Yu-Gi-Oh! Player Rates Classic MTG Cards | Staple or Stinker? 

Next time pick an Unfinity card with a acorn hologram… lol

Oh, and do a recent Pauper staple: Vicious Battlerager.

Now that he knows about Rishadan port, show him Rishadan dockhand! And my favorite Sin Prodder(aka Rob)! Maybe show him right after bob? And how about Bedlam reveler?

The card flash, glimse of nature

Treasure Cruise would be a good one

Because that's the order the keywords are written. "Flying, Trample". Not "Trample, Flying". Always, AFAIA.

@@calemr that just isn't trying

Almost as good as "paying life means nothing; never has, never will"

@@calemr I mean I knew that before I even started typing the comment But thanks for taking a facetious comment at face value

@@calemr So it should be F-r-ying

And LabMan!

this is a good idea tbh

Necropotence, Stasis, Energy Field, Balance.

Second this

DOOR TO NOTHINGNESS!!!

Which is especially true if you just don't have a card in hand.

@@Earthboundmike yep, kinda comparable to liliana of the veil if the card works that way >empty hand >+1 >opponent discards and you don't

Yeah the problems of random discard are usually too high in Magic to risk playing Tibalt. You are reliant on lands to play the game, so if you randomly discard them you probably lose. You sculpt your hand with mulligans to fight against whatever the matchup is and you can potentially just discard the card you took time to mulligan to. If you want to play a deck like reanimator you need to have the reanimate in hand and the target in the grave, with Tibalt you can just end up with the opposite. It kind of fits in a deck like dredge, where pretty much every card had madness (you can cast them when you discard them), dredge, flashback, or some other way to get back from the grave, but it is way to slow for those decks when there are cards that cost 1 mana, draw 2 then discard 2 without the random factor. Spending double the mana and hopping Tibalt is alive two turns to still get a worse effect just isn't worth it.

The big thing is not that your hand might not change, it's that you might make it WORSE. In fact, you can very easily make it worse. If you have a lot of cards in hand, your topdeck is likely worse than a random card in your hand. If you only have a few cards in hand, you have a greater chance of just milling one. Basically the only time you want to use Tibalt's +1 is when you have a hand full of bricks, and then you're probably losing that game anyway.

It's also notable that Tibalt is not synergistic with a graveyard strat, and as an agro card the discard didn't provide value success those strats tend not to utilise their graveyard.

Pauper edition sounds like a solid idea. :)

Oooooh, astrolabe would be such a good choice ! Maybe with other bad reading card or else the trap would be obvious ^^

Brainstorm Faithless looting Myr enforcer Artifact lands I think those could be viable

I like the Urza lands and Nettle Sentinel for this. Pauper-only cards might be a bit too niche. Chronatog or Psychatog might be interesting choices too.

@@chuckwagon3718 ÿeah i was thinking about psychatog as well but would it even qualify as a staple today? today it barely sees play, right? Maybe tendrils of agony or mind's desire

And in legacy it is played since legacy has a ton of very powerful lands,so does vintage (bazaar, library of alexandria, mishra´s workshop). You can also use it against mutavault or mishra´s factory. So it really does a lot for just 1 mana.

The big one in Legacy is AEther Vial. You can play a basic land turn 1 (which can't be hit by Wasteland) into AEther Vial, then play turn 2 Rishadan Port and start tapping away. You'll still "curve" out with the Vial, while your opponent can't cast anything because of all your mana denial. You don't see Port in Vintage so much because of Strip Mine + 4x Wasteland is enough. Ghost Quarter is the next best option because so many decks operate off of cheap artifact mana while not having much room for basics. You'll see some nutty MUD variants in Vintage playing 4x Wasteland, 4x Ghost Quarter, and 1x Strip Mine (restricted).

Oof that sounds brutal

@@GuyIncognito575 ....which reminds me: you won't beat a deck with Port by trying to out-deny them on mana. They have the full suite of Wastelands like you do, then Port to back it up. It can be absolutely brutal for a Delver player who made the mistake of using their own Wasteland early on (Wastelanding your Wasteland with their Wasteland), not realizing you're a Vial deck. They think they're making a strong tempo play, only to get BTFO'd.

Port was brutal back in the day in suicide black in conjunction with Nether Void and Sinkhole. I also saw it in some versions of Prop-Orb with Icy Manipulators.

Nullhide Ferox is fun as a troll sideboard card against opponents running hand disruption but yeah otherwise not that great

The thing about showing 3 cards and have him try to guess which one was the staple is pure genius!🤯 we are absolutely doing that going forward

@@CardmarketMagic another one is chosing one planeswalker type and see if they can find the good ones xD like all Jace

Sensei's Divining Top for me. I remember getting one at the release event draft and thinking "oh, it's OK". Then I played it in Tooth and Nail (a deck with a lot of shuffle effects) and really felt how absurd it was.

I actually don't play Magic and I'm curious about the Narset question. Is the answer Narset of the Ancient Way?

Academy got banned/restricted in every format before Masques was printed. But yeah, people were still playing Cradle and Serra's Sanctum.

@@nekrataali I remember masks well because it was such a staggering step down in power that I actually quit magic for years after it.

@@raze667 Oh yeah lol we went from having turn 1 and 2 kills in Standard to having....playing white creatures that put lower costing white creatures into play is the best deck??? 🤣

@@raze667 Considering the entire R&D department went into an executives office after printing Urza's block to get yelled at for a couple hours about how bad the design of Urzas was, the power pull back was needed.

@@werefrogofassyria6609 sadly. Urza's was fun as hell at the casual level.

Yeah, the modality is part of what made walkers like The Wandering Emperor or Gideon Ally of Zendikar so powerful in standard because they could do three relevant things and do them repeatedly.

I mean it's a part of it but also not a big part of it, imagine he could turn things to elks for his +1 or deploy a 1/1 devil thing he'd be perfectly playable as is(3 mana tibalt was a full mana more could only do it twice and still saw play) , because the real key to good planeswalkers is the ability to defend themselves, either by making a blocker or removing a threat or gaining an absurd amount of loyalty while doing that (looking at you Oko and Karn) Consider emperor but she now magically only got the ability to make samurais but as a +1, she'd be absurd, much more so than her current power level, she'd come down end of opponent turn and effectively have 5 loyalty and 2 2/2s before opponent can really do anything. Or consider Ugin for example, he is almost exclusively a board wipe but then he also bolts, however if his board wipe mode was the only one and you gained 3 loyalty minus the x that you chose(meaning you lose 1 loyalty if x is 4 or gain 3 if x is 0), once again it's a singular mode and once again absurdly broken anyway. Tibalt's problem is that he doesn't defend itself AND the one thing he does is bad for you and it really doesn't help that it takes 5 turns of this actively bad for you ability to hit the only good effect on the card.

I'm surprised that tibalt was ever worth anything at all. I remember opening it in a prerelease and everyone already considered it to be sh*tty

Yeah he really has a firm grasp on card game theory, him resuming Hogaak as "card is free at everytime" to pass a jugdment was spot on.

do it in conjunction with savage knuckleblade and see if the non mtg player picks up on why knuckleblade was the bad one

@@0xGRIDRUNR I wouldn't describe knuckleblade as bad. If it were reprinted into standard, it very well might see play, siege rhino was just too efficiënt and since knuckleblade cannot get through rhino it was unplayable at the time

@@baukeschenkelaars6555 I kinda would say it's bad to be honest. All of its abilities require extra mana to activate, whereas siege rhino was a one time investment that remained a present threat, no future investment needed. It seems like it would be good due to it's modality, but using those abilities prevents you from doing other things. For example, casting storm breath dragon on curve, or using disdainful stroke to counter the rhino. It was much worse as a tempo piece than the rhino due to those mana intensive abilities. Compared to a threat that was ran in the same deck, storm breath dragon, your initial investment got you flying and pro white for one extra mana if you assume you cast knuckleblade and give it haste. That evasion was huge considering how gummed up board states were in that standard, with the Elspeth tokens and rhinos.

@S V well so has tarmogoyf, but I think it can still be called such. Being a staple of any format for any reasonably long amount of time is enough justification to call a card a staple.

Siege Rhino looks innocent now due to powercreep, but it was a Standard staple from day 1. People immediately recognized how powerful it was.

So much of the strength of that card comes from the fact that it can target it self. It makes it so you pretty much have to use two removals on it if you are ever gonna kill it.

too easy, drawing cards is obviously broken to a yugioh player. (but yeah, sweet card.)

@@TJMiton Gotta agree, to a YGO player anything that says draw 2 cards is automatically going to be seem as staple or broken.

They would see the -1 toughness and be in love with clamp. Even R&D knew about clamp before it was released when the future future league had a player put together a clamp deck after darksteel had been sent to the printers and absolutely bashed everyone's faces in until all of them were playing clamp decks.

Oh yeah that card stinks

He’d agree to ante his entire lifetime collection for draw 7 (and he’d never have to pay up).

The only time One With Nothing was truly playable

wdym it was? You can still play forced draw in EDH, its a supported archetype in multiple colors.

​​@@ich3730 They are talking about the specific Owling Mine deck from standard ~20 years ago, not the general archetype.

It wasn't really though. It simply wasn't in the right colors, where rhino was a center piece to abzan planeswalkers knuckle's only home was 4 color jeskai ascendancy combo which played 4 of him in the board for the match ups he was good for and that deck There was simply no temur midrange to support him enough while you did have abzan and jeskai versions one of which running rhino the other mantis and seeker. Calling him a stinker because the format didn't have a deck to support him is a huge mistake when he served as a backup for the 4c jeskai combo deck (and they ran him instead of seeker or mantis which were jeskai's staples so this goes to show how strong of a card it was that you'd use it if possible over 2 of the format's biggest staples)

I think it's a great suggestion! The fact that siege rhino even saw play in modern shows that this card had everything going for it (I personally pre-ordered 4) and just did not end up seeing that much play!

Savage Knuckleblade is the perfect example of what looks like a powerful card which was weak because of the environment it was printed in rather than any particular flaw with the card itself. If Siege Rhino had been a 5/4 instead of a 4/5 it might have had a chance.

@Blag Blargson: I think we can go one further: Show a Staple, then show a card that looks like it would combo very well with that Staple, and the contestant has to guess if the second card is a Staple or Stinker. First card pairing could be Adanto Vanguard and Font of Agonies.

Adanto vanguard is a fantastic suggestion!

A video about sleeper cards would be cool. I remember during Mirrodin block looking at spoilers and thinking Jitte and Chalice were busted. Jitte flew under the radar for a bit but Chalice was the real sleeper. Once people in legacy/vintage figured out that playing first and dropping Chalice for 0 was broken it finally got hit, but it took years for it to happen.

Oh dark depths is an interesting one

@@DarkTenkahaha so true. Stinker at the time, staple when synergy cards came out

have this in my Urza commander deck and its amazing

My bad 😅 I actually knew this because I had just made a video about it

Aetherflux marvel was much more powerful than creativity during its time in standard because the energy shell was too powerful.

@@joshuagriffith9191 I think it's an easy staple or stinker any way. You still need to build round the energy which will throw someone off and the attune with aether card would be a better choice for staple or stinker anyway. You can also see the power as it casts any card for free in the top six. Creativity on the other hand is more obscure and you have to build around it for a better result (I had to edit this as I thought you were talking about aetherflux reservoir)

@@tedpengu1n Don’t worry. I agree with your assessment as a good choice to evaluate. I was just pointing out why it was bad in standard. Creativity could have been used to get ulamogg or emrakul in an artifact control deck, but it would have been much harder to build around and a lot less consistent. Could have been a fun jank deck.

iirc it was also played in standar golgari midrange

@@aguilefo And Surveil decks of that era. By far one of the best cards in the deck, especially once you had Disinformation Campaign up and running. Ain't nobody killing your 6/6 demon because they don't have any cards in hand.

It's played in 2% of EDH decks, not 0% like they stated. This is comparable numbers to Lion's Eye Diamond 🙄

EDH ... doesn't matter too much. It can't. Almost any card with some powerful efffects can be made functioning in an EDH deck that's built around it. Plus the structure of the format (no meta game) prevents comparisons to some degree. Actually ... the series "staple or stinker" can't represent all formats. The core idea of the series doesn't align too well with Sealed, Draft, EDH, Brawl, Pauper, ... In other words: Tell me how Stinkers work in Pauper.

@@FR0STBL0D doom whisperer has standar top 8's man

Browbeat -> Risk Factor -> Fact or Fiction -> Truth or Tale -> Gifts Ungiven.

Browbeat and the like are absolutely stellar suggestions! 👌

Uh what? Browbeat saw a ton of play in Standard and block. It was strong as hell.

@@danlorett2184 Browbeat is actually a classic card for showing new players that giving opponents the choice is almost always worse than the sum of the card's parts.

tbh hoogaak could easily be a Yugioh card from his artwork alone and snow would not even be the most weeb thing to come to MTG

I used it in my dimir control/surveil/discard deck and I can tell you that it was a blast. By the time it enters the game it was lock for the opponent and it just allowed me to find more and more options so no, it’s not too late. Most of the people like to slap these cards as soon as they get them and therein lies the mistake.

@@dalexa It'll definitely end games if it sticks, protect it and it'll help you find what you need. It's just not a DRC or something that manipulates the top of your deck from turn 1 kinda thing.

@@dalexa Yeah I didn't agree with this video. I also played Surveil for a bit and Doom Whisperer was probably the strongest card in the deck. Pure fucking value with Disinformation Campaign. Combined with Duress and Thought Erasure, nobody was casting no removal spells on your 6/6 demon lol

@@nekrataali Doom Whisperer was cool, but it wasn't good even during its set's standard. When it was released, it was competing against cards like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and Niv-Mizzet, Parun, which just do way more, it got out-valued by the explore deck and outraced by Pelt Collector aggro decks, and it died extremely easily to the removal people were packing like Assassin's Trophy and Vraska's Contempt. By the time RNA released, Doom Whisperer was niche, and the busted Simic Ramp Wilderness Exploration or Esper Hero decks could just bury it in value, which were further improved once WAR released with Nissa, Who Shakes the World. It just wasn't well-positioned against the field.

@@nekrataali Thought erasure really felt like the best card in the surveil deck closely followed by disinformation campaign and sinister sabotage. Doom whisperer usually held a 1 of slot for me because I didn’t really do much when I drew it.

Unfortunately, this would involve showing him all the enablers, which would clue him in too much 😅

We all know I was not talking about CEDH 😉 that format is a whole other monster

All EDH truly is casual. It’s a casual format that is taken too seriously by some.

@@joshuagriffith9191 Thats not for you to decide tho. If people want to organize tournaments and events, let them cook.

The biggest potential issue, I feel, with including exactly 1 "it's complicated" card amongst the 5, is figuring out where in the line-up to put it. If you put it somewhere in the beginning (1st or 2nd), you lose the effect of the non-MTG player second-guessing themselves once they know the "it's complicated" card is gone. If you always put it at the very end (4th, or even worse, 5th), then they don't have to worry about the other cards, plus it makes it easier to guess the "complicated" card when there are only a few chances left. It's probably best to put it somewhere in the middle (2nd-4th), but if Adam or some other non-MTG player is smart enough to figure out this "meta" analysis in the same way that I did, they'll still know that at least the 1st and 5th cards will be absolute staples or stinkers.

@@AhsimNreiziev True, but if it was completely rng where it goes, then it still works on average for half the session. As the series goes on, truly difficult staple/stinker cards will become harder and harder to find so this would also serve to delay the almost inevitable end of the series or help it transition to some other format down the line. Example: Here's 5 cards and they have to guess which format it sees play in. Or if it's terrible.

Seconded for Minsc and Boo, I totally whiffed on that card the first time I saw it- boy was I wrong

Ultra hardmode would be Chalice of the Void. It took literally YEARS for everybody to figure out how busted Chalice for 0 on the play was.

I feel like he would get balance because of evenly matched.

I don’t think misevaluation is the problem in this case. It’s realizing that there was enough synergy with artifacts that mill to make an actually competent deck. Not really the best for this series - it requires knowledge of the cardpool, not card evaluation skill.

wasn't even close to a stinker, but just a solid card printed at the wrong time

As I made sure to stress in the beginning of the video, a stinker does not mean it's a bad card. It means it wad very hyped up in spoiler season and ended up seeing almost no play ;) the card is purely good stats. But it simply did not catch up with what the other cards where doing at the time

@@CardmarketMagic You were wrong about the 0% play in EDH though - it actually sees 2% play on EDHRec, which is comparable to LED.

Yeah I remember playing standard when this was out, it was a chunky threat if it stayed

Thank you for the algorithm boost! 😃

Definitely urza's saga, took me a while to come from "yeah that's kind of fine" to "oh god"

Lurrus will be an irritating one to assess due to the companion errata but I do love that card.

@@arnaudbellinger397 its a land with more text then every card in an intro deck combined, "oh god" should be the first reaction xD

I found 0% on the EDHRec page, but maybe I looked in the wrong place? Nonetheless, 2% is almost the definition of something not being a staple :) a good example of a commander staple would be rhystic studies

@@CardmarketMagic 2% is also the amount of play LED sees, so no, that's not accurate.

Yeah it seems like a reasonable card for EDH because it seems like a goldilocks, powerful enough to be meaningfully impactful in the right deck, but not so powerful to draw removal, counter magic, or archenemy status.

But then we can't use him for staple or stinker anymore if he sees the cards 😅

@@CardmarketMagic Maybe standard then? The cards outside of it are pletiful and more useful in staple or stinker than the newer ones🧐

I was just going to suggest this! And vice versa, teach Carl to play a YGO meta deck.

@@dagonhydra I would have said Vintage, but nobody plays that format. Vintage MtG and meta YGO are so hilariously similar, but nobody really talks about it.

@@randommaster06 having recently learned YGO because of Master Duel, I agree! I’d modify it slightly that YGO is very similar to Legacy, Vintage is still a class of its own.

@@dagonhydra I was thinking of Vintage more for the "dead out of nowhere" aspect to the format. Either way, getting a YGO pro to try some of the more busted formats would be great.

Well in Yugioh we have cards that search for equips that made a certain equip deck really good until there were some band, so Stonfeorge wouldn't be that hard, a card that would actually be hard for an only Yugioh player to understand is Field of the Dead, we don;'t have something that similar to that, maybe Black Garden but is not even on the same power level.

I don’t think mystic remora has been a staple in any format outside of commander. So… stinker?

@@joshuagriffith9191 It's seen vintage play a while back especially when mana drain was on top of the format in the mid to late 2000's.

@@dstreetz91 fair enough. I will admit I didn’t start playing vintage until a few years ago. Funny you say that though, because I got top 8 in a vintage tournament today.

Dark depth would be a deep cut. The guesser would have to know that cards like vesuva exist to know whether it's a staple or not.

@@Synedrex12 Well, he's definitely shown knowledge that cheats in the game exist. "Oh this is bad but if you cheat it out or double it it's very powerful." It's a tricky one for sure but Depths has a very interesting MTG history where it was essentially not worth the cardboard it was printed on for the better part of a decade.

But what is the answer for Rancor? It was considered a staple where I played, not sure how it was worldwide as magic was a lot less global back then. Today I don't think it would see standard play (but it would probobly be good in limited).

@@vicdark8807 Rancor was/is amazing in boggles. In boggles day in modern it was one of the most powerful cards in the deck. Same with pauper boggles now.

@@joshuagriffith9191 True I guess but boogles is not really a deck outside pauper right (is it a deck in pauper?)? So it is still contextually a decent card but WotC does not want to recreste the context it shines in.

@@vicdark8807 it is not a deck outside of pauper anymore. But it goes up and down popularity in that format. In its day though, it was a scourge of modern.

@@vicdark8807 I'd wager to say if it was reprinted it would likely see play in standard. It's still a good card even compared to today's card strength. What always made it powerful was the fact that you could keep bringing it back. I could see it playing nicely with Quiron Beastcaller.

This is a great list!

This comment is full of great suggestions that I'm putting on our list!

Thank you for the sub! 😃 and Brimstone is a great deck name 👌

Formats make "staple or stinker" complicated. Is it a staple if its all over the place in pauper, or in current standard?