Party time! I liked playing Lurrus decks. Will it be good enough? I think so.
Lurrus unbanned
I've been testing my old Lurrus Combo PO deck. A bunch of good stuff, and my protection is discard instead of coutermagic. So far, with the companion rule change, Lurrus is more fair but still incredibly strong.
Their rationale provided by Wizards is that the "companion tax" is more detrimental in vintage. However, because Lurrus is such a cheap companion at only 3CMC the tax only delays the powerful plays, usuallly by only a turn.
The major issue is that, if your deck can support a companion without sacrificing anything... then you run it. Lurrus is just the best of em.
I'm surprised I don't see more companions in Storm or other non creature decks, honestly. The nightmare lord or lurrus would prolly fit.
The calculation for me is usually either necro and tinker or lurrus. Also oko. Its probably gonna be common but by no means universal.
@maximumcdawg said in Lurrus unbanned:
The major issue is that, if your deck can support a companion without sacrificing anything... then you run it. Lurrus is just the best of em.
Maybe I am alone here but isn't Lurris kinda top tier playable without having to be a companion? Recall that there was a discussion when she first came out as to if it would be better to have 4 copies main deck than 1 as a companion with the restrictions. There are a few cards, notably Monastery Mentor, that you would very likely like to run along side her.
I think the new companion tax is enough that it will remove that strategy from the meta outside of decks that already conformed to the deck building requirements, but as a maindeck player in something like standstill? That's still very strong.
@maximumcdawg said in Lurrus unbanned:
I'm surprised I don't see more companions in Storm or other non creature decks, honestly. The nightmare lord or lurrus would prolly fit.
if kaheera didn't cost G/W G/W, maybe.
decks that can cast it probably have monastery mentor in them, and thus can't play it as a companion.
there aren't many that are really freely available in vintage aside from kaheera in truly creatureless decks, and the fact that any deck could be 80 cards if you really wanted to play yorion. odd/even/3cmc+ all are significant constraints. Jegantha means that among other things, you can't play force of will or force of negation. zirda (activated abilities) or umori(all spells of the same type) are free or close to it in the right deck, though they add constraints to the 75 (boarding in leylines or dismember with umori or cage/defense grid with zirda turn off the companion). lurrus's constraint are substantial: no narset, any other non w6 walker, tinker (unless it's just for vault/key), mentor. in legacy, it meant no gurmag, borrower, TNN, oko. these constraints were just worth it, because of what lurrus did, but wouldn't have been worth it for just a vanilla creature, which is what Kaheera effectively is.
@blindtherapy said in Lurrus unbanned:
there aren't many that are really freely available in vintage aside from kaheera in truly creatureless decks
Just an aside I never understood. Why does Kaheera work with no creatures in the deck. The wording is "Companion — Each creature card in your starting deck is a Cat, Elemental, Nightmare, Dinosaur, or Beast card.".
If there are no creatures in your deck then none of them meet the prerequisite right? EACH in my mind is different than ALL. It is asking for a positive result with this wording. If the card had been worded differently like "Your deck does not contain creatures except for Cat, Elemental, Nightmare, Dinosaur, or Beast card." I would say it works, but it seems to me this prerequisite is requires a non null value. This is why so many of the templates have changed for cards that say "Your opponent discards X and then does Y" to Your opponent discards X, then if they discarded a card do Y".
@protoaddict said in Lurrus unbanned:
Just an aside I never understood. Why does Kaheera work with no creatures in the deck. The wording is "Companion — Each creature card in your starting deck is a Cat, Elemental, Nightmare, Dinosaur, or Beast card.".
it works for the same reason lurrus works if you have no permanents, or obosh if your deck is entirely lands, or umori if you have only lands... a deck of 80 basic lands satisfies the requirements of all existing companions, despite missing odds/evens/expensive things/cheap things/cats/uniquely named nonland cards
"each creature card in your starting deck is a cat/etc" is functionally identical to "there are no non-cat/etc creature cards in your starting deck"
each creature in your creatureless deck is a cat, in the same way that every vintage champs i've won i've won with a U/G madness draft deck shuffled together with two Unhinged boosters, and every Lamborghini I own is neon green.
@blindtherapy said in Lurrus unbanned:
and every Lamborghini I own is neon green.
I understand that mathematically this technically works out, but the rules of language are different than this. I feel like if you made this statement on a legal document for instance and had to go to court over it, it would be deemed misleading if not fraudulent
Also, reread Obosh and Gyruda. They specifically call out lands as an exclusion on Obosh and not on Gyruda because we know that lands are both a card and has a CMC of 0. Now granted that CMC 0 is something that was codified in the rules some time ago for cards without casting costs like lands, but they were very explicit with these wording so you could not wind up with a null value. Likewise Keruga is also this explicit in that it includes lands so you cannot wind up with a null value, and Jegantha in such a way that it is looking for the lack of, not the presence of.
Honestly after rereading them I actually question the way a few of them are worded. Zirda, the Dawnwaker should probably say all instead of EACH because we know all includes 0, each is not as explicit. I realize we use them the way we use them because WOTC can just say by edict that it works this way, but the templating seems sloppy to me.
@protoaddict said in Lurrus unbanned:
Honestly after rereading them I actually question the way a few of them are worded. Zirda, the Dawnwaker should probably say all instead of EACH because we know all includes 0, each is not as explicit. I realize we use them the way we use them because WOTC can just say by edict that it works this way, but the templating seems sloppy to me.
I would say that if Zirda said "All" instead of "Each," that would be ambiguous because it could imply that all cards would have the same activated ability. The use of "each" implies that for each permanent card in your deck, they each have their own activated ability.
If the templating were instead "All permanent cards in your starting deck each have their own activated ability," that would be redundant. The templating, as worded, uses "each" to save space and use fewer words on the card
I used to work in publishing, and it always boiled down ensuring the typesetting and format of a page not only made sense, but looked "as clean as possible."
@horologium said in Lurrus unbanned:
I used to work in publishing, and it always boiled down ensuring the typesetting and format of a page not only made sense, but looked "as clean as possible."
I also used to work in publishing, it is a different Paradigm in a game. There can be no interpretation of how a card works, otherwise you wind up having to issue addendums and clarifications. Better to be slightly redundant and clear than ambiguous and need to clear up something that is not explicit enough.
there isn't any ambiguity in kaheera. it looks at a certain subset of cards in your deck and checks if they meet certain requirements: lurrus, lutri, umori, and zirda are templated in the same manner. lots of problems with companion as a mechanic from a design perspective, but the templating is fine. it's not Hostage Taker, or printing a card that makes '4/4 tokens' that aren't creatures.
my real issue with companion is that you can play jegantha as your companion with an alladin's lamp in your deck, despite the card being printed with a cost of {5}{5}. I believe this constitutes power level errata.
So sad by these changes. Not so much for Lurrus, but because Teferi was a 4x in my pioneer deck and SSG was crucial in my Modern deck (the ones I dumped all my other decks to max out on). Now those 2 decks are essentially dead cardboard :(.
