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I've played over 1k matches on the 360... BH has statistically performed better than RoI... both playing with and against. 

When you look at all of the various abilities in Magic, card advantage/card draw stands out as the most important.  Without it, you're stuck at one per turn aside from your initial draw.  Illusions has many card draw advantages and as long as you're not using Prosperity , you're good.

No other deck can match the consistency of drawing extra cards like Illusions, although Machinations beats it IF you get the Sundial out, except Forest's Fury or Garruk's but I don't count those because it can easily benefit your opponent more than you.

Feb 13, 2012 -- 11:00AM, Venrathe wrote:

Feb 13, 2012 -- 4:45AM, LanceKalzas wrote:

When you look at all of the various abilities in Magic, card advantage/card draw stands out as the most important.  Without it, you're stuck at one per turn aside from your initial draw.  Illusions has many card draw advantages and as long as you're not using Prosperity , you're good.

Dotp's land tapping issue's (which arent just limited to tri color decks)

This is 100% correct.  I've lost count of how many times my friend will cast Ajani's Pridemate and it'll tap his only  Mountain when all he has in his hand is a Lightning Helix .  You would think with 4 lands in play, it would simply tap two of the 3 Plains . 

Feb 13, 2012 -- 4:45AM, LanceKalzas wrote:

When you look at all of the various abilities in Magic, card advantage/card draw stands out as the most important.  Without it, you're stuck at one per turn aside from your initial draw.  Illusions has many card draw advantages and as long as you're not using Prosperity , you're good.

No other deck can match the consistency of drawing extra cards like Illusions, although Machinations beats it IF you get the Sundial out, except Forest's Fury or Garruk's but I don't count those because it can easily benefit your opponent more than you.

I don't disagree, but I think it's a little more than just because the deck "draws cards". The concept of card advantage is an important one for a deck's success, and partially why I think plenty of decks fail at being great, but I think it should be noted that RoI has a great aggro element along with its ability to generate tempo over an opponent. Thus, I'm basing a lot of the success of the deck on the power of cards like Repulse , Aether Adept , and Sower of Temptation that can continually set back the opponent while the RoI pilot incrementally applies pressure with the efficient low cost beaters like Phantasmal Bear and Krovikan Mist .

I can't dimiss the importance of card draw late game though. The last thing you want to do is run out of cards, or essentially ways to win or control the game. I just think a card like Divination , even though it's +1 card advantage, isn't exactly exciting for RoI early in the game as you're skipping a turn of your development or undeveloping your opponent's side just for an extra card. There's a lot more other things I'd rather do on turn three than draw cards. However, come turn 5+, Divination and Jace's Ingenuity are pretty strong plays as you can either draw into more threats or disruption and have mana left open off Divination, or front the disruption and follow-up with the Ingenuity. So this "control" element that offers card draw can alleviate some of the late game shortcomings, but I think the deck is more reliant on the "aggro" component as essentially most of the threats are at the low mana cost and I consider that a lot of the disruption elements help ensure the aggro component stays ahead on the board.

@Brodo,

When I say card draw is the single most important ability in Magic, which ROI has a lot of, I'm only looking at each ability of the game individually.  Not really talking about whether the deck is aggro or control, which it can be both.  Thoughts of Wind had a large amount of card draw also but lacked sufficient threats throughout the deck, even though I found the deck fun to play. 

Card draw being the most important ability is completely dependent on having the necessary threats to back it up.  In the end, we're saying the same thing...lol.