Wrath of God

[Machinus]

According to Phil Stanton, not even one person has played WoG and done well in a large tournament in the last year. I can see for myself all the standard arguments for why this card is bad - sorcery, costs four, double white. But isn't there any redeeming value to this card?

First off, control decks running exalted angel already have to generate double white at some point. Crucible really helps this. Second, the kind of deck that would benefit from this card is already running mana drains and lots of artifact acceleration, so wrathing on turn 3 seems reliable with enough white land sources. In addition, the kind of decks that this play is best against wouldn't recover that easily from it.

While there might still be some question about the resolution of the wrath, the bigger question is usefulness. Let us examine that more closely.

Balance makes the cut in almost every u/w/x control list, mainly because of the text regarding creatures. Yes it is super broken at 2 mana and yes it is a mind twist/armageddon but it is first and foremost very excellent creature removal. (Also sacrifice > destroy).

Wrath does cost twice as much, but you don't have to lose lands or cards when you cast it. It seems like wrath is really useful against many of the top decks at the moment. Welder decks are really good at pumping out fatties, and wrath gets them and the welder too. Wrath owns affinity, madness, and fish. It is not so good against tog and oath, and it is horrible against combo, but again these u/w/x control decks are strong against other control decks, and the maindeck swords and fire/ice suck against combo too.

I didn't expect to see anything major concerning WoG in the play statistics over the past year, but given the somewhat substantial power of the card, I am curious if not surprised that it is completely absent.

[Hi-Val]

As far as it goes, I'd rather run Humility over WOG. Same speed and Humility is the gift that keeps on giving. WOG isn't played because Balance does its job at half the cost, and most decks only need access to a single WOG effect.

[Cavius The Great]

Wrath of God is horrible. It's only good when you're opponent overextends and when you're oponnent does in Type 1, he's already won.

[BigMac]

As balance is also good for hand and land control it can be played against most decks. WoG can only be played against critterdecks. Imagine you run a WoG and you play against TPS, or even stax for that matter. TPS has no critters so its a dead card. Stax, if you have 4 good mana against stax the chances of you winning are allready pretty good. So again a dead card you do not want to draw.

As for 4CC that could run it, it has more and better solutions to deal with threats. They are called instants and can be gotten with cunning wish. This way you can get what you need and keep your mana for what it is meant to do, keep control.

So it is just a bad card to play in any deck.

[jpmeyer]

Wrath of God also has strikes against it  in that the cheaper and more splashable Fire/Ice and Rack and Ruin are just as likely to be able to kill more than one creature.

[Komatteru]

Wrath of God also has strikes against it  in that the cheaper and more splashable Fire/Ice and Rack and Ruin are just as likely to be able to kill more than one creature.

Exactly.  The traditional benefits of Wrath of God are:
1) Kills ideally about 3 or 4 creatures all at once.  This doesn't happen in our format, as there traditionally aren't more than 2 on the board at once, and even 2 is a stretch.  Aggro that plays more than like 2 creatures is nonexistent, barring Kowal's Madness, or the never-talked-about-less-often-than-that-played Oshawa Stompy.

2) Kills large creatures that, say, Pyroclasm can't hit.  It just so happens that the large creatures are also artifacts, so Rack and Ruin is just more versatile in that respect.

3) Kills untargetable creatures.  We don't have any of those right now.

4) Deals with annoying protection from X and regenerating creatures.  Again, none of those are to be found in Vintage at the present time.

I don't think that Wrath is necessarily a terrible card in Vintage, it's just that none of the traditional benefits of Wrath apply.  This makes it very difficult to justify the sorcery speed and double white committment for a card that doesn't do anything more than something that costs 2 or 3 mana already does.  Don't forget that those 2-3 mana options are wishable.  You know how that old "strictly better" thing goes.  Wrath of God is just suboptimal, not necessarily terrible (terrible means much worse than simply "not good").