Wow, has it really been so long since I built my Balthor deck? I realised when I printed up my list of current decks that, while the generals may still be pretty up-to date, the contents surely weren't. I'm going to have to do an overhaul of all of them once I get the Mirrodin Besieged cards I'm interested in.
Munke has asked for a full list for my Balthor deck. I've done a flavour piece already which you can read through the link above. I must stress that this is one of my "fun" decks where the object is to lurch in with Zombies rather than a minor Zombie theme in an MBC deck. It also has a huge and obvious weakness to Tormod's Crypt & similiar which I've decided to just accept as a necessary evil. If you want to play a Balthor deck seriously, you'll need to address that.
Balthor, the Defiled
Land:
30 Swamps
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Cabal Coffers
Leechridden Swamp
Dakmor Salvage
Darksteel Citadel
Zombies:
Twisted Abomination
Geth
Corpse Connoisseur
Cairn Wanderer
Corpse Harvester
Noxious Ghoul
Vengeful Dead
Grave Defiler
Escaped Null
Graveborn Muse
Gravedigger
Soulless One
Undead Warchief
Viscera Dragger
Fleshbag Maurader
Death Baron
Lord of the Undead
Cemetary Reaper
Phyrexian Ghoul
Shepherd of Rot
Yixlid Jailer
Rotting Rats
Cabal Interrogator
Carion Feeder
Maggot Carrier
Non-Zombies:
Grave Titan
Puppeteer Clique
Thrashing Wumpus
Plague Spitter
Phyrexian Rager
Bloodghast
Nether Traitor
Reassembling Skeleton
Artifacts:
Coat of Arms
Door of Destinies
Brittle Effigy
Expedition Map
Sensei's Divining Top
Nim Death-Mantle
Skullclamp
Lightning Greaves
Enchantments:
Bloodchief Ascension
Zombie Infestation
Grave Pact
Bitterblossom
Infernal Genesis
Spells:
Damnation
Patriarch's Bidding
Living Death
Reanimate
Zombify
Beacon of Unrest
Stitch Together
Rise from the Grave
Cruel Revival
Buried Alive
Mutilate
Corrupt
Tendrils of Corruptions
Go for the Throat
Diabolic Edict
Sadistic Sacrement
Sign in Blood
Skeletal Scrying
Exsanguinate
So nothing special (in fact, it needs a lot of work!)
Notes to self: Skinrender is a Zombie.
Edit: I traded at the MBS pre-release for some cards and have switched out Infectious Horror, a Swamp, Quest for the Gravelord, Soul Burn and Terror for Go for the Throat, Damnation, Coat of Arms, Door of Destinies and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. Skinrender will go in too, probably for a spell and I will be adding a Mimic Vat once I get my hands on a copy.
EDH: The Crazy 99 An EDHer's take on EDH and MTG. (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bombs.)
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Friday, 28 January 2011
Mirrodin Besieged - The Big EDH/Commander Review Part II -Artifacts
Ok, here's Part 2: The artifacts.
I had said there there may be more artifacts than non-artifacts but, as it turns out, there's only 10 to the pervious 14. Shucks! The same rules apply vis-a-vis the mechanic-centric cards needing to stand up by themselves. They really don't, so we'll be doing this without them.
Sword of Feast and Famine:
Let's start with the straight forward stuff first. Long gone are the days when we wet the bed over a Sword of X and Y. Let's have a look at this one: Basic 2 colour protection and +2/+2 boost. Pro-Green and Black are nice and obviously relevant in the format, maybe less so than G/U but nice nonetheless. The discard ability is a lot weaker in multiplayer Commander than in any of the 1v1 formats, it could even be a disadvantage if you're unable to remove whatever they discard. When you're moving a card from a zone they can use to another zone they can use just as easily, you always have to be careful. I'd prefer if the discard was random or chosen by you but we're stuck with the defending play choosing not to block because he really wants that Genesis in his graveyard and you're going to help him with that.
The second ability is what makes this Sword interesting and it's probably what will ultimately determine whether it will be widely used. What do you need to do before combat that you're willing to spend your mana on with the idea that you should be able to untap once you've dealt damage. The "should" is important because, if you were counting on that "untap" trigger and your attack is Mazed or Fogged, you're an unhappy bunny. Someone will find a great use for this in Commander. Until then it's a good Type 2 sideboard card against Infect decks.
Bonehoard:
Bonehoard is one of the nicer Commander cards in the set IMO. Firstly, it's rare but nothing too fancy or splashy so getting a single copy shouldn't be too hard. SSG are pre-selling them for $1.25 and there's nothing really there that suggests that they are going to rise all that much above that. You're getting an "almost" Lhurgoyf for 4 colourless mana. According to the calculation of coloured/colourless mana, it should cost us 6, but for the loss of 1 toughness, we get it at 4. That's a good deal.
We all know about Living Weapons: Equipment that CIPs attached to a 0/0. This one gives a +X/+X boost so, as long as the graveyards are stacked, it's an X/X for 4. When it dies, it doesn't: it reverts to being a normal Equipment. The initial deal on equipment was that you needed mana, the equipment card and a creature to equip it to. In that sense, it was a dead top-deck on an empty board. Bonehoard is that equipment that will always be attached to a creature so it's never a dead draw on an empty board. The rest of the Living Weapons are, frankly, disappointing but this is one that could come out huge and help your smaller guys be huge too. If ever the graveyards get exiled or shuffled back in, it sticks about ready for when they get filled back up again. Stuff dies all the time in EDH, if you are patient, it will always be a player.
Another minor advantage to this: Bribery doesn't hit it. You have a guarenteed creature in your deck that can never be pulled against you on a Bribery. You can go find it with your Fabricate and drop it into play as a monster but your opponent need to be running Acquire to do the same.
For once, I'm happy to rubber-stamp a vanilla P/T boost equipment.
Darksteel Plate:
We've see this before as the legendary Shield of Kaldra but this is the knock-off version. We've traded in the protection for Helm & Sword for a huge mana reduction. The original at 4 & 4 was really only played if you were running the remaining 2 but this will slide right into decks looking to protect their general at all costs. 3 to cast and 2 to equip, both the creature and the Plate are indestructible, it comes in all sizes from Shaggy Dog (Isamaru), through Elemental (Ashling) right up to Dragon (Insert Dragon Legend Name here).
As a direct comparison to Living Weapon equipment it still falls short at the "onto an empty board test" but realistically you want to be playing this onto your general more often than not.
Ironically the gung-ho flavour text comes from a charater that you can never equip this to: Koth. Flavour fail.
Phyrexian Revoker:
Last of the straight forward ones, Phyrexian Revoker is a Pithing Needle on legs. A 2/1 for 2 colourless is an acceptable set of stats, if a little fragile. A smaller front end and larger butt whould have been batter because, let's face it, if you fear a card enough to run this and name it, you're not going to put it into any danger.
Big differences between the master and the student, Needle said "a card" while the Revoker stipulates non-land. Needle says mana-abilities are sacrosant but the Revoker doesn't care about that. Between them they can both shut down planeswalkers, creatures and artifacts, seperatly they can handle the likes of Gilded Lotus and Maze of Ith.
Our only real concern with these two obviously good cards is where we draw the line as to the number of answers we're willing to run balanced against the threat count our deck needs to maintain. With lovely disruption cards like this, we have answers if we need them.
Mirrorworks:
In the recent Commandercast Generals Redux competition, I submitted a version of Mishra that allowed an artifact token copy of a cast artifact to come into play. He had text that exiled any existing tokens so as to avoid overly confusing boards. You got 1 token at a time.
Now R&D have come out with this monster of a card that allows you to pay 2 to make a single copy of any artifact that comes into play under your control. It doesn't go away. The board is going to be multiple different artifact token heaven.
Were they high when they made this?
Any artifact?
I'm going to plagerize Fugu from the official mtgcommander.net boards as he put it so very, very well:
But hey, I mean, why stop there? Fugu stopped well before doing something stupid. At best, your opponent will waste 30 mins of your life trying to figure out some über combo to copy a Sol Ring (Hint: Just tap it when the copy ability is on the stack) but, at worst, it will make you wish you had a Shahrazad handy to start a sub-game with the rest of the table. Extreme cases may also require a Twincast. (Benoit, I'm looking at you!)
That all said, I'm going to play this until it gets group banned or real banned and I'm going to kill it on sight across the table from me. As a bonus I'm going to harrangue any R&D member that I meet about this because it's just stupid. I love my playgroup though so I'm going to learn how to use it first before I go sticking it randomly into a deck. I owe them that much.
Myr Welder :
Hey! Myr Welder, whatcha doing with Phyrexian Revoker's stats?
Here we go: a useful ability on a body that's not going to die when someone sneezes. What's the useful ability? I kid you not, it's the first one, not the second. Here we have an ability that any single colour can use: targetted artifact removal from graveyards. That's the ability that will mean the most in any game of Commander. It's almost irrelevant if he dies subsequently (as he will because, let's face it, "artifact" and "creature" are pretty low on the food chain in the format) because that dratted Mindslaver will be GONE! That Nev's Disk? GONE! Academy Ruins targetting Duplicant at EOT? >fizzle!< This is the "little" ability on Myr Welder, but it's the one that will mean that you can win games.
Guess what? He can also win games. Remove your Voltaic Key, remove your Soliton (whatever), machine gun your graveyards, tap, untap, draw a card, everyone draws a card, tap, untap, he gains flying, he gains trample, he returns an artifact to my hand and puts a new one into play, he taps target permanent and then untaps, tap, untap, and so on. Then he dies and you shrug because he's solved a lot of problems for you for the rest of the game. He's going to own some artifact decks so hard and we will laugh the laugh of victors (or cry like a baby because he's just dismantled my Wrexial deck).
Knowledge Pool:
This is going to be a pain.
First off, you don’t get to play anything you draw right away so if you want to resolve spell A, you need to play it (it gets exiled), trigger the Pool to play another spell from the pool and then play a second spell (it gets exiled) in order to play Spell A. Even then, I’m not sure that someone couldn’t gazump you with an instant once the “Exile that spell” trigger is on the stack. God forbid that some fool puts a counterspell on the pool so that anyone with an instant and a grudge can ruin your game.
Does needing to cast 2 spells to resolve the one you actually want remind you of any 2cc Blue flip general?
Knowledge Pool spells chaos, which is fun for some people. If your playgroup doesn’t like these overcomplicated cards where they feel they are getting scammed, this is one to avoid.
Oh, and from the FAQ, where this is the only card to have an entire page dedicated to it: X is 0 every time.
Psychosis Crawler:
The Phyrexians are really the Martians from Mars Attacks or so Psychosis Crawler would have you believe. A rare artifact creature in an artifact set, this had better be good. A */* for 5 colourless could be a great deal if you have 7 cards in hand or it could be a waste with only 1 other card in hand. Either way we don’t care really. If the fluctuating P/T is an interesting novelty, especially if you dream of growing it into a 15/15, it’s not what this card is about. It’s about winning the game: Psychosis Crawler is your win condition.
Either you set your deck up to draw a lot of cards and win slowly while controlling the table or you pair it with something that’s going to draw you a LOT of cards in one go and win right away. Something like Consecrated Sphinx and Teferi’s Puzzle Box or Memory Jar. Math time!
4-player game. You have Consecrated Sphinx & Psychosis Crawler in play along with Memory Jar. How much life will they lose when you activate the Jar?
You draw 7 cards, your opponents each draw 7 cards triggering the Sphinx which allows you to draw up to 14 per player. That’s… eh…. um…… lots? Actually, that makes 49 life loss for each opponent and you draw 49 cards, less of both if you are getting low as the Sphinx benefit is optional. If you didn’t just win, you’re doing it wrong. You can also attack with your 50/50 Crawler afterwards.
You can also replace the artifacts mentioned with any “draw 7” for a similar effect. Even if you can’t do the splashy kill, he’s incremental life loss tacked on to an effect you want to be doing anyway: drawing cards. It’s also obligatory so your opponents can’t “forget” to lose the life.
Spine of Ish Sah:
Speaking of things getting out of hand: What costs 0 and can destroy every non-shroud permanent on the battlefield?
Spine of Ish Sah, of course!
Spine also answers the question posed by Vindicate and Angel of Despair, to wit: What would a non-creature artifact version of Vindicate cost? The answer is obviously “7”.
So how do you destroy every non-shroud permanent for 0 mana? Well, I cheated a bit because it will cost some initial investment but once everything is in place, the Spine’s triggered graveyard ability makes this the cog in a nasty combo.
Spine of Ish Sah + Sculpting Steel + Krark-Clan Ironworks + 1 of Etherium Sculptor/Cloud Key/ Semblance Anvil. You play the Spine, then play the Sculpting Steel copying the Spine. Sacrifice the Sculpting Steel Copy to the Ironworks for 2 mana and it will return to your hand as the text on the Spine, copied by the Sculpting Steel, is still valid. Any of the cost reducers will then allow you to cast the Sculpting Steel for what’s in your mana pool, once again copying the Spine. Repeat until someone punches your lights out.
I had said there there may be more artifacts than non-artifacts but, as it turns out, there's only 10 to the pervious 14. Shucks! The same rules apply vis-a-vis the mechanic-centric cards needing to stand up by themselves. They really don't, so we'll be doing this without them.
Let's start with the straight forward stuff first. Long gone are the days when we wet the bed over a Sword of X and Y. Let's have a look at this one: Basic 2 colour protection and +2/+2 boost. Pro-Green and Black are nice and obviously relevant in the format, maybe less so than G/U but nice nonetheless. The discard ability is a lot weaker in multiplayer Commander than in any of the 1v1 formats, it could even be a disadvantage if you're unable to remove whatever they discard. When you're moving a card from a zone they can use to another zone they can use just as easily, you always have to be careful. I'd prefer if the discard was random or chosen by you but we're stuck with the defending play choosing not to block because he really wants that Genesis in his graveyard and you're going to help him with that.
The second ability is what makes this Sword interesting and it's probably what will ultimately determine whether it will be widely used. What do you need to do before combat that you're willing to spend your mana on with the idea that you should be able to untap once you've dealt damage. The "should" is important because, if you were counting on that "untap" trigger and your attack is Mazed or Fogged, you're an unhappy bunny. Someone will find a great use for this in Commander. Until then it's a good Type 2 sideboard card against Infect decks.
Bonehoard is one of the nicer Commander cards in the set IMO. Firstly, it's rare but nothing too fancy or splashy so getting a single copy shouldn't be too hard. SSG are pre-selling them for $1.25 and there's nothing really there that suggests that they are going to rise all that much above that. You're getting an "almost" Lhurgoyf for 4 colourless mana. According to the calculation of coloured/colourless mana, it should cost us 6, but for the loss of 1 toughness, we get it at 4. That's a good deal.
We all know about Living Weapons: Equipment that CIPs attached to a 0/0. This one gives a +X/+X boost so, as long as the graveyards are stacked, it's an X/X for 4. When it dies, it doesn't: it reverts to being a normal Equipment. The initial deal on equipment was that you needed mana, the equipment card and a creature to equip it to. In that sense, it was a dead top-deck on an empty board. Bonehoard is that equipment that will always be attached to a creature so it's never a dead draw on an empty board. The rest of the Living Weapons are, frankly, disappointing but this is one that could come out huge and help your smaller guys be huge too. If ever the graveyards get exiled or shuffled back in, it sticks about ready for when they get filled back up again. Stuff dies all the time in EDH, if you are patient, it will always be a player.
Another minor advantage to this: Bribery doesn't hit it. You have a guarenteed creature in your deck that can never be pulled against you on a Bribery. You can go find it with your Fabricate and drop it into play as a monster but your opponent need to be running Acquire to do the same.
For once, I'm happy to rubber-stamp a vanilla P/T boost equipment.
We've see this before as the legendary Shield of Kaldra but this is the knock-off version. We've traded in the protection for Helm & Sword for a huge mana reduction. The original at 4 & 4 was really only played if you were running the remaining 2 but this will slide right into decks looking to protect their general at all costs. 3 to cast and 2 to equip, both the creature and the Plate are indestructible, it comes in all sizes from Shaggy Dog (Isamaru), through Elemental (Ashling) right up to Dragon (Insert Dragon Legend Name here).
As a direct comparison to Living Weapon equipment it still falls short at the "onto an empty board test" but realistically you want to be playing this onto your general more often than not.
Ironically the gung-ho flavour text comes from a charater that you can never equip this to: Koth. Flavour fail.
Last of the straight forward ones, Phyrexian Revoker is a Pithing Needle on legs. A 2/1 for 2 colourless is an acceptable set of stats, if a little fragile. A smaller front end and larger butt whould have been batter because, let's face it, if you fear a card enough to run this and name it, you're not going to put it into any danger.
Big differences between the master and the student, Needle said "a card" while the Revoker stipulates non-land. Needle says mana-abilities are sacrosant but the Revoker doesn't care about that. Between them they can both shut down planeswalkers, creatures and artifacts, seperatly they can handle the likes of Gilded Lotus and Maze of Ith.
Our only real concern with these two obviously good cards is where we draw the line as to the number of answers we're willing to run balanced against the threat count our deck needs to maintain. With lovely disruption cards like this, we have answers if we need them.
In the recent Commandercast Generals Redux competition, I submitted a version of Mishra that allowed an artifact token copy of a cast artifact to come into play. He had text that exiled any existing tokens so as to avoid overly confusing boards. You got 1 token at a time.
Now R&D have come out with this monster of a card that allows you to pay 2 to make a single copy of any artifact that comes into play under your control. It doesn't go away. The board is going to be multiple different artifact token heaven.
Were they high when they made this?
Any artifact?
I'm going to plagerize Fugu from the official mtgcommander.net boards as he put it so very, very well:
I want to cast Mirrorworks, then cast Sculpting Steel as a copy of Mirrorworks, then use Mirrorworks to copy Sculpting Steel so I'll have three Mirrorworks. ...Then I'll Capsize Sculpting Steel and cast it again and copy it twice so I'll have five Mirrorworks. ...And then again, so I'll have nine! ...And then I'll cast Gilded Lotus, tap it, and copy it, and tap the copy, and copy it again, UNTIL I HAVE TEN GILDED LOTUSES! ...AND WITH MY TWELVE BLUE FLOATING I'LL CAPSIZE THE ORIGINAL GILDED LOTUS AND RECAST IT AND COPY IT NINE MORE TIMES AND CAPSIZE IT AND RECAST IT AND COPY IT NINE MORE TIMES UNTIL I HAVE ENOUGH MANA TO CAPSIZE SCULPTING STEEL AND RECAST IT AND COPY IT NINE TIMES SO I'LL HAVE NINETEEN MIRRORWORKS AND THEN........ I'll stop.
But hey, I mean, why stop there? Fugu stopped well before doing something stupid. At best, your opponent will waste 30 mins of your life trying to figure out some über combo to copy a Sol Ring (Hint: Just tap it when the copy ability is on the stack) but, at worst, it will make you wish you had a Shahrazad handy to start a sub-game with the rest of the table. Extreme cases may also require a Twincast. (Benoit, I'm looking at you!)
That all said, I'm going to play this until it gets group banned or real banned and I'm going to kill it on sight across the table from me. As a bonus I'm going to harrangue any R&D member that I meet about this because it's just stupid. I love my playgroup though so I'm going to learn how to use it first before I go sticking it randomly into a deck. I owe them that much.
Hey! Myr Welder, whatcha doing with Phyrexian Revoker's stats?
Here we go: a useful ability on a body that's not going to die when someone sneezes. What's the useful ability? I kid you not, it's the first one, not the second. Here we have an ability that any single colour can use: targetted artifact removal from graveyards. That's the ability that will mean the most in any game of Commander. It's almost irrelevant if he dies subsequently (as he will because, let's face it, "artifact" and "creature" are pretty low on the food chain in the format) because that dratted Mindslaver will be GONE! That Nev's Disk? GONE! Academy Ruins targetting Duplicant at EOT? >fizzle!< This is the "little" ability on Myr Welder, but it's the one that will mean that you can win games.
Guess what? He can also win games. Remove your Voltaic Key, remove your Soliton (whatever), machine gun your graveyards, tap, untap, draw a card, everyone draws a card, tap, untap, he gains flying, he gains trample, he returns an artifact to my hand and puts a new one into play, he taps target permanent and then untaps, tap, untap, and so on. Then he dies and you shrug because he's solved a lot of problems for you for the rest of the game. He's going to own some artifact decks so hard and we will laugh the laugh of victors (or cry like a baby because he's just dismantled my Wrexial deck).
This is going to be a pain.
First off, you don’t get to play anything you draw right away so if you want to resolve spell A, you need to play it (it gets exiled), trigger the Pool to play another spell from the pool and then play a second spell (it gets exiled) in order to play Spell A. Even then, I’m not sure that someone couldn’t gazump you with an instant once the “Exile that spell” trigger is on the stack. God forbid that some fool puts a counterspell on the pool so that anyone with an instant and a grudge can ruin your game.
Does needing to cast 2 spells to resolve the one you actually want remind you of any 2cc Blue flip general?
Knowledge Pool spells chaos, which is fun for some people. If your playgroup doesn’t like these overcomplicated cards where they feel they are getting scammed, this is one to avoid.
Oh, and from the FAQ, where this is the only card to have an entire page dedicated to it: X is 0 every time.
The Phyrexians are really the Martians from Mars Attacks or so Psychosis Crawler would have you believe. A rare artifact creature in an artifact set, this had better be good. A */* for 5 colourless could be a great deal if you have 7 cards in hand or it could be a waste with only 1 other card in hand. Either way we don’t care really. If the fluctuating P/T is an interesting novelty, especially if you dream of growing it into a 15/15, it’s not what this card is about. It’s about winning the game: Psychosis Crawler is your win condition.
Either you set your deck up to draw a lot of cards and win slowly while controlling the table or you pair it with something that’s going to draw you a LOT of cards in one go and win right away. Something like Consecrated Sphinx and Teferi’s Puzzle Box or Memory Jar. Math time!
4-player game. You have Consecrated Sphinx & Psychosis Crawler in play along with Memory Jar. How much life will they lose when you activate the Jar?
You draw 7 cards, your opponents each draw 7 cards triggering the Sphinx which allows you to draw up to 14 per player. That’s… eh…. um…… lots? Actually, that makes 49 life loss for each opponent and you draw 49 cards, less of both if you are getting low as the Sphinx benefit is optional. If you didn’t just win, you’re doing it wrong. You can also attack with your 50/50 Crawler afterwards.
You can also replace the artifacts mentioned with any “draw 7” for a similar effect. Even if you can’t do the splashy kill, he’s incremental life loss tacked on to an effect you want to be doing anyway: drawing cards. It’s also obligatory so your opponents can’t “forget” to lose the life.
Speaking of things getting out of hand: What costs 0 and can destroy every non-shroud permanent on the battlefield?
Spine of Ish Sah, of course!
Spine also answers the question posed by Vindicate and Angel of Despair, to wit: What would a non-creature artifact version of Vindicate cost? The answer is obviously “7”.
So how do you destroy every non-shroud permanent for 0 mana? Well, I cheated a bit because it will cost some initial investment but once everything is in place, the Spine’s triggered graveyard ability makes this the cog in a nasty combo.
Spine of Ish Sah + Sculpting Steel + Krark-Clan Ironworks + 1 of Etherium Sculptor/Cloud Key/ Semblance Anvil. You play the Spine, then play the Sculpting Steel copying the Spine. Sacrifice the Sculpting Steel Copy to the Ironworks for 2 mana and it will return to your hand as the text on the Spine, copied by the Sculpting Steel, is still valid. Any of the cost reducers will then allow you to cast the Sculpting Steel for what’s in your mana pool, once again copying the Spine. Repeat until someone punches your lights out.
And, of course, Blightsteel Colossus:
Thanks to Adam for his Mirrorworks quote.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Mirrodin Besieged - The Big EDH/Commander Review Part I -No artifacts
Here's my take on the upcoming set. As always I'm only looking at some standout cards and this isn't a comprehensive review of every single new card released. I'll try to keep comments EDH related but bear with me if I branch out occasionally. All cards and images have been borrowed from the Visual Spoiler which you should visit to fill in any obvious gaps missing from what I review.
I'm also reviewing the cards on their individual merit rather than their dependance on a mechanical keywords such as Metalcraft or Infect and, as such, I'm leaving out almost every card from those mechanics. Of course Infect cards will be strong with other Infect cards (and proliferate) but they will be notably weaker when watered down with non-infect cards. Likwise Metalcraft cards need to stand up to the test of their worth when you don't have metalcraft. Unfortunatly, most fail that test.
White
And that's it for White. I'd say Red got the worst EDH deal in Scars. In Besieged, it seems to be white.
Blue
Consecrated Sphinx:
A vanilla 4/6 Flyer for 4UU is nothing special, it needs an additional ability to be really excellent. Consecrated Sphinx has that ability: Whenever any opponent draws a card, you may draw 2. That's nutty. Absolute worst case scenario: You play it, he dies to removal, it's a 1-1 trade (for which you probably paid a lot more but, hey, I did say "worst" case!)
After that it's just gravy. The opponent to your left draws and you have paid 4UU for a 4/6 flier and 2 cards. Excellent! And on it goes around the table. You have a blocker/attacker and you are drawing a lot of cards. What if you have a Baby Jace or Temple Bell in play when you drop the Sphinx? Everyone draws 1 and you draw an additional 4 or 6 or 8. I'm going to leave this one here because I will be coming back to him in Part II of the review with some very, very interesting possibilities.
Treasure Mage:
Most non-artifact centric decks have a few hefty high end artifacts hiding somewhere in their decks. He finds them. Artifact centric decks (that generally run blue anyway) have a LOT of high end artifacts in their decks. He finds them too. Note that, as with Trinket Mage, he can find creatures and not just "normal" artifacts. This is often overlooked with Trinket Mage because there are very few 1cc artifact creatures that are worth him tutoring for. Treasure Mage makes this lack of distinction a huge advantage by finding your DSC, Memnarch, Sundering Titan as well as your Darksteel Forge and Mycosynth Lattice.
I think that he's an auto-include in anything remotely artifact related and, while I think it bears testing, his re-usability and chump-blockiness as a creature rather than as a spell, might make him a very interesting option in the place of Fabricate.
Oh, I forgot: His art is sick (you can interret that as you wish!)
And that's it for Blue. Two cards is a pretty meagre return this time round but the quality of both cards means that you will see them again and again. The Sphinx in particular is one to pick up as soon as you can though, as a mythic, it'll be a little harder to find.
Black
Gruesome Encore:
I'll start with the bad news: It's not an instant. The good news is that it will steal a creature from an opponent's graveyard, let you play with it for your turn and then exile it. How often have you finally dealt with a bomb creature that an opponent has played only for him to bring it back multiple times. This one-shot Puppeteer Clique will showcase again and again why, if you're not already running Puppeteer Clique in your B/x deck, you really should be. The advantage this card has over the Clique is that they have closed the loophole that allowed a player to bounce their own creature back to their hand or just kill it again to avoid the exile clause. When this hits a creature, it's gone. (Usual corner cases apply.)
The problem with the card is that you can be gazzumped by instant speed GY removal. You can't have everything.
Massacre Wurm:
It's an "almost" titan with a slightly harder CC and 1 less toughness. It doesn't give you the constant advantage triggers that the real titans enjoy every time they attack but the Wurm does have a sweet life-loss trigger for your opponents to enjoy. Someone building a little army with Rhys & Seedborne Muse? Well if they don't have some form of static boost out when the Wurm hits, there's going to be a massacre (heh!).
There's very little wrong with this creature: he's huge, scary and he provides board and life advantage in a colour that likes killing creatures. If you play blue either with or against this, I'd say that a kicked Rite of Replication pointed his way would be a lot of fun. Lose a creature: lose 10 life. Damnation FTW?
I like him, he's got flavour.
Black Sun's Zenith:
Red is not Commander's best colour. In fact, many would argue that it's the worst. Lets look at a card like Pyroclasm and compare it to Infest or Massacre? Creatures with Pro-Red will laugh off the Pryo but cards with Pro-black can't do that against Massacre. It's an inequality that bleeds through all the colours to the detriment of Red. There's very little that Red can do that another colour can't do equally well with better support or just straight out better. Black Sun's Zenith is another in the line of non-red cards just thumbing it's nose at their poorer cousin: Scalable, mass creature burn that doesn't go away during the clean-up step.
At best, BSZ clears the entire board and gets "Beacon"-ed back into your library for another go round in a colour with the tools to tutor it back out again just as easily. At worst, it weakens the entire board permanently and keeps you in the game. And that's not looking at any of the little combo's it can pull off: refueling your Grim Poppet or Carnifex Demon is cute but making it a permanent Insurrection with Necroskitter in play seems like it could be worth a few giggles.
Another huge tool for B/x decks. Black is following blue's trend: not giving much in the way of volume (though we'll see 2 more later in the Gold section) but more than making up for it in impact. These are three monster cards.
Red
Crush:
After a hugely disappointing Scars, Red needs some love in Besieged. Despite being seemingly the only colour untouched by the Phyrexian taint (though it does get some Phyrexian watermarks), Red is, once again, a huge disappointment. While Green and White have spent the last few years broadening their scope and providing better quaility at what they do best, Red is still doing the same tired old thing: Some burn, an occasional decent weenie, artifact destruction and some cumbersome dragons. It needs to power creep it's non-burn, non-weenie suite and at least Besieged gives us some of this if nothing else.
1 Red mana, instant, destroy target non-creature artifact. It's strong, it's simple, it's useful. There's such a long way to go for Red but they got this right. I'm not a huge fan of 1-for-1 cards but there's very little you can say against this as you're more likely to run out of ways to Fork, Sceptre, Radiate and otherwise copy your Crush before you run out of worthy targets. This is as close to a red staple as your likely to get in Commander.
Into the Core:
Add a colourless mana, make the WW into a RR, switch from Instant to Sorcery........ There are some who are accusing R&D of being a little lazy when it came to design on Mirrodin Besieged, an accusation that's already taken up a lot of pixels as teh debate rages on SSG, Twitter, MTG.com and a myriad of forums all over the Magic net. For this card, I won't complain. Tired of dropping a Crush on your opponent's artifact only for it to come back again and again with Academy Ruins? Now you can Dust to Dust in Red as an instant for a single colourless mana more. Here is where I want to see R&D go with Red's core abilities: they can destroy artifacts a hundred different ways but only now can they definitively settle the score of a problematic artifact.
If I'm allowed to be overly critical, there is just one small niggle: the additional mana requirement has jumped "Rust to Rust" over the Gaddock Teeg boundary. Other than that, this is a slam dunk.
And there we leave it for Red with a common and an uncommon. At least they shouldn't be too hard to get your hands on!
Green
Creeping Corrosion:
And again with the lack of creativity. An uncommon in Revised, a rare in Antiquities, back to uncommon for V Ed. and back to Rare for VI Ed. before being finally shunted back to Uncommon in X Ed., Shatterstorm doesn't know where he stands. Creeping Corrosion is most definitely rare (due to block & limited play considerations). We mentioned before that anything Red can do, another colour can do as well with better support? Here we have a staple red mass anti-artifact card getting a direct colour make-over in Green which can now deal with all Enchantments at instant speed, all Artifacts at sorcery speed and either one at various speeds, sometimes even while attached to relevant creatures.
Whatever about the general shafting of Red at the moment, this card is wholey to Green's benefit and a welcome addition to decks that like to beat on the machine.
Green Sun's Zenith:
This is the 3rd Zenith on the list and we're in our 5th colour. Time to take a step aside and revisit the Red & Blue versions. "XUUU, instant, Target player draws X cards. Beacon." and "XR, Sorcery, Deal X damage to target creature or player, Exile the creature if killed, Beacon." Critics of the Blue Zenith suggest that Stroke of Genius is easier on the mana base, especially if you are in multiple colours. They also cite the fact that it shuffles back into your deck as a slight draw-back over a version you could more-easily fish back out of your graveyard. Personally, I find that it's only worth it if you have enough mana so that you're getting a better deal than off a Concentrate. At that point in the game, you could be posing threats instead of digging more. Maybe it's different elsewhere but I don't see blue mages here waiting to tap 10 to draw 7, even at EOT. Mind Spring is cheaper, Stroke is easier and both are BFF with Eternal Witness. Each to his own but this is going into my binder as trade fodder rather than into my decks.
The Green Sun's Zenith is a doozy. Granted you're going to be a paying over the odds for something but it's straight from your deck to play and that just can't be beat with a big stick, unless you go find a big stick and beat with it. It's in a colour that just wants to make big mana, once you've achieved this, your XG becomes the beater of choice.
In a pinch, it can also get you something useful, like the already mentioned EWit to bring back the spell from your graveyard you need to keep you alive, or destroy some permanents with a Terastodon. Dang, no matter how much you say you're going to get a Llanowar Elf if you need a Llanowar Elf, this just has a fat dude written all over it. [TY to DT for the catch!]
Praetor's Council:
It's looking rough for our hero Karn!! Ok, this is one of the oddball ones out there. PC costs a whopping 8 mana but for that you get a permanent Spellbook and the mother of all Regrowths. Now, the success of this card requires a couple of things to go right:
- You need to have something worth bringing back. This should be the easiest because you are essentially going to sandbag it until your hand is looking bare before you remake your entire early game. You can now leay the threats with impunity knowing that the new "Big Ups" is going to help you from running out of threats.
- You need to make 8 mana. You're playing Green. Shucks. Next!
- You need to protect your graveyard. Apart from Ground Seal and Bind, you're looking at artifact answers to these problems. Probably nothing a Null Rod wouldn't shut down if you ran it..
Thrun, the Last Troll:
Thrun didn't get caught up in the mind traps and stayed on Mirrodin. Seems like a raw deal to me. Now he's a grumpy oldman troll who's got the hump and he's leaving his hermetic life to lay down some beats. Boy, are we happy!
Kinda.
Everyone remembers the original Mirrodin's Troll Ascetic with either huge mooney cow eyes or dread depending on which side of the table he was on. The combination of troll-shroud and regenerate made him a formidable road block. Add equipment or an aura or two and there was little short of a Wrath of God that could deal with him directly. What we didn't know then is that he was just the baby troll. Now the daddy troll is here. For a mere 1 colourless more he has +1/+2 and uncounterable. And he's a legend. Clique decks in 1v1 just got the shivers: You can't counter him, you can't kill him, you can't bounce him. What's a mono-U deck to do?
How good is he for Multiplayer? Em, he'd be a decent Voltron general, maybe? I know that I'd prefer the fragile body but stupid accelleration of Azusa any day over a beater so I don't know exactly where he's going to fit in. What's sure is that, if Infect has any sort of impact on Standard, he's not going to shine there either and he's only 1 of 15 mono-G trolls which is a bit short for tribal. I guess the jury is out on what is without doubt an excellent creature, just sadly without a home for now.
And that's it for Green. I make that 4 solid cards no matter how you cut it.
Gold
Glissa, the Traitor:
Frickin' yeah! This is a bad-ass legend ticking a lot of very interesting boxes. While the initial Glissa was an interesting puzzle to solve, she has ultimatly become a minor addition to Captain Sisay decks and not much else. In the storyline the myr saved Glissa at the end of the Mirrodin plotline and hid her in the core to recover. Unfortunatly the core also held some Phyrexian taint and the rest was pretty inevitable.
Glissa is an Elf. She's also a Zombie. She's a cheap legend with a decent P/T. She kills whatever she touches (First Strike & Deathtouch >Ka-POW!<) and she profits from it. Surround her with useful little (and large) artifacts and she'll get double duty out of them. Executioner's Capsule is an interesting one. Machine-gun the blockers, and get the Capsule back for more. She's in Infect colours so she could easily head up the Phyrexian invasion of your playgroup. What's nice about this Glissa is that she has synergies but nothing broken, she is a formidable creature but not something you can't deal with. All in all she's just enough of a handful to be very interesting without being bonkers good.
Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas:
Can I get away with just saying "Look, he's good if you've got artifacts. Play him!"?
No?
Ok, no stats about 3 & 4 CC 'walkers being better than 5cc+ ones. And yes, he is good with artifacts, but this is Tezzeret we're dealing with here. I want to know why he's suddenly Black? Black isn't very artifacty, in fact, it's the most un-artifacty of all the 5 colours even with it's splash in Esper. If it's because he's now with Bolas (dig the forehead tattoos man!), then why isn't he UR or UBR? The Drain Life ultimate seems to be about the only reason, but does he have Drain Life because he's UB or is he UB because they wanted a Drain Life? On most other cards I have to say that this shouldn't matter. On Bolas (or any other PW) there's got to be a sound reasoning behind it.
Ok, on to the card. Let's presume your playing an artifact deck and your opponent's control artifacts. We can accept that Impulse for 5 for Artifacts is good in this situation. We can also accept that, while it's not Exiling Permanents or a Nev's Disk, double Drain Life for artifacts is not a terrible ultimate, especially at only -4 loyalty. Where Tezz 2.0 gets interesting is his -1: Target Artifact becomes a 5/5 Artifact Creature. Things to note:
* The artifact will remain a creature after the EOT, essentially until it leaves play.
* It's any artifact in play, not just your own (this is important for later)
* If you animate an equipment it will fall off a creature it's equipped to and/or not be able to become equipped to a creature. Animated Equipment don't have the abilities granted by the equipment as they are all "Equipped creature gets...."
* It doesn't say "Target non-creature artifact" so you can target any artifact, even a creature artifact, and make it a 5/5. Your late game Chalice becomes a 5/5 for 0, your opponent's Blightsteel Colossus becomes an indestructible 5/5 Infect (not 11/11), and your little Necropede, usually a 1/1 infect for 2, becomes a 5/5 infect for 2.
* The artifacts that become creatures don't lose abilities so you can make them into a creature, take control of them as creatures and use as intended.
That's it for the non-artifacts. There may be as many artifacts as non-artifacts in Part II, you'll just have to wait and see!
I'm also reviewing the cards on their individual merit rather than their dependance on a mechanical keywords such as Metalcraft or Infect and, as such, I'm leaving out almost every card from those mechanics. Of course Infect cards will be strong with other Infect cards (and proliferate) but they will be notably weaker when watered down with non-infect cards. Likwise Metalcraft cards need to stand up to the test of their worth when you don't have metalcraft. Unfortunatly, most fail that test.
WhiteWhite Sun's Zenith:
To be honest, I had to scrabble around a bit to find a decent white card that is really going to stand out from this set. You could make a case for Phyrexian Rebirth but a "Wrath with Benefits" has been done and this new version is not particularly stunning. The number of times when it will be a blow-out will be vastly inferior to the number of times you get a 3/3. It's also missing a "no regeneration" clause. The Zenith, however, is more interesting.
Kemba is making a ripple in flavour-filled cat-tribal as a very playable, build-around-me general. As a one-girl army and voltron general she's ticking boxes for aggressive mono-W decks in a way that Isamaru really didn't. White Sun's Zenith is a nice addition to that deck but also to any deck that can make a decent amount of mana in the game (as long as 3 of it is WWW). The reason why this is playable over something more flexible such as Decree of Justice is that the 2/2 tokens will actually matter much more than the 1/1 soldiers even outside tribal. If you think that it's essentially a cycled Decree where the card draw is replaced by creatures twice the size at the same mana investment, it becomes an interesting comparison. Who made angels off Decree anyway? Combat trick, instant army and "EOT: I create enough damage to kill you next turn" should be enough to make the card playable. The "Beacon" re-shuffle ability is just a nice addition.
Blue
Consecrated Sphinx:
A vanilla 4/6 Flyer for 4UU is nothing special, it needs an additional ability to be really excellent. Consecrated Sphinx has that ability: Whenever any opponent draws a card, you may draw 2. That's nutty. Absolute worst case scenario: You play it, he dies to removal, it's a 1-1 trade (for which you probably paid a lot more but, hey, I did say "worst" case!)
After that it's just gravy. The opponent to your left draws and you have paid 4UU for a 4/6 flier and 2 cards. Excellent! And on it goes around the table. You have a blocker/attacker and you are drawing a lot of cards. What if you have a Baby Jace or Temple Bell in play when you drop the Sphinx? Everyone draws 1 and you draw an additional 4 or 6 or 8. I'm going to leave this one here because I will be coming back to him in Part II of the review with some very, very interesting possibilities.
Treasure Mage:
Most non-artifact centric decks have a few hefty high end artifacts hiding somewhere in their decks. He finds them. Artifact centric decks (that generally run blue anyway) have a LOT of high end artifacts in their decks. He finds them too. Note that, as with Trinket Mage, he can find creatures and not just "normal" artifacts. This is often overlooked with Trinket Mage because there are very few 1cc artifact creatures that are worth him tutoring for. Treasure Mage makes this lack of distinction a huge advantage by finding your DSC, Memnarch, Sundering Titan as well as your Darksteel Forge and Mycosynth Lattice.
I think that he's an auto-include in anything remotely artifact related and, while I think it bears testing, his re-usability and chump-blockiness as a creature rather than as a spell, might make him a very interesting option in the place of Fabricate.
Oh, I forgot: His art is sick (you can interret that as you wish!)
And that's it for Blue. Two cards is a pretty meagre return this time round but the quality of both cards means that you will see them again and again. The Sphinx in particular is one to pick up as soon as you can though, as a mythic, it'll be a little harder to find.
Black I'll start with the bad news: It's not an instant. The good news is that it will steal a creature from an opponent's graveyard, let you play with it for your turn and then exile it. How often have you finally dealt with a bomb creature that an opponent has played only for him to bring it back multiple times. This one-shot Puppeteer Clique will showcase again and again why, if you're not already running Puppeteer Clique in your B/x deck, you really should be. The advantage this card has over the Clique is that they have closed the loophole that allowed a player to bounce their own creature back to their hand or just kill it again to avoid the exile clause. When this hits a creature, it's gone. (Usual corner cases apply.)
The problem with the card is that you can be gazzumped by instant speed GY removal. You can't have everything.
Massacre Wurm:It's an "almost" titan with a slightly harder CC and 1 less toughness. It doesn't give you the constant advantage triggers that the real titans enjoy every time they attack but the Wurm does have a sweet life-loss trigger for your opponents to enjoy. Someone building a little army with Rhys & Seedborne Muse? Well if they don't have some form of static boost out when the Wurm hits, there's going to be a massacre (heh!).
There's very little wrong with this creature: he's huge, scary and he provides board and life advantage in a colour that likes killing creatures. If you play blue either with or against this, I'd say that a kicked Rite of Replication pointed his way would be a lot of fun. Lose a creature: lose 10 life. Damnation FTW?
I like him, he's got flavour.
Black Sun's Zenith:
Red is not Commander's best colour. In fact, many would argue that it's the worst. Lets look at a card like Pyroclasm and compare it to Infest or Massacre? Creatures with Pro-Red will laugh off the Pryo but cards with Pro-black can't do that against Massacre. It's an inequality that bleeds through all the colours to the detriment of Red. There's very little that Red can do that another colour can't do equally well with better support or just straight out better. Black Sun's Zenith is another in the line of non-red cards just thumbing it's nose at their poorer cousin: Scalable, mass creature burn that doesn't go away during the clean-up step.
At best, BSZ clears the entire board and gets "Beacon"-ed back into your library for another go round in a colour with the tools to tutor it back out again just as easily. At worst, it weakens the entire board permanently and keeps you in the game. And that's not looking at any of the little combo's it can pull off: refueling your Grim Poppet or Carnifex Demon is cute but making it a permanent Insurrection with Necroskitter in play seems like it could be worth a few giggles.
Another huge tool for B/x decks. Black is following blue's trend: not giving much in the way of volume (though we'll see 2 more later in the Gold section) but more than making up for it in impact. These are three monster cards.
Crush:
After a hugely disappointing Scars, Red needs some love in Besieged. Despite being seemingly the only colour untouched by the Phyrexian taint (though it does get some Phyrexian watermarks), Red is, once again, a huge disappointment. While Green and White have spent the last few years broadening their scope and providing better quaility at what they do best, Red is still doing the same tired old thing: Some burn, an occasional decent weenie, artifact destruction and some cumbersome dragons. It needs to power creep it's non-burn, non-weenie suite and at least Besieged gives us some of this if nothing else.
1 Red mana, instant, destroy target non-creature artifact. It's strong, it's simple, it's useful. There's such a long way to go for Red but they got this right. I'm not a huge fan of 1-for-1 cards but there's very little you can say against this as you're more likely to run out of ways to Fork, Sceptre, Radiate and otherwise copy your Crush before you run out of worthy targets. This is as close to a red staple as your likely to get in Commander.
Into the Core:
Add a colourless mana, make the WW into a RR, switch from Instant to Sorcery........ There are some who are accusing R&D of being a little lazy when it came to design on Mirrodin Besieged, an accusation that's already taken up a lot of pixels as teh debate rages on SSG, Twitter, MTG.com and a myriad of forums all over the Magic net. For this card, I won't complain. Tired of dropping a Crush on your opponent's artifact only for it to come back again and again with Academy Ruins? Now you can Dust to Dust in Red as an instant for a single colourless mana more. Here is where I want to see R&D go with Red's core abilities: they can destroy artifacts a hundred different ways but only now can they definitively settle the score of a problematic artifact.
If I'm allowed to be overly critical, there is just one small niggle: the additional mana requirement has jumped "Rust to Rust" over the Gaddock Teeg boundary. Other than that, this is a slam dunk.
And there we leave it for Red with a common and an uncommon. At least they shouldn't be too hard to get your hands on!
Creeping Corrosion:
And again with the lack of creativity. An uncommon in Revised, a rare in Antiquities, back to uncommon for V Ed. and back to Rare for VI Ed. before being finally shunted back to Uncommon in X Ed., Shatterstorm doesn't know where he stands. Creeping Corrosion is most definitely rare (due to block & limited play considerations). We mentioned before that anything Red can do, another colour can do as well with better support? Here we have a staple red mass anti-artifact card getting a direct colour make-over in Green which can now deal with all Enchantments at instant speed, all Artifacts at sorcery speed and either one at various speeds, sometimes even while attached to relevant creatures.
Whatever about the general shafting of Red at the moment, this card is wholey to Green's benefit and a welcome addition to decks that like to beat on the machine.
Green Sun's Zenith:
This is the 3rd Zenith on the list and we're in our 5th colour. Time to take a step aside and revisit the Red & Blue versions. "XUUU, instant, Target player draws X cards. Beacon." and "XR, Sorcery, Deal X damage to target creature or player, Exile the creature if killed, Beacon." Critics of the Blue Zenith suggest that Stroke of Genius is easier on the mana base, especially if you are in multiple colours. They also cite the fact that it shuffles back into your deck as a slight draw-back over a version you could more-easily fish back out of your graveyard. Personally, I find that it's only worth it if you have enough mana so that you're getting a better deal than off a Concentrate. At that point in the game, you could be posing threats instead of digging more. Maybe it's different elsewhere but I don't see blue mages here waiting to tap 10 to draw 7, even at EOT. Mind Spring is cheaper, Stroke is easier and both are BFF with Eternal Witness. Each to his own but this is going into my binder as trade fodder rather than into my decks.
The Green Sun's Zenith is a doozy. Granted you're going to be a paying over the odds for something but it's straight from your deck to play and that just can't be beat with a big stick, unless you go find a big stick and beat with it. It's in a colour that just wants to make big mana, once you've achieved this, your XG becomes the beater of choice.
In a pinch, it can also get you something useful, like the already mentioned EWit to bring back the spell from your graveyard you need to keep you alive, or destroy some permanents with a Terastodon. Dang, no matter how much you say you're going to get a Llanowar Elf if you need a Llanowar Elf, this just has a fat dude written all over it. [TY to DT for the catch!]
It's looking rough for our hero Karn!! Ok, this is one of the oddball ones out there. PC costs a whopping 8 mana but for that you get a permanent Spellbook and the mother of all Regrowths. Now, the success of this card requires a couple of things to go right:
- You need to have something worth bringing back. This should be the easiest because you are essentially going to sandbag it until your hand is looking bare before you remake your entire early game. You can now leay the threats with impunity knowing that the new "Big Ups" is going to help you from running out of threats.
- You need to make 8 mana. You're playing Green. Shucks. Next!
- You need to protect your graveyard. Apart from Ground Seal and Bind, you're looking at artifact answers to these problems. Probably nothing a Null Rod wouldn't shut down if you ran it..
Thrun, the Last Troll:
Thrun didn't get caught up in the mind traps and stayed on Mirrodin. Seems like a raw deal to me. Now he's a grumpy old
Kinda.
Everyone remembers the original Mirrodin's Troll Ascetic with either huge mooney cow eyes or dread depending on which side of the table he was on. The combination of troll-shroud and regenerate made him a formidable road block. Add equipment or an aura or two and there was little short of a Wrath of God that could deal with him directly. What we didn't know then is that he was just the baby troll. Now the daddy troll is here. For a mere 1 colourless more he has +1/+2 and uncounterable. And he's a legend. Clique decks in 1v1 just got the shivers: You can't counter him, you can't kill him, you can't bounce him. What's a mono-U deck to do?
How good is he for Multiplayer? Em, he'd be a decent Voltron general, maybe? I know that I'd prefer the fragile body but stupid accelleration of Azusa any day over a beater so I don't know exactly where he's going to fit in. What's sure is that, if Infect has any sort of impact on Standard, he's not going to shine there either and he's only 1 of 15 mono-G trolls which is a bit short for tribal. I guess the jury is out on what is without doubt an excellent creature, just sadly without a home for now.
And that's it for Green. I make that 4 solid cards no matter how you cut it.
Glissa, the Traitor:
Frickin' yeah! This is a bad-ass legend ticking a lot of very interesting boxes. While the initial Glissa was an interesting puzzle to solve, she has ultimatly become a minor addition to Captain Sisay decks and not much else. In the storyline the myr saved Glissa at the end of the Mirrodin plotline and hid her in the core to recover. Unfortunatly the core also held some Phyrexian taint and the rest was pretty inevitable.
Glissa is an Elf. She's also a Zombie. She's a cheap legend with a decent P/T. She kills whatever she touches (First Strike & Deathtouch >Ka-POW!<) and she profits from it. Surround her with useful little (and large) artifacts and she'll get double duty out of them. Executioner's Capsule is an interesting one. Machine-gun the blockers, and get the Capsule back for more. She's in Infect colours so she could easily head up the Phyrexian invasion of your playgroup. What's nice about this Glissa is that she has synergies but nothing broken, she is a formidable creature but not something you can't deal with. All in all she's just enough of a handful to be very interesting without being bonkers good.
Can I get away with just saying "Look, he's good if you've got artifacts. Play him!"?
No?
Ok, no stats about 3 & 4 CC 'walkers being better than 5cc+ ones. And yes, he is good with artifacts, but this is Tezzeret we're dealing with here. I want to know why he's suddenly Black? Black isn't very artifacty, in fact, it's the most un-artifacty of all the 5 colours even with it's splash in Esper. If it's because he's now with Bolas (dig the forehead tattoos man!), then why isn't he UR or UBR? The Drain Life ultimate seems to be about the only reason, but does he have Drain Life because he's UB or is he UB because they wanted a Drain Life? On most other cards I have to say that this shouldn't matter. On Bolas (or any other PW) there's got to be a sound reasoning behind it.
Ok, on to the card. Let's presume your playing an artifact deck and your opponent's control artifacts. We can accept that Impulse for 5 for Artifacts is good in this situation. We can also accept that, while it's not Exiling Permanents or a Nev's Disk, double Drain Life for artifacts is not a terrible ultimate, especially at only -4 loyalty. Where Tezz 2.0 gets interesting is his -1: Target Artifact becomes a 5/5 Artifact Creature. Things to note:
* The artifact will remain a creature after the EOT, essentially until it leaves play.
* It's any artifact in play, not just your own (this is important for later)
* If you animate an equipment it will fall off a creature it's equipped to and/or not be able to become equipped to a creature. Animated Equipment don't have the abilities granted by the equipment as they are all "Equipped creature gets...."
* It doesn't say "Target non-creature artifact" so you can target any artifact, even a creature artifact, and make it a 5/5. Your late game Chalice becomes a 5/5 for 0, your opponent's Blightsteel Colossus becomes an indestructible 5/5 Infect (not 11/11), and your little Necropede, usually a 1/1 infect for 2, becomes a 5/5 infect for 2.
* The artifacts that become creatures don't lose abilities so you can make them into a creature, take control of them as creatures and use as intended.
That's it for the non-artifacts. There may be as many artifacts as non-artifacts in Part II, you'll just have to wait and see!
Monday, 20 December 2010
Active decks
A quick one on my active decks:
Wrexial, the Risen Deep - Formerly know as Thada Adel. Still artifact focused but now with additional Blackness. Not really all that sure it needs the Black but I'm giving it a go. The mana base shouldn't be hell, but it is. That part needs work.
Ashling the Pilgrim - the most recent in a long, long line of mono-red decks. Gauntlet, Gauntlet, Flare and some ways not to have Ashling die constantly. No Magebane or SoFaI makes a hot chick sad!
Azusa, Lost but Seeking - Broccoli, mono-Green combo beats, Forests FTW, Death by Plant / Wolf / Insect / land / Elephant. Cloudstone Curio: I <3 U
Gaddock Teeg - GW Goodstuff. The current home of my Mimic Vat & Nim Deathmantle. Very focused on destroying artifacts & enchantments. Reveillark, Saffi & Karmic Guide are bonkers with Vat & Deathmantle (and everything else!)
Balthor the Defiled - Zombies. They die, they come back to life, they sing songs.
Phelddagrif - Group Hug. This needs Planar Birth & Oath of Druids/Lieges but is otherwise perfect.
Wrexial, the Risen Deep - Formerly know as Thada Adel. Still artifact focused but now with additional Blackness. Not really all that sure it needs the Black but I'm giving it a go. The mana base shouldn't be hell, but it is. That part needs work.
Ashling the Pilgrim - the most recent in a long, long line of mono-red decks. Gauntlet, Gauntlet, Flare and some ways not to have Ashling die constantly. No Magebane or SoFaI makes a hot chick sad!
Azusa, Lost but Seeking - Broccoli, mono-Green combo beats, Forests FTW, Death by Plant / Wolf / Insect / land / Elephant. Cloudstone Curio: I <3 U
Gaddock Teeg - GW Goodstuff. The current home of my Mimic Vat & Nim Deathmantle. Very focused on destroying artifacts & enchantments. Reveillark, Saffi & Karmic Guide are bonkers with Vat & Deathmantle (and everything else!)
Balthor the Defiled - Zombies. They die, they come back to life, they sing songs.
Phelddagrif - Group Hug. This needs Planar Birth & Oath of Druids/Lieges but is otherwise perfect.
Friday, 17 December 2010
Scars of Mirrodin: a "Commander" Mid-Term Report
Commander Pre-Cons? Check!
Spoiler Season starting up for Mirrodin Besieged? Check!
I guess it's time for the Scars of Mirrodin Mid-Term report!
This is going to be brief in some areas because, let's face it, if I don't limit myself I'll never stop talking...... I'm not going to talk about every single card either so it's possible that I may skip over something that you think is a real star or a sleeper. Let me know in the comments.
Infect
It's interesting that the posterboy mechanic for Scars of Mirrodin is both a hit and a miss in Commander. It's a miss because there's really not enough cards (yet) for a real Infect deck to be a force in Commander. As there's only one Legend, (I'll talk about Skittles later) and a mono-coloured one at that, you're really restricted to Mono-B & artifact infect or to playing a Commander without infect in order to fully benefit from a Green and Black mechanic (which is a pretty backwards way of approaching a deck-build centered around a specific mechanic).
In addition, Proliferate, included in this set to go hand in hand with Infect, is partly in artifact and partly in a third colour. While Proliferate has multiple applications outside Infect, if you want to have your Infect and Proliferate it, you're in GUB/artifact and have a general (Vorosh, the Hunter) who has nothing in common with your strategy bar his +1/+1 counters ability and holding an Exoskeletal Armor or be the target of a Tainted Strike.
That was the "miss". The "hit" is Exoskeletal Armor, Tainted Strike and Skithiryx. The first is a short clock or an alpha strike; the second is an insta-win and a huge political tool; and the third is just a huge scary clock-beast. These can go into any deck that cares to carry them with no other interest in or reference to either Infect or Proliferate. Players attacking anywhere with a 4/x double-strike creature or a 9/x creature can allow you to piggy-back a kill off Tainted Strike. Suddenly, there's a player less and your chances of winning the table are much, much higher.
Sure, we have another two extensions to get through so the volume of infect in Black and Green has the potential to increase just enough to make the mechanic as a whole in either or both colours Commander viable. We'll just have to wait and see.
Proliferate
Proliferate will either be huge or useless depending on what your deck contains. As it does nothing in a vacuum, the strength of the mechanic will fluctuate wildly. In this respect, it's real benefit to commander is seeing cards that have other abilities or effects tacked on such as Contagion Engine & Clasp.
Metalcraft
Honestly, are there any good metalcraft cards?
Imprint
Variations on an existing theme, there are 5 imprint cards in the set. Only Prototype Portal and Mimic Vat have any potential in Commander and even then Prototype Portal is going to require a lot of building around and protection.
Mimic Vat, on the other hand, is probably the best Commander card in the set. It has competition, sure, but you're probably never going to be wrong putting it into any deck. Despite the artifact hate that should permiate all Commander metagames, running this monster maker is still worth the effort. There's one constant in all Commander games and it's that creatures will die. They don't need to be your own creatures, just creatures that go from the battlefield into any graveyard. From this point onwards your Mimic Vat is going to be pumping out a lot of helpful or downright nasty creatures for the low cost of 3 colourless. Try Sunblast Angel if you don't like being attacked for example, or a Titan, any Titan........
An advatage/disadvantage is that you can change the creature (though you're not required to so), if you like your imprinted Nekretaal, then keep it until you kill a Primeval Titan with it and then you take the Titan. The "disadvantage" to having a card imprinted is that it remains exiled if the Mimic Vat ever gets destroyed. If that card is something of your opponents that you don't necessarily want to see again, all the better. If it's your own creature, you've just been 2-for-1'ed.
I'll give Elspeth Tirel an honorary mention as she's a Disk but the other two are, so far, pretty unspectacular in this format.
I touched on the generals in a previous blog. I think the rankings hold up still:
1.) Skithiryx - Excellent
2.) Geth - Good, "build around" general and otherwise a solid guy.
3.) Azuri - Excellent at what he does, there's even a few combos, but you have to want what he does. Tribal Elf is not everyone's cup of tea.
4.) Kemba - Fun but not near the power level of the others. Tries to compensate with suggestive clothing.
White
White didn't give us a huge amount with the possible exception of Sunblast Angel, a conditional, flying Wrath of God and True Conviction.
Yes, you read that right: True Conviction. 5 Mana is nothing in this format and giving your team double strike is truely excellent. If you also gain life out of that, that's pretty neat but, whether attacking or blocking, Double Strike is what will deter your opponents from attacking into you and fear attack from you. Now, I'll admit it's not for everyone. Who it is for are aggressive W/x decks that have to win in the red zone. The afforementioned Kemba, wearing only a Konda's Banner played this in a game I was quickly knocked out of. She went roughly: Sol Ring, Mox Diamond, Kemba, Konda's Banner, equip the Banner, True Conviction, Armageddon, win. Yes, that's an equipped Kemba on turn 3, into double strike and Lifelink for your free 4/4 kittens into almost no mana around the table. Even without situations like this, the True Conviction gives you a huge amount of reach in a single attack phase either to alpha strike with your army or just your general. At the same time, you're reducing the ability to kill you to general damage strategies.
The other white card of note is Sunblast Angel. A 4/4 Wrath of God that flies. Sure, it only kills tapped creatures but don't tell me that you don't have ways to tap creatures or that creatures don't attack. Putting one on a Mimic Vat essentially means that no-one is attacking you without first dealing with the Vat. The Angel is good under pressure, it's good to clear away unsuspecting armies, it's just good. And it sticks about to attack for 4.
Green
Green should get some great beasts however it's quota was seriously effected by Infect taking up creature slots. Even the Fatties that are there are uninspiring. We have a nice effect in Bellowing Tanglewurm but it's hardly groundbreaking. Engulfing Slagwurm is cute too but really, it needed to have trample to be even considered. About the only fat that could be mentioned is Liege of the tangle and that comes with a warning sticker. This 8/8 for 6GG does have trample but the benefit is that you make your land base more fragile. You have to decide if the land(s) you animate into 8/8s will still be there for your next attack phase. The redeeming point is that you choose which lands, it's not automatically every land so you can go all in if you've just played a Final Fortune or just put a couple up there if you're being cagey. Beware the Nev's Disk which will kill your lands!
The other green highlight is, of course, Genesis Wave. There's actually not a huge amount to be said about this apart from: Generate a lot of mana, Wave for X, Profit. I mean, it's not rocket science.......
Red
Help me out here, Red is screwing the pooch for Commander in this set.
Black
Nothing to see here......
Only kidding! Black got some sweet, sweet toys. We've already mentioned Skithiryx, Geth and Tainted Strike. Black also got Exsanguinate, Necrotic Ooze, Painful Quandry and Carnifax Demon as well as some other little toys.
The last card in this section deserves an article unto itself. It already has a piece of Legacy glory, adding a combo to the quiver of arrows pointed towards the banning of Survival of the Fittest in that format. It's already present in Excended with yet another Conley Woods special, this time cooking up another Quillspike combo, and he's quite the broken card with, well, everything really. I give you Necrotic Ooze.
I think that this card is going to become a focal point for a lot of decks that like to manipulate what exactly is in the graveyard and, I'm sad to say, may even be the card that pushes Survival of the Fittest over the edge in Commander. When I said it did everything, take a situation where you have an active Necrotic Ooze in play and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker in any graveyard. Just Kiki-Jiki allows you to make infinite Ooze tokens. This in turn allows you to kill everyone with a Hissing Iguanar when those tokens die at EOT or earlier if you have a means to sacrifice them. Leaving the Hissing Iguanar aside and focusing on the sacrifice aspect, Ashnod's Altar and Phyrexian Altar will give you infinite colourless or any coloured mana respectively (which will allow you to do some of the following), Attrition will kill all targettable non-black creatures, an infinitely large Phyrexian Ghoul or Carrion Feeder, the ability to draw out your deck with Carnage Altar, make infinite Spawning Pit tokens (which won't die at EOT) or all of this at the same time!! And that's not even the start of what the Ooze can do, that's just an extremely tiny part of what it can do just with a single Kiki-Jiki in any graveyard. The forummer "Stardust" over on the official Commander boards posted a list of 57 different interactions the resulted in instantly winning, infinite life or infinite mana just using Kiki Jiki as a base point. Start with a different base point and just go wild.
I'm going to leave this one here but I think you can start including it in your deck for any incidental activations you can garner off it like copying Karn's or Memnarch's abilities from your opponent's graveyard........
Land
Scars gave us a cycle of friendly bi-coloured lands to add to the 20 friendly bi-coloureds with more or less drawbacks that we already have. In that they are likely to CIPT more often than not, they are not the best, but they could occasionally come into play untapped and so are marginally better than the Invasion bi-coloureds that we still see played.
Artifacts
It's technically an artifact set and a much larger percentage of the card count was assigned to artifacts to the detriment of each of the colours. This is probably a greater part of why each colour bar black only got 1-2 really good Commander cards. Let's see if the artifact section makes up for it.
We've already looked at Mimic Vat when talking about Imprint and Grafted Exoskeleton when talking about Infect. What the artifact section needs to give us is something that's a little more durable. Think Wurmcoil Engine with both lifelink and deathtouch and the ability to leave warm bodies behind when someone clears the board or Chimeric Mass, which you can find with both Tolaria West and Trinket Mage and can be either a small or huge beast that's oblivious to opponent's traditional Wrath effects.
The other star in the set seems to be another sleeper: Nim Deathmantle. This 2cc Artifact equips for 4, gives Intimidate, +2/+2 and makes the equipped creature Black. That's.....ok. What is special is that it also features a triggered ability that allows you to pay 4 mana when a creature is put into your graveyard from play to bring it directly back into play with the Deathmantle equipped to it. What's important to note is that the dying creature didn't need to have been equipped in the first place to benefit from this hasty resurrection. Add some "leaves/enters play" triggers, a little mana and, why not, a sacrifice outlet and you have yourself a dirty little combo.
What seems to be interesting here is that the three top cards in the set have a direct relationship with the graveyard:
1.) Mimic Vat triggers on any creature going to any graveyard
2.) Nim Deathmantle triggers on any creature going to your graveyard
3.) Necrotic Ooze has the activated abilities of creatures that are in any graveyard.
What is quite fun to note is that Necrotic Ooze will actually have a window between the first two triggering and those triggers resolving to activate abilities of any creature just put into a graveyard.
Another interesting interaction is that your opponent's Mimic Vat and your own Nim Deathmantle both trigger off a creature going into your graveyard and AP/NAP will apply resulting in your creature getting stolen before the Deathmantle can bring it back to you. Anyone who has engaged in "Mimic Vat Vs Mimic Vat" wars can attest that a thorough knowledge of the priority rules will serve you well while using these artifacts.
1-.) Mimic Vat
1-.) Necrotic Ooze
3.) Nim Deathmantle
4.) Skythiryx
5.) Genesis Wave
6.) Exsanguinate
7-.) Sunblast Angel
7-.) Grand Architect
7-.) Geth
10.) Tainted Strike
Have a great Holiday Break! See you in the New Year!
Spoiler Season starting up for Mirrodin Besieged? Check!
I guess it's time for the Scars of Mirrodin Mid-Term report!
This is going to be brief in some areas because, let's face it, if I don't limit myself I'll never stop talking...... I'm not going to talk about every single card either so it's possible that I may skip over something that you think is a real star or a sleeper. Let me know in the comments.
The Mechanics
Infect
It's interesting that the posterboy mechanic for Scars of Mirrodin is both a hit and a miss in Commander. It's a miss because there's really not enough cards (yet) for a real Infect deck to be a force in Commander. As there's only one Legend, (I'll talk about Skittles later) and a mono-coloured one at that, you're really restricted to Mono-B & artifact infect or to playing a Commander without infect in order to fully benefit from a Green and Black mechanic (which is a pretty backwards way of approaching a deck-build centered around a specific mechanic).
In addition, Proliferate, included in this set to go hand in hand with Infect, is partly in artifact and partly in a third colour. While Proliferate has multiple applications outside Infect, if you want to have your Infect and Proliferate it, you're in GUB/artifact and have a general (Vorosh, the Hunter) who has nothing in common with your strategy bar his +1/+1 counters ability and holding an Exoskeletal Armor or be the target of a Tainted Strike.
That was the "miss". The "hit" is Exoskeletal Armor, Tainted Strike and Skithiryx. The first is a short clock or an alpha strike; the second is an insta-win and a huge political tool; and the third is just a huge scary clock-beast. These can go into any deck that cares to carry them with no other interest in or reference to either Infect or Proliferate. Players attacking anywhere with a 4/x double-strike creature or a 9/x creature can allow you to piggy-back a kill off Tainted Strike. Suddenly, there's a player less and your chances of winning the table are much, much higher.
Sure, we have another two extensions to get through so the volume of infect in Black and Green has the potential to increase just enough to make the mechanic as a whole in either or both colours Commander viable. We'll just have to wait and see.
Proliferate
Proliferate will either be huge or useless depending on what your deck contains. As it does nothing in a vacuum, the strength of the mechanic will fluctuate wildly. In this respect, it's real benefit to commander is seeing cards that have other abilities or effects tacked on such as Contagion Engine & Clasp.
Metalcraft
Honestly, are there any good metalcraft cards?
Variations on an existing theme, there are 5 imprint cards in the set. Only Prototype Portal and Mimic Vat have any potential in Commander and even then Prototype Portal is going to require a lot of building around and protection.
Mimic Vat, on the other hand, is probably the best Commander card in the set. It has competition, sure, but you're probably never going to be wrong putting it into any deck. Despite the artifact hate that should permiate all Commander metagames, running this monster maker is still worth the effort. There's one constant in all Commander games and it's that creatures will die. They don't need to be your own creatures, just creatures that go from the battlefield into any graveyard. From this point onwards your Mimic Vat is going to be pumping out a lot of helpful or downright nasty creatures for the low cost of 3 colourless. Try Sunblast Angel if you don't like being attacked for example, or a Titan, any Titan........
An advatage/disadvantage is that you can change the creature (though you're not required to so), if you like your imprinted Nekretaal, then keep it until you kill a Primeval Titan with it and then you take the Titan. The "disadvantage" to having a card imprinted is that it remains exiled if the Mimic Vat ever gets destroyed. If that card is something of your opponents that you don't necessarily want to see again, all the better. If it's your own creature, you've just been 2-for-1'ed.
Planeswalkers
I'll give Elspeth Tirel an honorary mention as she's a Disk but the other two are, so far, pretty unspectacular in this format.
Generals
I touched on the generals in a previous blog. I think the rankings hold up still:
1.) Skithiryx - Excellent
2.) Geth - Good, "build around" general and otherwise a solid guy.
3.) Azuri - Excellent at what he does, there's even a few combos, but you have to want what he does. Tribal Elf is not everyone's cup of tea.
4.) Kemba - Fun but not near the power level of the others. Tries to compensate with suggestive clothing.
The Colours
White didn't give us a huge amount with the possible exception of Sunblast Angel, a conditional, flying Wrath of God and True Conviction.
Yes, you read that right: True Conviction. 5 Mana is nothing in this format and giving your team double strike is truely excellent. If you also gain life out of that, that's pretty neat but, whether attacking or blocking, Double Strike is what will deter your opponents from attacking into you and fear attack from you. Now, I'll admit it's not for everyone. Who it is for are aggressive W/x decks that have to win in the red zone. The afforementioned Kemba, wearing only a Konda's Banner played this in a game I was quickly knocked out of. She went roughly: Sol Ring, Mox Diamond, Kemba, Konda's Banner, equip the Banner, True Conviction, Armageddon, win. Yes, that's an equipped Kemba on turn 3, into double strike and Lifelink for your free 4/4 kittens into almost no mana around the table. Even without situations like this, the True Conviction gives you a huge amount of reach in a single attack phase either to alpha strike with your army or just your general. At the same time, you're reducing the ability to kill you to general damage strategies.
The other white card of note is Sunblast Angel. A 4/4 Wrath of God that flies. Sure, it only kills tapped creatures but don't tell me that you don't have ways to tap creatures or that creatures don't attack. Putting one on a Mimic Vat essentially means that no-one is attacking you without first dealing with the Vat. The Angel is good under pressure, it's good to clear away unsuspecting armies, it's just good. And it sticks about to attack for 4.
Green should get some great beasts however it's quota was seriously effected by Infect taking up creature slots. Even the Fatties that are there are uninspiring. We have a nice effect in Bellowing Tanglewurm but it's hardly groundbreaking. Engulfing Slagwurm is cute too but really, it needed to have trample to be even considered. About the only fat that could be mentioned is Liege of the tangle and that comes with a warning sticker. This 8/8 for 6GG does have trample but the benefit is that you make your land base more fragile. You have to decide if the land(s) you animate into 8/8s will still be there for your next attack phase. The redeeming point is that you choose which lands, it's not automatically every land so you can go all in if you've just played a Final Fortune or just put a couple up there if you're being cagey. Beware the Nev's Disk which will kill your lands!
The other green highlight is, of course, Genesis Wave. There's actually not a huge amount to be said about this apart from: Generate a lot of mana, Wave for X, Profit. I mean, it's not rocket science.......
Red
Help me out here, Red is screwing the pooch for Commander in this set.
Black
Nothing to see here......
Only kidding! Black got some sweet, sweet toys. We've already mentioned Skithiryx, Geth and Tainted Strike. Black also got Exsanguinate, Necrotic Ooze, Painful Quandry and Carnifax Demon as well as some other little toys. Do you remember when you played Syphon Soul in a 4-man game and thought "Heh, 6 extra life. Sweet!" Now the 2 damage life lost has become X and you still gain life equal to what was lost, essentially X*Y (where Y is the number of other players). Play it for 5 in a 4-man game and you gain 9 life; 6 gains you 12 life; 7 gains you 15 life and so on. I'm sure no-one would stoop to using Urborg and Cabal Coffers to fuel a decent 15 point Exsanguinate. I think it's obvious as well that infinite mana engines probably should run this. If you're going to do stuff like that, at least end our misery quickly.
Painful Quandry is the black 5cc enchantment in the Scars of Mirrodin almost-cycle (red missed out, go figure). As mentioned when talking about True Conviction, 5 mana is really not a big deal in this format, especially not in Black. Simply put, if an opponent plays a spell, they lose five life or discard a card. If players are patiently playing 1 or 2 spells a turn this is a slow clock or a minor annoyance but once they start multiplying their activity you are passively attacking one of two resources: Cards in hand or life total. Granted, they get to choose whichever one least effects them at any given point in a game but you're likely doing your best to deprive them of cards in hand and thus the ability to choose. As with True Conviction, this is not a card that fits all decks but it's an under the radar annoyance that someone will eventually waste a card killing to stop the pain.
Carnifax Demon: See Sunblast Angel. It flies, it kills things. There are stronger solutions available if you're looking for some pin-point destruction however the Demon is excellent at clearing away token hordes and, if you're running some proliferate, you can set it up so that you're withering the rest of the table into oblivion.
I think that this card is going to become a focal point for a lot of decks that like to manipulate what exactly is in the graveyard and, I'm sad to say, may even be the card that pushes Survival of the Fittest over the edge in Commander. When I said it did everything, take a situation where you have an active Necrotic Ooze in play and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker in any graveyard. Just Kiki-Jiki allows you to make infinite Ooze tokens. This in turn allows you to kill everyone with a Hissing Iguanar when those tokens die at EOT or earlier if you have a means to sacrifice them. Leaving the Hissing Iguanar aside and focusing on the sacrifice aspect, Ashnod's Altar and Phyrexian Altar will give you infinite colourless or any coloured mana respectively (which will allow you to do some of the following), Attrition will kill all targettable non-black creatures, an infinitely large Phyrexian Ghoul or Carrion Feeder, the ability to draw out your deck with Carnage Altar, make infinite Spawning Pit tokens (which won't die at EOT) or all of this at the same time!! And that's not even the start of what the Ooze can do, that's just an extremely tiny part of what it can do just with a single Kiki-Jiki in any graveyard. The forummer "Stardust" over on the official Commander boards posted a list of 57 different interactions the resulted in instantly winning, infinite life or infinite mana just using Kiki Jiki as a base point. Start with a different base point and just go wild.
I'm going to leave this one here but I think you can start including it in your deck for any incidental activations you can garner off it like copying Karn's or Memnarch's abilities from your opponent's graveyard........
Blue
Blue was heavily invested in Metalcraft and minorly in proliferate. When you added the usual set staples, there's actually very little space left. Even less when you consider the increased Artifact presence in the set. Pearls are thus hard to find though there is one in Grand Architect. It's a specific activation but it will fit well in 2 places: mono-blue aggro for the lord ability and U/x Artifacts for the Mishra's Workshop ability. There's an incidental extended combo with Pili-Pala that allows you to create infinite mana once you can turn the Pili-Pala blue and it's no longer got summoning sickness. In Commander it's just likely to allow you to play your Darksteel Forges off the Architect and a Etherium Sculptor for essentially 4 mana. Imagine a Mana Crypt/Vault or Sol Ring on the first 2-3 turns and a turn 3 Forge is not all that unlikely a play with the Architect's help. This is a pretty easy inclusion if you have blue creatures and like to cast big artifacts early.
Land
Scars gave us a cycle of friendly bi-coloured lands to add to the 20 friendly bi-coloureds with more or less drawbacks that we already have. In that they are likely to CIPT more often than not, they are not the best, but they could occasionally come into play untapped and so are marginally better than the Invasion bi-coloureds that we still see played.
Artifacts
It's technically an artifact set and a much larger percentage of the card count was assigned to artifacts to the detriment of each of the colours. This is probably a greater part of why each colour bar black only got 1-2 really good Commander cards. Let's see if the artifact section makes up for it.
We've already looked at Mimic Vat when talking about Imprint and Grafted Exoskeleton when talking about Infect. What the artifact section needs to give us is something that's a little more durable. Think Wurmcoil Engine with both lifelink and deathtouch and the ability to leave warm bodies behind when someone clears the board or Chimeric Mass, which you can find with both Tolaria West and Trinket Mage and can be either a small or huge beast that's oblivious to opponent's traditional Wrath effects.
What seems to be interesting here is that the three top cards in the set have a direct relationship with the graveyard:
1.) Mimic Vat triggers on any creature going to any graveyard
2.) Nim Deathmantle triggers on any creature going to your graveyard
3.) Necrotic Ooze has the activated abilities of creatures that are in any graveyard.
What is quite fun to note is that Necrotic Ooze will actually have a window between the first two triggering and those triggers resolving to activate abilities of any creature just put into a graveyard.
Another interesting interaction is that your opponent's Mimic Vat and your own Nim Deathmantle both trigger off a creature going into your graveyard and AP/NAP will apply resulting in your creature getting stolen before the Deathmantle can bring it back to you. Anyone who has engaged in "Mimic Vat Vs Mimic Vat" wars can attest that a thorough knowledge of the priority rules will serve you well while using these artifacts.
My Mid-Term Top 10
1-.) Mimic Vat
1-.) Necrotic Ooze
3.) Nim Deathmantle
4.) Skythiryx
5.) Genesis Wave
6.) Exsanguinate
7-.) Sunblast Angel
7-.) Grand Architect
7-.) Geth
10.) Tainted Strike
Have a great Holiday Break! See you in the New Year!
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Who you gonna call?
I suppose you've all had time to come to terms with the recent announcement regarding changes to the naming of the Elder Dragon Highlander format and the forthcoming multiplayer product featuring 5 seperate EDH Commander decks! With the boost of publicity and the news that there will be 51 brand new cards in the release, it's sure to sell well.
What has me excited is the announcement that these decks will be enemy wedges and will each contain 3 Legendary creatures in Enemy Wedge colours. An "enemy wedge" is a card containing 2 friendly colours, for example Green and Red, with a third "enemy" colour, in this case Blue. Of the legends in the upcoming release, we already know 5 as they are the Planar Chaos dragons. In addition, WotC have decided to give us 2 new legends per enemy wedge. This will vastly improve the playability and popularity of enemy wedge decks. Up to now only 6 enemy wedge legends existed, the 5 Planar Chaos Dragons and Doran the Siege Tower, who shared Treefolk colours from the Lorwyn block.
To sweeten the announcement Wizards gave us one of the 10 unknown legends. Meet Karador, Ghost Chieftain:
An 8-mana 3/4 requiring 3 different coloured mana? I think we need to read the text box because this is seriously underwhelming.
"Karador, Ghost Chieftain costs 1 less to cast for each creature in your Graveyard"
Ok, So he doesn't cost 8, he costs 8-x, where x is the number of creatures in your Graveyard. This means he can cost from 8 down to 3 (the ability doesn't reduce colour mana costs). I'll have to check up on this but I'm fairly sure that you'll be able to get around the general tax with his ability so if you have 11 creatures in your graveyard you'll be able to pay just BGW for the third casting from the commander zone. This makes him very attractive as a general.
What else does he do?
During each of your turns, you may cast one creature from your graveyard.
That's pretty cool, you get an extension of your hand into your graveyard for some nasty creature once per turn. There's an interesting, but minor, tension between how many creatures you have in your graveyard and his cost should he be returned to the Command Zone.
Karador is more likely be be useful in builds where you're less reliant on other players and happier to set up your own interactions and synergies. Teneb wouldn't necessarily be bad in that style of deck either so the choice could come down to personal preference, very specific builds or just that shiney new general feeling.
Either way, you'll rarely be unhappy when you're filling everyone's graveyards!
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Cool! It's a Generals: Remixed!
Those lovely guys over on Commandercast have put together a Generals Remixed contest.
Here's the skinny:
Have you ever looked at a Legendary Creature while looking for a general and thought, "Cool, but..."
Hey, that's a pretty cool idea! There's loads of times I know I wished that Thada Adel had haste but there's possibly one guy out there who needs the help more than our little merfolk: WOTC's own Ken Nagle!
Oh, you thought I was joking?
A very little known fact is that the blast unleashed from the Golgothian Sylex didn't, in fact, kill Mishra and Gix. It only killed the Phyrexian Demon. In Mishra it awoke his planeswalking spark and he was flung into the blind eternities, lost for ages until, very recently, he gained control of his planeswalking abilities and emerged here, on our own Earth, in our time to hide among us. He disguised himself by colouring his hair blonde and submitted an entry into the Great Designer Search 1 and now Ken "Mishra" Nagle works hand in hand with Mark Rosewater in shaping the future of Magic: the Gathering. You want to know how the Phyrexians got to Mirrodin? Ken/Mishra. You want to know who has been developing the infection that will take over that plane? Mishra's puppet, MaRo. And he's a little too interested in EDH for my liking. Watch out people: We're next!!
But not with a lame-ass card like this one.
Ok, I get that EDH wasn't at the top of the agenda when Mishra, Artificer Prodigy was designed. In a non-singleton format, he can be extremely powerful if you can work out his casting cost requirements. That said, we haven't exactly been inundated with PT level Mishra decks. To put it very simply, one of the most iconic figures in the history of Magic: the Gathering is a bit of a dud.
I'm thinking How are we going to remix our friend Mishra? A wardrobe change would be an excellent start. Something like this:
Version #2:
If I wanted it to be a basic or "boring" fix of the original card, I'd stop there but I really want to push this further. There was a bit of a tiff that started the brother's war, something about a fight over the Mightstone and the Meekstone. How about we make him a coveter and copier?:
The power-lever readings of this one are through the roof. I had better stop before things get really silly....... Ooops! Too late!
Final choice!!
So, which one will we choose for our Mishra Remixed?:
° Annoying opponent annoyer stealy stealy Ken/Mishra? Mmmmmmmm.......
° Bah-rok-en!, combo enabling, deck thinning, future EDH Overlord Ken/Mishra? Mmmmmmmmm......
° Ken/Mishra (Kenshra?) who does kinda what he's supposed to do?
Tough choice!
No, seriously, despite the insane suggestions of a demeted and twisted mind, my real remix choice is the simple, elegant solution*. BEHOLD: Kenshra!!
Here's the skinny:
Have you ever looked at a Legendary Creature while looking for a general and thought, "Cool, but..."
° It has good flavour, but it's weaksauce rules-wise.
° It has amazing art but nothing else going for it.
° It has nice abilities, but it's incredibly boring flavour-wise.
° It has abilities that just aren't interesting enough.
° It matches the colour combination you want, but not anything else.
° It just seems to be lacking that... something.
Then this is the contest for you!
We want you to take a potential general and spice it up. Switch things around. Remix it, so to speak. The goal in this contest is to take an existing Legendary Creature card and modify it with the following goals:
° Retain the original things that feel good about the card, like it's flavour, colour combination or rules.° Discard the things that aren't so awesome and replace them with something of your own design.° Try to keep some semblance of the card's original function. As a guideline, it should still be recognizable as the original Legendary Creature, just... cooler.° For the purposes of the contest, you only have to worry about the card as a general in EDH.° Producing a visual aid like a card created with Magic Set Editor will be worth extra points because the visual representation appeals to us.
Hey, that's a pretty cool idea! There's loads of times I know I wished that Thada Adel had haste but there's possibly one guy out there who needs the help more than our little merfolk: WOTC's own Ken Nagle!
 |
| Don't let the blonde fool ya'! |
A very little known fact is that the blast unleashed from the Golgothian Sylex didn't, in fact, kill Mishra and Gix. It only killed the Phyrexian Demon. In Mishra it awoke his planeswalking spark and he was flung into the blind eternities, lost for ages until, very recently, he gained control of his planeswalking abilities and emerged here, on our own Earth, in our time to hide among us. He disguised himself by colouring his hair blonde and submitted an entry into the Great Designer Search 1 and now Ken "Mishra" Nagle works hand in hand with Mark Rosewater in shaping the future of Magic: the Gathering. You want to know how the Phyrexians got to Mirrodin? Ken/Mishra. You want to know who has been developing the infection that will take over that plane? Mishra's puppet, MaRo. And he's a little too interested in EDH for my liking. Watch out people: We're next!!
| Would the real Ken Nagle please stand up? |
Ok, I get that EDH wasn't at the top of the agenda when Mishra, Artificer Prodigy was designed. In a non-singleton format, he can be extremely powerful if you can work out his casting cost requirements. That said, we haven't exactly been inundated with PT level Mishra decks. To put it very simply, one of the most iconic figures in the history of Magic: the Gathering is a bit of a dud.
In EDH terms, his ability says: "Whenever you play an artifact spell, you may shuffle your library."
Wow!
I play one of the most gifted artificers in the history of all the planes and get a 4/4 for 1UBR that occasionally allows me shuffle my library?
My flabber has been officially ghasted.
About the only thing going for him is that we have proof that Mishra's dress sense hasn't improved under his current guise as Ken Nagle. I mean, come ON! What is with the Frog-Logo overalls? And if that wasn't enough, he's rocking some X-Men geek in there too. Make up your mind, Ken/Mishra! Ridiculing a talented, planeswalking artificer with potential to be your future overlord for their dress sense is probably not a great idea, but fashion laws have been infringed and this baby needs a makeover! What are we starting with?
 |
| Frog? X-Men? GEEK OVERLOAD!! |
Ok, I can get behind a slightly classier version of Ken/Mishra.
What can we do about that horrific text?
What can we do about that horrific text?
Whenever you cast an artifact spell, you may search your graveyard, hand, and/or library for a card with the same name as that spell and put it onto the battlefield. If you search your library this way, shuffle it.
When you make an artifact, he gets a second one for free. To be honest, that is pretty cool. Unfortunatly the highlander nature of EDH means that you can look but you won't find a second copy of the artifact in question.
Version #1:
What about making a token copy of an artifact spell? It will have the same end result but without the searching part. An obvious drawback is the potential of seeing multiple tokens in play and getting them confused but we could avoid that with the following wording:
Version #1:
What about making a token copy of an artifact spell? It will have the same end result but without the searching part. An obvious drawback is the potential of seeing multiple tokens in play and getting them confused but we could avoid that with the following wording:
Whenever you cast an artifact spell, exile all artifact clone tokens you control. Then put into play an artifact clone token that is a copy of that spell.That's a neat solution, keeping the functionallity of the original card but restricting it to one token at a time. I think that players could easily live with that as there's some very nasty artifacts running about out there. Getting an extra copy of just one may be all that's needed. It can also create some tension if you make it a required trigger. If you are happy with the artifact clone in play, you're not going to want to play another artifact.
Version #2:
If I wanted it to be a basic or "boring" fix of the original card, I'd stop there but I really want to push this further. There was a bit of a tiff that started the brother's war, something about a fight over the Mightstone and the Meekstone. How about we make him a coveter and copier?:
Whenever you cast an artifact spell, you may search target opponents graveyard, hand, and/or library for a card with the same name as that spell and put it onto the battlefield. If you searched a library this way, shuffle it.
Hey, hey, hey! Buy one, get one free.... from an opponent!! "Sol Ring, steal your Sol Ring?" Advantages: it can be extremely effective stripping ubiqious artifacts from opponents hand, graveyard or library. You get to riffle through their deck to see what they are up to and, as a bonus, your general is in colours that has access to 9 or 10 cards that can subsequently remove anything nasty from their deck. Disadvantages: If they don't have one of the artifacts you are playing or it's already in play, you're a sad puppy. It's a pretty disgusting ability with a potential downside. My personal big issue is that it's not a "fun" interaction. Players don't like when you steal things directly from their decks and search effects generally take a long time to resolve. I think this one is a runner for overpowered and annoying ability of the month. Let's not go there. What else can we do that's a step up from our basic "1 copy free"?
Version #3:
If you stayed away from the stealing part but wanted to play on his ability to create some intricate pieces of artifice, you could keep the basic printed ability but change just one little thing:
Version #3:
If you stayed away from the stealing part but wanted to play on his ability to create some intricate pieces of artifice, you could keep the basic printed ability but change just one little thing:
Whenever you cast an artifact spell, you may search your graveyard, hand, and/or library for an artifact card with the same converted mana cost as that spell and put it onto the battlefield. If you search your library this way, shuffle it.Yikes!! Who's been smoking the carpet? So, let me get this right: I play a Sol Ring and I get to search my library for a Sensei's Divining Top to be put into play for free? For reals? And that Pithing Needle you took ages to get rid of is back from the dead too because I've just gone and played a Skullclamp. Hey, what am I saying? SDT is going to draw all the 1cc spells we could ever need once you bounce it back to the top of our library, re-draw it and cast it again for another go round. Can you say Black Friday Discount MADNESS!? And hey, guess what, we haven't even gotten out of the 1cc spells yet.
The power-lever readings of this one are through the roof. I had better stop before things get really silly....... Ooops! Too late!
Final choice!!
So, which one will we choose for our Mishra Remixed?:
° Annoying opponent annoyer stealy stealy Ken/Mishra? Mmmmmmmm.......
° Bah-rok-en!, combo enabling, deck thinning, future EDH Overlord Ken/Mishra? Mmmmmmmmm......
° Ken/Mishra (Kenshra?) who does kinda what he's supposed to do?
Tough choice!
No, seriously, despite the insane suggestions of a demeted and twisted mind, my real remix choice is the simple, elegant solution*. BEHOLD: Kenshra!!
I'm going to finish up here with a special thanks to Ken Nagle for being such a good sport and posing for our images. Cheers Ken!
*Though, I'd play the other two in a shot!
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Single card Strategies - Portcullis
1.) It sticks the number of creatures in play at 2 if there aren't already more than 2 in play.
2.) Creatures enter the battlefield, trigger their CotB effects and disappear under the Portcullis.
3.) When Portcullis leaves play, those creatures will once again CotB and their triggers will fire all over again.
3.a.) It's a "leaves play" trigger on Portcullis, so bouncing, blinking, exiling or destroying it will work.
4.) It works for your opponent's creatures too.
5.) It hoses Tokens
There are a couple of good things and a couple of bad things in there that I'd like to look at in a little more detail to see how we can work around them.
First of all, you have to look at finding some way to control the entry and exit of Portcullis other than the turn it comes into play. One of the suggestions on the podcast was Master Transmuter and it bears looking at in some detail. What will happen if you return a "loaded" Portcullis to your hand with Master Transmuter and return it to play again?
First, returning the Portcullis will be part of the cost of the ability, so this is a realistic defensive measure if you are planning on running the two cards together. The Transmuter ability goes on the stack. The Portcullis "leaves play" ability goes on the stack after the Transmuter ability and will be resolved first.
All of the hidden creatures come into play and their abilities trigger and resolve. You may then put an artifact into play upon resolution of the Transmuter's ability. For the purposes of this excercise, we're going to return the Portcullis. The creatures that recently came into play will remain there but any further creatures will go the usual route and be hidden by the Portcullis.
That's the very basic up-and-down with Master Transmuter. What happens if you start playing with the trigger orders on creatures coming into play normally rather than creatures hidden by the Portcullis?
A.) A creature comes into play where there are already 2 more creatures in play.
B.) It triggers the Portcullis.
C.) The exile trigger from the Portcullis goes on the stack
D.) Activate the Transmuter, returning the Portcullis: the Transmuter ability goes on the stack.
E.) The Portcullis "leaves play" ability goes on the stack.
F.) Resolve the the Portcullis "leaves play" ability though there's nothing to return.
G.) Resolve the Transmuter ability and return the Portcullis to play.
H.) Resolve the exile trigger on the initial copy of the Portcullis. Exile creature. Cheer.
Now that we have this, we can play with variations on the theme. If we wanted to have creatures under a Portcullis come back into play and leave again right away, how would we do that? We're going to use a Voltaic Key to untap our Master Transmuter and then re-activate her ability, returning a second (unrelated) artifact to hand and the original Portcullis to play. It would look something like this (taken from the top):
2.) Portcullis "leaves play" trigger goes on the stack.
3.) Pay 1, tap Voltaic Key: Untap Master Transmuter.
4.) Pay U, Tap Master Transmuter, Return another artifact to your hand: Transmuter ability #2 goes on the stack.
5.) Transmuter ability #2 resolves, you put Portcullis into play.
6.) Original Portcullis "leaves play" trigger resolves, all creatures hidden under initial Portcullis come into play. The new Portcullis sees these creatures coming into play and, as the active player, you place the exile ability onto the stack. The controllers of these creature's CotB triggers put them onto the stack in clockwise play order.
7.) Resolve the creature's CotB triggers in counter clockwise order.
8.) Exile all newly returned creatures under Portcullis #2 if, including them, there are 2 or more creatures in play.
9.) Resolve the Transmuter ability #1 and put an artifact from your hand into play.
Wow! That's a lot going on right there! You can now "flash" in and out a whole host of creatures that you have hidden under a Portcullis as many times as your opponents will allow you to. Despite all that, there's a small hole in your plan in that you don't always control what the other players are going to do with their CotB abilities if they have any. What if there was something annoying that you just didn't want to see back in the game? You could Stifle the "return to play" trigger of that creature but you can also permanently remove all the creatures coming back in if you're willing to lose any of your own too. This will essentially involve adding the steps A.)-G.) into steps 1.)-8.). (Steps G.) and 8.) are essentially the same.)
Between Steps 6.) and 8.), after the point where the copy #2 of Portcullis, introduced in Step 5.), triggers upon "seeing" all the creatures coming into play but before you resolve its exile trigger, you need to use a bounce spell or effect (more Master Transmuter activations if you can untap her again) to cause the Portcullis #2 to leave play. The "leaves play" trigger will go on the stack, then resolve, returning all creatures under the Portcullis #2 to return to play except that there are no creatures under Portcullis #2: they are all still waiting for Portcullis #2 to exile them in Step 8.). What you've done here is slipped A.)-G.) in before you resolve Step 8.). Once you've done that you resolve Step 8.) and exile those creatures. Unfortunatly for them, their lifeline has now been cut and they will stay exiled. How sad. Cheering is not obligatory. Again, there is some price to pay in that any unfriendly CotB effects will fire once, but after that they are gone.
Not every creature will have a relevant CotB effect, some will just be annoying creatures. Either way, if you haven't set up to exile those creatures, when they come back under an opponent's control, unless you have a way to deal with them, it's probably not going to be good news for you. Let's face it, you're not going to be able to remove every creature every time with the method described in A.)-H.). What if I told you that, when these scary creatures came back into play, they'd all be working for you, irregardless of who owned them? Well, it's possible:
If you can find a way (and the hefty mana requirement) to do it, it's entirely possible that, once you have cast a Gather Specimens, you can give the Portcullis a quick spin, get some nifty CotB effects once or twice and end up with the whole army ready to do your bidding.
Just one last point: in the suggestions here, we haven't gone outside Blue. It's entirely possible to stay mono-coloured here as well as branching out into other colours. Go have fun, you crazy kids!
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