Sinis wrote: ↑4 years ago
Gallia feels right, the random discard, the haste, everything makes sense... but, it just adds up to something not quite enough for me. The part of Gallia that calls to me is the reckless test-the-water-with-two-feet nature of random self-discard, but, the payoff just doesn't seem there.
It's a 2/2 with haste that gives you +1 card every attack step once it's active (which can easily be T3 even without fast mana), plus a limited kind of card selection...I'm not sure how good a payoff you think you need, but that's a really, really good payoff.
There is some merit to discard synergies (personally I focused on phoenixes for my gallia build) but imo the main thing is just to not have too focused of a game plan. You're playing aggro. Play your on-curve minions and swing for the fences. Nothing is so crucial that it's better than 2 random cards - especially nothing that you can't play this turn. If you have a literal win-the-game-next-turn kind of card, you can always choose not to use Gallia's ability, though that's rarely the right call.
Imo the best way to build Gallia is with a pretty low curve, and as many creatures as possible. If you're playing an answer, it should probably be a creature as well so you never let off the pressure. I also found some planeswalkers to be pretty good since they give you some stickiness through board wipes, and you're already playing heavily to the board so defending them is usually pretty doable.
Looking briefly at the list, imo it's too token focused - but in a small way. You're not running enough meaningful creatures that won't suck post-turn-2, but it doesn't have enough tokens to really go insane with anthems/overruns. You've got discard but not enough synergy to justify it. And then a little random ramp and ramp payoffs that are, again too thin to really work. Too many answers, not enough creatures. This looks to me like a deck that will fail to hit hard enough early, but will quickly run out of gas when it gets outclassed later. I'd ditch the tokens in favor of more meaningful creatures, and cut the answers and focus on aggression. Gallia is really built to go aggro - not ramp, not control, not tokens, and not TOO heavy on the discard synergy (although cards that are already decent and have discard synergy as a bonus, like glint horn bucc, are fine). I don't think you're focusing on what she's good at.
(I realized I kinda used "you" to refer to two people so...hopefully "you" can work out who "you" is at any given time, my b)