Pointed Discussion

I think this is a very strong card. It's cheap and reliable, able to serach for any creature card by discarding one you don't want. Awesome.
4.0

this card is great by itself but crazy good if you combine it with some return from graveyard creatures.

Yea like Squee, Goblin Nabob

This card is amazing with Recurring Nightmare. Made one of the best decks control decks at the time. Allowed you to fetch whatever creature you needed at the moment. You would run the deck is just one of each utility creature. Incredible

It's creature-cycling for all your creatures, at the low, low cost of one green mana. Great card.

Evil

I can't number how many times I've drawn the wrong creature at the wrong time. This will make sure that doesn't happen again.

Love pure and simple. My giant red heart is throbbing with love for this green feast for the fires of my SOOOOUUUULLL!!!

Also great for Goblin Welder, bouncing some huge fat into play.

Mogg on Mogg violence.... so sad.

Fauna Shaman, a new card in 2011, is this in creature form.

5/5 for the bloody hot mess of artwork.

BANNED?!? Are you kidding me wizards theres nothing wrong with this card. I refuse to buy another pack of magic till this is unbanned.

@Ace,

u mad?



I am quite happy to see this card gone. When 3/4ths of a tournament is survival decks, you know something needs to be changed. Let's hope it stays banned indefinitely.

CCC-COMBRO BREAKER

I agree with ace. Don't get me wrong, this card is seriously over-the-top good...but it still shouldn't be banned. Now, I'm not gonna quit playing magic because of it...but still...

I think Wizards needs to learn this: Don't ban cards because they're good. Ban cards because they ruin the game. Kinda like mystical. Sure, it was really good, but it's not like people stopped playing legacy while it existed. It's not even like legacy was less fun while it existed. Sure, survival is dominating the metagame, but so what? It makes no more sense than banning BBE "because it's really good". Yeah, it is really good. So?

Banned.

Still a fantastic engine with almost endless possibilities.

I will say that although I enjoy the synergy with vengevine, I have been having a lot of fun using survival with a toolbox of legendary creatures and then recurring them with Loyal Retainers.

5/5

The reason for banning cards as I understand it is to allow for a more varied metagame and make creative deckbuilding relevant when compared to pure luck.

It kind of defeats the purpose of having a lot of cards to choose from if only one archetype is ever going to be successful.

The banning of this card is a ridiculous move on Wizards' part:

1). It's an enchantment, any serious player will have an answer for enchantments (and most likely artifacts) in their sideboard if not their main deck because of all the other enchantments we all know, love and fear (Counterbalance, anybody?).

2). It's an activated ability, so there are ways to prevent it or limit it (Pithing Needle, Aven Mindcensor, Suppression Field, Mindlock Orb...).

3). It fuels the graveyard, and decks that make the most aggressive use of Survival rely on their graveyards. And just like the first example, any legacy player worth their salt will have graveyard hate on hand to shut that down...I won't bother with examples because there are so many. Sure the Survuval player can still get any creature they want as long as they have something to pitch and one green to pitch it with, but that's much more manageable than Vengevines and Iona popping back into play from the 'yard.

4). It's a 2 casitng cost card, which is right in the primary range to be shut down by Counterbalance, Spell Snare, Chalice of the Void, snagged by Engineered Explosives, Pernicious Deed, and other board permanent removal.

Yes it is a very powerful card, one that can be used in many ways and is extremely versatile...but there are plenty of cards in the format that are just as ubiquitous and cause much more far-reaching changes in what is viable in the format. Survival should be allowed in the format because there are so many ways to deal with it, and all with stuff people already have access to and use frequently (and are CHEAP!!!)

This isnt banned. I agree it should be, but why are people saying it is.

And fauna is not anywere near a creature version of this. It has to tap to do this, severarly weakening it.

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/122k

^ This is the address to the December 2010 Banned & Restricted List Announcement. In the article two things are changed: Survival is banned in Legacy, while Time Spiral in unbanned.

It is strange that Gatherer lists Survival as legal; it must be an oversight.

Fauna Shaman

I Will Survive. cuz im goin to get PROGENITUS After i choke this stupid bird. LOL

Sliiiight difference between this and fauna: this can be used multiple times in a turn...this is stronger, the lack of a chump blocker is balanced by survivability...altho unlike fauna this cant cycle copies of itself. still. strong.

This card should read - G: choose one or both - put a creature you want into the graveyard for combo shenanigans, or search your library for a creature that will be much more useful much sooner than the one you discarded.

I'm mostly a standard player so I've been playing with Fauna Shaman for a while and loving her, but Survival? The ability to do it as many times per turn as you can pay for it? It's just awesome.

Perhaps the most gruesome card art I've seen yet.

This, Food Chain, and that crazy madness 0 lizard.

G, discard find the rootwalla
G, discard (ie play) rootwalla to find another
G, repeat step 2
G, once more
G discard rootwalla for something good.

Exile Lizards for 8 mana to cast your creature

PS your turn one is forest llandwar elf, turn 2 forest Food chain, 3 this card step one, turn 4 forest and steps 2-5.

Oh! It doesn't have to tap! Thats way better than fauna shaman! thats like three mana, four vengevines in the grave status

Vengevine along with a super flexible toolbox caused the deck that centered around this card to become dominant in the Legacy metagame for a while. Something like 80% of the top 8 decks were survival decks for some time.

Vengevine

Just thought I'd state the obvious

There's no reason this should be banned while Elvish Piper isn't even restricted.

Elvish Piper? This is way better than Elvish Piper.

Survival of the Vengevine.

This card was legal in Legacy, a powerful but not broken card, until it was possible to put four fresh 4/3 hasty warmongers into play every turn by pitching a couple Basking Rootwallas.

I love this card in EDH! Works great with Squee and Genesis

My favorite card ever. You have to love a card that encourages you to play a deck crammed full of singletons and then is powerful enough to make it work.

Such a shame they banned it in Legacy. Sure, Vengevine sent it over the top, but prior to that there were a huge huge number of different Survival decks (dating back to Angry Tradewind Survival!) and none of them broke the format.

@Thewrathofshane It takes a mistake to recognize a mistake.

Guess this card wasn't fit to survive another round of bannings.

This is one of the key cards in my favorite deck of all time - Nightmare Survival. As mentioned, team it up with Recurring Nightmare and you have a steam rolling deck that is very fun to play, and even play against. (I've lost to it so many times, lol)

@atemu1234: Well said.

@TheWrathofShane: Cards like these are what make magic fun. Balancing and "fair" magic is overrated. Though I have to wonder, do you hate cards like these because you constantly lose to them?

@thewrathofshane I hardly think it's the fact the creature goes to the graveyard that makes this card broken. That's like saying that it was the fact it countered a spell for {U}{U} that broke Mana Drain.

@Blackhawk900: Tell that to Vengevine, the most popular use of Survival.

If mana drain didn't counter, it'd be unplayable. If survival didn't discard and instead shuffled the card into your library, it'd be much weaker. These little things are what make these cards ridiculous.

OOH OOH! Wheel of Sun and Moon!

Why yes! I would like to search for the creature I just discarded!

Completely broken..
.5/5


Even when this is not used in a top tier deck, can get you exactly the creature you need at any time for . If it said exile instead of discard would be a bunch more fair and actually be used as the card was intended. Even though it still would be crazy with exile, at least you couldnt abuse the graveyard with it as well.


@Recurring Memories
Cards like this are what make magic Pay 2 Win and One Sided.

@thewrathofshane: People like you that never stop bitching are what make magic unfun. I'd rather magic be pay to win than every card be the same, like you want them to be.

Survival decks created Aggro/Control/Combo decks; literally good at all three. This card is one of the few that's broken Legacy in spite of free counterspells, in spite of mega-fast combo decks; nothing could match it's consistency, power, and speed at the same time.

You were going to combo? Mental Misstep or Force took care of it. They could counter your counters. They could tutor up solutions to their problems. They could combo into vengevines easily (requiring any two castable creatures, which they could tutor with this single card over the course of 4-5 mana allowing 2-3 hasty vengevines on top of their other critters)

Can't be stopped by counterspells and stifle is only card parity.

Amazing card. I hope it's never unbanned.

@TheWrathofShane
"Cards like this are what make magic Pay 2 Win and One Sided."

I have several issues with your complaint, so I will break them down for you:
1) "Pay 2 Win"

First, Vintage Dredge would like to have a word with you. Aside from the 4x Bazaar of Baghdad, many Dredge lists cost under $50. Since unsanctioned tournaments, i.e. the majority of Vintage tournaments, usually allow 10-15 proxies, you could feasibly show up to a tournament with a deck worth less money than its sleeves.

Second, let us deal with the idiom "Pay to Win" itself. Magic: The Gathering is a Trading Card Game (TCG), so it requires some amount of monetary investment to even play the game, which, in most contexts, is required to win in the first place. This is a property of all commercially produced games, though TCG's often require sustained investment, rather than a lump sum up front like a non-subs_cription video game or a board game. Hence, the phrase "Pay to Win," is only vacuously true unless you are advocating playing with borrowed, stolen, or counterfeit cards. That being said, if you are dissatisfied with the product, that is your opinion and completely valid, but you (again, hopefully) knew that TCG's have an entrance fee: the cards themselves. Complaining that a TCG is "Pay to Win" is like buying a car and then complaining that you had to pay for the car - it serves no other purpose than to make yourself sound like an inarticulate fool.

2) "One Sided"

Now let us examine the current Legacy and Vintage metagames as of the date of this post:
Top 5 Vintage decks by volume: MUD - 20%, Fish - 15%, Snapcaster Control - 13%, Planeswalker Control - 9%, Oath of Druids - 9%, Other - 34%

No deck takes up more than one-fifth of the metagame, with the top five dominant decks taking up only two-thirds of the metagame.

Top 5 Legacy decks by volume: BUG - 15%, Stoneblade - 9%, UR Delver - 9%, Show and Tell 9%, UW Miracles 7%, Other - 51%

Legacy is even more diverse, with the dominant deck occupying even less of the metagame, and consisting of two different decks - BUG Aggro and BUG midrange. The top five dominant decks make up less than half of the metagame.

Surival was indeed a dominant deck in Legacy prior to its banning, but its matchups were by no means one-sided. At least, not until the printing of Vengevine - at which point they were not one-sided... that would be CawBlade in Standard.

Hence, Magic: The Gathering is neither "Pay to Win" nor "One Sided" - in fact, its accessibility and diversity are what make it appealing even two decades after its conception. Stop complaining about one card in a deck that beat yours and learn how to play against it, or around it, or with it - whatever suits your fancy. But leave the hate-ratings at home.

(Source for metagame stats - mtgtop8's reports on the last 12 months for Vintage, last 2 months for Legacy).

TL;DR
5/5 for a powerful and interesting card.
0.5/5 for TheWrathofShane's ignorant and needlessly querulous hate-rate post.

OBSTINATE BALOTH

@JamesDudding: "If a spell or ability an opponent controls causes you to discard Obstinate Baloth (...)".

As one of the most broken cards in Magic, even without an ever expanding list of combos, this can't be fairly given less than a 4.5. I give it 5/5 for being astounding.