First, I'd like to point out that assault strobe is a really terrible card, and it never should be considered as a slot in any standard deck. Secondly, Silverblade Paladin is actually an amazing card in a humans deck, though it is a bit worse than Mirran Crusader (depending on the meta). Mirran Crusader does have evasion, and while it is against the color with the best removal, black really isn't played too heavily anymore outside of zombies. U/W control is looking favored over U/B control by a wide margin given the tools that white picked up from Avacyn Restored. What does this have to do with the paladin? Well, the fact of the matter is that Crusader and Paladin do equally poorly against blue, white, and red which are becoming more and more prominent as of now. Yes, green is a big part of our standard meta in R/G beats and Wolfrun, but both of those decks can deal with Mirran Crusader very easily (Wolfrun packs slagstorm and whipflares while R/G aggro rocks sword of war and peace and burn). Now, let's look at what Paladin brings to the table. Paladin does just as much damage as Crusader and it gives a buddy double strike. The moment Paladin hits, part of its damage actually has haste, so it does do something upon entry (which Mirran Crusader cannot boast). Another thing is, you have two bodies coming across for double strike damage which is huge against the infinite chump block machine known as Lingering Souls and other cards like Tumble Magnet. Does this make Paladin better than Crusader? No, but it does make him a decent replacement and pretty close to Crusader in terms of power. The big thing is that you have to pay attention to the meta and where it looks like its going when evaluating a card like Mirran Crusader. In the previous season where U/B control was starting to show up very often and Zombies was popping up everywhere, Crusader would have had a huge advantage over Paladin. However, we're going into a meta where U/W tap out will be the control deck of choice (maybe splash black for Lingering Souls and maybe Sorin), the popularity of Zombies has died down, wolfrun is going to be nuts, and Delver is still a very strong deck. With all of that in mind, Paladin seems way closer to Crusader.
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