Magical Notes: thragtusk blog

There was a very nice article posted to the mother ship last friday. The context was the role of the core set in designing/developing standard. I highly recommend the read even if the writing is a bit excruciating (should a blogger really be criticizing some one's writing?) (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/255).

The money part of the article is the following paragraph:

As I have been saying for a long time Thragtusk needed to be GG. Especially with a multi color set in standard. I am super excited to see this card leave standard. It has been warping the format and it has not been healthy.

But what I really want to talk about is the color pie. Does a 5/3 make sense for only a single G? Does it make sense for a 5/3 with lifegain for only G. Does it make sense for all of that and a leaves the battle field trigger? Recently R&D has been solidifying hard counters requiring UU in the casting cost. Implying the ability to counter is blue and if you want it to be unconditional it needs to be more than just a splash.

Let's start by baselining the power and toughness. What does green usually get. Keep in mind green is supposed to be the best at big creatures [1]. There is only one green creature with CMC of 5 (two if you count the hybrid.

Interesting, a 5/5 for 5 but takes GG. I guess it makes sense that the hybrid guy is a little worse. After all it is "easier" to cast. Well that must mean that other colors are worse in the 5 slot. Let's take a look at them in WUBRG order. Once abilities and higher rarities get in the mix things get crazy so we're going to stick to common for the baseline and then bootstrap up to higher rarities.

Pretty straight forward in white. I would say 3/5 crushes 1/6 with a weak ability. So let's call it 3/5. For blue there isn't a good one so we go with the best approximation:

Weaker that the white guy but with two solid abilities. Looks like blue is winning here.

Now it gets interesting. Black has a mech and a decent one in this slot, and something in between. Makes sense since the demon is the hardest to cast so it should have better stats. However recall the 3B/G B/G guy. He was "easier" to cast than this demon but was 5/4.

Finally we come to red. Again we notice that the "easier" casting cost is a worse creature. I do find it interesting that given the hybrid dude from RTR we see that Red and Black and Green all get 5/4 for 3CC. Green does get 5/5 for 3CC, so it is marginally better. White has gone into defensive mode here and blue is just being better than every other color once again. Which makes sense because, you know, blue always has better creatures in the 5 drop slot *.

Well this post has sort of wandered into a color pie exploration. I hope you enjoyed it. The bottom line is that Thragtusk is way over the curve and they did push it. Perhaps R&D is just starting to figure out how lifegain works. Certainly we've seen a major increase in the use of lifegain from lifelink, as well as straight lifegain on a stick. I speculate that R&D really didn't know what they were doing with this guy. Also as a note the metagame of the FFL was focused on a different green five drop [2].

I'm not saying that is a bad five drop. I love me some 12 power for 3GG. But let's be real. When you instant speed blow up the dude this guy is bonded to it winds up being a disaster for the green mage, we're probably talking a 2 for 1 situation here. When you blow up the Thragstusk at instant speed they pick up a 3/3 duder so you are at a card disadvantage with that move. Yeah this is hindsight, but yeah this is not complicated.

PS: These cards are rotating from standard and they can eat shit and die.