Thing is that a good amount of the time, making your opponent fight over a Misstep is actually great for you. In a one-for-one battle, you win by being the proactive player.
The fact that he stumbled on one, and it was YAWGMOTH'S BARGAIN, I feel like the text on the card is so powerful he reverse psychology-d himself into thinking you must have been pulling some kind of 3000IQ trick.
kinda: it's so blatantly game breaking that he couldn't convince himself they would ever print something like that unless it was basically impossible to actually play it, and to be fair enchantments are probably the hardest cards to cheat out. There is a reason that there are several cards that just straight up say "you win the game" or "you can not loose the game" that still manage to suck. ...in a lot of ways survival of the fittest seems even better though: it's not as blatantly [play card = win game] but it's a classic case of a card being designed with a "cost" that's at least as beneficial as the intended payout.
@@evernewb2073 Enchantments may be the hardest to cheat out, but Yawgmoth's Bargain was printed in the *same set* as Academy Rector. And even then, that path only became useful once all the absurdly fast artifact mana ramp got banned.
@@evernewb2073 What I was thinking about is a somewhat similar card in Yu-Gi-Oh that is never played. Tongue Twister. It's a card that lets you draw 2 cards, but the condition of needing to tribute summon the card and then get rid of it makes it kinda bad. There are actually a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards that make you draw cards, but most of them (like, 95%) have cards that make them not worth the effort in a normal game. That's why Exodia decks are able to have 35 different cards that allow them to draw more cards in them, yet those decks are considered bad but fun on a casual level.
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917 yep! it's pretty much exactly that in a nutshell, card draw isn't quite so utterly broken in MTG because of the resource economy being, well, more like an economy than a sequence chain but draw is still powerful enough for 1 life = 1 card to be WAY to good a bargain for you to believe there isn't some kind of catch even before you stick it in a deck that just straight up wins as soon as you have a couple specific cards in your hand, even worse they printed it in the element with the best options for cheezing it out _and_ abusing it once you have it. the card looks like someone either accidentally printed a joke card or made some bad decisions after getting through a 20 hour day at the office with the help of their secret stash and doubled down _hard_ when a playtester tried to bring it to attention. to use your example imagine how much better those exodia decks would be if you could just pay a thousand life points to draw a card any time you like as many times as you like, heck, half the decks that use this in MTG include ways for paying that life to be a _bonus_ so half the time all they actually want the card for is to instantly bring their life total down to their ideal because they already have a win condition on the field, drawing a handful of counterspells and a secondary win condition at the same time is just a bonus.
I remember when Mental Misstep was released a lot of people were playing it in their decks. I was running a green ramp deck at the time and I played a turn one Birds of Paradise. My opponent immediately used Mental Misstep on it. I however also ran a card called Summoning Trap in my deck. Summoning Trap was cast at instant speed for 4 of any color + 2 Green mana and when cast allowed you to look through the top 7 cards of your library and put a creature from among those cards onto the battlefield and then shuffle the library. But, if any creature spell that I cast was countered on that turn I could then cast Summoning Trap for 0 mana. I had 2 of them in my hand and used both of them which allowed me to get a Primeval Titan and an Emrakul, The Aeons Torn onto the field turn 1. My opponent then forfeit the round and pulled his Mental Missteps out of his deck for some other sideboard cards. I still get a chuckle out of that one.
Fun fact: in the last issue of The Duelist magazine that was printed, which coincided with the release of Urza's Destiny, they had a tentative list of "top 10 cards from the set". Yawgmoth's Bargain took first, AND second place. Because it was too good for "just" first place.
Either TCG Player or CFB did something similar in a video when Khans block was rotating out. 3rd place was Siege Rhino, 2nd place was Fetch lands, 1st place was the second Siege Rhino.
@@bobzour I believe it was CFB! Pretty sure LSV was in it, talking about cards they won’t miss after rotation, and yeah, number one was specifically “the *second* siege rhino”
@@bobzour I remember when Dragons of Tarkir and Magic Origins were rotating, LSV did an article with images of major cards rotating, and Collected Company was in there four times.
I feel like he shouldn't have gotten the point if only because "really good" is just off by orders of magnitude lol. It's pretty rare that a card breaks Standard, Modern, and Legacy all at once. Even though, if I'm remembering correctly, Modern didn't exist quite yet when this card dropped.
@@CxOrillion But if the game worked like that and the degree mattered, his line of thought led him basically to the doorstep of saying it's banworthy. It wasn't him underrating the card, it was just a turn of phrase.
I mean i can understand every single card game in the market(hs, lor etc but i mostly play weiss and yugioh irl because the demographic here force me to do it) but i somehow still need an emulators to determine how an effect resolve in yugioh negate faceup etc. Show how stupidly annoying yugioh rulings are, but it is so satisfying when i pull it off, like i summoned Lonefire Blossom(im playing rikka irl) through living fossil and activate its effect, then my opponent poker facing my play unknowingly that's a legal move lmao.
To be fair a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards I've seen look like a novel with all the words. Although MTG is getting there. we're just not used to a lot of text.
The other thing about Mental Misstep to make it the ultimate staple is that it's effectively colourless. Literally every deck could play it when it was legal, because they can pay the 2 life instead of the blue mana.
In Yugioh we have a card called Solemn Judgement with the activation cost of half the current life point and is still played constantly in many decks, seeing the cost of 2 lives for a disruption is definitely a broken effect
2:40 Despite declaring it a staple, they UNDERRATE this card. I started playing Magic in '97. Survival of the Fittest released in '98 with Exodus. It was the primary card in the '98 World Championship deck. Certainly the creatures of the time were trash tier compared to modern Magic--Serra Angels, a staple of the series since release, were removed from 5th Edition for being 'far too powerful'--but even with that in mind, this card allowing you to fill your hand and graveyard with any creatures of your choice for very cheap made it quite broken even at the time.
Yeah, there was even a block deck that used survival called recsur because recurring nightmare was in the same block and oh man was recsur degenerate when you got the engine rolling. It was a slow grind, but it got lots of card advantage going to the point opponents couldn't keep up at all while fogging with spike weaver, gaining life with spike feeder, or pounding your face in with that card that spawns a 1/1 every turn to feed the recurring nightmare and was also a big beatstick. I remember legacy with the card, it was crazy what it could do at the end before the axe came down and now it could do even more of course just getting better with each set usually.
@@dark_rit I had the gold-border Recurring Survival WC deck and it took me a while to figure out how it worked (couldn't just look it up on the internet at the time), but once it clicked, that was a super fun deck to play. It was pretty busted then, but would be absolutely broken with today's pool of cards.
When he realized "Misstep your misstep" was a play I couldn't help but say, out loud, HE SAW THE LINE. But yeah, unless you weren't playing 1-mana spells you played misstep, if only to protect you from everyone else's missteps
I still remember the few short weeks Mental Misstep wasn't banned in Legacy, & man did I freaking hate that format. I had to find 4 cards to pull from my U/R Painted Stone deck just to mainboard 4 x Missteps to prepare for the inevitable counter war 😅 Crazy how that card made it through testing when everyone knew the minute they saw it how it would play out! Even a non-MTG player spotted it within a minute of talking about the card aloud!
They mostly thought oh phyrexian mana can't be that good right? Right? Wrong, you basically printed a modern day urza block set in new phyrexia considering how many cards got played because they had phyrexian mana. Like you have to wonder how they thought something innocuous like gitaxian probe was fine.
@@elitebuster2012 There's absolutely no way he'd fall for Stoneforge. Cheating things out of the Deck for cheap, is universally a good effect, especially when it's coming off a cheap monster/creature.
Being a Yu-Gi-Oh! Player who doesn't know anything about magic, it was very fun and interesting to watch it from the opposite prospective! It sounds way harder when you don't know the game 🤣
I’ve watched a lot of these from the MTG perspective but I just watch these two evaluating YGO cards and I can confirm. My head was absolutely spinning.
Thing is that a lot of these game-actions are used in multiple games and kinda demand a proper one word term to describe them. Tutoring and milling are useful verbs that replace longer sentences.
I heard tutor was a reference to a magic card but I don't know what it actually does. But in the past when I heard people mention 'tutor', they were talking about special summoning from deck, not searching? What does it actually do?
@@IamGrimalkin In the very first set of Magic, they printed a black card called Demonic Tutor that looked through your library for any card and put it in your hand. Not having been around back then, I can't tell you if that immediately became the name for deck searching effects or if it took until the printing of things like Enlightened Tutor, Mystic Tutor, and Vampiric Tutor (respectively, searched enchantments and artifacts, instants and sorceries, and anything but cost 2 life) to solidify that name for the effect. Importantly those 3 instead of putting it in your hand, put it to the top of your library, thus any deck searching effect became known as a tutor, no matter where the card ended up. Even cards like Buried Alive that send it to your graveyard, are known as tutors (although the actual action of doing it is sometimes called entombing, named after the 1 mana spell that does it).
Gauging strength in resource based games can be tricky specifically for Yu-Gi-Oh players who aren't used to costs just being part and parcel of a card doing anything, and expect insanely fast-paced interactions.
Card suggestions: Chains of Meph (not-errated printing) - Might as well give the YGO player a YGO card Endurance Dragon's Rage Channler Golgari Grave Troll Living End
Yugioh doesn't actually have many cards like Chains of Mephistopholes, it very much functions with mtg logic, where the cards bend the rules. The yugioh equivalent of this card would be "small world": It's complicated to use, but what it does is let you go minus one to search any monster, so long as your deck is set up right.
Another thing that I think makes Undergrowth Champion pretty bad is the amount of removal that doesn't care about doing damage, potentially a lot of wasted set up just to get destroyed or exiled.
Welp in Yugioh we have a card called Solemn Judgement, which allows us to yeet a card activation clean with the cost of half a life point and it's still super good ,so seeing mental mistep only cost 2 lives for a effect of disruption I instantly thought it was a staple
Tbf it’s not quite that. It’s a much more limited range you can use it on, like a judgement for 800 but you can only use it on a normal summoned monsters effect. But that judgement is also a handtrap that counters itself.
Undergrowth Champion was bad because cards that say "destroy" or "exile" don't do damage, and they're far more common than cards that do, and it's too slow to be consistent in the combat step, it was often just blocked by bigger things.
Another option would be if it had trample, because then you would not be able to chump block it, and all those +1/+1 counters making it huge would actually allow it to do damage.
@@justavictim9432 Even with Hexproof, I don't think it would have been great. If it had both some form of Evasion AND some form of removal protection (beyond preventing damage) it might have been decent.
@@UmeII I mean yeah if it had evasion too it would be strong but Champion would have been a staple in Pioneer ramp as is because that is more of a control deck that wants to hit land drops and have chump blockers.
I love these staple or stinker videos. I have been getting more and more into Flesh and Blood and would enjoy seeing some of the players try to evaluate cards for that game, too.
An episode about limited cards would be great. Cards like Goblin Shortcutter from ZDR or Imperial Oath from NEO is a great way to look at another side of MtG.
MtG is tough to do this with imo. Different formats value cards differently. What might be good in standard isn't necessarily good in modern or legacy, but could be godlike in commander.
Yeah it becomes difficult to say what it means to be a good card. Notice in this video every staple is vintage playable and every stinker didn't make the cut in standard, which makes it hard to argue they don't fit those categories but gives a pretty high delta in power level.
Is there a format where Mental Misstep isn’t good? As a Yugioh player who’s only experience with Magic at all is the starter deck in MTG Arena, I think that card is insane no matter the format
@@JpegDog yes actually. It was not good in standard when it was printed and wouldn't be today. Standard is low enough power level that 1 mana cards just aren't that common.
@@JpegDog It's probably at it's worst in Commander purely because of the amounts of mana used in that format. Even then, it still has its uses because people play cards like Sol Ring, Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, etc (especially since the 2 life is even more negligible when you're starting at 40 instead of 20). It's the only format it's fully legal in, but I can't think of any time I've ever seen it played there.
This is pretty great content. Some suggestions for future episodes: Darksteel Relic Curse of Silence Mind Swords Meddling Mage Jace, Wielder of Mysteries Kappa Cannoneer
Here are some other hard to evaluate cards for him to evaluate: 1) Mindslaver 2) Gitaxian Probe 3) Yawgmoth, Thran Physician 4) Chaos Warp 5) Armageddon 6) Jace, Unraveler of Secrets
@@thomasestling3400 Exactly. People sometimes don't think it's all that good, and then they play against somebody using him in EDH and get blown out with an undying and/or Nest of Scarabs loop.
@@theprogressivecynic2407 Feel like Yawg is kinda cheap. It's a fine creature without the existence of Undying but probably wouldn't see play, and if you look at it without knowing the existence of the mechanic Undying you can't really fairly evaluate it
That's kinda true, but also the point of having him evaluate that card was to see if 6 mana was worth such an obviously broken effect or if you could cheat it out, not for him to go "oh the effect is broken" and not think about the mana cost
I saw the video from the Yugioh channel yesterday... and as a magic player I was shocked how much this game could be difficult if you're out of the loop with a game. Cool content, keep going!
YGO player here with almost no Magic experience - this was a really fun video! I judged every card based on whether or not I thought it would be good in YGO and I got the same answers. Yawgmoth's Bargain was a tricky one because the effect is obviously insane, but I didn't know if any ways to cheat the cost existed (was getting Heart of the Underdog or Supply Squad vibes). Also, I had no idea that Magic cards could have two sides and my mind has been completely blown away by that concept. I also watched the opposite version of this on the YGO channel and it was really neat to see the other perspective. Love this content, hope there's more in the future.
Yu-Gi-Oh player here, dabble in Magic now and then. Relentless Rats seems better than Shadowborn Apostle because it’s just a flat boost to your other rats, Apostle probably isn’t going to activate it’s effect during a game. The effect of being allowed any number of those cards in a deck is very funny, Digimon has similar cards, I don’t think Yugioh could have a card with that effect without making it very bad
@@rustycox7741 apostle is actually better due to combo potential because of the card edge Walker. At least IMO. The only thing that relentless rats can really combo off with is thrumming Stone
As a yugioh player: MTG has no zone limits, right? So you could summon a load of Relentless Rats and use them to OTK? Like you might do with Numeron in yugioh? (Although this kind of card would never be printed in yugioh, you can't even play 4 different Umi retrains).
@@IamGrimalkinYes, Magic has no zone limits, so in theory you could storm off to play a ton of rats, but they have summoning sickness and can't attack because they don't have haste, meaning you need to pass turn to your opponent, who could wipe your whole board and leave you with nothing. The rats also cost three mana each, which is awkward because it means you normally can't cast two of them a turn until turn 6, which is very late, plus you have to actually draw all of them. Obviously you can build your deck to give your rats haste and draw more cards and make more mana, but now you're diluting your rats with a bunch of other pieces just to make them playable (and spending more mana to do it). It's just too much work for a mediocre payoff. If you're already building your deck to include massive mana generation or infinite mana and tons of card draw, you want a wincon that wins the game on the spot with a single card, instead of trying to cast a bunch of rats. Something like Tendrils of Agony would be a much better choice; even mana-intensive Storm wincons like Mind's Desire or Dragonstorm are more efficient. Compare also to cards like Empty the Warrens or Chatterstorm, which will also make a huge board of creatures but do so when you cast just one copy of that card, so you don't need to draw as well and can do it earlier because you don't need to have as many cards or as much mana available to get your reward. Honestly, Relentless Rats seems better played fairly to apply pressure in a grindy midrange strategy, but even there and even sticking just to the Rat creature type, you'd be better off playing Pack Rat along with cards you could discard for value and removal.
Only now watching this do I realize that the double faced cards where you pick a side to play are basically pendulum monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, where you choose whether you play it as a monster or a spell.
Other yugioh player here, this was a lot of fun to play along with. I knew Survival of the fittest was insane because I play Dragon Ravine in my deck which works similarly, but I have to loop the card to re-use it. This seemed so nutty.
I feel like dredge cards would potentially be difficult to see the power of. Lions eye diamond is another example of a broken card that is hard to evaluate at first glance. Sensei’s divining top would probably be easier to figure out it was at least good, but I imagine it would be hard for someone to recognize just HOW good it really is.
LED at first was...bad. Even though demonic tutor existed there wasn't storm cards printed yet. It only took a few years for it to reach oh this is just flatout broken though when burning wish was released into the world and vintage got the 4 burning wish 4 LED with yawg's win in the sideboard, wheel of fortune, timetwister, all sorts of silly stuff ensued.
+1 for necropotence, back why Scrye used to rate the cards it was a 1 out of 5. It took what felt like forever in the pre-dojo days for the world to learn how broken it was.
Love this series! One thing I think should be mentioned just as background info to help out is the distinction between /playing/ a land and having a land enter the battlefield. It seemed like at times he was evaluating some of the cards (Cosima, Undergrowth Champion) by thinking of the land effect as only happening once per turn because you're only allowed to /play/ one land per turn (unless a card like Explore etc. lets you do otherwise). But of course decks with green in them can easily be putting out 3 or 4 per turn with good ramp. I realize fetches were mentioned, but other ramp stuff wasn't. Cheers!
I actually like seeing things like this as it show the balance between both games. I've played both games and can tell you it's always nice to see people look at the other game and get a solid grasp on the mindset of somethings.
I think the reason why Adam had a somewhat easier time guessing Magic cards is that Magic is actually still relatively within the realm of sanity, while YGO is just so insane that anyone coming from outside is just left just speechless.
these cards were also pretty easy choices imo (although Undergrowth Champion was a bit more difficult to evaluate compared to Tarmogoyf, but he wouldn't know about Tarmogoyf so...)
Would love to see cards that can break Yu-Gi-Oh like sensei's divining top or cards that are so weird like gitrog monster and just bad stuff like Aurelia's fury
Kinda hard to evaluate what would "break yugioh" since magic cards are balanced around mana which yugioh doesnt have. A lot o cards would break yugioh if they didnt have mana costs. Most draw spells would
The equivalent of Stupor and Act of Treason (and of course divination) are banned in YGO. Not having a mana system wildly alters the power level of noncreatures
@@fredrikfagerberg6783 You're absolutely correct on these points, but we did get the Act of Treason equivalent back last banlist, and it's seen no play due to the current speed of the game (Not discounting Change of Heart's history of course, it's just too likely to be prime negation-bait in most matchups to be worth running the one copy in your deck)
The omenkeel is terrible in standard but amazing in EDH. It's a great feeling when the rest of your tables eyes pop out their sockets when you exile the top 17 cards of someones deck and now you'll never miss a land drop. The keyword here is the omenkeel says when a vehicle does damage not when it deals damage.
as a YGO player, getting 5/5 felt pretty good 😎 fun content! the card with more text on the back reminded me of pendulum monsters having a second text box and being overly complicated lol
I'm much more of a YGO player (of sorts), but I like that the magic videos have good variety and it's not just stuff like black lotus, which usually puts me off from these kinds of things. Also both sides seem to have a least a basic understanding of each game so it's not just "omg drawing? that's crazy".
I feel like the second card could be useful in a deck that has Apocalypse(its been a while might be the wrong name, exiles all permanents) along with locating spells and damage spells because having a creature racking up points after taking out potentially a really synergistic combo could very well be really good. I could be dumb though idk.
5 for 5 over here! I know the very basic fundamentals of Magic - life, lands, tapping, stats - but played a significant amount of Yugioh. Several of these effects were easily identified as exploitable, even without understanding MTG meta or average cost/stats.
One thing that wasn't hammered home enough with Phyrexian mana is that you can slam them in ANY deck. Can be super powerful. I do like these videos a lot. Maybe you could touch on stuff like tribes and wild mechanics like infect or miracle.
These are fun to watch. Thanks for making and sharing the guessing if cards are good episodes! Would be cool to see him do a draft in mtg arena or something, not knowing the meta
Your explanation of mental misstep reminds me of that grass looks greener in yugioh. It was warping the format where everyone has to play suboptimal large decks of 60 cards just cuz that card existed. The ideal deck size is usually the minimum 40 cards.
I really like these videos where people accustomed to one card game evaluate cards from other games. I play magic, yugioh, and Pokémon tcg and I’ll keep watching these vids.
Another wonderful game of "Which Piece of Cardboard is best?". I'd be struggling with the Yugioh cards. This is not a game to get over emotional about, it's entertaining.
Another thing with misstep is that it gives counter magic to every colour. While usually spells that say "coubter target spell" with very few conditions are only in blue
Even casting Yawgmoth's Bargain "fairly" is pretty easy. There is a universe where swamp > Dark Ritual > Sol Ring > Mana Vault > Yawgmoth's Bargain, on T1. Or any number of other combinations of mana rocks off dark ritual. 6 mana isn't the barrier most people think it is, even in formats like commander and pauper.
That's not "fair" casting. Fairly casting some thing means you only used lands with no accelerated drops to cast it. Any thing else that would get it out faster than it's normal turn is considered cheating it ahead of time in common mtg jargon.
@@tonysmith9905 I always considered free casts like with Braids or Fires of Invention to be cheating the cost and paying the cost whether with rocks or spells to be fair casting but maybe that's just me.
Bargain is a really hard and somewhat controversal card for his challange. While powefull its not bonkers anymore. In Vintage it sees absolutly no play and in Legacy one can cheat out grislebrand easly or one can cheat out worser stuff like Omnipotence with show and tell. For storm there are similar payoffs and those are also searchable with burning wish while bargain isnt. Might see some play in some kind of academy rector control deck. It has kinda become a stinker but there is little reason to unban it even tho it wouldnt do much.
I was thinking the same. I don't know what format Bargain would be broken in currently (I guess it would be a slight upgrade to Ad Nauseam in Legacy. Especially since you could run multiple copies of it), despite being banned in everything except Vintage. Same thing with Windfall, Memory Jar and other Vintage cards. They are mostly defined by their mythology and not their actual power level.
When Bargain first came out it was not seriously played in the main formats. It was too expensive and the other decks were just too fast. There were much more powerful cards to "cheat" into play.
@@muchograndeyolatengo They will never unban Windfall in Legacy (even though there's no Academy or Mind Over Matter) because it essentially forces a mulligan. Going Lotus Petal -> Ancient Tomb -> Windfall on turn one means your opponent could have kept a good hand with four spells and three mana sources, but then got punished by drawing into seven non-land cards. And the Windfall player basically got a free Ancient Tomb out of the deal.
Delver, 5 drop Teferi, Dress Down, Unlicensed Hearse, Thragtusk, Maze's End, 2 Drop Tibalt, Feather would all be fun. Gathering Throng and like cards would actually be fun to watch in this specific series bc it is a very sought after type of ability in YGO. Maybe Whisper Squad is the best one to show.
Just thinking Cyclonic Rift, Stormbreath Dragon, Capenna Triple Lands, Goblin Guide, Oath of Nissa, Slippery Bogle, 2 Drop Thalia are all maybe interesting ones to throw at him as well.
I just want to say that Cosima, The Omkeel actually, was the pivoting card of a UW deck that brought me to top 800 ranked Mythic Arena some months ago. In the right deck, that card alone put real pressure on your opponent. 🙂
Yeah I haven't played magic in a while, but I thought the card was neat. Like sure horrible against aggro, but in a control mirror you could destroy the opponent with it.
One of Paolo's SCG articles had a pretty fun Temur Giants +Yorion list for Kaldheim Standard, playing Cosima as a 4-of. It was nice that you could wipe the board with Battle of Frost and Fire while Cosima was in exile, and you could also let her pick up a couple of counters and then she'd have enough toughness to survive the Battle.
I think if you really want to throw him for a loop ask him what he thinks of Bonesplitter. It's a great example of a card that would otherwise be in one category, but because of the existence of another card, it goes straight into the other. Mirrodin block btw is filled with cards like that.
The reason Yawgmoths Bargain is so OP is exactly the fact that the cards that cheat it out are also the ones you want lots of. There's many cards that convert handcards into one shot mana, giving you a boost for the turn at the cost of Handsize. What you need to break those is a way to convert that mana into more cards, so you can spiral out of control and finally do something for a lot of mana. The Bargain fills exactly that gap. It asks you to throw away cards for fast mana and rewards you with even more cards. Insane combo engine. Especially once you add Storm, but that's another chapter.
I'm pretty familiar with Magic in general, I've played on and off at times over the years since Ice Age. But, I have not been in the know on current meta in at least 10 years probably at this point beyond the occasional video like this or whatever and there are lots of holes in my timeline prior to that as well. So often as not I'm seeing these cards for the first time as well and I'm pretty good at assessing their play value but I always feel uncertain until they say haha. Great series.
In fairness, though not that he would have known, Yawgmoth's Bargain is kind of a trick question. It's amazing, but so amazing that it's barely playable which makes it kinda stinky too.
Bargain is a funny card because in a standard set now it would not be quite as broken and many decks would lose before being able to take advantage of it, but in many other formats and in its original era, it is the strongest card printed that led to an emergency ban soon after release. It's so hard to evaluate cards even that look potentially so strong, because context is so important.
It would be interesting to do this with the following 5 cards: Survival of the Fittest Fauna Shaman Birthing Pod Prime Speaker Yannifar Evolutionary Leap They're all, broadly speaking, the same effect: pitching one creature to go find another, on a permanent which lets you do it repeatedly. But two of those cards have entire archetypes named after them, and the other three saw either zero play or extremely fringe play.
Some cards to include in these: Fact or Fiction, and Steam Augury Gifts Ungiven Standstill Tangle Wire Rishadan Port Cursed Scroll Isamaru, Hound of Konda Remand Wild Nacatl Venser, Shaper Savant Ball Lightning
I think if you want to trip Adam up you should include one of the 'pact' cards like Pact of Negation or Slaughter Pact- having a card that is initially free but forces you to pay a cost later could be hard to figure out, and those cards vary wildly in playability so you can pick one that's a staple or a stinker.
Bargain is a tricky one. I think it’s fair to say that it might be a little closer to stinker, simply because it was a powerful card that was enabled by broken enablers. If you don’t know about Urza block and the ridiculous fast mana that those decks had access to, the card looks more like a challenge to get into play. There are cheaper and faster and easier wincons in eternal formats; comparing this to Griselbrand is fair, and I think even in a side-by-side comparison, the latter wins out just by being a more relevant card type. I’m certainly not saying that Yawg’s Bargain is a fair card by any means, just that It’s a bit more nuanced than just being good or bad.
I can't imagine any situation where casting Griselbrand wins faster than casting Bargain unless a lot of cards are illegal, and Bargain is just a lot cheaper, too.
@@thomasestling3400 even in really weak formats (formats that dont have access to griselbrand mind you) reanimation is 4 mana and there are always a plethora of ways to get stuff in the graveyard (wotc always prints draw 3 discard 2 etc) in modern/legacy getting griselbrand in play is trivially easy and always costs 2-3 mana
granted bargain would be ridiculous in modern *because* the format is slow enough for you to resolve it in money pile type decks without building around nonsense (fury hardcast is a good play for whatever reason) but comparing cheating out the two griselbrand is so so much easier
![BRASIL vs. URUGUAY [1-1] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-hWBAuxF1eY/mqdefault.jpg)
“This can counter itself.”
*PTSD of mental misstep one ups manship* “Yes.”
That's why at the end you just mention the Storm count to make your opponent sweat.
mental misstep is still my fav card.
@@ODST_SSGT I loved the MM Legacy meta no cap...
@@bruwin at the end of the war
Flusterstorm
Thing is that a good amount of the time, making your opponent fight over a Misstep is actually great for you. In a one-for-one battle, you win by being the proactive player.
The fact that he stumbled on one, and it was YAWGMOTH'S BARGAIN, I feel like the text on the card is so powerful he reverse psychology-d himself into thinking you must have been pulling some kind of 3000IQ trick.
kinda: it's so blatantly game breaking that he couldn't convince himself they would ever print something like that unless it was basically impossible to actually play it, and to be fair enchantments are probably the hardest cards to cheat out. There is a reason that there are several cards that just straight up say "you win the game" or "you can not loose the game" that still manage to suck.
...in a lot of ways survival of the fittest seems even better though: it's not as blatantly [play card = win game] but it's a classic case of a card being designed with a "cost" that's at least as beneficial as the intended payout.
My thoughts exactly
@@evernewb2073 Enchantments may be the hardest to cheat out, but Yawgmoth's Bargain was printed in the *same set* as Academy Rector. And even then, that path only became useful once all the absurdly fast artifact mana ramp got banned.
@@evernewb2073 What I was thinking about is a somewhat similar card in Yu-Gi-Oh that is never played.
Tongue Twister. It's a card that lets you draw 2 cards, but the condition of needing to tribute summon the card and then get rid of it makes it kinda bad.
There are actually a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards that make you draw cards, but most of them (like, 95%) have cards that make them not worth the effort in a normal game.
That's why Exodia decks are able to have 35 different cards that allow them to draw more cards in them, yet those decks are considered bad but fun on a casual level.
@@ashblossomandjoyoussprung.9917 yep! it's pretty much exactly that in a nutshell, card draw isn't quite so utterly broken in MTG because of the resource economy being, well, more like an economy than a sequence chain but draw is still powerful enough for 1 life = 1 card to be WAY to good a bargain for you to believe there isn't some kind of catch even before you stick it in a deck that just straight up wins as soon as you have a couple specific cards in your hand, even worse they printed it in the element with the best options for cheezing it out _and_ abusing it once you have it.
the card looks like someone either accidentally printed a joke card or made some bad decisions after getting through a 20 hour day at the office with the help of their secret stash and doubled down _hard_ when a playtester tried to bring it to attention.
to use your example imagine how much better those exodia decks would be if you could just pay a thousand life points to draw a card any time you like as many times as you like, heck, half the decks that use this in MTG include ways for paying that life to be a _bonus_ so half the time all they actually want the card for is to instantly bring their life total down to their ideal because they already have a win condition on the field, drawing a handful of counterspells and a secondary win condition at the same time is just a bonus.
I remember when Mental Misstep was released a lot of people were playing it in their decks. I was running a green ramp deck at the time and I played a turn one Birds of Paradise. My opponent immediately used Mental Misstep on it. I however also ran a card called Summoning Trap in my deck. Summoning Trap was cast at instant speed for 4 of any color + 2 Green mana and when cast allowed you to look through the top 7 cards of your library and put a creature from among those cards onto the battlefield and then shuffle the library. But, if any creature spell that I cast was countered on that turn I could then cast Summoning Trap for 0 mana. I had 2 of them in my hand and used both of them which allowed me to get a Primeval Titan and an Emrakul, The Aeons Torn onto the field turn 1. My opponent then forfeit the round and pulled his Mental Missteps out of his deck for some other sideboard cards. I still get a chuckle out of that one.
That is disgusting lmao
Activated your trap card
lol green can be degenerate too
Sounds like he made a mental misstep.
@@kevinb5417 take your damn like
Fun fact: in the last issue of The Duelist magazine that was printed, which coincided with the release of Urza's Destiny, they had a tentative list of "top 10 cards from the set". Yawgmoth's Bargain took first, AND second place. Because it was too good for "just" first place.
Either TCG Player or CFB did something similar in a video when Khans block was rotating out. 3rd place was Siege Rhino, 2nd place was Fetch lands, 1st place was the second Siege Rhino.
@@bobzour I believe it was CFB! Pretty sure LSV was in it, talking about cards they won’t miss after rotation, and yeah, number one was specifically “the *second* siege rhino”
@@bobzour I think it’s a cfb MTG top 8
@@bobzour I remember when Dragons of Tarkir and Magic Origins were rotating, LSV did an article with images of major cards rotating, and Collected Company was in there four times.
@@maileesaeya3614 What? why would LSV care about bant company rotating? it's not like he ever did anything with that deck......
Extremely Impressed by him so quickly honing in on exactly what happened with Misstep, spot on.
Yes! However i am supprised they did not mention, that with the alternative cost, it can be played in any deck regardless the color!
You can easily see a train wreck if you thrive in an environment full of train wrecks
@T.J. Johnson I immediately thinking about Solemn another Solemn
@@sirsimon6562 it happened in yugioh with crossout designator, low cost but going second you can set and crossout a crossout to get out of a bind
@T.J. Johnson one of the counters to Maxx "C" being activating your own to lock your opponent out of it IIRC
Impressed by his evaluation of Misstep, because he nailed the exact reason why it's toxic. He wins pretty hard for just that take, in my opinion 👍
Yugioh has a lot of cards like that and they are not even banned, so we are used to them 😂
I feel like he shouldn't have gotten the point if only because "really good" is just off by orders of magnitude lol. It's pretty rare that a card breaks Standard, Modern, and Legacy all at once. Even though, if I'm remembering correctly, Modern didn't exist quite yet when this card dropped.
@@CxOrillion thats not how the rules of the game work tho lmao
@@CxOrillion But if the game worked like that and the degree mattered, his line of thought led him basically to the doorstep of saying it's banworthy. It wasn't him underrating the card, it was just a turn of phrase.
@@researchinbreeder Plus the moment he said "it enters a toxic area" he was in the right magnitude anyway
13:07 tfw a Yu-Gi-Oh Player understands "Reading the card explains the card" better than most Magic players LOL
magic players seem way more likely to take design truisms like that for granted rather than thinking them through and applying them
I mean i can understand every single card game in the market(hs, lor etc but i mostly play weiss and yugioh irl because the demographic here force me to do it) but i somehow still need an emulators to determine how an effect resolve in yugioh negate faceup etc.
Show how stupidly annoying yugioh rulings are, but it is so satisfying when i pull it off, like i summoned Lonefire Blossom(im playing rikka irl) through living fossil and activate its effect, then my opponent poker facing my play unknowingly that's a legal move lmao.
Ironically, neither of them read lol
Nah Yugioh players are infamous for not reading the cards, lol. But to be fair, every card is a book nowdays
To be fair a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards I've seen look like a novel with all the words. Although MTG is getting there. we're just not used to a lot of text.
I like it better when you show in the bottom of the screen the rated cards and how the guest is doing, but very fun series!
The other thing about Mental Misstep to make it the ultimate staple is that it's effectively colourless. Literally every deck could play it when it was legal, because they can pay the 2 life instead of the blue mana.
In Yugioh we have a card called Solemn Judgement with the activation cost of half the current life point and is still played constantly in many decks, seeing the cost of 2 lives for a disruption is definitely a broken effect
Yeah both this and probe were a problem. You didn't really have a 60 card deck, you had a 52 card deck with four probes and 4 missteps.
White finally had a decent counterspell and it was a blue card
And because you could, you effectively had to
@@OriginalMokthol hey, dont you dare disrespect mana tithe like that. 😋 Mana tithe is a G.O.A.T!
2:40 Despite declaring it a staple, they UNDERRATE this card. I started playing Magic in '97. Survival of the Fittest released in '98 with Exodus. It was the primary card in the '98 World Championship deck. Certainly the creatures of the time were trash tier compared to modern Magic--Serra Angels, a staple of the series since release, were removed from 5th Edition for being 'far too powerful'--but even with that in mind, this card allowing you to fill your hand and graveyard with any creatures of your choice for very cheap made it quite broken even at the time.
Yeah, there was even a block deck that used survival called recsur because recurring nightmare was in the same block and oh man was recsur degenerate when you got the engine rolling. It was a slow grind, but it got lots of card advantage going to the point opponents couldn't keep up at all while fogging with spike weaver, gaining life with spike feeder, or pounding your face in with that card that spawns a 1/1 every turn to feed the recurring nightmare and was also a big beatstick. I remember legacy with the card, it was crazy what it could do at the end before the axe came down and now it could do even more of course just getting better with each set usually.
@@dark_rit I had the gold-border Recurring Survival WC deck and it took me a while to figure out how it worked (couldn't just look it up on the internet at the time), but once it clicked, that was a super fun deck to play. It was pretty busted then, but would be absolutely broken with today's pool of cards.
When he realized "Misstep your misstep" was a play I couldn't help but say, out loud, HE SAW THE LINE. But yeah, unless you weren't playing 1-mana spells you played misstep, if only to protect you from everyone else's missteps
really makes you wonder how it got past playtesting lol
I still remember the few short weeks Mental Misstep wasn't banned in Legacy, & man did I freaking hate that format. I had to find 4 cards to pull from my U/R Painted Stone deck just to mainboard 4 x Missteps to prepare for the inevitable counter war 😅
Crazy how that card made it through testing when everyone knew the minute they saw it how it would play out! Even a non-MTG player spotted it within a minute of talking about the card aloud!
Really was a misstep for wotc yeah
Easy to spot. Yugioh does stupid crap like that all the time. lol
They mostly thought oh phyrexian mana can't be that good right? Right? Wrong, you basically printed a modern day urza block set in new phyrexia considering how many cards got played because they had phyrexian mana. Like you have to wonder how they thought something innocuous like gitaxian probe was fine.
Equipments are super hard to evaluate. They would work as great bait in this series!
Oh yeah, and Stoneforge Mystic
@@elitebuster2012 There's absolutely no way he'd fall for Stoneforge. Cheating things out of the Deck for cheap, is universally a good effect, especially when it's coming off a cheap monster/creature.
Maybe do a "swords special" fire & ice, feast and famine, and the world ender type one that looked powerful but was a bit crap.
Just use CAWBlade cards. It’s a hard deck to pilot and not everything is clearly powerful.
I think goblin guide is a perfect card to try and throw someone off as well
Being a Yu-Gi-Oh! Player who doesn't know anything about magic, it was very fun and interesting to watch it from the opposite prospective! It sounds way harder when you don't know the game 🤣
I’ve watched a lot of these from the MTG perspective but I just watch these two evaluating YGO cards and I can confirm. My head was absolutely spinning.
Yugioh players make really good magic players. I don't play it, but some of the strongest players I know came from yugioh.
I love that he refers to a search card as a "tutor", which just shows Magic's historic influence on all card games
Yu-Gi-Oh players even use mill 😅 and they don't know why
Thing is that a lot of these game-actions are used in multiple games and kinda demand a proper one word term to describe them. Tutoring and milling are useful verbs that replace longer sentences.
@@lostalone9320 sure. But they come specifically from Magic cards. Hence OPs comment....
I heard tutor was a reference to a magic card but I don't know what it actually does.
But in the past when I heard people mention 'tutor', they were talking about special summoning from deck, not searching?
What does it actually do?
@@IamGrimalkin In the very first set of Magic, they printed a black card called Demonic Tutor that looked through your library for any card and put it in your hand.
Not having been around back then, I can't tell you if that immediately became the name for deck searching effects or if it took until the printing of things like Enlightened Tutor, Mystic Tutor, and Vampiric Tutor (respectively, searched enchantments and artifacts, instants and sorceries, and anything but cost 2 life) to solidify that name for the effect.
Importantly those 3 instead of putting it in your hand, put it to the top of your library, thus any deck searching effect became known as a tutor, no matter where the card ended up. Even cards like Buried Alive that send it to your graveyard, are known as tutors (although the actual action of doing it is sometimes called entombing, named after the 1 mana spell that does it).
Gauging strength in resource based games can be tricky specifically for Yu-Gi-Oh players who aren't used to costs just being part and parcel of a card doing anything, and expect insanely fast-paced interactions.
Card suggestions:
Chains of Meph (not-errated printing) - Might as well give the YGO player a YGO card
Endurance
Dragon's Rage Channler
Golgari Grave Troll
Living End
Green Slime
"Counter target ability, and if you do, destroy that card"
And it's already a yugioh card xD
Aetherling
Just show him a card with banding.
Yugioh doesn't actually have many cards like Chains of Mephistopholes, it very much functions with mtg logic, where the cards bend the rules. The yugioh equivalent of this card would be "small world": It's complicated to use, but what it does is let you go minus one to search any monster, so long as your deck is set up right.
@@alexanderjackson7948 It's about the paragraphs of text to adequately describe something very simple, not the effect itself.
Another thing that I think makes Undergrowth Champion pretty bad is the amount of removal that doesn't care about doing damage, potentially a lot of wasted set up just to get destroyed or exiled.
Welp in Yugioh we have a card called Solemn Judgement, which allows us to yeet a card activation clean with the cost of half a life point and it's still super good ,so seeing mental mistep only cost 2 lives for a effect of disruption I instantly thought it was a staple
Tbf it’s not quite that. It’s a much more limited range you can use it on, like a judgement for 800 but you can only use it on a normal summoned monsters effect. But that judgement is also a handtrap that counters itself.
Like solemn warning where its nore limited but only 2000 life which while not a staple did see a bunch of play back when traps were viable
A- I love he realized it can counter itself. And B- I just love this series haha.
Monogreen running missteps to misstep their opponent's missteps on their elves
@@karfsma778 yep! Every deck period! 😒😒
Undergrowth Champion was bad because cards that say "destroy" or "exile" don't do damage, and they're far more common than cards that do, and it's too slow to be consistent in the combat step, it was often just blocked by bigger things.
Also you *had* to prevent the damage, even if it wasn't enough to kill it. That made it easy for yoyr opponent to set it up for a blast spell.
Had Champion had hexproof it would have been very very good and honestly not back breaking
Another option would be if it had trample, because then you would not be able to chump block it, and all those +1/+1 counters making it huge would actually allow it to do damage.
@@justavictim9432 Even with Hexproof, I don't think it would have been great. If it had both some form of Evasion AND some form of removal protection (beyond preventing damage) it might have been decent.
@@UmeII I mean yeah if it had evasion too it would be strong but Champion would have been a staple in Pioneer ramp as is because that is more of a control deck that wants to hit land drops and have chump blockers.
I love these staple or stinker videos. I have been getting more and more into Flesh and Blood and would enjoy seeing some of the players try to evaluate cards for that game, too.
An episode about limited cards would be great.
Cards like Goblin Shortcutter from ZDR or Imperial Oath from NEO is a great way to look at another side of MtG.
MtG is tough to do this with imo. Different formats value cards differently. What might be good in standard isn't necessarily good in modern or legacy, but could be godlike in commander.
Yeah it becomes difficult to say what it means to be a good card. Notice in this video every staple is vintage playable and every stinker didn't make the cut in standard, which makes it hard to argue they don't fit those categories but gives a pretty high delta in power level.
Is there a format where Mental Misstep isn’t good? As a Yugioh player who’s only experience with Magic at all is the starter deck in MTG Arena, I think that card is insane no matter the format
@@JpegDog It's effectively banned in any format that matters
@@JpegDog yes actually. It was not good in standard when it was printed and wouldn't be today. Standard is low enough power level that 1 mana cards just aren't that common.
@@JpegDog It's probably at it's worst in Commander purely because of the amounts of mana used in that format. Even then, it still has its uses because people play cards like Sol Ring, Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, etc (especially since the 2 life is even more negligible when you're starting at 40 instead of 20). It's the only format it's fully legal in, but I can't think of any time I've ever seen it played there.
This is pretty great content. Some suggestions for future episodes:
Darksteel Relic
Curse of Silence
Mind Swords
Meddling Mage
Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
Kappa Cannoneer
Be really funny to see a card like Norin the Wary and Dark Depths on here
Here are some other hard to evaluate cards for him to evaluate:
1) Mindslaver
2) Gitaxian Probe
3) Yawgmoth, Thran Physician
4) Chaos Warp
5) Armageddon
6) Jace, Unraveler of Secrets
Yawgmoth is so hard to understand, even for magic players
@@thomasestling3400 Exactly. People sometimes don't think it's all that good, and then they play against somebody using him in EDH and get blown out with an undying and/or Nest of Scarabs loop.
I could really see someone being g thrown by Gitaxian Probe. It's not very evident how good of a cantrip it is.
@@theprogressivecynic2407 Feel like Yawg is kinda cheap. It's a fine creature without the existence of Undying but probably wouldn't see play, and if you look at it without knowing the existence of the mechanic Undying you can't really fairly evaluate it
@@retronymph even then theres a decent amount of other graveyard recursion that would make it pretty good
Cards, that you should include:
Memory Jar, Nethershadow, Despotic Scepter, Maze of Ith, Minion of Leshrac
Sword of the Meek
Actually if Thoralf hadn't talked Adam out of ihis mind when it came to evaluate Yawgmoth's Bargain, Adam would have found all of them.
Reminding someone about the resource system isn't talking someone out of their decision.
That's kinda true, but also the point of having him evaluate that card was to see if 6 mana was worth such an obviously broken effect or if you could cheat it out, not for him to go "oh the effect is broken" and not think about the mana cost
I saw the video from the Yugioh channel yesterday... and as a magic player I was shocked how much this game could be difficult if you're out of the loop with a game. Cool content, keep going!
Listening to him explain exactly why the bargain is one of the most busted cards ever then decide it was a stinker had me dying!
Definitely one of my top 3 favorite series you guys do
YGO player here with almost no Magic experience - this was a really fun video! I judged every card based on whether or not I thought it would be good in YGO and I got the same answers. Yawgmoth's Bargain was a tricky one because the effect is obviously insane, but I didn't know if any ways to cheat the cost existed (was getting Heart of the Underdog or Supply Squad vibes). Also, I had no idea that Magic cards could have two sides and my mind has been completely blown away by that concept.
I also watched the opposite version of this on the YGO channel and it was really neat to see the other perspective. Love this content, hope there's more in the future.
There will definitely be more on both channels 🙂
I've watched a lot of videos like this... and 16:39 is probably my favorite moment in any of them. Kudos on recognizing the counterwar potential.
I love MTG and have a pretty casual interest in Yugioh, so seeing content like this is always very fun
I really want to see how a Yu-Gi-Oh player would react to cards like Relentless Rats or Shadowborn Apostle, even if they are easy to evaluate
Yu-Gi-Oh player here, dabble in Magic now and then. Relentless Rats seems better than Shadowborn Apostle because it’s just a flat boost to your other rats, Apostle probably isn’t going to activate it’s effect during a game. The effect of being allowed any number of those cards in a deck is very funny, Digimon has similar cards, I don’t think Yugioh could have a card with that effect without making it very bad
@@rustycox7741 They both never saw any tournament play. But they DO have some really fun EDH decks
@@rustycox7741 apostle is actually better due to combo potential because of the card edge Walker. At least IMO. The only thing that relentless rats can really combo off with is thrumming Stone
As a yugioh player: MTG has no zone limits, right?
So you could summon a load of Relentless Rats and use them to OTK?
Like you might do with Numeron in yugioh?
(Although this kind of card would never be printed in yugioh, you can't even play 4 different Umi retrains).
@@IamGrimalkinYes, Magic has no zone limits, so in theory you could storm off to play a ton of rats, but they have summoning sickness and can't attack because they don't have haste, meaning you need to pass turn to your opponent, who could wipe your whole board and leave you with nothing. The rats also cost three mana each, which is awkward because it means you normally can't cast two of them a turn until turn 6, which is very late, plus you have to actually draw all of them. Obviously you can build your deck to give your rats haste and draw more cards and make more mana, but now you're diluting your rats with a bunch of other pieces just to make them playable (and spending more mana to do it). It's just too much work for a mediocre payoff. If you're already building your deck to include massive mana generation or infinite mana and tons of card draw, you want a wincon that wins the game on the spot with a single card, instead of trying to cast a bunch of rats. Something like Tendrils of Agony would be a much better choice; even mana-intensive Storm wincons like Mind's Desire or Dragonstorm are more efficient. Compare also to cards like Empty the Warrens or Chatterstorm, which will also make a huge board of creatures but do so when you cast just one copy of that card, so you don't need to draw as well and can do it earlier because you don't need to have as many cards or as much mana available to get your reward.
Honestly, Relentless Rats seems better played fairly to apply pressure in a grindy midrange strategy, but even there and even sticking just to the Rat creature type, you'd be better off playing Pack Rat along with cards you could discard for value and removal.
Only now watching this do I realize that the double faced cards where you pick a side to play are basically pendulum monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, where you choose whether you play it as a monster or a spell.
I mean that's a stretch
@@ant-onemusic444 just a little bit
As a non Magic player Pendulum cards were the first thing I was thinking off too. Instantly thought "So basically works like a Pendulum card"
Out of curiousity, do they still count as both types while in the GY for stuff like Delerium or Tarmogoyf?
@@Aquilenne as far as I know they count as the front face while in the grave, so in Cosima's case he would count as the creature side.
Other yugioh player here, this was a lot of fun to play along with. I knew Survival of the fittest was insane because I play Dragon Ravine in my deck which works similarly, but I have to loop the card to re-use it. This seemed so nutty.
I feel like dredge cards would potentially be difficult to see the power of. Lions eye diamond is another example of a broken card that is hard to evaluate at first glance. Sensei’s divining top would probably be easier to figure out it was at least good, but I imagine it would be hard for someone to recognize just HOW good it really is.
i think anyone who reads LED would say its strong because its so suspiciously hard to use.
@@empty5013 I don’t know this would look any better to an MTG noob than something like One With Nothing.
@@empty5013 Somewhat on the contrary, initially people thought LED's drawback was impossible to circumvent and the card was useless.
@@TheJohtaja it kinda was until cards came about that can abuse it and rules changes took place that made it more usable
LED at first was...bad. Even though demonic tutor existed there wasn't storm cards printed yet. It only took a few years for it to reach oh this is just flatout broken though when burning wish was released into the world and vintage got the 4 burning wish 4 LED with yawg's win in the sideboard, wheel of fortune, timetwister, all sorts of silly stuff ensued.
I can tell this guy is very intelligent and analytical by his thought process spoken out loud. It's always fun to see these videos.
it's exactly why i like watching him talk. This is some of the best content.
I loved this guy on Staple VS Stinker while rating Yugioh Cards, glad to see him again!
Some fun cards to evaluate. Yagmoth’s will, painter’s servant necropotence, helm of obedience, life from the loam, maze’s end.
+1 for necropotence, back why Scrye used to rate the cards it was a 1 out of 5. It took what felt like forever in the pre-dojo days for the world to learn how broken it was.
they did Necro
Love this series!
One thing I think should be mentioned just as background info to help out is the distinction between /playing/ a land and having a land enter the battlefield.
It seemed like at times he was evaluating some of the cards (Cosima, Undergrowth Champion) by thinking of the land effect as only happening once per turn because you're only allowed to /play/ one land per turn (unless a card like Explore etc. lets you do otherwise). But of course decks with green in them can easily be putting out 3 or 4 per turn with good ramp.
I realize fetches were mentioned, but other ramp stuff wasn't. Cheers!
I actually like seeing things like this as it show the balance between both games. I've played both games and can tell you it's always nice to see people look at the other game and get a solid grasp on the mindset of somethings.
Even in early Magic, Survival was a good card, pro tour top 8-ing even. Survival + Recurring Nightmare was a core to a very old pro tour deck.
Turns out dumping a Spirit of the Night into play for 3 mana was really good lul.
It's not just a good card in early magic. It's still insane now there's a reason it's banned in legacy lol.
I think the reason why Adam had a somewhat easier time guessing Magic cards is that Magic is actually still relatively within the realm of sanity, while YGO is just so insane that anyone coming from outside is just left just speechless.
these cards were also pretty easy choices imo (although Undergrowth Champion was a bit more difficult to evaluate compared to Tarmogoyf, but he wouldn't know about Tarmogoyf so...)
Would love to see cards that can break Yu-Gi-Oh like sensei's divining top or cards that are so weird like gitrog monster and just bad stuff like Aurelia's fury
Kinda hard to evaluate what would "break yugioh" since magic cards are balanced around mana which yugioh doesnt have. A lot o cards would break yugioh if they didnt have mana costs. Most draw spells would
The equivalent of Stupor and Act of Treason (and of course divination) are banned in YGO. Not having a mana system wildly alters the power level of noncreatures
@@fredrikfagerberg6783 You're absolutely correct on these points, but we did get the Act of Treason equivalent back last banlist, and it's seen no play due to the current speed of the game (Not discounting Change of Heart's history of course, it's just too likely to be prime negation-bait in most matchups to be worth running the one copy in your deck)
As a former yugioh player who started playing magic this is awesome and I love it so much. The yugioh video was awesome too
For mental misstep, since it has pherexian mana, you can play it in any deck regardless of colour
Mono grenn vs Mono white.... forest, llanowar elf, go... plains, savannah lions? *green player - No!, misstep*
The omenkeel is terrible in standard but amazing in EDH. It's a great feeling when the rest of your tables eyes pop out their sockets when you exile the top 17 cards of someones deck and now you'll never miss a land drop. The keyword here is the omenkeel says when a vehicle does damage not when it deals damage.
Every card can be great in the right EDH deck 😉 for the purposes of these series, we pretend EDH doesn't exist and focus on the 60-card formats
as a YGO player, getting 5/5 felt pretty good 😎 fun content!
the card with more text on the back reminded me of pendulum monsters having a second text box and being overly complicated lol
I love this type of series! I love seeing people make informed guesses and seeing if they get them right while I already know the answer.
I'm much more of a YGO player (of sorts), but I like that the magic videos have good variety and it's not just stuff like black lotus, which usually puts me off from these kinds of things. Also both sides seem to have a least a basic understanding of each game so it's not just "omg drawing? that's crazy".
I feel like the second card could be useful in a deck that has Apocalypse(its been a while might be the wrong name, exiles all permanents) along with locating spells and damage spells because having a creature racking up points after taking out potentially a really synergistic combo could very well be really good. I could be dumb though idk.
I think just use suspend tho
5 for 5 over here! I know the very basic fundamentals of Magic - life, lands, tapping, stats - but played a significant amount of Yugioh. Several of these effects were easily identified as exploitable, even without understanding MTG meta or average cost/stats.
One thing that wasn't hammered home enough with Phyrexian mana is that you can slam them in ANY deck.
Can be super powerful.
I do like these videos a lot. Maybe you could touch on stuff like tribes and wild mechanics like infect or miracle.
These are fun to watch. Thanks for making and sharing the guessing if cards are good episodes! Would be cool to see him do a draft in mtg arena or something, not knowing the meta
I don't play either game, but the general theory discussion makes these videos really interesting
Your explanation of mental misstep reminds me of that grass looks greener in yugioh. It was warping the format where everyone has to play suboptimal large decks of 60 cards just cuz that card existed. The ideal deck size is usually the minimum 40 cards.
I really like these videos where people accustomed to one card game evaluate cards from other games. I play magic, yugioh, and Pokémon tcg and I’ll keep watching these vids.
Since he is still learning how to evaluate the mana resource system, I'd love to see a "rocks & rituals" episode!
Another wonderful game of "Which Piece of Cardboard is best?".
I'd be struggling with the Yugioh cards. This is not a game to get over emotional about, it's entertaining.
I like that the Yu-Gi-Oh player was talking about the Pot of [whatever] being $100, and my man starts with a $250 card.
Another thing with misstep is that it gives counter magic to every colour. While usually spells that say "coubter target spell" with very few conditions are only in blue
Came here from the Yu-Gi-Oh channel, loving this cross game/player content.
Maybe Vexing Devil, Library of Alexandria, Niv-Mizzet Reborn and Thousand-Year Storm could be interesting to evaluate :)
As someone who came around from the beginning of magic
Loved both infinite living death and rec/sur
Survival has a special place in my heart ❤
Ah yes, mental misstep, the miniature force of will. The phyrexian set made a lot of interesting decisions.
another thing about bargain is turbo naus type setups in commander. hit bargain turn three, draw your tutors, and blammo
These videos are very fun; I'd love to see MTG players rate classic YGO cards as well as opposed to modern stuff.
Cool idea!
Jackal Pup would be a fun trick card to talk about, especially with its interraction with Necropotence and Yawgmoth's Bargain historically
Even casting Yawgmoth's Bargain "fairly" is pretty easy. There is a universe where swamp > Dark Ritual > Sol Ring > Mana Vault > Yawgmoth's Bargain, on T1. Or any number of other combinations of mana rocks off dark ritual.
6 mana isn't the barrier most people think it is, even in formats like commander and pauper.
That's not "fair" casting. Fairly casting some thing means you only used lands with no accelerated drops to cast it. Any thing else that would get it out faster than it's normal turn is considered cheating it ahead of time in common mtg jargon.
@@tonysmith9905 I always considered free casts like with Braids or Fires of Invention to be cheating the cost and paying the cost whether with rocks or spells to be fair casting but maybe that's just me.
I love this. Seeing analysis getting carried from game to another is super interesting.
It'd be fun to show him an on-rate 2-4 drop beater that actually did just happen to be good enough for standard, like Mantis Rider or Spawn of Mayhem.
Thundering Raiju is good rn
Bargain is a really hard and somewhat controversal card for his challange. While powefull its not bonkers anymore. In Vintage it sees absolutly no play and in Legacy one can cheat out grislebrand easly or one can cheat out worser stuff like Omnipotence with show and tell. For storm there are similar payoffs and those are also searchable with burning wish while bargain isnt.
Might see some play in some kind of academy rector control deck. It has kinda become a stinker but there is little reason to unban it even tho it wouldnt do much.
I was thinking the same. I don't know what format Bargain would be broken in currently (I guess it would be a slight upgrade to Ad Nauseam in Legacy. Especially since you could run multiple copies of it), despite being banned in everything except Vintage. Same thing with Windfall, Memory Jar and other Vintage cards. They are mostly defined by their mythology and not their actual power level.
When Bargain first came out it was not seriously played in the main formats. It was too expensive and the other decks were just too fast. There were much more powerful cards to "cheat" into play.
@@muchograndeyolatengo They will never unban Windfall in Legacy (even though there's no Academy or Mind Over Matter) because it essentially forces a mulligan. Going Lotus Petal -> Ancient Tomb -> Windfall on turn one means your opponent could have kept a good hand with four spells and three mana sources, but then got punished by drawing into seven non-land cards. And the Windfall player basically got a free Ancient Tomb out of the deal.
Mental mistep reminds me of crossout designator. I've seen people playing 2 of it so they could use crossout designator on crossout designator.
Yeah, you gotta play at least 2 copies. This is why it got limited to 1 in Master Duel. Because they wanted to stop that interaction you mentioned.
Man I love his assessments. Listen to him dissect mental misstep was perfect. 😂
Delver, 5 drop Teferi, Dress Down, Unlicensed Hearse, Thragtusk, Maze's End, 2 Drop Tibalt, Feather would all be fun. Gathering Throng and like cards would actually be fun to watch in this specific series bc it is a very sought after type of ability in YGO. Maybe Whisper Squad is the best one to show.
Just thinking Cyclonic Rift, Stormbreath Dragon, Capenna Triple Lands, Goblin Guide, Oath of Nissa, Slippery Bogle, 2 Drop Thalia are all maybe interesting ones to throw at him as well.
I just want to say that Cosima, The Omkeel actually, was the pivoting card of a UW deck that brought me to top 800 ranked Mythic Arena some months ago. In the right deck, that card alone put real pressure on your opponent. 🙂
Yeah I haven't played magic in a while, but I thought the card was neat. Like sure horrible against aggro, but in a control mirror you could destroy the opponent with it.
One of Paolo's SCG articles had a pretty fun Temur Giants +Yorion list for Kaldheim Standard, playing Cosima as a 4-of. It was nice that you could wipe the board with Battle of Frost and Fire while Cosima was in exile, and you could also let her pick up a couple of counters and then she'd have enough toughness to survive the Battle.
To think that Yawgmoth's Bargain was a "fixed" version of Necropotence lmao
Staples:
Goblin Guide
Mishra's Bauble
Crucible of Worlds
Gush
Thassa's Oracle
Dark Depths
Stinkers:
Kalonian Hydra
Temporal Mastery
Phyrexian Obliterator
Stuffy Doll
Phage the Untouchable
Divert
Decimate
Thank you! We are always looking for new ones, especially good stinkers!
Howling Mine, Stasis, Mogg Fanatic, Fling, and the Freebie, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.
That should get him to think a bit more.
I think if you really want to throw him for a loop ask him what he thinks of Bonesplitter. It's a great example of a card that would otherwise be in one category, but because of the existence of another card, it goes straight into the other.
Mirrodin block btw is filled with cards like that.
The reason Yawgmoths Bargain is so OP is exactly the fact that the cards that cheat it out are also the ones you want lots of. There's many cards that convert handcards into one shot mana, giving you a boost for the turn at the cost of Handsize. What you need to break those is a way to convert that mana into more cards, so you can spiral out of control and finally do something for a lot of mana. The Bargain fills exactly that gap. It asks you to throw away cards for fast mana and rewards you with even more cards. Insane combo engine. Especially once you add Storm, but that's another chapter.
I like the more qualified/educated guesses on this genre! Great video!
Glad you enjoyed!
The omenkeel is actually insane in a vehicle tribal deck. I have it in my Shorikai Gundam deck, it’s so gross
Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis - wonder how will he handled it?
I'm pretty familiar with Magic in general, I've played on and off at times over the years since Ice Age. But, I have not been in the know on current meta in at least 10 years probably at this point beyond the occasional video like this or whatever and there are lots of holes in my timeline prior to that as well.
So often as not I'm seeing these cards for the first time as well and I'm pretty good at assessing their play value but I always feel uncertain until they say haha. Great series.
In fairness, though not that he would have known, Yawgmoth's Bargain is kind of a trick question. It's amazing, but so amazing that it's barely playable which makes it kinda stinky too.
I like how he instantly stapled Mental Misstep, it's basically MtG's Ash Blossom/Effect Veiler but on crack
Bargain is a funny card because in a standard set now it would not be quite as broken and many decks would lose before being able to take advantage of it, but in many other formats and in its original era, it is the strongest card printed that led to an emergency ban soon after release. It's so hard to evaluate cards even that look potentially so strong, because context is so important.
I love both the Yugioh and the Magic version of these despite only playing one of them. Please keep making these!
…and keep the cute Irishman too.
It would be interesting to do this with the following 5 cards:
Survival of the Fittest
Fauna Shaman
Birthing Pod
Prime Speaker Yannifar
Evolutionary Leap
They're all, broadly speaking, the same effect: pitching one creature to go find another, on a permanent which lets you do it repeatedly. But two of those cards have entire archetypes named after them, and the other three saw either zero play or extremely fringe play.
Here’s some suggestions for cards to do in this series!
•Dress Down
•Fury
•Narset Transcendent
•Manaplasm
•Chandra, Flamecaller
And Umezawa’s Jitte!
I would also put Narset, Enlightened Master on there as well.
@@jbradentraw2083 They already did that for one of these
i downvoted you.
- Savage Knuckleblade and/or Siege Rhino
- Whisperwood Elemental
- Bloodbraid Elf
- Slippery Bogle
- Grim Flayer
Some cards to include in these:
Fact or Fiction, and Steam Augury
Gifts Ungiven
Standstill
Tangle Wire
Rishadan Port
Cursed Scroll
Isamaru, Hound of Konda
Remand
Wild Nacatl
Venser, Shaper Savant
Ball Lightning
Esper Greaseflayer (Pioneer)
X4 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
X2 Nighthawk Scavenger
X4 Striped Riverwinder
X4 Greasefang, Okiba Boss
X4 Soulflayer
X4 Parhelion II
X3 Tainted Indulgence
X4 Faithfull Mending
X4 Consider
X4 Otherworldly Gaze
X2 Thoughtseize
X1 Collective Brutality
X1 Island
X4 Mana Confluence
X3 Concealed Courtyard
X4 Hallowed Fountain
X3 Drowned Catacomb
X3 Watery Grave
X1 Glacial Fortress
X1 Godless Shrine
Sideboard:
X1 Swan Song
X2 Vanishing Verse
X2 Thoughtseize
X2 Dovin’s Veto
X4 Portable Hole
X4 Spell Pierce
With the new elrond drops from the lotr set, that undergrowth champion seems legit. Giving it 3-5 +1/+1 counters every turn seems good.
I think if you want to trip Adam up you should include one of the 'pact' cards like Pact of Negation or Slaughter Pact- having a card that is initially free but forces you to pay a cost later could be hard to figure out, and those cards vary wildly in playability so you can pick one that's a staple or a stinker.
I don't know if it was mentioned but tireless tracker would fit very well too especially after we saw cosima :)
Bargain is a tricky one. I think it’s fair to say that it might be a little closer to stinker, simply because it was a powerful card that was enabled by broken enablers. If you don’t know about Urza block and the ridiculous fast mana that those decks had access to, the card looks more like a challenge to get into play. There are cheaper and faster and easier wincons in eternal formats; comparing this to Griselbrand is fair, and I think even in a side-by-side comparison, the latter wins out just by being a more relevant card type. I’m certainly not saying that Yawg’s Bargain is a fair card by any means, just that It’s a bit more nuanced than just being good or bad.
I can't imagine any situation where casting Griselbrand wins faster than casting Bargain unless a lot of cards are illegal, and Bargain is just a lot cheaper, too.
@@thomasestling3400 no one is telling u to hardcast it lol
@@kuru-chan6644 nor would I expect them to, but just ritualing/ramping to 6 is easier than reanimating in most contexts, too.
@@thomasestling3400 even in really weak formats (formats that dont have access to griselbrand mind you) reanimation is 4 mana and there are always a plethora of ways to get stuff in the graveyard (wotc always prints draw 3 discard 2 etc)
in modern/legacy getting griselbrand in play is trivially easy and always costs 2-3 mana
granted bargain would be ridiculous in modern *because* the format is slow enough for you to resolve it in money pile type decks without building around nonsense (fury hardcast is a good play for whatever reason) but comparing cheating out the two griselbrand is so so much easier