[LEG] Greed
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Normally you are snappy but this is very good analysis and explanation.
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I'm just gonna throw some gasoline on the fire and say that skeletal scrying is great
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@botvinik I have my moments. I usually am selective with my snark - typically when someone dismisses good criticisms in favor of a pet...or when someone 5-0s an online league and tries to justify a 1-of they crammed in their 60 by holding that 5-0 record as proof.
In general, I like good discussion on cards. Hard for me to not poke the bear when people get chippy though. Can't contain my online troll sometimes.
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@thewhitedragon69 said in [LEG] Greed:
@botvinik I have my moments. I usually am selective with my snark - typically when someone dismisses good criticisms in favor of a pet...or when someone 5-0s an online league and tries to justify a 1-of they crammed in their 60 by holding that 5-0 record as proof.
In general, I like good discussion on cards. Hard for me to not poke the bear when people get chippy though. Can't contain my online troll sometimes.
Agreed except for one thing. There is a false equivalency comparing unproven cards to minimally proven cards. We should at least respect people that play for their willingness to put their money where their mouth is. Being all talk and no walk is also a detriment to people that are just out there to yuck someone’s yum.
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I have played with Infernal Contract and Cruel Bargain. They’re the same card and unrivaled for their ability. If your goal is to play a variant of “Contract Tendrils”, I’m sure there is a build that makes great use of those cards. So I wouldn’t say they’re unplayable. In fact they might even deserve their own thread for deck design.
I admit that my inspiration for Greed has been taken from old school. In terms of raw card draw, there are more straight forward options. But Greed possesses multiple traits that make it unique.
The first is the ability to pace the draws. You don’t have to draw everything at once. You can leave up mana for countermagic and then simply dump the excess into Greed. This makes it great for playing alongside countermagic or playing around Narset. You can also strategically dwindle your life to coincide with a Mirror Universe effect or Death’s Shadow. In this case, Greed can function as part of a win condition.
The second is the initial mana cost. It’s 3B, which means you really don’t have to burn a Ritual to cast it. You can cast it off of some moxes and a Sol Ring and let it sit until it makes sense to use it.
The 3rd is that it is an enchantment. I suspect Black enchantments are one of most elusive card types in the current meta. It can’t be Flusterstormed. It can’t be REBed. It can’t be Okoed or Daked. It can’t be Abrupt Decayed. There is Force of Vigor though, but maybe Greed is not a great card for the Bazaar matchup.
I might compare this card to baby jace. It really isn’t doing much the turn you cast it, but once it’s down it can represent the victory — and it’s not easily removed.
I would very much like to brew with this card. I might not be successful, but I just think there is a little more to this card than meets the eye.
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@lienielsen You are free to brew with anything you want. Let us know how successful you are.
I don't know how valid the "gets around restricted Narset" argument is. That's pretty niche nowadays and won't come up in most blue matchups as a 1-of (and blue will be only half your matches anyway).
In OS, Greed is sweet...but OS is such a slower format than Vintage. I don't even think Greed is fast enough for MODERN. IC/CB is all black, but I thought we were staying in black. If blue is an option to run with counters, then there are lots of superior blue draw spells (standstill for example only dies to REB on the stack - can't be flustered, decayed, vigored, or REBed in play). If we're staying in black...IC is probably the best 3-mana draw-4 I can find. In a deck where you run rituals, BBB is light years faster than 3B - especially when they can remove Greed before you ever draw 1 card with Vigor (and oath/vengevine would eat Greed for lunch with their ability to win faster or take your life toward 0 in a hurry).
You mention Mirror Universe, so I know you are an OS player
. MU has no prayer of ever being a viable win in Vintage nowadays. Death's Shadow is more Modern. I know some have tried a turbo-DS list, but infect is honestly just faster/better (invigorate + berserk anyone?).Play any card you want. But if you are "just throwing the idea out there" without ample testing/success to back it up, people will point out the flaws/reasons why it likely won't work.
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@thewhitedragon69 said in [LEG] Greed:
@lienielsen You are free to brew with anything you want. Let us know how successful you are.
You’ve already made it clear you’re going to shit on his deck if he 5-0s with a maindeck 1-of. If anything I recommend @LieNielsen chose a different community to share his ideas with.
This about you?
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It’s honestly pretty fair to call Greed terrible. I’m still going to go to bat for it but I don’t want to turn this into a flame war thread.
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To be fair, I wouldn't shit on the deck if he 5-0 with Greed as a 1-of if he could explain why every time he drew it, it was THE card he wanted to draw, or why it was better than other options. I don't have issues with people posting good records and showing how the card was critical to the result. If the OP ran a ritual storm list with a greed, went 5-0, and could explain the scenarios where it won him games, was better than other options, or was at least as good as any other card when he drew it in multiple stages of the game....that's perfectly fine reasoning.
What I DO dislike is when people play a 1-of and 5-0 a league (and maybe went 3-2, 1-4, whatever the other 90x they played it) with a solid 59 card deck with a 1-of that was irrelevant or inferior in those 5 wins and holds up that record as proof that "card X is good." When someone runs a tuned Workshop list with a singleton Burning Wish (with no red mana), 5-0s, and then says "see, I 5-0d; Workshop Wish is baller," that's where I take issue.
Yes, that post from BrassMan was about me. The only one who I can see that I annoy (probably consistently) is Chubbyrain. I've actually had a lot of good discussions on TMD, but for some reason I tend to get snarky/snippy with Chubbyrain.
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@thewhitedragon69 said in [LEG] Greed:
To be fair, I wouldn't shit on the deck if he 5-0 with Greed as a 1-of if he could explain why every time he drew it, it was THE card he wanted to draw, or why it was better than other options. I don't have issues with people posting good records and showing how the card was critical to the result. If the OP ran a ritual storm list with a greed, went 5-0, and could explain the scenarios where it won him games, was better than other options, or was at least as good as any other card when he drew it in multiple stages of the game....that's perfectly fine reasoning.
What I DO dislike is when people play a 1-of and 5-0 a league (and maybe went 3-2, 1-4, whatever the other 90x they played it) with a solid 59 card deck with a 1-of that was irrelevant or inferior in those 5 wins and holds up that record as proof that "card X is good." When someone runs a tuned Workshop list with a singleton Burning Wish (with no red mana), 5-0s, and then says "see, I 5-0d; Workshop Wish is baller," that's where I take issue.
From experience, you would ignore all the scenarios they described and the posts where they literally went through other cards that could be played in that slot to rail against your own personal interpretation of what they wrote even though they tried to correct you multiple times.
http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/3248/zrn-omnath-locus-of-creation/43
http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/3248/zrn-omnath-locus-of-creation/61
http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/3248/zrn-omnath-locus-of-creation/70
http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/3248/zrn-omnath-locus-of-creation/79
http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/3248/zrn-omnath-locus-of-creation/83Yes, that post from BrassMan was about me. The only one who I can see that I annoy (probably consistently) is Chubbyrain. I've actually had a lot of good discussions on TMD, but for some reason I tend to get snarky/snippy with Chubbyrain.
Could you share some pointers on how to successfully annoy people from the site? Asking for a friend.
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@chubbyrain1 LOL. I think this is why I pick with you. You clearly get riled up and hold grudges from post to post. Makes it too easy. You feed my troll.
But I think I'll call a truce and stop sniping you. Not sure why I singled you out in the first place (other than you make it so easy!) Let the Omnath thing go - I release you. Peace be with you
.As to the OP, I made my points on Greed vs other cards like IC/CB. Happy testing.
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There's a kind of playful teasing that feel really welcoming and inclusive in person. At my local card shop I might crack jokes at a friend's misplay and they might make fun of some ridiculous pet card I'm running. This serves as a kind of play, a way of pushing your friends to be better while letting them know it's no big deal. It can work to break down prestige-hierarchies, so Andy doesn't get a big head because he published an article on SCG, it flattens the hierarchy and keeps people equal, it comes from a place a love, it's a way of saying "I see you as part of a community that we're building together."
There are two very common ways this can break down.
One is that people have trouble reading the room. When a new player shows up and they feel like an outsider, that same joke might make them feel less included, being laughed-at instead of laughed-with. When a player identifies very deeply with a particular card or archetype, or identifies very deeply with their results, a joke at the expense of a card or play mistake can be felt as a personal attack. The recipient isn't wrong for "not getting the joke." Rather, developing a shared sense of humor is a protracted, interactive process that involves an initial stance of welcoming/inclusivity, and all parties gently pushing on the edges of the relationship until boundaries and norms are established. This process requires a great deal of empathy, to notice which actions hurt rather than harm people.
Of course, empathy is very difficult online. Even giving your best effort, asynchronous text without physical cues can be interpreted in so many ways. On a forum there's pressure to gather your thoughts into a cohesive narrative, to make your /ideas/ more structured and understandable, which means consciously stripping away a lot of the cues and context that would be used to facilitate mutual understanding of someone's emotional state. As methods of communication get less formal, more realtime, you get more and more of this feedback. (think about what it even /means/ for communication to be informal, those "um"s and "ahh"s are loaded with metadata about your relationship with the words you're saying). From your best friends playtesting, to your local card shop, to a live-chat discord server, to a local informal facebook/reddit group, to a global forum, it gets harder and harder to recognize when what you say isn't landing.
It gets harder to notice when you're being shitty.
And think about your close group of playtest buddies. I bet one of them tends to go a bit too far with their humor, and you all just kind of roll your eyes and think "oh that's just Andy, he means well." Empathy isn't something everyone's good at. Not even in the best conditions. An asynchronous global online forum might be literally the worst conditions for empathy most of us will ever deal with (It's a bigger challenge in completely one-sided communication like professional writing). That means if you place any value on not being a shitty person, you have to be more gentle, more careful, in a forum like this, when you're dealing with people you don't know from other, more empathy-friendly environments.
The second way it breaks down is a second-order consequence of the first. Maybe I crack a friendly joke about your deck, but my lack of tact makes the joke hurt, and my lack of empathy means I don't notice your reaction. If Andy goes on being a well-liked member of the community and you still feel excluded, you're going to learn a different lesson. You're going to think that Andy is well-liked despite, or because-of, the fact that he makes fun of people. Maybe you're the target of the joke, or maybe you just see observe and misinterpret the dynamic happening between two other people. But you learn something else. Now humor isn't seen as a tool to flatten prestige hierarchies, but a strategy to improve your place within them, by proving how clever you are. Maybe you start to see humor as revealing a dominance hierarchy - A can make fun of B, but B can't make fun of A. In this case cruelty is is a virtue, the more cruel someone can be without retribution, the firmer their position in the dominance hierarchy must be. This may not be a misinterpretation because there are absolutely communities that operate on these rules, and someone who has been stuck in these communities might adopt this mindset as their default behavior as a completely rational strategy.
I'm strongly against this kind of community norm in person, but online it's completely broken. When people get a whiff of a dominance hierarchy they react by trying to climb on top, or by leaving. In an online hobby community the cost of leaving is very low, and it creates a vicious/virtuous cycle. People who don't like playing that game leave, constricting the community. Now people in the middle of the dominance hierarchy have fewer people beneath them and have to spend more of their time on maneuvering than community-building. That means the fighting gets more vicious, the hierarchy becomes more obvious, and the value provided by the community constricts, which makes the community less valuable for people outside of the dominance game, who migrate somewhere else, constricting and amplifying things further. People motivated by altruism or prestige hierarchies have no one to help or show off to. The whole process spirals and spirals until novices are afraid to ask questions and experts don't post ideas because ideas just get attacked.
This attractor-state isn't inevitable, but an online forum is more susceptible to it than other sorts of communities. So I, as the admin, and you, as members of the community, need to be a little more careful (with humor especially), and keep in mind that play is supposed to unify us, not stratify us.
If you're making fun of somebody online and you don't know how they're going to emotionally respond, try and dial it back until you really get a better sense of them. Yeah it can feel dry and sterile sometimes, but you can get to that playful relationship, you just have to build up trust and empathy and earn it first.
But this is me being charitable, and assuming that your actual goal is to have a good time with the person you're joking with. Consider that trolling is, by definition, an attempt to get a negative reaction out of someone.
If you're writing a post and you think "hey, is this trolling?". Just don't fucking post it.
If you're reading this and you're thinking "but trolling is funny!". Just fucking leave.
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@brass-man said in [LEG] Greed:
If you're reading this and you're thinking "but trolling is funny!". Just fucking leave.
Generally a well put and thought out wall of text as usual. However point of order:
Trolling is funny not infrequently but TMD is not the place for it. Trolling is in a very direct way an attack: I am trying to hurt you or your social standing through the power of the internet and if you bite I can employ a complete lack of standards or decency and a fair understanding of how the platform works to do that. (this explanation is a bit of an extremization but less drastic cases differ in intensity not in function) This is unpalatable, when not targeted at someone you truly revile, but it can certainly be funny however you should never lose sight of what you are actually doing. Trolling is a poor fit for TMD because it lacks truly reprehensible people to target and if you are targeting a person at random you are just engaging in indirect sadism. -
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