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TheBrassMan
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« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2010, 03:29:22 pm » |
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Extirpate is far from a dead card, but you may be overvaluing its impact.
Generally speaking, Extirpate has two huge strikes against it - Like a millstone, it doesn't directly affect cards that a player has or has already played, only cards they might play later. It also only really has value against unrestricted spells, which are, on average, much worse than restricted ones.
When a player plays a Fastbond, then immediately plays a Gush, Extirpate basically kills the future value of Fastbond. In this case, your Extirpate is effectively killing the Fastbond that your opponent already invested resources in - that could totally be worth the card.
Without Fastbond though, Extirpating a Gush may not accomplish much. Without Gush in their deck, a player just draws the first card Gush would have drawn, instead of the Gush. Without Fastbond in play, this might even be *better* than drawing and having to cast the Gush itself. Think about that - Extirpating Gush could easily make your opponent more likely to win, even ignoring the opportunity cost you spent by drawing and casting Extirpate.
As a dredge player for a while, I certainly don't want my opponent to be running around with maindeck Extirpate... but if I had to choose playing against Extirpate or almost any other hate card (Needle, Crypt, Leyline, Jailer, maybe even wasteland), I'm much less afraid of Extirpate than those cards. In other words, adding Extirpate to your deck makes it better against Dredge, no argument there - but replacing a different hate card with Extirpate makes your deck worse. (Without knowing the rest of your deck and metagame concerns here, it's impossible for me to know if that's the case in your specific example(
As for your other examples, they run similar to the argument against Gush. Most of the time takes 3 unrestricted cards and removes them from their library, their deck is better for it, not worse. In most games I would far rather Extirpate targeting my own Misty Rainforest than my opponent's. Force of Will is the card that's the most common exception to this, but after the first few turns, there are certainly games where a deck is better without Forces than with.
I wouldn't rely on Extirpate in general, but if you do decide to run it, be really careful when you cast it. There are lots of situations where your opponent is better off after it resolves. You need to have a lot of information available to you to get enough value from it to make it worth casting.
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