How Can Tutor Effects Remain Interesting and Not Too Powerful?
General forum
Posted on June 23, 2025, 9:30 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
In these two posts, Mark Rosewater stated that WotC is very careful about printing tutor effects, as such cards decrease variance in gameplay, and I understand his perspective, on that matter, but tutors have been a part of the game from its very beginning, so I believe that it would be wrong to stop printing them, and I would like to see tutors with creative effects that require the players to use them strategically, such as Beseech the Mirror or Grim Servant, both of which require proper deckbuilding to be used to their fullest potential.
What does everyone else say, about this subject? How can tutor effects remain interesting and not too powerful? I certainly am interested to hear your thoughts, on this matter.
I'm a fan of Diabolic Revelation, obviously a bit of a build around. I think most tutors suffer from people wanting them to be almost as good as Demnonic/Vampiric Tutor, and those are badly designed/broken cards that ate bans, yet because they exist they normalize something that hurts the game. Diabolic Tutor sees a surprising amount of casual play, and I think that's a reasonable card.
I also enjoyed Transmute, but I will forever be doing penance for having actually cast Brainspoil, is that actually the worst removal spell ever printed? I think it's worse than the Portal stuff, 5 mana for sorcery speed conditional removal with an upside that almost never mattered from the day it was first used? I know they didn't want it to be a good spell, but even Murder was only 3 mana, and this is MUCH WORSE than Murder. I still wonder if they'll do something like Transmute for Boros, only it's restricted to finding Artifacts/Enchantments to keep it from being too useful. I just hope they don't nerf the spells THAT hard.
June 26, 2025 9:34 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #4
DreadKhan, I was new to the game during the original Ravnica block, but Brainspoil is definitely a terrible card, and I cannot imagine ever actually casting it, rather than using its transmute ability, and, on that subject, I dearly would like to see WotC print additional cards with transfigure, which currently exists only on Fleshwrither.
gavriel1136 says... #2
Demonic Bargain is a fun way to allow powerful tutoring
June 25, 2025 12:59 p.m.