Beanstalk Giant – One Card a Day

The ups and downs of ramp

Ramp is good in vintage cube, but was kind of a trap in my cube in the early days. Though one paper it should be good, because there were many expensive cards that didn’t even need to be prioritized, and ramp is a surefire way to deploy them quickly, prioritizing the ramp cards like Llanowar Elves and Rampant Growth should have been enough to put together a solid deck. The deck often did not turn out as solid though, since threats from that time were fragile, like Phantom Nishoba, dying to any counterspell or Doom Blade – and the cube had a lot of high powered removal. The worst part was the deck often fizzled because it did not drawn an even mix of acceleration and fatties.

Ramp is kind of like a synergy deck where the ramp cards are the enablers and the fatties are the payoffs. Beanstalk Giant is amazing in it because it is, like I talked about in Banewhip Punisher – One Card a Day, a payoff-enabler. Its inclusion helps ramp with its biggest weaknees: consistency.

From the point of view of the environment, I like Beanstalk Giant as a threat; it’s fairly low-powered, easily dealt with (no targeting restriction, trample, though hard to burn), and provides no value beyond the Adventure. The scaling is benign, as it gives ramp’s something for its 9th and 10th otherwise useless lands, but due to the possibility of chumping, doesn’t make a big difference in the grand scheme of things.

Flavor-wise, Eldraine was a highly resonant set, and this is an easily recognizable fairy tale, though it has this strange twist that the beanstalk was the giant all along?

A con is that Beanstalk Giant is quite wordy. Fortunately, the Adventure mechanic is spelled out on this card, but makes text box even more crammed.