Merfolk Looter/Reckless Scholar/Cephalid Looter/Looter Il-Kor/Riddlesmith are good cards. If you have 3 or more cards in hand, being able to cycle 1 or 2 of them to smooth out your draws each turn is a powerful effect.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor was a powerful card for his ability to "Brainstorm" every turn, but his usefulness doubled with the aid of fetchlands to shuffle away useless cards you just placed on top of your library, otherwise he was basically a fancy Swiss Army Scroll Rack (still a powerful card). All these cards do is give you new cards, guaranteed, no questions asked. They don't provide card advantage, but they do offer card quality, a subtle yet powerful concept.
Posted By:
DacenOctavio
(9/7/2011 8:38:16 PM)
Let's have a functional reprint, wizard. You can call it Merfolk Broker.
But if you're not going to make it targetable then don't bother, that would defeat the purpose.
Posted By:
Vedalken_Arbiter
(9/21/2011 7:08:09 PM)
My very first attempt at a combo was this + Confessor. I discarded Obsessive Search and drew an extra card. I discarded Prismatic Strands and wrecked some combat later. It was awesome.
With the same deck, I also learned to always leave two mana for Counterspell, and to appreciate the power of control. (My appreciation for aggro, the deck type I excel most at today, would come a bit later.)
Posted By:
sweetgab
(8/26/2013 11:36:54 PM)
You think that you're safe from my Liliana's Caress because you have no cards in hand? Mill just hurt, biatch.
Posted By:
MCcreator
(10/31/2013 10:42:51 AM)
Card selection is great. Most of the time you're either looking for land or not, and the cards that you draw that aren't what you want are basically dead. This means that on average, drawing a card gives you a 'live draw' 50% of the time. Looters basically give you an extra draw at the expense of a card that would have been dead (a land or something uncastable with current mana) anyways.
This isn't entirely accurate since there are occasions where you either have no cards in hand (at which point it does nothing), or need to sacrifice something important to the discard part.
However, casting something every turn (or at least holding something up) is important, and looking at 3 cards per turn means you're pretty much guaranteed to hit something you want to cast.
Posted By:
Aremath
(12/12/2013 7:37:11 AM)
This guy was the star player of my Megrim deck back in the day. I'd give a kidney for a functional reprint.
Posted By:
GGCrono
(5/19/2014 2:01:29 PM)