Love to Hate, Hate to Love

Hello Aether Community! This is my first post - you have your Master Shake Signal here reporting out from the Arena with something that I find near and dear to my own little heart - cards we love to hate and cards we hate to love. Cards we love to hate drive us to beat these cards/decks, intensifying our concentration and determination to the point where if we lose we want to crack a tooth staring at the opponent or screen with the utmost of hatred. Cards we love to hate are the opposite - we slide this cards into our dms...I mean decks with shame and revulsion, knowing full well that they are going to propel us to victory and in spite of our self-loathing.

I've been playing MTG for a long, long time and have developed hate/love and love/hate relationships with MANY cards and decks over the years. There have been a few, in fact, on the hate end that even made me take extended breaks from MTG - the longest of which was caused by Dragonstorm. Yeah, you remember Dragonstorm - the deck that not even side-boarding Thought-Seize could reliably stop. Cards like this you love to hate, so much that when you beat them, you dance uncontrollably and start a riot around your office/house/basement/attic/dungeon. There are two cards, currently, that I absolutely love to hate. The first is Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. I know, I know - you LOVE Esper, you spiteful, hateful, time-mongering Magic player-you. As much as you LOVE to play Tef, I HATE it that much. I HATE it enough that I will design decks specifically to kill Tef without any regard to any other Meta out there - as long as I don't lose to Tef/Esper, I'll feel good about my 2-5 finish. It's a masochistic approach, I know, but that card - and the value - is just outrageous. Bounce my Bolas and shut me down? Draw and untap to counter my Scapeshift? You've had me on lockdown for so long you are exiling my permanents?! The worst is that it is quite often backed by Teferi, Time Raveler, Hero of Precinct One, or Dovin's Veto. So here's to you, Big Tef, and your absolutely frustrating domination of the past year of my life. Cheers, you cheeky bastard. 

The second and equally frustrating card is Feather, the Redeemed. Now, this card is not dominating Standard NEARLY the same way that Teferi has, and my LOATHING for it doesn't come from its power. No, this is a different kind of hatred, one born from what I would call the Clint Eastwood factor. Get off of my lawn, Feather, I have many, many other things to do in my life. This card SLOWS gameplay down to a crawl, with so many different levels of priority that it would take a Law degree to explain. Feather is especially frustrating on Arena where it seems players tend to not plan out their moves turns in advance. I will admit, I'm impatient. I gnash my teeth and glare at the screen, growing angrier and angrier with a fairly good card solely because it takes SOOOOOOOOO long to play it. Click faster, people! Some of us are literally dying where we sit - age having caught up with our once handsome selves and turned us into wrinkly - but steely-eyed - old people sitting on our porch complaining about when 4/4's with flying and vigilance SHOULD cost 5 mana. 

Now there is one card in particular that I am absolutely ashamed to love. Like - I don't even willingly admit to my friends that I play this card and sheepishly hide the fact that it has propelled me to Diamond-level play on Arena for the first time. I hide it under my pillow like I'm hiding my Playboy from 1991 from my parents, secretly loving the access too it, caressing it ever so....wait, that's personal. ANYWAY - I secret this card away and don't admit that it is so good and so powerful - Scapeshift - a card I dismissed upon its release as "A great way to thin out a deck." The current Bant Scapeshift deck is so good, in fact, that I have had 60% of people scoop before swinging for lethal damage. Seriously, I've kept a tally. I've played the deck maybe 100 times or so and 6 out of 10 people scoop the second you scapeshift for the Dead. I mean...it does create upwards of 22 2/2 Zombies....but c'mon. It's so awesome! But I am ashamed to give it props - are you?

So there you have it, Aqua Teens, straight from the leader himself. What about you? What cards do you Love to Hate? How about Hate to Love? Let me know in the comments below.