Or in response to a wasteland on one of the pieces (a.k.a. bait). Or in response to bolt on the hexmage. Or in their own turn if they fear the opponent hitting a wasteland more than bounce/sacrifice. But in any of those situations, they aren't really relevant to determine if this is a playable card.
This card seems good for burn strategies in general. Against a deck with creatures if you have like eidolon and your opponent has a goyf or Leovold or whatever you can enable a lot of damage with it, for 1 mana. Not sure about how consistently good it would be for other strategies though. Stealing to sack effects is probably where it would be in other strategies.
Being an artifact makes it kinda sketchy. This was supposed to kill walkers, not get stolen by them. Other than that, a 5/4 flying for UU would be awesome. Goyf is already good with no evasion.
All this supposing it was djinn of beatdown. The original one doesn't feel right.
Sorry, I meant good permanent hate cards. Tormod crypt is ok and grafdigger's cage is awesome. It's like a grafdigger's cage for decks that cast lots of non-creature spells. And that's a pretty huge deal IMO, because storm and other decks had the advantage of constantly being faster than hate, being able to go off before they landed or having to respond to less cards because their opponents weren't able to deploy them fast enough.
There are 2 things I find peculiar about this one. It's a 1 mana enchantment that shuts down combo until answered. It makes your opponent's counterspells useless against it to protect their hate destruction spells.
I mean, if your opponent has nature's claim or vapor snag and 2 pyroblasts, they can't destroy it if you have like spell Pierce and fow. It's a hate card that protects itself for 1 mana.
Besides of course force of vigor which is uncounterable in this scenario (more than abrupt decay has been since veil), but how many combo decks that get rekt by it play FoV?
But really, good hate cards are usually 2 mana or more. Effects similar to this one were available at 3+ mana, unless I'm forgetting something.
If it means anything, force of vigor on this card on the turn it comes in is uncounterable. Unless your opponent is playing also counterbalance. Which means... it's uncounterable.
This card is great. 2 mana for this effect alone is too much for vintage, it'd be good for 1 mana. But being free as the first spell obviously changes things, so...
As a survival player I can see myself wanting some copies of it, specially in builds with maindeck force of vigor. If it's not in your first hand you will either have the mana to play it or bazaar to 'cycle' it. We have several kinds of cards between lands and creatures, and we can have at least like 4 different approaches with our first hands:
-fast bazaar with VV+rootwalue and hollow
-survival with or without manarock/dork
-playing out hatebears
-'ramping' into 4-mana 4/3 haste (yeah, it happens and depending on the situation it's not bad).
-blind bazaar hands (only lands and irrelevant spells, trying to get lucky)
In all of those situations there are good, mediocre and bad cards for the situation. Cards that are great in some of those are bad in others. But this free turn 1 spell can grab cards that go into any of those situations. If you have it turn 1 it may be better than vengevine or even bazaar.
It's a mix of redundancy and filtering.
I don't think I'd run 4, maybe not now (having 2-4 of these in your openning hand would be bad). I can easily see myself playing 2 copies of this.
I don't know about other decks, I get the world isn't about survival (not of the fittest at least), but I'm just showing a case where this card WILL be good.
@smmenen said in Shambling Suit:
@gutocmtt said in Shambling Suit:
And it's a giant beater that dies to bolt.
You mean like Precrusor Golem? Which I played against like 10 times last weekend...
Yeah, like precursor golem. But nothing like precursor golem. The comparison was with dumb beaters (more precisely 'why I would play it instead of Traxos'), which isn't the case about precursor golem as it's more like a 3 in 1 creature, which ironically also dies to bolt. 3 thoughness with no evasion seems bad. We see tons of creatures like that being released in every edition in green colors usually, and with every edition we see they getting bigger and cheaper and also not seeing relevant competitive play.
I never played Traxos' version of shops, but when I played against Traxos it was always a problem if I didn't have a win in 1 or 2 turns with survival. If instead it was this creature that dies to any of the 3 creatures without passing any extra damage to my face I'd be really happy. It's maybe a good card against creatureless combo decks.