Faith vs Science DD challenge: Recent Activity
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Recent updates to Faith vs Science DD challenge: (Generated at 2025-05-01 04:17:45)
PLAYTEST: This should definitely be kept as long as we have some worthy ptential targets at cmc 6, but is probably terribly undercosted.
Compare: Trash for Treasure and Argivian Restoration. Even at CMC3 this would have less investment than TfT and benefit of recursion through bounce. At CMC2 this is insane.
PLAYTEST: This card ends games. All the artifact( token)s lying around and waiting to be tinkered into something useful suddenly become a win condition.
My favorite tinker card - this has a dozen different uses and modes. Even without flash worth the versatility. Premium common.
Science deck needs this to be more pro-active removal e. g. by adding tapping the enchanted creature upon ETB. That is very wordy for a common though.
Alternative: Caught in the Gears
Contesting Cogwork Binding.
As much as this play makes me happy, I hope you didn't just jam a turn two Prototype.
Either way, I think we are going to need to up Emulation machine's cost as we really can't up the cost of Break Down. I mentioned the fears of a turn two Spine of Ish Sah on the original Emulation Machine info.
Great job with taking the initiative to do your own playtest. Me and Dan will be playtesting this weekend and will add additional notes.
Alternatives: Hillside Hermit & Inquisitor's Escort.
Contesting Unseemly Zealot.
Contesting Unseemly Zealot.
You know what kind of effect makes little difference on a five-mana spell? Sorcery speed temporary +1/+1 to a single creature.
I loathed drawing this card during PLAYTEST simply because the deck only once ever reached seven mana and played like a charm on six or less.
The Science deck in its current incarnation does not want a card that costs nine mana.
Unrelated to the playtest it simply feels wrong to have the biggest, baddest flier of the two decks not in the Angel-themed Faith-deck.
PLAYTEST confirms: The Science deck is currently too fast to care about this kind of recursion - maybe if it was a Kozilek, Butcher of Truth-like re-shuffle on a card with another main effect.
If all this does is re-shuffle this is about as useful to the deck as a 5-mana Darksteel Relic.
Used this card during PLAYTEST. Part of the most memorable play of the evening (also: Break Down, Bounce Scrabbler & Emulation Machine.)
The card was originally made when pray triggers and activations were not tied to have a reliant, hard-to-remove pray enabler.
This is no longer necessary without orphaned pray triggers. Changed.
First PLAYTEST results. The cards were already a few days old yesterday since the playtest was originally planned for the weekend, so a few results were not entirely up-to-date, but I could make some general observations:
Both decks have slight mana issues even with just one copy of every card in a card slot. I think there were already some cuts that are not represented in the decks I played, so more after today.
Tinker works, but plays entirely different on nonartifact creatures which sometimes - lacking the artifact in play - are simply "turned off"; not necessarily a bug, but we want to be certain to have artifacts at the cheap end of the spectrum.
More importantly: Tinkering is fun. You always seem to be able to do something even on a stalled board. You get to feel clever, so thematically this is a good sign.
Pray causes a strange transformation in the Faith deck once you reach the magical amount of seven mana: You want to pray, but you might also need to put down additional creatures to make pray better or defend. This cuts into the good feeling over finally being able to activate pray.
The Faith deck seems notbly more reliant to hit both colors twice to avoid being stuck with dead cards. Possibly too much.
The Science deck seems to handle Angels well with removal/Thopters, but the Thopters are ironically now pressuring the Faith deck a bit too efficiently early on.
The many different singletons result in a high variance, so some cards never showed up and some almost every game. I'll comment on individual cards that stood out.
was: Pray 5WW is: Soul Warden-ish
EDIT: I played this with an even stronger variant (static +1/+1 as long as you control an Angel) and it never rose to be quite as strong as the Autonomous Thrasher is in the Science deck despite costing
less.
The Science deck is so far seemingly not bothered much by this being a bit over the curve.
gains -> gets
can we please move this back to cmc 2 for curve reasons
I prefer it how it is. It's more interesting than aballynock cohort, I think.
Wording quibble! Creatures "gain" or "lose" abilities, and "get" stat changes (whether positive or negative).
I would advise against a literally Ballynock Cohort. Science deck has one already in Autonomous Thrasher
Which puts this card in a weird place now...
Increased man's cost 1W->2W
2/2 first strike is too good for
even without the possible bonus. You get Youthful Knight 2/1 
at common, or variations on Ballynock Cohort 2/2 
at common, or variations on White Knight 2/2 
at uncommon. I think the Ballynock Cohort stats are probably best here but I'll leave you guys to assess this deck's curve.
What about "T: Shuffle any number of artifacts from your graveyard into your library."
This seems like a lot of unnecessary shuffling. What if just tucked the artifact and you could tap it to shuffle your library?
As much as I love the name reconbobulator and think this kind of control deck needs a way to be refueled, I'll back this idea.
Seconded. Paying 5-6 mana I'd rather have a resilient 6 power than a card that makes me shuffle all the time for little tangible benefit.