marton attackers. He's still a 1/1 no matter what, and he has to be declared as an attacker to pull this nonsense off. So it's virtually certain that he will personally die during his big attack. But it's a very big attack. If you have four other attackers, they all get +4/+4, so even if he's leading in Goblins and Mountain Goats, it's still an attack for lethal.
Dr. Stromgald here would be playable today. And he is such a good capstone for weenie rush decks that people wouldn't feel weird about including him in decks that pack Hordeling Outburst and Dragon Fodder with a straight face. Turn five, attack for 31. The only weird thing about it is that he is attacking for one and can be killed by an Arashin Cleric. Everyone else gets quadratic bonuses and gets completely out of hand.
Red doesn't interact much with the other Ice Age mechanics.
These basically exists to fuck with Icequake.
The surprising thing is that some of these cards look like they might actually have been useful, if the costs weren't bizarrely blown up. The Karplusan Giant, for example, is 7 mana for a pumpable 3/3. You're never going to field that, but the "tap snowlands to pump" is a good ability. Sacrificing a snow land to negate combat damage is too expensive, but tapping a snow land to do that would be interesting. Ironically, I think that Ice Age Red might have been the inspiration for the godawful "Snow Mana" bullshit in ColdSnap, because you can sort of see how they were trying to make snow-covered lands...useful.
Unlike the Black and Blue spells that were supposed to play nice with their ally colors, Red actually does a pretty decent job playing nice with its allied colors. Or rather, it has one card that plays really really nice with Green.
This isn't it.
This is it.
The Orcish Lumberjack makes a shit tonne of mana. You can tap that forest and then sacrifice it for 3 more mana. With a Mox or a Sol Ring you can drop a 6 mana dragon on turn two. It's very aggro, it's very Red, it's very Green, and it's very powerful. I mean, it can all go disastrously wrong of course. If you do a turn two sacrifice to put a Fire Elemental in play and your opponent untaps and kills it with a Dark Banishing, you are walking into turn three with almost nothing in play. But the Red/Green mid range rush was totally a thing, and the Orcish Lumberjack felt very at home in that. I think the Orcish Lumberjack was actually supposed to be a shitty joke card, all the other “Orcish [Job Title]” cards from the set are there to make fun of the fact that they aren't good at their job.
Hah! The joke is that Orcs are bad at their jobs and break everything they touch. Get it?
But the thing is, sometimes this was very very good. It's not just the bizarrely Dr. Seussesque Orcish Lumberjack, the Orcish Librarian is really powerful.
The thing is that exiling random cards off the top of your deck basically isn't even a cost. You're only going to see a finite number of cards during the game, so cards that are “out of the game” aren't really different from cards that are on the bottom of your deck or even the middle of your deck. The Orcish Librarian lets you choose your draws for the next four turns, and if you don't like your coming draws a few turns from now you can use it again. It's really good. It was written explicitly as a joke card, but the thing it does (hand management) is so good that it's very powerful nonetheless. People were offended that they were having their teeth kicked in by a joke card, but they were going to have their teeth kicked in. It pretty much guaranteed that the Red Deck was going to be drawing and casting on curve for the entire game.
The thing is that this vision of Orcs as the joke cards of bumbling buffoons who were useful if and only if their destructive hijinks fit tangentially into your master plan was a bad vision. It was grossly unpopular, and eventually WotC just stopped making these things altogether. There was a big Orcish reboot in Tarkir, and there are literally more Orcs in Standard today than there were in the entire previous history of Magic the Gathering. There were no new Orcs printed between 1997 (with Orcish Settlers in Weatherlight) until 2006 (there were some new Orcs in Time Spiral and Coldsnap) and then there were no more new Orcs until Tarkir in 2014. Even when Orcs were good mechanically, they were still explicitly joke cards and bad for the game.
The current crop of Orcs are awesome, and I have zero problems with them.
To round this out, Red has a lot of sideboard cards in this set.
Pretty straightforward there, nothing complicated. Classic Red.
We say that Red is Aggressive Creatures plus Burn, because that is all Red has had that has ever been enough to build a deck around. Yes, they have other shticks lying around the house, but they don't matter. Red has a little “Chaos” theme, and sometimes the Chaos cards it gets are really good (example: Wheel of Fortune), and in Ice Age the Chaos cards are really terrible. But that doesn't actually matter, because you were only going to use or not use any Chaos cards as a minor adjunct to your primary plan of beating your opponent to death with aggressive creatures with some burn to open lanes and possibly finish your opponent off.
The designers of Ice Age apparently thought that “chaos” meant “impenetrable mountains of text” and also “incredibly shitty crap.” But these wastes of cardboard have little overall effect on how good Red Decks were, because you weren't planning on running any of this shit anyway.
Similarly, Ice Age produced a “land theft” subtheme, which people tried to make decks around and ultimately gave up because it was shit.
A land destruction deck is a form of “Prison Deck,” which is a deck that attempts to create a situation where the enemy cannot do whatever their deck is supposed to do to win. Most decks need land to do their thing, so if you take or destroy their land, the prison is in place. The thing about Ice Age's contributions into this arena is that 5 mana to get rid of a land is bullshit. If you need to get to five mana to put your prison walls up, your opponent has already escaped before the first land gets taken away.
That's probably for the best. Prison Decks are frustrating to play against. Whether they are good or bad, they are defined by your opponent being forbidden from doing whatever it was the player thought sounded fun when they built the deck. Land destruction prison decks have pretty much never been good, because WotC has been reluctant to print the kinds of fast cards that would make them good. And that's good.
When compared against the other colors in Ice Age, Red generally holds its own. It doesn't have a gamebreaker on the order of Necropotence, and it's a bit weak on the high-end - there's basically nothing to counteract Big Blue or Big Black, if someone was going to play those, which they are not, but they do have some critter at pretty much every casting cost they can play, and those are generally competitive.
This costs one more mana than a Knight of Stromgald. But it will kill and eat a Knight of Stromgald, even if it dies doing it. And from a Red perspective, that is a fair price to pay. And where this really comes into its own is when Red is paired with Black, because you can get a cheap-but-mostly-useless Red critter on turn one...
...and then sacrifice it to play something useful on turn two.
And this embraces the strengths of both colors, but it's an emergent property of play - which is, ironically, better than some of the deliberate Black/Red cards:
With the possible exception of this one:
This is largely a land-denial card, as Frank pointed out above, but it has some weird and interesting uses, especially in a Red/Black deck where suddenly you have access to critters with Swampwalk.
Next up: Green.
Red
Red as it sees itself.
Red, as seen by Blue.
AncientH:
If Black is the clear winner of Ice Age, and Blue has a lot of great cards with a lot of chaff, Red is...interesting. It has enough stuff to basically stand alone, as Red usually does, but it also appears to still be caught up in some leftover Fallen Empires thinking. That is to say, it has a lot of stuff carried over or slightly modified from 4th edition standard burn spells, which is Red's bread and butter, and it has a lot of weird Orcs and Goblins which don't quite go together in any real sense, but are...well, they just are.
Presumably, the reason Ice Age includes an Orgg on a diet is because they couldn't think of a way to ruin Red standards Ball Lightning, Fire Elemental, Earth Elemental, Dragon Whelp, or Shivan Dragon.
Some of these cards are very useful and interesting. Others are just bizarre. Still, Red at least has some game in the 1-2 mana range.
...and this is basically where Goblins finally overtake Orcs. Because while you have critters like Orcish Librarian and Orcish Lumberjack which are interesting, Goblin Ski Patrol at least can attack pumped, do its damage, and then you blow it up with a Goblin Grenade because it's going to die anyway.
Hi Mike!
FrankT:
More than any other color, Red found its footing early. It gets rid of your opponent by doing damage to them, and it gets rid of your opponent's creatures by doing damage to them. You can beat Red by going bigger than their removal spells and creatures or by stopping damage. You can lose to Red by trying to go too big and having them beat you to death with a rock before you put together your death laser. We know what a good Red deck looks like, and thus what a good Red card looks like. Red cards are good if they burn out the creatures that people are actually using or if they can help kill your opponent before they can pull off whatever tricky shit they are attempting. More than any other color, Red plays by the rules. You can keep Red from killing your creatures by having more toughness, Red can kill you faster by having creatures with more power. Red cares about attackers and blockers and all that shit. White had a “Circle of Protection” that negated incoming damage from a color targeted at each color, but the one people actually played was the Red one. Because every other color might be pulling some kind of tricky bullshit while Red was just counting down your life points by swinging in for damage.
Red sometimes wants to go big and sometimes wants to go small, depending on what other decks are doing. There are times that Red wants to save up for big 5/5 Dragons because enemies are fielding 4/4 fliers. There are times that Red wants to throw down a lot of 1/1 Goblins... because enemies are saving up for 4/4 fliers. Red is happy when the dominant creature paradigm has creatures of a size that Red can kill one for one with the cheap burn spells they have. Red is sad when the dominant creature paradigm requires it to spend two cards or save up a lot of mana to remove enemy threats. It's all very simple, and you can explain the metagame evolution to an eight year old.
So going into Ice Age, Red pretty much knew what it wanted. It wanted aggressively costed aggro critters in whatever size categories happened to be available – be they big, small, or mid range. It wanted burn spells that could affordably kill the creatures that could be expected to be on the board.
That's kinda shit. But it's not completely shit.
What's really missing here is anything big that you'd want to use.
Believe it or not, the Goblin Mutant was considered a playable card at the time.
Red plays most like a football game of any of the colors. Cards are evaluated by how easy they are to get through and how many points they score when they succeed. Also what resources of your opponent that they can tie up. The Goblin Mutant does five damage, so if it gets through twice, he's given you half the game. He is difficult to get through, because he won't attack if the enemy has any mid-size blocker available. But if you can burn out the enemy blockers and run him through a couple of times, you're a long way towards victory.
That's actually pretty shit. Sorry, that's really shit. But at the time it was considered “kinda OK” because that's what there was to work with. And hey, if your opponent only has 2 power creatures, the Goblin Mutant could trade 2:1, and that's actively good.
AncientH:
Ice Age Red has critters with some interesting design in them. Not, y'know good, necessarily, because it's generally overpriced for whatever the effect is. For example:
This is basically an overpriced Lightning Bolt. But, for the extra 1 mana, it prevents regeneration. It may not be a first-turn cast, but it's a legitimate addition to your burn potential.
For Red, this is a joke card. It's not a bad card - the mechanics are interesting - it's just not a Red card. This should be a White card. And it should be 1W. But it isn't, so you're probably never going to play this. By a similar logic:
Frank and I both enjoy the design on this card. It's too expensive to boost, and you're unlikely to ever play it because it doesn't have trample. But it's a really nifty design, and Red doesn't often get interesting design.
"Chaos" is one of Red's sub-suits. It usually involves some random or pseudo-random schtick, which could be awesome or terrible. Doesn't come up very often these days, because people got tired of flipping coins and shit. And you almost never see a focus on these kind of decks outside of constructed, because Red never includes enough cards in a given set to build, say, a Red Control deck.
Red Control is kind of bizarre, and pretty much exists less as "Red is a counterpart to Blue" than "Red occasionally likes to play with mana and untap things too." Control just doesn't come naturally to Red, because it's easier to burn stuff.
FrankT:
We would be remiss if we didn't discuss Red's one and only power card in this set:
In case you can't read the incredibly tiny text on this bad boy, what he does is go on a suicide mission to make your opponent explode. When he attacks, all your other creatures get +x/+x, where x is the number of non-Marton attackers. He's still a 1/1 no matter what, and he has to be declared as an attacker to pull this nonsense off. So it's virtually certain that he will personally die during his big attack. But it's a very big attack. If you have four other attackers, they all get +4/+4, so even if he's leading in Goblins and Mountain Goats, it's still an attack for lethal.
Dr. Stromgald here would be playable today. And he is such a good capstone for weenie rush decks that people wouldn't feel weird about including him in decks that pack Hordeling Outburst and Dragon Fodder with a straight face. Turn five, attack for 31. The only weird thing about it is that he is attacking for one and can be killed by an Arashin Cleric. Everyone else gets quadratic bonuses and gets completely out of hand.
AncientH:
Red doesn't interact much with the other Ice Age mechanics.
These basically exists to fuck with Icequake.
The surprising thing is that some of these cards look like they might actually have been useful, if the costs weren't bizarrely blown up. The Karplusan Giant, for example, is 7 mana for a pumpable 3/3. You're never going to field that, but the "tap snowlands to pump" is a good ability. Sacrificing a snow land to negate combat damage is too expensive, but tapping a snow land to do that would be interesting. Ironically, I think that Ice Age Red might have been the inspiration for the godawful "Snow Mana" bullshit in ColdSnap, because you can sort of see how they were trying to make snow-covered lands...useful.
FrankT:
Unlike the Black and Blue spells that were supposed to play nice with their ally colors, Red actually does a pretty decent job playing nice with its allied colors. Or rather, it has one card that plays really really nice with Green.
This isn't it.
This is it.
The Orcish Lumberjack makes a shit tonne of mana. You can tap that forest and then sacrifice it for 3 more mana. With a Mox or a Sol Ring you can drop a 6 mana dragon on turn two. It's very aggro, it's very Red, it's very Green, and it's very powerful. I mean, it can all go disastrously wrong of course. If you do a turn two sacrifice to put a Fire Elemental in play and your opponent untaps and kills it with a Dark Banishing, you are walking into turn three with almost nothing in play. But the Red/Green mid range rush was totally a thing, and the Orcish Lumberjack felt very at home in that. I think the Orcish Lumberjack was actually supposed to be a shitty joke card, all the other “Orcish [Job Title]” cards from the set are there to make fun of the fact that they aren't good at their job.
Hah! The joke is that Orcs are bad at their jobs and break everything they touch. Get it?
But the thing is, sometimes this was very very good. It's not just the bizarrely Dr. Seussesque Orcish Lumberjack, the Orcish Librarian is really powerful.
The thing is that exiling random cards off the top of your deck basically isn't even a cost. You're only going to see a finite number of cards during the game, so cards that are “out of the game” aren't really different from cards that are on the bottom of your deck or even the middle of your deck. The Orcish Librarian lets you choose your draws for the next four turns, and if you don't like your coming draws a few turns from now you can use it again. It's really good. It was written explicitly as a joke card, but the thing it does (hand management) is so good that it's very powerful nonetheless. People were offended that they were having their teeth kicked in by a joke card, but they were going to have their teeth kicked in. It pretty much guaranteed that the Red Deck was going to be drawing and casting on curve for the entire game.
The thing is that this vision of Orcs as the joke cards of bumbling buffoons who were useful if and only if their destructive hijinks fit tangentially into your master plan was a bad vision. It was grossly unpopular, and eventually WotC just stopped making these things altogether. There was a big Orcish reboot in Tarkir, and there are literally more Orcs in Standard today than there were in the entire previous history of Magic the Gathering. There were no new Orcs printed between 1997 (with Orcish Settlers in Weatherlight) until 2006 (there were some new Orcs in Time Spiral and Coldsnap) and then there were no more new Orcs until Tarkir in 2014. Even when Orcs were good mechanically, they were still explicitly joke cards and bad for the game.
The current crop of Orcs are awesome, and I have zero problems with them.
AncientH:
To round this out, Red has a lot of sideboard cards in this set.
Pretty straightforward there, nothing complicated. Classic Red.
FrankT:
We say that Red is Aggressive Creatures plus Burn, because that is all Red has had that has ever been enough to build a deck around. Yes, they have other shticks lying around the house, but they don't matter. Red has a little “Chaos” theme, and sometimes the Chaos cards it gets are really good (example: Wheel of Fortune), and in Ice Age the Chaos cards are really terrible. But that doesn't actually matter, because you were only going to use or not use any Chaos cards as a minor adjunct to your primary plan of beating your opponent to death with aggressive creatures with some burn to open lanes and possibly finish your opponent off.
The designers of Ice Age apparently thought that “chaos” meant “impenetrable mountains of text” and also “incredibly shitty crap.” But these wastes of cardboard have little overall effect on how good Red Decks were, because you weren't planning on running any of this shit anyway.
Similarly, Ice Age produced a “land theft” subtheme, which people tried to make decks around and ultimately gave up because it was shit.
A land destruction deck is a form of “Prison Deck,” which is a deck that attempts to create a situation where the enemy cannot do whatever their deck is supposed to do to win. Most decks need land to do their thing, so if you take or destroy their land, the prison is in place. The thing about Ice Age's contributions into this arena is that 5 mana to get rid of a land is bullshit. If you need to get to five mana to put your prison walls up, your opponent has already escaped before the first land gets taken away.
That's probably for the best. Prison Decks are frustrating to play against. Whether they are good or bad, they are defined by your opponent being forbidden from doing whatever it was the player thought sounded fun when they built the deck. Land destruction prison decks have pretty much never been good, because WotC has been reluctant to print the kinds of fast cards that would make them good. And that's good.
AncientH:
When compared against the other colors in Ice Age, Red generally holds its own. It doesn't have a gamebreaker on the order of Necropotence, and it's a bit weak on the high-end - there's basically nothing to counteract Big Blue or Big Black, if someone was going to play those, which they are not, but they do have some critter at pretty much every casting cost they can play, and those are generally competitive.
This costs one more mana than a Knight of Stromgald. But it will kill and eat a Knight of Stromgald, even if it dies doing it. And from a Red perspective, that is a fair price to pay. And where this really comes into its own is when Red is paired with Black, because you can get a cheap-but-mostly-useless Red critter on turn one...
...and then sacrifice it to play something useful on turn two.
And this embraces the strengths of both colors, but it's an emergent property of play - which is, ironically, better than some of the deliberate Black/Red cards:
With the possible exception of this one:
This is largely a land-denial card, as Frank pointed out above, but it has some weird and interesting uses, especially in a Red/Black deck where suddenly you have access to critters with Swampwalk.
FrankT:
Next up: Green.
-
Josh_Kablack
- King
- Posts: 5318
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
- Location: Online. duh
Ok, this is the point where we leave "differences of opinion" territory and get to me screaming at you.Ancient History wrote:AncientH:
Let's talk about bad cards. Ice Age Black has them. Anything with CU. There aren't many of them, but you seriously don't need this or this:
Infernal Darkness was probably the strongest sideboard card in Ige Age, and one of small handful of cards where paying the Cumulative Upkeep was worthwhile. Against a non-black deck, it makes all of their lands produce only off-color mana. So in any environment without worthy colored-mana producing/converting artifacts/creatures/enchantments it locks a non-black opponent out of casting anything other than artifacts for as long as you can maintain it. It wasn't so good in Type I (now vintage) where a full set of moxen were expected, but in Ice Age Block the colored nonland sources of mana were 2 elves, Tinder Wall, Orcish Lumberjack and Barbed Sextant. In Type II (now standard - I think ?) you added cards from Fourth Edition (Birds of Paradise, another Elf) Fallen Empires (Farrelite Priest, Implements of Sacrifice) and the Dark (Gaea's Touch, Felwar Stone - which only produces black under Infernal Darkness).
So in the formats of the time, there was no a whole lot of useful non-land mana worth playing. And in practice you sideboarded this in against any non-black opponent, played it after your Necropotence deck had used early ramps and card advantage to get ahead, and dropped this to prevent an opponent from catching up or turning the corner. It came pretty close to a hard lock against opponents not running Green either. This is especially notable as Necropotence's biggest vulnerability in the meta was to mono-red Sligh decks.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
Ice age was a special set for me. Thats about when I first got in, and I totally remember being like 10, and stomping all the other 10 year olds. No one had thought of any tactic aside from "Get a giant creature and smash the opponent in one turn". My tactic was swarm you with a bunch of 1 mana common monsters before you got your dude out. I tore apart the playground. Occasionally someone would hear from their brother how awesome Necropotence was, and they would get really excited and play one. Then go into the "Oh man, you lose now" speech. Then they would lose hard, because they had no idea how to use it. I thought it was the worst card and didn't get at all why the forums were crazy about it. I was on some magic forum i can't recall, posting like you'd imagine a 10 year old would. I was probably literally one of those mouth breathers Frank talks about.
Then someone's brother actually came over and played a game with me using Necropotence. Shit did that change how I played magic forever. It was honestly the first time I realized that cards could combo with one another, card drawing was good, and things besides creatures were worth playing. I played up until 3-4 years ago, when I decided I didn't want to keep setting money on fire, and would still break out a Necropotence deck on occasion.
Then someone's brother actually came over and played a game with me using Necropotence. Shit did that change how I played magic forever. It was honestly the first time I realized that cards could combo with one another, card drawing was good, and things besides creatures were worth playing. I played up until 3-4 years ago, when I decided I didn't want to keep setting money on fire, and would still break out a Necropotence deck on occasion.
This was that story above. My deck was called "The mountain goat deck".Red sometimes wants to go big and sometimes wants to go small, depending on what other decks are doing. There are times that Red wants to save up for big 5/5 Dragons because enemies are fielding 4/4 fliers. There are times that Red wants to throw down a lot of 1/1 Goblins... because enemies are saving up for 4/4 fliers. Red is happy when the dominant creature paradigm has creatures of a size that Red can kill one for one with the cheap burn spells they have. Red is sad when the dominant creature paradigm requires it to spend two cards or save up a lot of mana to remove enemy threats. It's all very simple, and you can explain the metagame evolution to an eight year old.
100% true.Similarly, Ice Age produced a “land theft” subtheme, which people tried to make decks around and ultimately gave up because it was shit.
-
Josh_Kablack
- King
- Posts: 5318
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
- Location: Online. duh
Which is notably diffent than "the bad cards". Cards that are part of toolkits to deal with specific tournament meta are of limited use, but not useless. You could have been mocking Gaze of Pain, Drift of the Dead or Soul Kiss instead.Ancient History wrote:Listen to yourself: the strongest sideboard card.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
-
Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
-
RobbyPants
- King
- Posts: 5201
- Joined: Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:11 pm
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
I'm not so sure WotC did stop making Orcs because nobody liked having joke characters who were comically inept at their jobs as their main schtick. That theme continued unabated for many years, and in some cases still does - they just swapped it over to Goblins. I think it was more that Orcs were removed because they were too similar to Goblins thematically - small red creatures that were often jokey and cowardly - and having multiple similar creature types messes with the games ability to make tribal matter. It looks like the "goblins are bad at their jobs" meme is still a popular one:Ancient History wrote:The thing is that this vision of Orcs as the joke cards of bumbling buffoons who were useful if and only if their destructive hijinks fit tangentially into your master plan was a bad vision. It was grossly unpopular, and eventually WotC just stopped making these things altogether. There was a big Orcish reboot in Tarkir, and there are literally more Orcs in Standard today than there were in the entire previous history of Magic the Gathering. There were no new Orcs printed between 1997 (with Orcish Settlers in Weatherlight) until 2006 (there were some new Orcs in Time Spiral and Coldsnap) and then there were no more new Orcs until Tarkir in 2014. Even when Orcs were good mechanically, they were still explicitly joke cards and bad for the game.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Although even those are seemingly being phased out. The latest of those was a rare printed in Spring of 2013. The closest to a "humorous" Goblin in current Standard is the Dragonlord's Servant:
No evidence they are particularly bad at their job, just that their Dragon masters regard them as edible (something they apparently take steps to counteract). These days, Goblin Scouts appear to be decently good at scouting:
-Username17
No evidence they are particularly bad at their job, just that their Dragon masters regard them as edible (something they apparently take steps to counteract). These days, Goblin Scouts appear to be decently good at scouting:
-Username17