[SCD] Cornelian Choices with Bad Cards: Phyrexian Portal

Probably one of my favourite cards over time has been Invasion's Fact or Fiction. It rewards everything from correct piling and correct pile choosing to building your deck to take advantage of a lot of cards going into your graveyard. It even spawned an acronym to illustrate it's power in conjunction with the mighty Psychatog: EOTFOFYL (End of turn: Fact or Fiction. You lose!) Sometimes it spawned choices that meant you were damned irregardless of how you split your opponent's piles, there was essentially no good splits for you, just degrees of how bad it was going to get. The card spawned pages and pages of internet ink debating the ins and outs of the card on topics such as the benefits of the 1-4 split and when you should go 3-2.


My favourite part of the card, however, was not making the piles but forcing the choice on my opponents and then turning their choices into decisions that best reflected what I wanted at that time in the game. I'm often surprised at the extra importance some players give to certain cards: Why should I worry unduly about letting the 1-card Wrath of God pile disappear when the remaining cards will more easily win me the game? Sometimes with Fact or Fiction, the 1-card pile is the right answer because that's the one card that the opponent fears the most.  With Phyrexian Portal though, where they know the others aren't going to the graveyard, the choice for you is harder. The psychology of the presented piles is the game within the game.

Unfortunately, Fact or Fiction is not a Commander staple, though it does crop up from time to time. What does a one shot of this sort in a 100 cards deck serve you compared to the 3 or 4 copies that were de rigeur in 60 cards decks when it was legal? Some would argue "not much" though there are some compelling arguments for those who want to churn through cards and fill graveyards. Sadly, it's not a card that has seen much love and I miss it.
 
In its absence, I've been finding a lot of joy in a very (very) bad junk rare from alliances: Phyrexian Portal.

Now, don't make any mistake here, this is a bad card, you probably shouldn't ever play it. Some players, upon seeing it for the first time, immediately look for a way to get around the potentially crushing exile effect. As the exiled cards are exiled face up there are a couple of possibilities depending on your color mix: Riftsweeper and Pull from Eternity will both recover cards into your graveyard or library, however, unless you’re able to churn the Riftsweeper through some sort of loop, you’re probably not going to be able to rely on it. Add in that Riftsweeper itself it could be one of the cards that is unwittingly exiled in a face down pile and you may begin to see how unreliable such a solution is.

So yeah, bad card.

Before we go look at the what the card does, here's the Oracle Text:

3: If your library has ten or more cards in it, target opponent looks at the top ten cards of your library and separates them into two face-down piles. Exile one of those piles. Search the other pile for a card, put it into your hand, then shuffle the rest of that pile into your library.



What it doesn't do like Fact or Fiction:

•     It doesn't allow you to see both piles. You must make a blind choice based solely on the number of cards in each pile and your read of your opponent.

•     It doesn't put the un-chosen cards into the graveyard. One of the incidental strengths of Fact or Fiction was that the un-chosen pile was put into the graveyard. Occasionally, given the format, it mattered more what and how many cards you put into your graveyard than which cards you chose to take into your hand. Here the un-chosen cards are pretty much lost.

•     It allows you to activate the effect multiple times.

What it does like Fact or Fiction:

•     It forces your opponent to make a choice: into which of two groups of cards should they put a particular card. They must not only make this choice, but also make a decision on the size of each pile. Like Fact or Fiction, Phyrexian Portal doesn't stipulate the size of the splits and 1-9 splits are as possible as 0-5 Fact or Fiction splits. 0-10 splits are also possible, though I’m not sure why you’d want your opponent to have a choice of 10 unless you’re colluding with them to try to overcome a third player.

•     It forces you to make a choice. Now that you have seen the two face-down piles, which one do you take?

Essentially the entire fun behind the card is in these last two bullet-points: What is your opponent going to do and what are you going to do with whatever information you have gleaned from his process? If he splits it 1-9, is the 1 card so dominating right now that it will win you the game right there or is your opponent so good at mind games that he's just fucking with you and placing a basic land apart with signals that it's some über-spell? If you pass on the "1" pile, you're potentially missing out on the exact card you need to win the game right now. Potentially. Is it worth the risk of exiling the remaining 9 cards to find out?

I'd say that the answer is "No" 99% of the time. I think you can allow for yourself to get punked the once this actually crops up for better card selection in the remaining pile, even if that pile is 9 basic lands. Your chances of getting something worth playing are so much higher if you take the larger pile. Imagine that you're running this out on the third turn with no acceleration and play no land before activating on turn 4. You have drawn 11 cards from your 99, 3 of which are lands. Given the trend for about 40 mana sources in a deck, of the remaining 88 cards there's 37 mana sources and 51 spells if you have no other mana sources in hand. That gives you a rough ratio of 4 mana sources for every 10 cards revealed to your opponent off the Phyrexian Portal. Now, we all know that bad luck laughs in the face of statistics such as this and you can just as easily have a 10-spell reveal as a 10 mana-source reveal.

Now let's also assume that Phyrexian Portal is the worst card in your deck (shouldn't be hard really!). Every card revealed to your opponent that's not a mana source is now a spell worthy of having in your hand. As the opponent choosing, if there is the aforementioned 1 great card and lots of mana, the split is probably still better at something close to 5/5 than 9/1 as they are guaranteed to deprive you of at least 5 usable cards, even if they are only mana sources. Having 2 great cards and lots of mana make it easy to split with one in each pile. What do you do when it's 6 great cards and 4 mana sources?

If you split them straight down the middle, you cut out half of the great cards, as they will be exiled, but the remaining unchosen cards in the taken pile will get shuffled back in to the library. Are you willing to let that go? And, if so, which pile are you more willing to let go? Do you maybe shunt over an additional mana source into the "better" split to fake out your opponent into thinking that you don't care of they pick the bulkier pile? What about a full-on psych-out by stacking all the spells into the larger 6- or 7-card pile and keeping the mana sources in a smaller 3- or 4-card pile?

Don't forget that the person activating the Portal doesn't see the cards as they go into a pile as they would with a Fact or Fiction. You just see the back of 10 card sleeves split into two piles. How good are your Jedi mind tricks? And, in your multi-player group, knowing that it's closed information, which opponent do you choose: The guy who knows what he's doing or the guy who doesn't? If you pick a player who just randomly flips the cards into 2 separate piles of 5, it's really just a crap-shoot. You could be getting, and losing, anything. Someone who tries to choose "correctly" but has a weaker grasp of the cards he's looking at will be more inclined to make bad choices but you have to read that bad choice correctly. Someone who knows exactly what they are doing could play it straight up or try a bit of bluffing. You really need to know your playgroup well to the get the best out of this card.

Of course, Phyrexian Portal is not all bad. You do have cards that can help you decipher what is happening in the top ten cards of your library. Ancestral Knowledge is an obvious one, but tends to be a one-shot solution. Scroll Rack has much more promise as, with a large enough hand size, you get to look at most, if not all, of the cards you're putting on top of your library before your opponent looks at them. This way you can control some of what could be exiled, though I presume that most of the kind of players who would run something like Phyrexian Portal are not the types of players who really care that much what gets exiled!

Many thanks to Imshan for the rules spot that allows me to add in Mirror of Fate. For 5 mana, Mirror of Fate allows you to cherry pick from the exiled cards some of the more powerful ones that will help you win the game in short order. If you can get it up and running with some sort of artifact recursion support, there is potential there for a second or third shot at the prize. It seems like a pretty delicate balance that you’d need to strike between what you are exiling and what you’re bringing back, but I can see a situation where you get some choice cards into exile, pop the Mirror (which, very importantly, is not exiled with it’s own effect), recur the Mirror and pop it again to bring back the next pile of cards. 

This is probably something I’d use in a U/x deck rather than the Mono-R shell I’m currently using the Portal in as blue would give you access to Academy Ruins and a little more draw to churn through cards. I know people hate him, but I can see a very aggressive line of play with Mirror, Jin Gitaxis and Academy Ruins allowing you to both draw for the turn and draw 7 off Jin Gitaxis with each of the drawn cards being hand picked from your face-up exiled zone in addition to the Academy Ruins recurred Mirror of Fate. Of course, you can have this effect without the use of Phyrexian Portal, though planning for this eventuality allows you to tutor through the Portal with a lot less care for what gets exiled.

At worst, I suppose you could always run Labratory Maniac and hope for the best!

May your splits always be favourable and your Jedi mind tricks never fall on a Toydarian opponent!

Flashback! - The best of Knowledge Pool in 2011

The Knowledge Pool is a team of bloggers (authors of this blog including) who work hard to give you the best casual Magic: the Gathering content on the net.  Today I present you the highlights these guys produced in 2011 in an all-mighty Flashback.

"What is Casual"
by Daryl Bockett on Muse Vessel
The best definition and analysis of casual Magic: the Gathering so far.  Daryl tries to define what casual is about - and what not.
Other famous articles from Daryl include:  “Security Curve Theory” (Part I and Part II) and “Worst Rule in Commander”.

"Make your Own Rules"
and "Real Talk Redeux"
by Andy aka GHoooSTS on CommanderCast.com
These two podcast episodes feature Q&A with Alex Kenny aka Ban-ki-moon, a member of the MtG: Commander Rules Committee.  He explains many of the reasons why Commander is the way it is today.  He also gets across some motivations behind banning or not-banning certain cards.

“Trading In The Smartphone Age”
by Dominik Schönleben on CompletelyCasual.net
This article explains how trading Magiccards has changed recently through the diffusion of the smart phone.  Dominik explains how haggling and “the good deal” have been lost through technology.

“Politics, Complexity and Multiplayer Strategy” (Part I,  Part II and Finale)
by Daryl Bockett on Muse Vessel
A sweeping blow about the diverse angles of politics that can happen in MtG: Commander. He separates politics from strategy and gives an in depth analysis.
"The Battle to Defend the Peaks"
by Owen aka Zimagic on The Crazy 99
This little short story illustrates how an MtG: Commander game could look like when told from a narrative angle.  Owen uses his imagination to tell the story that lies behind any match.

“Life is Worth Living!”
and “Who Died and Made You F##king King of the Zombies!!!”
by C. R. Russell on Three To The Face!!!
If you like checking out decks for exotic Generals to get inspired, like us, C.R. Russel is your man.  These two pieces about [card]Daughter of Autumn[/card] and [card]Balthor the Defiled[/card] are his highlights from 2011.

From the “Generally Speaking” series: “Homura, Jedi Knight”
and “Erayo, Clockwater Ascendant”
by Imshan aka Sinis on CommanderCast.com
Comparing these two articles could not be more controversial.  In this article series Imshan normally surprises us with a wacky non-Magic related theme.  [card]Homura, Human Ascendant[/card] aka Obi-Wan Kenobi as a prime example for this, stands in stark contrast to his very competitive variants of [card]Erayo, Soratami Ascendant[/card].

“Horde Magic: A New Way to Play Magic and Survive Zombie Invasions”
by Peter Knudson on QuietSpeculation.com
After the Epic Design Fail form Kenneth Nagle in 2011, “Horde Magic” is taking over as the only viable one-vs-many variant Magic: the Gathering has to offer.  In this article Peter Knudson explains the basics of his newly developed variant and how to built your own Horde-Deck.

“If I Can Podcast, So Can You”
by Andy aka GHoooSTS on CommanderCast.com
You always thought CommanderCast is produced by a brilliant team of 20 professionals to be as awesome as it is - we have to disappoint you.  Here Andy, the hard working producer behind the best MtG: Commander podcast on the Internet, explains to you “how to make your own podcast”.  If you ever had the desire to get out there, follow his lead.

“I Hate Sol Ring and All that it Taps For”
by Brandon Isleib on Muse Vessel
Brandon does not like people who tell him what he has to play.  Staples like Sol Ring are no exception. Find out why the obvious choice is not always the right one.
Other famous articles from Brandon include:  “Decktagon” and “One Thing Leads to Another”

“Whiskey Identity”
by Sean Patchen on ManaDeprived.com
If you thought Magic: the Gathering and alcohol should not be combined, Sean proves you dead wrong. Sean, a true bon vivant, presents to you an exhaustive list of finer Whiskeys to go with each specific deck you have.

“Goblins and From the Vault: Legends”
by Cassidy Silver
This article relives a moment from Cassidy’s youth, where he had the one dream fulfilled every Magic: the Gathering player has (apart from winning the Pro Tour maybe): Meeting Richard Garfield, creator of the game we love. If you want to know why Richard Garfield first picked [card]Gobblin Digign Team[/card] in a Sixth Edition draft you must check out this piece.

“Call of the Nerd”
by Bruce Richard on Muse Vessel
No best-off list for 2011 would be complete without an response article to Alyssa Bereznak’s Gizmodo article about her date with World Champion Magic player Jon Finkel.  Bruce gets on his soapbox and speaks up for the “nerds” she disses.
Other famous articles from Bruce include:  “Standing Up for Sitting Back” and “Are you Done Yet?”

That’s it for Knowledge Pool in 2011.  I hope you liked being flashbacked.

Keep it also casual next year, though 2012 it might be the end of days.  

Yours Dominik Schönleben (Completelycasual.net)

The Best Blue Creature in Commander?

Ok, here's a bold claim.

We've a couple of players that have been rocking a Time Spiral Rare over the last few months and it has iced games multiple times when it has hit the field.

While it's not exactly Primeval Titan level good, it's a great foil for the titan and any other non-vanilla creature, which is to say, pretty much the entire format. It's not Draining Whelk, it's not Deep-Sea Kraken nor, surprisingly enough, is it Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir. My current top dog for best blue creatures in Commander is:

No direct damage to ping off that annoying creature that's just ruining your day? Ixidron

Some general just running away with the game thanks to their activated abilities? Ixidron

Lord of Extinction going to kill you next turn? Ixidron.

The "problem" of leaving a pile of faceless 2/2's sitting around should be mitigated somewhat by your own upturned dudes fending off similiar sized attackers allowing you to be the biggest dog on the block for a turn or two. And that's what a blue deck wants after all, isn't it? A few extra turns of not being milled, targetted or beaten down by the format's diverse set of creature abilities.

Oh and something else, death triggers don't trigger if something dies as a 2/2 morph. Suck it Reveillark!



Essentially the only ways players can get out of the Ixidron "lock" are:
1. Have their creatures die in some manner and bring them back.
2. Blink their creatures in some manner
3. Morph their creatures (Maindeck Break Open ftw!)


God forbid you managed to stick one onto a Mimic Vat. Everyone would be overpaying for vanilla 2/2s all over the place.

Artifacts in Balthor

Someone in my playgroup recently mentioned to me that I have a couple of funky artifacts in my Balthor deck and that, frankly, they both sucked.

He was only half right.

My Balthor deck gets added to and subtracted from pretty often so any given section is never nailed down. I get to make hard choices (If I add a Lake of the Dead, how many basic Swamps should I be running for it to be a hit every time?) and easy choices (Is Soulless One still worth it?*)


One of the places where I do the most tinkering is the artifact section. As my deck is a top-down, flavour-driven Zombie deck (rather than a "best of Black" with some zombies thrown in) I get to make choices based on whether a Door of Destinies should really be present in a Zombie scene. Since posting my last defined list back in January** I've completely overhauled the Artifacts section.

Things like Sensei's Divining Top are, flavourfully, very easy cuts to make because Zombies just aren't known for their divining or the ability to spin a top for that matter. Gameplay-wise this is a huge cut that, along with Vampiric Tutor, as effected my deck's ability to be consistent. Following on theme, that's an acceptable thing to happen though: zombies aren't always a full-on hoard from turn 2 or 3. It also forces me to play the deck differently as I'm not always going to the same outs. If this means that I'm losing more than usual, that's fine too.

Of the original list, only 3 cards have survived the cuts up to now: Lightning Greaves, Expedition Map & Skullclamp. All the boosts, exile abilities and recurring tricks have been cut and boosts have been taken care of by the full compliment of 4 lords available to Mono-B.

In their place, I have added in a couple of artifacts to help load the graveyards. A couple allow me to live the dream of a huge turn 3-4 zombie army but the statistical changes of that are ridiculously low. Here's the combo:

If you play a Mesmeric Orb and follow up with a Basalt Monolith, you can mill your entire deck just by tapping and untapping the Monolith. If you're lucky enough to have a Songs of the Damned or a Crypt of Agadeem (and the mana to use it, of course) you have enough mana to loop your Balthor to raise the Zombie Army you've always dreamed of. Of course, later in the game this is still a valid play allowing for the need to work around graveyard hates as that would seriously crimp your style.

In the meantime Mesmeric Orb is a huge pain in the rear for a lot of decks, not everyone wants to mill for 4-6 every turn.

The other artifacts I've added are Sol Ring, Charmed Pendant (an extremely dubious mana accellerant), Oblivion Stone/Nev's Disk (some necessary protection), and a Memory Jar. The Jar allows for some silly end of turn armies that you wouldn't otherwise be able to accellerate into.

Despite these additions, even more space is needed for the Grimoire of the Dead so I'll have to go back into the tank for that.

Space must be found

So, to sum up: Yes, Charmed Pendant sucks.

____________________________________________________________

* Sadly, no. He's the muscle who's become just too vanilla. We now have cheaper and better options. Goodbye, Soulless One, you are now "Friendless One".

** Coat of Arms, Door of Destinies, Brittle Effigy, Expedition Map, Sensei's Divining Top, Nim Death-Mantle, Skullclamp, Lightning Greaves

Goodbye, Daddy M.

This week a player left our playgroup. 

Our principal magic playgroup is at our place of work during our lunch-hour. That's pretty neat if you can accept the various constraints, such as the strict time limit and that you could be playing your direct superior any given afternoon. While the nature of the company and commander, our favoured format allow for a certain measure of familiarity, you can't just call your boss a douchbag when he pulls out a questionable play. Luckily, despite him being one of the 3 bosses who partake in our group, this was never the case with Marc anyway.

When he was called on to give his going-away speech, he covered the professional side pretty comprehensively but he skimped a bit on the gaming side so I’ve decided to list some of the Magic things that we’ll miss about Marc now that he’s gone.

Marc is a 40+ year old Timmy. There’s something really great about a guy who just loves his Timmy moments and really couldn’t give a damn what you think. It’s all about the full-on “Leerooooooooooyyy Jenkins!” and, now that he’s gone, we’re slowly realizing that he was pretty much the only full-on Timmy we had.

The profile of Timmy caring more about the EPIC wins rather than the quantity of wins was especially true for Marc and he notched up as many war stories for his epic blowouts as for being epically blown out himself because he waited just one turn too long. He just wanted to go big all the time.

One of the things that isn’t mentioned all that much about Timmys is their love for the red zone. For Marc, there was only one way to win: laying down the beats. So much so that the attack phase was renamed the “Yaaaarrrggghhhhhh” phase in his honor. Picture this jovial, middle-aged man up off his seat, turning his creatures, tokens, playmat and sandwiches sideways while shouting “Yaaaarrrggghhhhhh!!” often accompanied by diverse charging noises and other random battle sound effects while the rest of the company looks up from their lunch platter in bemusement. A full throated bellowing of The Flight of the Valkyeries a la Apocalypse Now was for those exceptional moments of face-smashery. That was Marc every day.

Of course, these epic calls to war wouldn’t be half as memorable if there weren’t equally copious examples of “yyyaaaaaarrrrgggghhhh…….oooooooohhhhHHHHHSSSHHIITTOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT” mixed right in there too. The attack was the “moment”, the pinnacle of all his hard work. It just that the execution didn’t always match the vision. 

Still, on those occasions when when Rhys & Seedborn Muse both survive a full, mana-rich turn around the table to be boosted by Garruk & Overrun once it come back to Marc, there’s not a huge number of possible results: You either have the Fog (and he generally had it but no-one else did!) or there’s a lot of dead or critically wounded planeswalkers!

Of course, timing was never really one of Marc’s strong suits. Picture the scene: the turn passes to Marc. He draws his card and goes deep into the tank calculating his potential damage. He realizes that he has just enough to deal lethal with cards in hand if the opponent does block but he’s got to finish the job because he’s wide open for the counter-strike.

He thinks some more.

Finally he leans forward and gives us his patented “Yaaaarrrggghhhhhh!!” as he moves into his attack phase. The unlucky defending player(s) go into the tank and calculate damage and blockers and realize that, unless something funky happens, they will survive the turn and kill Marc when the turn comes round to them.

So much better like this.

“No blockers,” they announce.

“No blockers? Then….. [and here he’d pause, draw himself up majestically and shout]… OVERRUN!!”

…

Now, if this had happened once, maybe twice, it wouldn’t be interesting but it actually happened so often that it got to the point where we could tell if he had the Overrun and could stop him (or not, depending on our life totals) before he got into his attack phase. He even managed to accomplish this magnificent, speed-changing feat twice during the same game! Some humorous cad decided to print out a HD proxy of the card with “Sorcery” replaced by “Instant” and slide it into his deck just to mess with his head a bit and he was presented with a play set of these errata versions upon leaving the company. 

So, what do you get when you give a Timmy a Grand Arbiter Augustin IV and tell him to make a deck? 

A full on Stax prison lock? Noooooo! Counterspells? Sure, a couple. Leviathans? Of course! But a rapid Rhino beatdown was probably not what you expected. We gave Marc a GAAIV and he gave us this:

Turn 1: Land, Sol Ring, Pearl Medallion
Turn 2: Land, GAAIV
Turn 3: Land, Mirror Sigil Sergeant, go.

When your opponent starts with a second turn Grand Arbiter, you know you’re in for a rough ride. Add everyone’s early game mana development torpor to a prison effect and garnish with a self-replicating rhinoceros across the table from you and it all spells >ouch<.  Fastest table kill ever and he achieved it with just one creature.

What about putting Celestial Mantle on a Battlegrace Angel before equipping on a Lightning Greaves and sending it into battle? I think we stopped counting at 3000+ life. There are games when you really need your Wrath of God to resolve and games where you really need to kill someone with your general. We didn’t get there with either solution and Marc stayed above 3000 from there on. He eventually ended up taking it out of his deck after repeated 2-for-1s but that never took anything away from that one occasion when it got there in a big way. From then on any significantly high life total has been regarded with distain and a “Pffff! Well, it’s not 3000+, is it?” by the entire group.

It wasn’t all good times though; Marc could be frustrating to play with and against. His turns would often take the following form:

“Ok, em,  go!
No, wait! Land, go!
No, wait! Attack you for 15!
Eh…… NOW go!” 

When it happens once in a blue moon, you can let this kind of thing slide but when it’s every other turn, it gets to be frustrating very, very quickly. Towards the end, if it seemed like it was one of those days, the table would gently nudge him along with innocent suggestions like “How may lands do you have there, Marc?” or “Gee, that’s a lot of creatures you’ve got there!!” during his pre-combat main-phases. Those touched by the Beatdown Gods have their minds on higher matters and such minutia as phases and being aware of what's happening can often be beneath them. 

Picture Marc as some sort of Beatdown Buddah (but with a lot less inner peace) and you’re half-way to knowing him already. 

With such great and ponderous thoughts of beatdown also comes the ability to realise belatedly what's actually going on and lead to last minute changes of mind. Being the beatdown is a complicated business. Do this first or do that first? Attack him over here or attack him over there? The number of takebacks our playgroup allows is actually pretty low with the exception of Marc who was constantly stuck on “actually, no, I think I’ll do that instead” mode.

This, unfortunately, extended to stuff that uses the stack, which, in Magic, is quite a lot of stuff. Those dreaded words “In response….” engendered a flight instinct in Marc that Norin the Wary would have been proud of. The usual response to another player’s “In response….” was always “In that case, no, I think I’ll do that instead.” If you worked it enough, I’m sure you could achieve a state of perpetual take-backs even when holding only a hand full of land.

That is until he got fed up and just pounded your face into the ground with 475 trampling damage from the pick’n’mix of creatures he had summoned. I suppose the moral to that story is not to bait the bear, the bear has claws.

And we’ll miss you around the table, old bear!

Maelstrom Wanderer: PT/Avenger enabler

I’m not sure that the announcement of the upcoming Planechase 2012 product was all that exciting in and of itself as a format mechanic but a huge amount of interest has been gained from what was announced in the product and hinted at in addition to the product:

First up: cards exclusive to the Planechase product. The Commander pre-cons (and, I suppose, to a certain extent the recent changes in the core sets) have galvanized the community and led to a huge amount of interest in non-core products. If the 21 new & exclusive, planechase-product-only cards are anywhere near as awesome as the ones that went into the commander product, then Wizards will have scored another home run.

Second up: a cycle of multi-colored legendary creatures. They don’t confirm they will all be enemy wedge, but the mention of a cycle strongly suggests they will be. We know there’s at least one enemy wedge legend because they showed it to us:

While I concede that this could be extremely cool, in only 24h of interweb fapping over Maelstrom Wanderer, the idea-mongers have managed to produce just 3 ideas that everyone keeps coming back to again, and again and again.

And again.

And once more again because we’re now approaching 36 hours since the announcement.

Ways to do “cool stuff” with MW: The First

• Fix the top of your deck to a Tooth & Nail.
• Play Maelstrom Wanderer.
• Cascade into the Tooth & Nail, paying 2 for Entwine.
• Get Primeval Titan & Avenger of Zendikar.
• Resolve second Cascade into whatever.
• Resolve Maelstrom Wanderer.
• Everything gets haste. Attack for 7+5+6+4X (where X is the number of lands you controlled when the Avenger triggered), so probably in the region of 50-ish damage.

>yawn!<

Ways to do “cool stuff” with MW: The Second

• Get Momir Vig, Simic Visionary into play.
• Play Maelstrom Wanderer.
• Stack the Momir Vig triggers so you draw first then tutor for an Avenger of Zendikar to put on top of the library (just hope you didn’t draw either it or PT).
• Resolve the first cascade into Avenger of Zendikar and play it.
• With the new Momir Vig trigger, tutor up Primeval Titan and put it on top of the library.
• Resolve the second cascade into Primeval Titan and play it.
• With the new Momir Vig trigger, tutor up something else and put it on top of the library.
• Resolve Maelstrom Wanderer. 
• Everything gets haste. Attack for 7+5+6+4X (where X is the number of lands you controlled when the Avenger triggered), so probably in the region of 50-ish damage. [Yes, I did just copy/Paste that]

>yawn!<

Ways to do “cool stuff” with MW: The Third

• Fix the top of your deck to a Jokulhaups or Devastation.
• Play Maelstrom Wanderer.
• Cascade into Jokulhaups or Devastation.
• Either set up your second cascade into Primeval Titan or cascade blind.
• Have a fun game!!

>yawn!<

About the only suggestion that I saw that was in any way original was by putting a Selective Memory out there, exiling all those annoying little spells that you really need in your deck but are really not exceptional when you are cascading so you know that whatever you cascade into will be pure gold. That gets the thumbs-up for being ballsey from me even if the original poster was still intending to cascade into Primeval Titan / Avenger of Zendikar.

So, yeah, Maelstrom Wanderer will be huge and swingy and big and epic but only if some effort is made to make his cascades original. Otherwise he, like so many other cards, will merely become another route to Primeval Titan / Avenger of Zendikar.

Another 6 months of this before we even get to touch the card.

>yawn!<

Third up: hints at another commander specific product.

So not only do we get more commanders, more cards, more new cards, we’re also getting additional commander product?

Hell, yeah.