But The Smooze? Turns out you can Smooze the Stop! Well, the Stop's events, anyway. Well, nothing except run The Smooze, of course! Being Colourless was a major benefit here as it allowed him to be run in a Mono-Orange deck that otherwsie would have had no long term way to stop Eff Stop from Eff Stopping. So what could be done about discard recursion if you weren't playing Purple, White, (or Yellow)? Nothing. Your options were more or less just Magical Misfire, Destiny Drain, Cleaning Up, and the rather bad The Soup Incident, and these could all be difficult to time, were one shot abilities, were pretty bad against almost every deck in the format (except Cleaning Up whose primary mode was the recursion, not the banish), and most importantly, were tied to specific colours. Going into continentals, it was pretty clear Eff Stop was going to in a very difficult to stop position, and there wasn't all that many options for disrupting discard recursion.

and along side Gyro: Poindexter, you didn't even have to have more than a single copy of your most important events as Gyro could find them for you, allowing Eff Stop to just play them again and again and again. By the time the Defenders of Equestria Meta was established, he was clearly proving to be an insanely powerful card, if not the most powerful card in game. Better and better Events were being printed every set, and Eff Stop let you replay them every single turn for one measely AT on top of their regular cost. So ultimately, Smooze was a mediocre friend with a mediocre growth ability.ĭuring the High Magic era, Eff Stop's strength had become incredibly apparent, so much so that he had at least one top tier deck in Harmony every set from then on out. So people weren't recurring events much either (unless comboing). While people were starting to dabble in Eff Stop decks at this point, they were still pretty few and far between. Its ability also wasn't good at stopping combo decks since you needed to have AT when the combo player went off, and even if you did, the combo player could just do something to make Smooze unusable somehow. Especially since the card you'd most want to target at the time was Dr. Friends were the most popular card type, after all, so being unable to banish them meant the ability was significantly weaker than it could have been. And that ability being tied to a situational banish from discard didn't do much to make that look any better. While being colourless is slightly appealing, 1 AT for 1 power wasn't, even if it was permanent.

Yet one year he rose to prominence and took two top 16 continentals slots. This wobbly blob hasn't really been used for much of anything, despite being an available option for literally every deck. For each card I'll attempt to answer the same 4 questions to determine just how this particular card made it big. I think these cards are interesting and worth discussing, don't you? They can help us look at how the game has changed in the past and how it might change in the future. Hello and welcome to Cards That Beat The Odds, where we look at a card that people dismissed initially, but then it got used to good effect. And the 'bad' ones? Almost never.īut sometimes a 'bad' card can become a 'good' card. The cards determined to be 'good' will then get used. Most of the time, people figure out whether a card is good or not almost immediately. There are good cards and there are bad cards.

The smooze ccg