FrankTrollman wrote:
Cinderella is exactly what Commander Sword needed. The problem with the Gawain Support Cannon plan is that Gawain's cost reduction is only good if you plan on playing 2 creatures a turn.
Strongly disagree with this.
The problem with the Support Cannon plan is that you are running a deck which wants to turn things around on turns 6+ in a craft that no healing, lousy sweep and no banish. In order to make Support Cannon a thing, the deck necessarily needs to have strong drops on turns 6,7, and 8. And in order to do that either your deck runs a bunch of 6,7, and 8 drops or you have held back on playing cards in the earlygame in order to play multiples on the post-cannon turns. So the deck has to play a bit soft in the earlygame -- and then it has to spend turn 5 playing a set-up drop instead of dropping and evolving to trade for board. That is currently a game-losingly bad plan. Now I agree that Cinderella being a repeatable source of 4 immediate random (maybe face) damage so long as you have additional curve-minus-3 orb followers in hand could change that plan to something worthwhile.
But that plan is NOT going to want Gawain. Because cost reductions go away after a cost-reduced follower is dropped, So Cinderella is going to cost 3. More importantly the deck absolutely has to turn things around on turn 6, so it's going to want to drop Cinderella and another 3-cost Commander on that turn. The ideal is 2 rotating Cinderellas, but White Paladin is a key part of surviving into cannonade turns. But it you spend turn 5 playing Cannon and turn 6 dropping Commanders, you only got to attack with Gawain if you were player 2 and got the first evolve -- so the deck has to be built to allow a double commander drop without any cost reductions. If Turn 7 doesn't need to be a Roland / Frontguard for defense, then it's a Cinderella + 4 drop where you might play unenhanced Gawain and evolve him in order to set up for the turn 8 discount Cinderella + Discount Roland / Frontguard pairing. But you'd likely be better off just playing an Amelia for extra cannon damage right now and a ward dude in your hand.
And while Gawain's cost reduction is good for turning 2-cost commanders into 1-cost commanders to get a multi-drop on turn 5 or 7, Gawain's cost reduction is ALSO good for letting you play 6-cost or 8 cost commanders one turn early. Right now that means either trying to drop Charlotte into an active Luminous Standard on turn 7 or trying to combo a turn 5 Otohime into a turn 6 Sage Commander (or the variant where Otohime is turn 6, but Walfrid is turn 7). What Gawain-based Commander Sword *needs* is something to make any of those plans more reliable and/or better packages at those cost points.
I have a suspicion that Dark Alice is terrible. The entire point of Mordecai in a neutralcraft deck is that you can Urd yourself a doubled Mordecai. But Dark Alice banishes her double, so it's pointless. Not sure what all else you could put in the Neutralcraft Shadow deck, and there might be some arcane advantage to deck thinning all the Shadowcraft followers from your deck on turn 7. But I can't think of what that would be.
I'm scratching my head wondering if Through The Looking Glass has combo potential here. In theory you end up with a deck that's like just Alice: Wonderland Explorer, Urd, Looking Glass and discount Mordecai in play - but you have to have painted at least one of your Dark Alices with a Looking Glass to make it work beforehand...so seems unlikely without more setup cards in the set
Red Ragewyrm is weird as fuck, and appears to be some sort of attempt to get us to play with Ace Dragoons. But it also means that if your opponent stumbles at all and you play it on turn 3, you can evolves plus face smash it in for ten on turn 4. Drop an Ace Dragoon after and then just flip your opponent off.
Stumbles?
Rahab showed that a 5 toughness drop on turn 3 usually requires multiple cards for an opponent to kill and couldn't always be killed immediately. But at least a turn 3 Rahab required dragon to ramp on turn 2. Ragewyrm pretty much just requires you to go 2nd so as to get the turn 4 evolve.
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