Wear//Tear ... Why not?
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Just a quick question. I've heard a couple people say now that wear tear has just been passed over completely by other, more recent printings. (Fragmentize?)
Kari's putting the Jeskai band back together, and I'm seeing that no lists are running wear//tear at all. This doesn't strike me as being quite so cut and dry as the rest of everyone seems to. What am I missing?
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@topical_island Fragmentize is cheaper and Abrade also can target creatures. You're much more likely to see a relevant enchantment OR relevant artifact, and rarely both together. You are likely, however, to see relevant creatures and artifacts in the same deck, so abrade serves more use with less SB slots.
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I think this has more to do with how Shops has evolved. Previous versions of Shops ran both 4 x Chalice of the Void and 4 x Tangle Wire. This created a need for 2 mana instant speed artifact removal and Wear/Tear had several advantages over Disenchant - it allowed decks to stay base red for their artifact removal (with Ingot Chewer) and the fuse ability was actually pretty relevant (blew up multiple Oaths + Mox when I ran it).
However, current versions of Shops are much more aggressive and threat dense. This strongly selects for one mana removal like Fragmentize, Swords, Bolt, etc. due to tempo considerations and if you are paying 2+ mana for removal, you want to destroy/nullify multiple threats (like with By Force, Shattering Spree, Hurkyl's, or Ancient Grudge). I still consider Wear/Tear as a metagame card. However it would be a rare metagame without much Shops and with large numbers of Oath, Sylvan Mentor, and random Search from Azcanza decks.
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@topical_island said in Wear//Tear ... Why not?:
Just a quick question. I've heard a couple people say now that wear tear has just been passed over completely by other, more recent printings. (Fragmentize?)
Kari's putting the Jeskai band back together, and I'm seeing that no lists are running wear//tear at all. This doesn't strike me as being quite so cut and dry as the rest of everyone seems to. What am I missing?
There are still people that are big fans of wear/tear. Joe Brennan tries to talk me into playing it every time we discuss artifact hate. I honestly dont see it as being passed over by cards like fragmentize. I see them as roughly equal but serving slightly different purposes. Wear/tear dodges chalice at 1 and is instant speed where fragmentize does neither. But fragmentize is easier to cast thru sphere effects.
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It also has to do with your manabase in Jeskai. Specifically, against Wasteland decks, what is your secondary, and what is your tertiary color? Often times you don't want to be fetching red mana if your secondary color is white, per se. There are small intricacies and tradeoffs, aside from the instant vs. sorcery speed and 1 vs. 2 mana.
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The simple answer really is that the other options have better rate, and are closer to the spot on the mana curve where they are needed. There is the classic heuristic about using removal that is less expensive than its target. It applies to Vintage now, which is kind of awesome.
Things like instant speed, or card economy, or card-card interactions, do act as extenuating factors to tip this decision one way or the other, but Wear/Tear’s extra little something is really mediocre.
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I don't know that it's any more complicated than Wear//Tear costs 2 mana to kill artifacts.
I do think that Wear//Tear is the better card against Oath - beyond being an instant, attacking mana can be pretty relevant against Inferno Oath decks planning on ramping to
6 drops. Still, Fragmentize is fine in the matchup and much better against workshop decks. I think generally people are more concerned about their Workshop matchup right now, and Jeskai players who are worried about Oath (like myself) have access to the probably-better-than-wear//tear Containment Priest.Still, there probably is a deck that wants the card - either something that's very short on anti-Oath/Shops slots and can't afford to run Cages/Priests, or something that has excessive anti-Oath/Shops slots and can afford Wear//Tear in addition to Fragmentize/Cage/Priest ... I don't know what that deck looks like, but it's plausible
