Am I supposed to just not do anything on Turn 2, hope they main phase activate so I can Thought Erasure on Turn 3 and stop the chain, and still take eight damage and be facing down their four-drop?

I have Thought Erasure and Oath of Kaya in my hand. My opponent casts a Growth-Chamber Guardian on Turn 2. Great sample experience from the Invitational: I lost the die roll against Gruul. In the case of most of these, that translates to being on the play so you activate your planeswalker before they do something, but many other things can play at this. It just happens that instead of “activate my planeswalker and get a physical card,” untapping with an unopposed 2/2 in that deck is “attack for a card worth of burn value.” Cascading advantage, just not obvious card advantage.Įvery deck in Standard is full of threats that are insane if you land them before your opponent can attack them. With that all put together, you have the following mess.Įvery deck in Standard is about 40% mana, 40% mythic-rare-level threats that all provide cascading absurd advantages if they survive and shrug off removal, and 20% not-actually-good removal that you are kinda hoping lines up right with the mythic rares they draw.Įven the Mono-Red Aggro deck works this way. Every deck is showing up with them, and you aren’t going to just dodge the issue somehow. The other thing that is obvious to everyone by now is that of the top ten or so best cards in the format, about half of them are planeswalkers. The cards needed to beat Ghitu Lavarunner, Gruul Spellbreaker, and Command the Dreadhorde are wildly different and they all come with planeswalkers attached.Īlso related to this, there’s no clean answer to multiple diversified threats. The other threats in the format are also a pain to answer. If you want to kill a planeswalker profitably, you need to spend zero cards and do it in combat. Even if you use The Elderspell and kill two planeswalkers, you are down a card, probably more because one of those two activated twice.

Every reasonable planeswalker in Standard immediately provides a card of value on first use, so if you have to Lightning Strike or Vraska’s Contempt them, you are down a card. The other thing you need to understand (that has also been said a million times) is that using removal on planeswalkers sucks. If you haven’t read it, this is the most important piece of Magic theory in the last half a decade and by far the most important piece for War of the Spark Standard. For about the millionth time since War of the Spark was released, here’s Michael Majors’s Traction article.

Manipulation Card Game Rules