Dies to Removal

I may be new to the thread, but I was aware of a debate over Purge the Profane. I think any intelligent person should listen to everyone in the thread. Different people have different play styles and different strategies that work best for them. I honestly don't believe that, outside of a few exceptions, a 'Bad Card' exists no more then a 'Bad tool'. Situational, maybe. Strictly better? Maybe. Pillar of Flame and Shock are apples and oranges. One is low CMC pinpoint instant removal. The other is an exile effect at sorcery speed for low cmc. Purge the Profane and Rakdos Return again are incomparable. One gains life and forces discard at a set CMC. The other forces Discard while damages with an X effect. If your thing is Lifegain, then Purge the Profane will be better FOR YOU then Rakdos Return will ever be. If you'd rather do damage,
then Rakdos Return will be better for YOU then Purge will ever be.

Furthermore, if anyone should be listend too, it would be Kamhal. I don't see anyone here who's posted the results of their list in a 217 man tournament that they came first in. Not only did he succesfully win with the Dega Midrange deck, but he was gracious enough to explain exactly how he did it and how he shored up against other players. I'm also fairly sure he started the thread.

Personally I find it frustrating when I have a go to thread for ideas about where to take my deck from here and there's 5 pages of damned bickering about why oranges are better then apples and Kamahl is stupid for liking Kiwis. If anything, mimic Kamahl's deck precisely, as far as I can see he is the only one with consistent tournament winning results with Dega Midrange. So Kamahl, as a Dega midrange player, thank you for your contributions and for having the kahoonies to stand by your decisions. You've given me hope as a Dega
player.

That being said, I don't think debating whether one card is more effective or not is a bad thing, it just better hashes out which cards work best in this deck. What I have a problem is people trying to discrediting someone who obviously knows what he's talking about. So I do not mean to slander anyone, to be honest I don't remember the names of anyone who flamed Kamahl, and frankly I don't care. I just recall him letting everyone know how he was getting results and being flamed for it.


Regarding deck build, I'll have to delay my post further. Again I'm at work, and my deck is at home. But honestly, Reveberate helps out immensely against the control match up. Even helps push spells through on occasion or even giving you your own Advent of the Wurm.

A few points:

1. Bad cards do exist and they can be compared to good cards even if the two aren't directly related or one isn't strictly better/worse than the other. Example: it&#
39;s okay to say Thermal Flux is bad and/or worse than Mana Drain.

2a. The tournament report shouldn't fill you with confidence - there are plenty of indicators that Kamahl's meta is not overly competitive, competent, or current:
-very few Aggro MUs when the meta is upwards of 40% Aggro
-the number of play mistakes he notes from his opponents - things you might expect in the first 2-3 rounds, but not at the top tables
-the number of mulligans and kept hands that shouldn't have been kept (like the RG Aggro player that apparently kept a hand with Scavenging Ooze as his only threat)
-opponents that straight didn't know or understand the rules like the Blitz player in Round 5 that didn't understand the new Planeswalker rules - honestly, I've never played in a tournament where my 4-0 opponent didn't understand the basic (even if they were new) rules of the game
2b. Besides all that, it looks like
luck played a pretty big part in that win - read the report: Kamahl never once had to mulligan as far as I can tell but his opponents regularly had sub-par hands (apparent from their play lines) and twice his opponent mulligan down to 4(!). In fact, it seems like the only times Kamahl's opponents had hands worth keeping were when his were even better.

So no, that report doesn't encourage me to disregard my own experiences and card evaluations.

3. It's not "obvious [he] knows what he's talking about" - if it were, multiple people wouldn't constantly be questioning him. To me it is, in fact, obvious that the opposite is true based on my experiences with the cards in question and specifically with Kamahl in the past - the most recent of which was him arguing with me that both Varolz and Blood Baron were unplayable trash (even though both have or do get played successfully in competitive environments) and that Varolz somehow represented card
disadvantage (still don't understand how anyone could think that). There are more examples, but these are the most recent besides Purge and clearly illustrate that Kamahl - while very good at abrasively arguing a point - actually has terrible card evaluation skills, faulty logic, a clear misunderstanding of how cards should be played, and, consequently, his advice should be scrutinized very thoroughly.