Alright, so I've browsed a lot of the well known cubes on these forums and none of them seem to run this card. Why not? In my experience this card is a power house and a half that many players undervalue... Just yesterday I was playing my cube and would have had the Thopter Sword combo on turn 3 going if my opponent didn't wreck me with Stonecloaker.
Pros:
+ 2W, very splashable.
+ Flash.
+ 3 power, so he can be a beating.
+ Exiles graveyard cards early and multiple times if needed at instant speed.
+ Evasion
+ Semi-blink effect that at times can be better than blink.
+ Can be tutored by things that find creatures and Mystical Teachings.
Cons:
- Mandatory gating.
- Mandatory remove from grave trigger.
- Can be killed with gating trigger on the stack.
From my experience he pretty much always makes the main deck and I'm always happy to have him. He's shut out more games than I can count at this point and might be my favorite creature in the cube.
I have played it and cut it. Twice. I think it's a fine creature, but unless the exile is crucial, he was just so underwhelming. And the competition against other good 3cc creatures is pretty steep.
This is such a massive downside, since you usually want to cast this card during your opponent's turn, but your opponent doesn't necessarily give you the opportunity to get full value out of the card (even if you ignore the exile part).
Sure those cards don't act as gy hate, but with Flickerwisp + Restoration Angel you already have 2 significantly better blink creatures.
I would choose this guy over Flickerwisp most of the time, since Flikerwisp doesn't allow you to save your guys but rather attempts to reuse something you've already landed.
Also, Flickerwisp is 1WW instead of 2W, which is rather relevant. On top of that Flickerwisp requires you to have the needed targets immediately, whereas you can be a little trickier using Evoke costs on something like Shriekmaw to get cheaper removal that you can hold back as Stonecloaker has flash (3BW for a 3/2 Flier instead of 4B for a 3/2 Fear.) and do neat tricks with something like Tidehollow Sculler to permanently exile a card from a players hand. The extra toughness is also relevant in the case of cubes having something like Fireslinger.
Now while Angel is obviously better in most cases than either card, because let's face it, Angel is nuts, the Stonecloaker does have one advantage in that it protects a guy from a Wrath effect where as Angel doesn't.
Really the exile part is the best part of Stonecloaker most of the time. There are so many cards in the format that use the graveyard to do so many things that exiling cards at instant speed, even if it's just to get rid of an undying Vorapede is awesome. I've Entombed and Animate Deaded a Stonecloaker before just to turn off people's engines in the past.
I was heavily planning on adding this until Restoration Angel came out. I support renimator pretty heavily across a number of colors and this is a good way to combat it. The only reason it lost out to Restoration Angel was, as mentioned, the mandatory gating. I'm not a huge fan of gating and feel like it often just leads to 2 for 1's.
I would choose this guy over Flickerwisp most of the time, since Flikerwisp doesn't allow you to save your guys but rather attempts to reuse something you've already landed.
Flickerwisp also kills my opponent's creature tokens, removes blockers and abuses my own ETB effects without requiring me to pay their mana costs again. I'd play Flickerwisp over Stoncloaker any day.
The Flickerwisp is also far and away the best stand-alone creature of all the ETB abusers in aggro, where I don't always want Restoration Angel and I definitely don't want Stonecloaker.
@demagogue:
For me keeping 3 mana open and try to protect one of my creatures in a creature deck sounds like battlecruiser magic. If you simply use small efficient creatures that do something on their own, you really don't have to fear losing them to removal.
See that's the thing really, I'm a huge control player to the point that in drafts (cube or otherwise) people usually assume I'm in some kind of UBx deck (To the point that there was a running joke that I'd play 40 Corpse Lunges and still make it to the top 20 of a PTQ) , so keeping three mana up isn't exactly bad for me because if not Stonecloaker then removal, counters, or card advantage, you know?
As for battlecruiser magic, I highly disagree. These days creatures are good enough that most can get there, even smaller sized ones, and overextending is a lot harder because of it. There's a reason why some pros asked "why would teams of control players switch to aggro in pro tours" and the answer was that being proactive was just better now as everything was a threat and it was getting consistently harder to answer everything. So as long as you play tight and have a plan it's very rare that you're simply sitting one three mana in hopes of protecting a creature, most of the time you're playing a couple of threats and then trying to win the board without committing more creatures until needed or it's wildly beneficial.
Also, a lot of times damage is redundant and doesn't shorten the clock once you've reached a certain point. An example being 5 power on the board and them being at 10, even playing another creature you're still on the same clock, and playing Flickerwisp and having a creature removed or leaving up 3 to cast Stonecloaker when they try to remove a creature, is the same clock.
I don't run him because he isn't really a "Surprise! Your attacker is now dead!" card, but more like a "Surprise! You attacker and my blocker are dead, and a 2nd blocker of mine is back in my hand!"
Alright, so I've browsed a lot of the well known cubes on these forums and none of them seem to run this card. Why not? In my experience this card is a power house and a half that many players undervalue... Just yesterday I was playing my cube and would have had the Thopter Sword combo on turn 3 going if my opponent didn't wreck me with Stonecloaker.
Pros:
+ 2W, very splashable.
+ Flash.
+ 3 power, so he can be a beating.
+ Exiles graveyard cards early and multiple times if needed at instant speed.
+ Evasion
+ Semi-blink effect that at times can be better than blink.
+ Can be tutored by things that find creatures and Mystical Teachings.
Cons:
- Mandatory gating.
- Mandatory remove from grave trigger.
- Can be killed with gating trigger on the stack.
From my experience he pretty much always makes the main deck and I'm always happy to have him. He's shut out more games than I can count at this point and might be my favorite creature in the cube.
So why no love for the good old Stonecloaker?
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I would choose this guy over Flickerwisp most of the time, since Flikerwisp doesn't allow you to save your guys but rather attempts to reuse something you've already landed.
Also, Flickerwisp is 1WW instead of 2W, which is rather relevant. On top of that Flickerwisp requires you to have the needed targets immediately, whereas you can be a little trickier using Evoke costs on something like Shriekmaw to get cheaper removal that you can hold back as Stonecloaker has flash (3BW for a 3/2 Flier instead of 4B for a 3/2 Fear.) and do neat tricks with something like Tidehollow Sculler to permanently exile a card from a players hand. The extra toughness is also relevant in the case of cubes having something like Fireslinger.
Now while Angel is obviously better in most cases than either card, because let's face it, Angel is nuts, the Stonecloaker does have one advantage in that it protects a guy from a Wrath effect where as Angel doesn't.
Really the exile part is the best part of Stonecloaker most of the time. There are so many cards in the format that use the graveyard to do so many things that exiling cards at instant speed, even if it's just to get rid of an undying Vorapede is awesome. I've Entombed and Animate Deaded a Stonecloaker before just to turn off people's engines in the past.
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Flickerwisp also kills my opponent's creature tokens, removes blockers and abuses my own ETB effects without requiring me to pay their mana costs again. I'd play Flickerwisp over Stoncloaker any day.
The Flickerwisp is also far and away the best stand-alone creature of all the ETB abusers in aggro, where I don't always want Restoration Angel and I definitely don't want Stonecloaker.
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How so
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See that's the thing really, I'm a huge control player to the point that in drafts (cube or otherwise) people usually assume I'm in some kind of UBx deck (To the point that there was a running joke that I'd play 40 Corpse Lunges and still make it to the top 20 of a PTQ) , so keeping three mana up isn't exactly bad for me because if not Stonecloaker then removal, counters, or card advantage, you know?
As for battlecruiser magic, I highly disagree. These days creatures are good enough that most can get there, even smaller sized ones, and overextending is a lot harder because of it. There's a reason why some pros asked "why would teams of control players switch to aggro in pro tours" and the answer was that being proactive was just better now as everything was a threat and it was getting consistently harder to answer everything. So as long as you play tight and have a plan it's very rare that you're simply sitting one three mana in hopes of protecting a creature, most of the time you're playing a couple of threats and then trying to win the board without committing more creatures until needed or it's wildly beneficial.
Also, a lot of times damage is redundant and doesn't shorten the clock once you've reached a certain point. An example being 5 power on the board and them being at 10, even playing another creature you're still on the same clock, and playing Flickerwisp and having a creature removed or leaving up 3 to cast Stonecloaker when they try to remove a creature, is the same clock.
If he was a 3/3 or 3/4, it'd be another story.
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