Much Abrew: Cool but Rude Is Bonkers (TMNT Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! The new class enchantment Cool but Rude was my spoiler-season pick for best Standard card from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Will it live up to the hype? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Cool but Rude
Wrap Up
I'm going to keep the discussion short today because I'm writing this article at the last minute thanks to early-access day, but I wanted to point out a couple of things about the deck. First, the deck killed it record-wise, winning 16 of the 20 matches I played with it for an 80% win rate, although I don't really take early-access day records very seriously. More importantly, the deck felt incredible. It's super consistent thanks to all the looting and rummaging, fast (we won on Turn 4 a bunch and can win on Turn 3 with the perfect draw), and powerful. I honestly think it has a chance to be a real top-tier deck in TMNT Standard.
As far as Cool but Rude itself, the card was absurd. I've seen people say that it looks like a worse Monument to Endurance. While this might be true for a deck like Lessons, I actually think Cool but Rude might be better in our Rakdos deck, to the point where, if I had to cut some copies of one or the other, I'd start with Monument to Endurance. (Although in reality, the cards are so good together that you should just play both. Having redundancy for our self-discard payoffs is part of the deck's power.) During our games, we got to see what makes Cool but Rude so absurd: the second level is uncapped. Unlike Monument to Endurance, which can only deal three damage a turn, Cool but Rude can deal an unlimited amount of damage, assuming we have enough cards to discard. We got to see some games where we literally just played and leveled up Cool but Rudes and then discarded our entire hand to 20 our opponent! Even before we level it up, letting us rummage whenever we attack is really strong, almost turning our random creatures into Gran-Gran, which is especially good with our one-drops Moonshadow and Marauding Mako since they'll grow as we rummage away cards.
While I think the deck is great and has the potential to be a real player in Standard, I have one piece of advice if you want to play the deck: make sure to count the damage you can deal because it's often way more than you think. I was shocked at how easy it was to kill opponents from between 10 and 15 life on Turn 4 or 5, even with just a single creature on the battlefield. Cards like Iron-Shield Elf and Bloodthorn Flail let us discard our entire hands, and when you add in a Monument or Cool but Rude, the deck can often deal a shocking amount of damage seemingly out of nowhere. They say that math is for blockers, but with this deck, at least, math is for attackers too. If you don't actually count up exactly how much you can deal, it's pretty easy to miss wins because you assume your not-especially-threatening-looking board just can't muster up enough damage, even though it actually can!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com
