Picking Prickly Pair over Scalestorm Summoner?
I wondered how to rate draft picks in Outlaws of Thunder Junction for Prickly Pair and Scalestorm Summoner, and this is what I came up with…
Both cards are payed by 3 colorless and a red. But where the Prickly pair enters as a 2/2, its ETB provides you immediatly with an additional body under the form of a 1/1 red Mercenary token that taps to provide target create you control +1/+0 until end of turn (Only to be activated as a sorcery). The Scalestorm Summoner immediatly comes as a 3/3 body, but needs some additional work to provide an extra body. It needs to attack you own a create with power 4 or greater for you to create a 3/1 red dinosaur creature.
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I would think that the Scalestorm summoner would be better if you could attack with it the next turn it comes down. Ideally it comes down on T3 and on T4 you have something out with power 4 or greater. If you would hope to play this in a Rakdos build, then it doesn’t look like you have a lot of enablers like this, except maybe for Quilled Charger, Gila Courser, Rictus Robber… Where Quilled charger and Gila Courser being mounts, not immediatly the creature type you are looking for in RB. So for RB, Prickly Pair might be the better pick and provides 2 outlaws. “Power 4 matters” is typically a RG thing, so I would imagine the Scalestorm Summoner gets better in this color pair. Curious about this hypothesis, I looked up the winrates for both cards on 17lands, herafter the Game In Hand winrates for both cards…
RG
So for RG, the Scalestorm Summoner is sitting at a 57.3% winrate, well above the Prickly Pair sitting at 54.3%. I would even argue that RG doesn’t care that much for the 1/1 Red Mercenary token as the creatures in G are rather huge anyway. These creatures also block pretty well, so I guess, the additional body is not that much help. However, there will be a high chance to get the 3/1 dinosaur out, leaving extra value.
BR
Didn’t surprise me that the Prickly Pair seems to be the better choice in BR, however I was quite surprised that the GIH winrate at 53.5% is pretty close to the 54.1% winrate for the Prickly Pair.
RW
Pretty interesting to see that RW seems pretty happy with both of these cards! Where I can see the Prickly Pair of interest in a Go-Wide strategy, I fail to see how the Summoner enables the high GIH winrate of 57.2%! Please leave your ideas in the comments!
UR
In UR, the Summoner seems a really low pick with 51.6% GIH winrate.