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Mujadaddy wrote:

I've *never* been a fan of discarding cards from my own hand, especially as a creature-based effect, for a number of reasons:

Going to stop you right here. The entire point of this deck is the possible synergies that Gibbering Descent + no cards in hand brings. If you don't want to discard cards, whoop de friggin doo, but my deck is BASED AROUND IT.

I'm not a card-drawing machine

I *like* the cards in my deck--I put them there for a reason, not to 'waste' them

Why am I 'wasting' a card, again? I want it in my graveyard? I'll just Millstone myself or Pox or something.... "Useless land" you say? Mana curve, I say.

Lol, that's a very naive way of thinking about it. First of all, mana curve is based on probability. You can (almost) never pick up the perfect number of lands even if you "curve" your deck because what you draw will be random. If you can build magical decks that always curve perfectly, then you have a prosperous life ahead of you. Realistically though, people will pick up excess lands in a multiplayer game (they are relatively longer then duels). This benefit is one reason why I opted to use the spellshaper version.

Secondly, what good is a Slicer when people are locked down to 0 cards? What good is Dark Ritual in top deck mode? What good is another Mage? What good is 2 Glacial Chasms? What good is 2 Contaminations? If you want to use SS, and use it once, that's fine. I like turning ALL my EXTRA, extremely useful, worthwhile cards into an additional win condition. There are cards I need, but not in multiples. I'm not wasting anything, I'm turning effects I no longer require into life.

Finally, it's a win condition. SS will hit ONCE. If I lock the board down but lose my/don't have any Rack effects, I can't win. If that happens, I suddenly have 4 more outs in my deck. You can say deny this if you want, even though my deck does feature a lock with contamination that (in general) prevents them from killing my creature, but he has drained me to victory in the past.

What if the critter is killed? How am I going to 'waste' my card now!!??

Play them? Creatures get killed, strategies get ruined, plans backfire, that's magic. The cards I'm discarding can easily be played for a minor effect. Sure, I'd rather have more life, but it's not like playing out my entire hand is hard with this deck. The purpose of the mage was never to waste cards. I never said waste, and it kind of made me mad how you kept quoting it like I had. You can say "what if X happens" to any card or strategy, so I'm not going to humor this argument any further.

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By all means, I'm not cheerleading Syphon Soul as the hawtest card on the planet -- just a solid multiplayer spell.

This is almost an insulting statement. In my guide to black cards and strategies I have it listed as a card everyone should have (you can check the link and see when it was last updated/edited). I advocate using this card all the time to people here on the forums, and during my real life games. I know it's a good spell, I never said otherwise, I never hinted otherwise, don't talk to me like I don't know that.