Cards We Misevaluated | EDHRECast 237 

You actually didn't mention that Arcane Denial is insanely good at protecting your own win. Cards drawn don't matter if the next upkeep is actually the shuffle phase for the next game.

I'm glad you brought up Treasure Nabber because I remember the hype when it came out. I tired it in at least 3 decks (Saheeli, boros, Shattergang bros) and everytime I played it I've said, "man I wish I had a mana rock instead."

I also like Arcane Denial because it solves the single target removal in multiplayer problem, where 1:1 trades drain your resources and put the two non-targeted players ahead. That combined with the 1U cost makes it really useful. Casting a regular counterspell is like giving your other two opponents a card, anyway.

Midnight Clock is great for decks that want to dump their hands. It's like Wheel of Fortune but only for you with suspend 3 for 3 mana that pays back that investment over those turns and if you really need the cards you can speed up. Just fits so nicely with so many play patterns.

Video starts @5:23

I did the same thing as Dana. I overlooked Midnight Clock when it first came out and until someone else used it against me I thought it was trash. It’s now in just about every deck that has blue!

The way the math works with arcane denial in a four player game is so weird, but essentially you go behind less in card advantage than you would with a normal counter spell

As far as the Golos issue, I think part of what made him so bad was a card that wasn’t out when he was released. World Tree. It wouldn’t be nearly as powerful if you couldn’t just cast him then immediately have perfect mana fixing to activate him the next turn

I’ll try Protection Racket in my Liesa deck. I’ve been afraid to give opponents a chance to veto my combo pieces, but in practice that deck usually wins through steady drain and some big commander attacks, and often casts one big spell a turn to minimize pain from my own commander’s trigger. So as long as I’ve got enough lands already (and I don’t need more for Liesa’s commander tax), making people drain themselves and getting an occasional card should be great.

Why have I never AD my own spell? I've PTE my own creatures before... huh. I'll keep that in mind

don't forget with Toralf and a damage doubler, a single lightning bolt can basically become a one sided boardwipe followed by a player kill.

The FIRST time I played Reckless Endeavor I rolled 2 12s and fell in love.

I'm so glad someone finally put a spotlight on Toralf! I built him about 6 months ago and it's easily one of my favorite commanders i've built in years.

I really like the Ravenform pick! 1thing you didn't mention is that, pardon the pun here, but many players simply don't see it coming because it's such an underplayed spell. In a control deck it can slow opponents down considerably because they think it's a Saw It Coming or a Doomskar and they won't commit as much to the board thinking a wipe is coming.

Wild to me that ive lived through 2 different ban announcements that ended with me playing a stronger card. First was emrakul ban in standard. Then was golos ban in commander. Ulamog was the best hit off of aetherworks marvel and Kenrith was always the best 5 color goodstuff commander

I play Ravenform in my Oskar deck, where you can make it an instant by just discarding it. Very useful. Cards like this also make me run liquimetal torque as a two mana rock that can incidentally make ravenform and resculpt into "exile target nonland permanent" by effectively paying an additional mana

I like swift reconfiguration due to it's flexibility. It can be used as pseudo removal, and protect your own dudes, but yeah it was definitely over-hyped.

Rite of harmony is good in a heavy blink strategy.

Golos is hilarious because right before he got banned I put him in the command zone of my Ramos, Dragon Engine deck to power it down since it was a little too strong with Ramos in the command zone for my playgroup.

Solar Blaze can be a one-sided board wipe in Kynaios and Tiro if you're also running a handful of those higher toughness group hug creatures (e.g. Selvala, Explorer Returned)

Love you guys!! All of you are always a good listen.

Somehow I had a massive brain fart when it came to the spell Sevinne's Reclamation. I don't know if I had a blind spot about the fact that it could bring back fetch lands or stuff like that, but initially I pulled it out of my Jeskai deck. It wasn't till after I saw numerous references to the fact that it could ramp that I ended up putting it back into the deck. Now not only is it one of my All-Star cards but it's one of my absolute favorite cards to just see hit play.

I feel like the biggest hype would actually be bootleggers stash. I saw it as high as $50 and I recently picked one up for $4 now the hype is settled.

I generally don't make split second interpretations of cards. Instead, I consider them all viable in specific strategies where I just need to find the right slot for them to shine. A recent example was figuring out that Inspiring Statuary is absolutely incredible in equipment aggro decks like my Syr Gwyn Historic Brawl deck.

Looking forward to drawing protection racket in my rakdos riots deck...no good choice to make :)

Cool video, Joey! I do agree that sometimes, we all can get Burned Out when we play the same deck and fell like we’ve solved the deck. What I tend to do to prevent that is to make deck less efficient by adding weird janky cards to make the deck more unique to my play style. I also tend to get a cool reaction from my opponents, I.E. WHAT DOES THAT CARD DO??? And when they all figure it all out, too late, because I win. 😂

TORALF. I built this deck and it is WILD

With Toralf, damage doublers and the damage tripler REALLY make cheap, low damage, instants deadly. Especially if you have both. Lol.

I really wanted Relic of Legends to be any legendary permanent instead of only creatures because it would be absolutely awesome in Superfriends if that were the case but as it is its basically a weaker Honor-Worn Shaku.

One I misevaluated is Mob Rule. It's 2 mana cheaper than Insurrection and is the same in most scenarios. I used to think the card was hot garbage, until I started destroying players with it!

random thing but I did a combo the other day, I casted arcane endeavor, I used narsets reversal on it to bounce it back to hand and then copy it, i got a 7 and a 5, so i drew 5, and casted arcane endeavor again for free and drew another 6 cards... narsets reversal is nice

Cards for me that overperformed: Ghostly pilfer Past in flames Wrap in vigor Lulu loyal holyphant Drana liberator of malakir Haughty djinn All of the new Defilers from dominaria united!

Treasure Nabber plus Rats of Rath is hilarious. Either they don't use their mana rocks and this slows them down or they do and you can blow them up.^^

Having played both Ingenious Artillerist and Reckless Fireweaver, IA is just substantially worse in play. At 3 Mana, it comes down later than I would like. I'd rather drop a piece of acceleration or a more impactful 3 drop. Also, at 3/1 it dies to a stiff breeze. It's a powerful effect that I don't want to drop to any odd Ping effect.

In a similar vein to sirens call the card mischievous imp is basically this spell on a STICK and it’s absolutely nuts. It reads really weird but its to the cards benefit

after the second or third time sticking a nezahal i bought 4 of them to put them in all my blue decks from then on. Possibly one of my favorite cards of all time

Funnily enough, even though you said "Deroche" has no pun, but you actually said "Orrin rocks!" If you translate Deroche from english to French, it translates to "of rocks". So, you made a joke by accident, good job!

Was playing a Xanathar deck and someone had an Arcane Denial as their top card, and I couldn’t figure out how to make sure they didn’t get it… then I noticed I had a Mind Stone in hand. Still one of my favorite plays.

Dana runs 3 basics in a mono colored deck... one of them is snow-covered and another one is a Waste Change my mind!

#29 let's go baby. KEEP STAYING PAWZITIVE GUYS

Rite of harmony works really well with certain token decks, but yeah, it's mostly a draw 2-3...still play testing it in my Ghave deck.

Swift Reconfiguration is great in Ghen, but as mentioned, not as a removal spell. It's a protection piece that can be sacrificed for value.

Rite of harmony is fantastic in torens fist of the angels because you play a lot of cheap creatures and every creature gives you two bodies because of torens’ ability

For Reckless Endeavor, won't the Artillerist and Fireweaver die (assuming the die rolls are both > 3) before they see the treasures? The effect specifically says "Then create treasure tokens..." so I assume it happens directly after the creature damage.

Treasure Nabner will be very useful once new artifact decks come out. All of those power stones with the Brothers war.

All of the cards that roll dice are very much underrated since most of them are just all upside or are varying amounts of upside, and while sometimes some of them can whiff but…

Totally on the money with how players wouldn't agree about protection racket. protection racket has been REALLY lackluster to me and my playgroup, completely counter to the EDHRECast team's experience. Giving my opponents the choice to just...NEVER EVER let me draw that card I needed feels awful and would 9/10 screw me over when i flipped a card i needed to answer a threat.

I misread Champion of Lambholt until 2018. I didn't see the part saying it applied to all of your creatures.

I'm sad I didn't sell my monologue tax as soon as I got the deck. I thought the card was bad, but there were so many people who were high on it, I said to myself I needed to wait and see. I didn't trust my instinct because I've been wrong before and a lot of knowledgeable people thought otherwise.

+1 for Siren's Call! Love it!

Brothers war literally increased the potency of winter orb static orb decks by an insane margin. My rograhk thrasios deck is a winter/static orb deck and I must admit, I’m kinda grossed out by the upgrades I got. They are too powerful. Drafna and battery bearer and citanul stalwart. Doesn’t sound like a lot? Wait till you get pwned. I’m already holding my own in the constant 3v1s I play in lmfao. Those upgrades are gonna be filth.

Rite of harmony is good with Bear Umbra. 😊

I overrated so much the Dominaria Reunited tribal lord that I bought 4 Elves and 4 Merfolks for 6€ each (yes, 48€ euros wasted). The elves are the only truly useful ones since drawing in "budget" elves is hard. The merfolk one is almost redundant (there are lots of lords in merfolk) and you either lose a real card while countering a spell (through the sacrifice-costed activated ability) or lose a very rarely produced token. The soldier one is ok, having a lord for 2 mana in mono white is powerful.

I htink it's kind of funny how Joey's takes on Windgrace's Judgement V Casualties of War went, war is good for most of the reasons Judgement is "bad" (except ofc it's still not a greature). You don't need to worry about leaving the mana up because you have to just shoot it off main phase and get it over with, and there's no feelsbad when it's just you and 1 other player. You can actually bully the archenemy instead of "helping" them. I feel like 3 things for 5 mana is only "good" because it's instant, which Judgement feels like it's hard to make work. But 2 more targets for 1 more mana is a good trade off. Honestly, try out CoW in the decks you used to have Judgement in, you might be surprised. It's like a super decimate, but better

Ok the ruler joke got me good. Actually slapped my knee

I wanna put protection racket in my Yuriko deck, more burn or more card draw, and can manipulate the top of my deck already

Yooo I just picked up Ingenious Artillerist for my Malcolm/Kediss deck. He's going to do ton of damage and if I make him a pirate he'll be a win con with Malcolm

just subbed to this channel, good content guys!! Thanks!

Relic of Legends is just a power crept Honor-Worn Shaku and I refuse to play it because I can't tap my planeswalkers for mana with it.

I played castle embereth in krenko for ages and it coming in tapped came up more than the buff and I play 20 basic mountains

Great video

Right of harmony in Rhys the redeemed

I like castle lochtwain more repeatable card draw.

Best use for Swift Reconfiguration is to use it on an Astral Dragon, then clone the astral dragon with something like phyrexian metamorph to make 3/3 dragon vehicle copies of astral dragon to then make one copy lands and the other copy astral dragon until you have infinite mana's worth of astral dragon lands, then use the infinite mana (this turn if you have haste ideally) to put infinite rocket launcher triggers on the stack and kill someone with rockets to the face. Why? Well mostly because no one has ever been killed by rocket launcher in edh and no one can argue infinite astral dragon vehicle creatures wouldn't be funny.

Spell lands can (especially when we get more) lands that happen to be spells (like the channel lands are lands with upside). However most decks see spell lands as the spell side and the fail state is the land (you need your 4th through your 7th land). This second state is probably how players should see spell lands.

I still don't understand how Golos was really a problem. Ive watched people talk about it but I just don't get it.

Love the show and the different perspectives the 3 of you offer. I normally listen on Spotify when I'm driving or doing chores. I've noticed that you guys aren't reading out what the cards do as often, particularly the last couple of episodes, and sometimes don't say the card name more than once. Is that a conscious choice to encourage more youtube views? It makes the listening experience quite frustrating. Could you consider returning to a more listener friendly format please?

Wait I thought the hype about Swift Reconfiguration was about making your commander not a creature anymore as protection.

Good Stuff

Midnight Clock!

What are your guys' opinions on MTGO? Do you think the numbers on EDHREC are affected at all by whether or not a card is on the platform or not? I personally play the majority of my games on MTGO and have many decks on it that I do not have in paper (typically much cheaper). Not sure why WotC refuse to add any cards to MTGO outside of standard or cards that see play in vintage or something. How can Commander be the most popular format, yet essentially be ignored on MTGO and be straight up excluded from Arena?

I'm gonna have to point out that Castle Ardenvale has the benefit of surviving board wipes of creatures. I've won a lot of games with this card just because of how many times i still get a creature when there's no other creature on the board. Especially when i still have equipment to rebuild my bomber out of that 1/1. Really helps in those games when it's late game top decking time. As for Castle Embereth i've not had much success with it either but will say that having an untap land source of some kind definitely helps this (and other tap to do 'whatever' lands) cards effectiveness.

What I like about Castle Embereth is that is has almost no opportunity cost in decks that are two or less colors, it will almost always be at worst a basic mountain, and at best the difference between a swing being for game or not. Same is true for all the castles. All but Garenbrig are certainly overcosted, but they enter tapped so rarely that it really is never a worry for me. Even in decks that are 3 or more colors, if your mana base is powerful enough to have fetches, shocks, and other lands with types, you'll almost never give up anything putting them in your deck over a basic.

Last week in a game of commander I used Arcane Denial on my own Dovin's Veto. That was sick :D

Better help is not affordable

I would like to see treasure nabber in cedh with all the mana rock

Monolog tax works quite well in a Howling Mine style deck. Those type of decks force (encourage) opponents into wanting to cast more cards. Pretty limited case i gotta admit. But still as with many cards, in the given case it's very strong. *Generally, not always useful i agree.

Hmmm, I can't agree with arcane denial. There are just so many better counter spells out there.

It was a shame they wouldn't give an inch on the matter.

Protection Racket is terrible. I will gladly pay 7 mana to exile your combo piece, and I'm not going to give my opponents the ability to keep my best cards in exile got just a few life.

see, I think Midnight clock is very overrated. I just said this in Joeys upping the average on ghyrson starn. he put Midnight clock in there and I'm like 2it takes 3 turns to go off, thats like a windfall with suspend 3". No one would play windfall if it had "suspend 3" on it. I know it's also a blue mana rock, but, unless you play it late game and can pump mana into it, it's not worth it and even if you pump mana into it's a more expensive wheel spell.

Just here eating my Adult chicken nuggets happy meal!

If you are going to have Betterhelp as a sponsor, could you clarify if they are still a scam. This company has quite a few controversies and a generally bad reputation on YT. Unless you have had personally good experiences with them to justify the sponsorship, I personally feel a bit dirty watching anything that has had their fingers on it.

Do most playgroups actually follow the commander banlist? I find it hard to believe people wouldn't let someone play a Golos deck with everything else that's in the format.

Windgrace judgement at its floor is instant and destroys a nonland permanent. Not great but by that late in the game, whose complaining? Obviously gets better with more opponents, but every card has to be evaluated in context otherwise we can sit here all day mis-evaluating cards ad Infinitum

Kept waiting for a mention of Keen Duelist. Maybe next time. Meanwhile more card advantage and political value for me. Particularly great in decks that care about top deck manipulation (like my codie and aminatou decks) or decks that ramp hard and go for big cmc spells (like my big mana black mind flayer deck)

wow you know times are tough when you have to put your feet (jokes) on the internet

Protection racket... give each opponent the opportunity to exile a card that is useful to you or harmful to them at the cost of life. Sounds great if your opponents are low on life otherwise you get to watch all your best stuff end up in exile 😅

34:23 It's just a bad version of Reckless Fireweaver tho

How are you going to evaluate Arcane Denial without even mentioning 4 player card economy

34.41

I'm concerned that Tamiyo's name has "completed" spelled wrong.

treasure nabber with the future p o w e r s t o n e problem will be awesome

Ah pronouns…

With Liquimetal Torque, Ravenform and Resculpt is a powerhouse... I started replacing my Mind Stones with Liquimetal Torque.

I appreciate that you guys mention the context in which you find yourselves, because this has been an interesting look into your playgroup versus my own. I have had great success using Swift Reconfiguration as a protection spell, and a combo stopper, rather than an enabler. I also have a friend with a Hamza deck, who sold our entire group on Rite of Harmony when he used it. Sometimes, you just have to see the card strike gold in order to really see its value. A lot like Dana and Midnight Clock as well.

Matt literally saying “ideally i would like to kill everybody” and just staring at the viewers with his ice cold blue eyes made me think he has a dark side to him 😂😂

Ive been preaching the utility of the one drop instant speed protection spells like Tamiyos Safekeeping for a minute. Blacksmiths Skill, Professors Warning, Withstand Death, etc etc

Midnight clock is my favorite "new" blue card. You burn through your hand without a care knowing your going to draw a full grip. If you top deck it late in the game, you can burn all your extra mana into getting those cards faster. Just a great card. I completely agree and run it in all blue decks.

I feel you on the Endeavors Joey… anytime I see a card with “roll a….” I instantly swipe left cause I don’t think dice belong in Magic other than keeping track of counters haha