Brian Kelly Freudian self-analysis of the day:
I like to express the id that a player would feel without the superego of being like, "oh you have to be nice."
You don't really care about me or who I am - not really, if you think about it.
If this doesn't work, it is still very cool. If it does... very very very cool deck sir.
@brass-man You know what, good call man. I already own one. My wife and I will play a match with a clock.
@craw_advantage To be fair, it would add some dexterity, albeit small. Again though, if you've ever seen rapid chess, hitting a button over and over isn't that hard. Captain hook could honestly do this. If an octopus were playing vintage, doing the clock would literally be the only component of the game that it could do. It really isn't the brain surgery people make it out to be.
Honestly the thing it would change most is probably encouraging people to shuffle faster. That would be the dexterity component. But honestly I'm ok with that. If I'm in a match that draws on time and I took 14 mins of it shuffling and they took 6, I should probably lose.
@brass-man Yeah. I love it. I wish there were cardboard equivalents. Folks have told me that they don't think that's wieldy at all. I'd like to see it tried, even as a gimmick. Anyone who's seen much blitz chess... it's possible.
Feels like at best this is a SB card for Humans against Blue decks. Which is to say that it will see about 0.0003 of the meta.
The fact that it really only weakly protects you from their counterspells, and makes it slightly harder to waste you on their turn, or deathrite or whatever, means you won't see it alongside those Thalia-taxing aggro decks. 2 mana for a 2/1 is just too inefficient.
@brass-man Please explain why survival would be happy to see this card.
@stuart Yeah, that's a great point. Honestly the "easiest" way is to just drop an early mentor and own the board with tokens. I don't run a lot of pyromancer, but I presume that would be similar? Is pyromancer a SB card against white eldrazi? Strikes me as a slightly odd choice, but could be a thing.
@juice-mane I tried it back-when. It was baaaayyyd. Way to slow and if they are running Smasher, which they are. It's way way way too slow. Instead, if you are Xerox, you want a bunch of swords and a bunch of snapcasters. If you really want to go deep then Fire/Ice can be good to try to value town them on a Thalia + Wingmare or a Revoker. Baby Jace is decent too. Basically you just stay alive and grind out a card advantage with draw spells + graveyard value (Snapcaster/JVP). I've found that its about reaching critical mass on cheap removal spells, since they really can't draw cards. If you run them out of their hand and you are alive, then you likely just win.
As usual I have something I found in left field. This card has a cool synergy with Oath of Nissa. So if we wanted to pack even more cards that aren't likely vintage playable into vintage decks... could be a thing!