The Treasure we should be Cruising

[DubDub]

We all know this card exists:


We like to cast it.  We love to cast Misdirection targeting it when it is cast by our opponents.  It's a fun card.  But it's maybe a little too good for the non-Vintage formats?

Unfortunately WotC saw fit to reprint this card in a Standard legal set with the name Treasure Cruise (and with two slight drawbacks (sorcery speed and a high cost mitigated by Delve) and a slight improvement (it's no longer Misdirection-able)), and it's now running rampant in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage.  At the recent Legacy GP the existence of Treasure Cruise encouraged over a quarter of the field (over 1,000 players) to sleeve up Delver Tempo decks, the plurality of which were on UR Delver.  People are complaining, though we know that people will always find something to complain about.

But wait, what's that you say?  There's a way WotC could have avoided all this?  A way they could have printed a fun and slightly less unbalanced card?  A way they could have printed a card at common that didn't overshadow the rare card they printed that does something highly similar?

Yes!  It's true.



These cards exist.  Why not call back to them instead of Ancestral Recall (or, arguably, Concentrate)?

Treasure Cruise 
Sorcery
Delve.
You draw three cards and you lose 3 life.

What would the world look like if they had printed this instead (obviously insert a caveat about the butterfly effect here)?

More decks would be playing Dig Through Time in place of the [WotC] Treasure Cruise they're using now.  I would argue that Dig Through Time is a more decision intensive card, and leads to more complex decks and more complex interaction than [WotC] Treasure Cruise, though with the power level of some Vintage cards the decisions are sometimes very straightfoward.

You couldn't just play UR Delver in all formats.  Pyroblast would still be a marginal maindeck card in Legacy for Miracles to devote to winning the mirror in blue-heavy metagames instead of a card, as Glenn Jones and others have put it, "My list from the Oakland Legacy Open maindecked two copies of Pyroblast, a choice I didn't regret and would happily make again. Why? Because if my opponent isn't playing blue, then they're not playing Treasure Cruise, and I can afford to draw a blank once or twice… especially considering I'm already playing Brainstorm to revitalize weak holdings. If they are playing Cruise, then I want something capable of tipping the balance in game 1 that remains relevant after sideboarding--that's Pyroblast."

Players couldn't quite be in that mindset if Treasure Cruise were a black card.

Sure, there would be some players with an ancient craving who are willing to pay ambition's cost by going Grixis with their Delver decks.  Those who think they can afford to pay three life to draw three cards would be, you could say, seeking greatness, at any cost.  Wasteland would be more effective against these decks than the UR decks (I'm assuming they're be Grixis, and not just UB).

Or maybe players would go Esper instead, in order to gain access to Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull to offset the life loss of [My] Treasure Cruise.  Brian Braun-Duin could still have won the GP, with the same list he played with Dig Through Time in place of [WotC] Treasure Cruise, or with black instead of red.

Not too much would change, but I imagine the complaints being voiced currently would be the largest absence in that parallel universe.
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Anyway, I'm just surprised that WotC lined up Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise side by side, and said, "Looks good.  Let's shave a mana and a toughness off Lightning Angel and call it a day."  Simply for drawing a greater contrast between the common and the rare card I would have put my version into the development file, and at the same time there would have been lesser downside risk to printing another blue card that draws multiple cards very cheaply.

[Norm4eva]

It bears remembering that a lot of the trickle-down effect of recent Blue printings are just regarded as unavoidable products of the state of Eternal Magic. The current devs aren't willing to change their vision of Standard just to suit Vintage; card drawing is a Blue thing, creature killing is a Black thing, fat creatures are a Green thing, and so the Delve cards that are immediately playable in each Sultai color reflect that.

With that being said -- Yeah, it kills me that the playable Delve draw card wasn't Black. What a fucking shot in the arm that would have been. Black has been waffling in Standard a lot lately; apparently once effects such as "life loss for profit", tutoring, and non-targeted removal are excised from Standard for being OP, Black becomes a difficult character to pen without making it seem like it's just borrowing against other colors (you know, like Blue, only shitty).

I don't think it is just players bitching and moaning; there have been more than a few cards over the last several years which are arguably much more at home in other colors, or at least would have looked "as appropriate" in other colors, but for some reason ended up in Blue and have shifted Eternal Magic in a strange direction.

I do think it's interesting that the first side effect you mention of a Black Treasure Cruise isn't that people would play new technology or start brewing; but that existing Blue decks would just have made different choices. Perhaps that's telling of WotC's motives right there; it almost wouldn't have mattered what came down the pike, because "the Blue one" would be tapped first and then everything else would fall into whatever role the rogue brewers decide it does. A draw three, even a painful one like the Delve Ancient Cravings you propose, in a non-Blue color, would hopefully make people stop and consider other decks for a moment - but instead, it has to be ceded that Blue is king, and the first best tools should be disbursed to Blue and its decks before dickering around with new tech.
Oh, hey, this is the CCF.

Seems fine.