{"id":41,"date":"2012-11-19T13:14:25","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T18:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/?p=41"},"modified":"2012-11-19T13:17:56","modified_gmt":"2012-11-19T18:17:56","slug":"magic-the-gathering-tips-are-you-a-good-card-or-a-bad-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/2012\/11\/magic-the-gathering-tips-are-you-a-good-card-or-a-bad-card\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic The Gathering Tips &#8211; Are You A Good Card Or A Bad Card?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I loved The Wizard of Oz. I wonder if HE played Magic?<\/p>\n<p>Glinda: &#8220;Are you a good witch or a bad witch?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Little did we know that &#8230; oh never mind.<\/p>\n<p>Where was I?<\/p>\n<p>Oh yes. So, you want to know how to tell a good card from a bad card when attempting to put together a deck for whatever format you&#8217;re attempting to play. This is one of the biggest traps that players can fall into. See, not everything is as cut and dried as you&#8217;d like to think it is.<\/p>\n<p>Just look at the Wizard of Oz.<\/p>\n<p>Truth is, you can&#8217;t evaluate a card in a vacuum. And there is no better way to illustrate this than with some examples. Hopefully, after seeing these, you will understand that good and bad are relative and that you have to look at the OTHER cards being played to determine where YOUR card fits in.<\/p>\n<div style=\"float: right;margin: 3px;\"><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\ngoogle_ad_client = \"pub-4025562143158908\";\ngoogle_alternate_color = \"FFFFFF\";\ngoogle_ad_width = 125;\ngoogle_ad_height = 125;\ngoogle_ad_format = \"125x125_as\";\ngoogle_ad_type = \"text\";\ngoogle_ad_channel =\"\";\ngoogle_color_border = \"\";\ngoogle_color_link = \"\";\ngoogle_color_bg = \"\";\ngoogle_color_text = \"\";\ngoogle_color_url = \"\";\ngoogle_ui_features = \"rc:0\";\n\/\/--><\/script>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\n  src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\n<\/script><\/div><p>Let&#8217;s take Delver of Secrets.<\/p>\n<p>In the last Standard environment, this 1 drop that could turn into a 3\/2 flier on turn 2 almost dominated the format. Today, even though it is still Standard legal, it is almost non existent. Why is that?<\/p>\n<p>In the last format, we had a card called Ponder. This card could look at the top 3 cards of your library and arrange them in any order and then draw a card. This made it so that when you revealed your top card in an attempt to flip Delver, you had a better chance of revealing an instant or sorcery, the cards needed to do so.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Ponder is no longer Standard legal so Delver has to rely on pure luck to flip. Because of this, it doesn&#8217;t flip as often and spends many turns as a 1\/1. This makes the card infinitely worse than what it was last Standard. As a result, almost nobody plays it.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s still the same card. The only thing that&#8217;s changed are the supporting cards around it. Delver doesn&#8217;t have the support that it once did, so it&#8217;s now a bad card.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take another example.<\/p>\n<p>In the last standard, Zombies was a great deck. You had amazing 1 and 3 drops in Gravecrawler and Geralf&#8217;s Messenger. When Return to Ravnica hit the streets, everybody thought Zombies would be a force to be reckoned with. And it was for about a week. But shortly after, players began to realize that these cards weren&#8217;t good enough because of the loss of two cards &#8230; Phyrexian Metamorph and Mortarpod.<\/p>\n<p>Metamorph could copy your Messenger and cause an additional life loss of 2 for each time it copied it. And, it could do this coming into or back into the battlefield as it gained Messenger&#8217;s abilities. With the loss of Metamorph, Messenger just wasn&#8217;t as good.<\/p>\n<p>Mortarpod was great in that you could attach Messenger to it, sac it, causing the opponent to lose one life and then when it came back into play, causing opponent to lose 2 more life. Without Mortarpod in the format, we can no longer do this.<\/p>\n<p>In essence, Messenger just isn&#8217;t as good a card as it used to be.<\/p>\n<p>Now, having said that, are there some cards that are just ALWAYS bad? Sure. That has to do with the power curve, which is a topic for another article.<\/p>\n<p>But the point I wanted to make here is that just because a card is good or not good in one format, doesn&#8217;t mean it can&#8217;t be good or not good in another.<\/p>\n<p>To YOUR Magic the Gathering Enjoyment,<\/p>\n<p>Steve &#8220;Land Boy&#8221; Wagenheim<\/p>\n<p>Get my FREE report\u00a0<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevewagenheim.com\/mtg\/mtg1\/index.html\">\u201c7 Steps To Magic Success\u201d<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and become a better Magic player<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I loved The Wizard of Oz. I wonder if HE played Magic? Glinda: &#8220;Are you a good witch or a bad witch?&#8221; Little did we know that &#8230; oh never mind. Where was I? Oh yes. So, you want to &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/2012\/11\/magic-the-gathering-tips-are-you-a-good-card-or-a-bad-card\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[4,14,6],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magic-the-gathering-general","category-magic-the-gathering-tips","tag-magic-the-gathering","tag-magic-the-gathering-deck-construction","tag-magic-the-gathering-tips-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevewagenheim.com\/mtgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}