Sid the Chicken wrote:
TheDoctor wrote:
I never really understood Cloudstone Curio, so I'd rather not play with a card that I can't knowingly use/abuse.

Cloudstone Curio is one of the finest ways ever printed to abuse the crap out of ETB effects. Simple example - you cast Acidic Slime and waste something. Next turn you drop Woodfall Primus, waste something and return Acidic Slime to your hand... Some control player tries to path your best creature; you activate Ant Queen, and return that creature to your hand... Unmorph Thelonite Hermit, makes 4 triggers, return the hermit (and anything else you want to abuse) to your hand...
Or you make a few tokens with a
Wolfbriar Elemental and use one trigger to bounce the Elemental back to your hand and decline the remaining triggers. That way you have an army in play and an army waiting in your hand for the next turn when you do the same trick. Opponents must either deal with the
Cloudstone Curio or repeatedly deal with an increasing number of 2/2 wolves. To top it off you're not actually spending any cards to make this army, neither the Elemental nor any other cards from your hand so you're slowly building up a hand of things to do after they
finally deal with your wolves.
Incidently, if you tweek your land base slightly, with
Beacon of Creation &
Planar Portal you can do the same trick: pump out an army each turn until they deal with the portal. It takes 10 mana though.
You can also keep lands back in your hand in case there's anyone in your group running LD. You tap a land for mana, play one from your hand and bounce the tapped land back to your hand. You're retaining parity on the board without losing the amount of mana you can spend on a turn and covering yourself for the bad times ahead. Obviously this can be abused if you have multiple land drops in a turn but the basic principal for a one land-drop turn is still sound once you have reached your desired number of lands in play.