Red is rarely deep. It has a one-track mind, and on that track, it’s usually easy to see which deals are good and which deals are not. Pick out the good burn, the good aggressive creatures, and perhaps an engine card or two. Scars has no interest in arguing with that tradition and sticks its two best red cards out like sore thumbs. One of them is the next in a long line of Bolts, but the other is something new. Red has a real planeswalker now.
★★
Following it leads only to pain.
We’ve all been spoiled by the rise of a new class of burn spell that tries to compete with Lightning Bolt, and that has made two-mana burn spells highly awkward. This continues that tradition, unable to even hit the opponent for the full three damage and sometimes requiring you to take a little for the team. It’s not a terrible tool in the exact right spot, but it’s well below the standard rates.
★
Fine, I will, but what’s step two?
This doesn’t even have the decency to be an instant. If you want double strike this bad, play creatures that already have it, since you’re clearly trying to pump them up beyond all reason.
★
Lightning reigning down from the sky is scary. Metal is worse.
With cards so obviously Limited-only, I like to think about how much better they’d have to be to make them interesting for Standard. In this case, you’d need to give it haste, remove the sacrifice requirement, and probably boost the damage to three.
★
Getting new weapons can be highly inspiring.
Sending over a 6/6 for four mana sounds good to me, but it only leaves behind a 3/3. As a one-time attack, it’s important to have trample, and the Berserkers doesn’t have it. Combined with the extra mana, this seems worse than Ball Lightning and other similar staples. All of that assumes that metalcraft is available, which it won’t always be, and this is particularly awkward when you’re not sure if you should try to wait for it or not.
★
“I don’t care how tired you are, we’re going to keep trying this until you get it. First you take rock.”
The payoff isn’t that great, and it’s a lot of work to get it. It’s going to make a lot of people throw up their hands in drafts, but that’s what these cards are made for. At least this one requires some effort. I’ve heard rumors it was previously printed, but if I don’t remember seeing it, it’s new to me!
★
You’re on fire today!
This is what is known as completely missing the point; although in Limited, it looks like a lot of fun. The most important thing about a Wrath effect, whether one-sided or otherwise, is that it’s reliable. This is anything but reliable. They may not even play cards big enough to trigger this at the level you want, and it’s very easy to miss. Even in a scenario where you’re using Jace to set the top card of their library, the best you can do is wipe their side and do some damage once you find a big enough target. Admittedly there is some upside here from the fact that you don’t lose your own creatures, but the reliability issues aren’t something that can be overcome.
★★
Strike your iron when it is boiling hot. Then point it in the right direction.
The requirement to spend mana means that even the best-case scenario isn’t all that impressive, and there are far more efficient ways to turn playing artifacts into victory. If there are one-toughness targets to pick off, an outright Cunning Sparkmage or similar creature is a vastly better choice.
★
Tog, you’re it.
There’s no safe way to take advantage of this card. It requires spending mana. It doesn’t boost toughness, so it can’t win in a fight. It can potentially do a lot of damage, but there are many ways to do similar amounts of damage with a lot less work, investment, and exposure.
★
That born of fire can do nothing but burn.
This is a six-drop for the desperate Limited player. Only time will tell whether even they’re all that interested.
★★★
Some people just want to see the world burn.
This can add up to a reasonable deal if sacrifices can be summoned on cue at reasonable cost that are worth doing anyway. Fetchlands are an excellent start to this process, and there are a number of other similar cards that sacrifice to replace themselves or to do damage. It’s still not cheap to get this to add up to a lot of damage, and this will often end up being less than convenient (for example, try sacrificing two lands to use this on turn 4 and see what happens), but the potential is there.
★★★★
The more lightning rods, the better.
Lightning Bolt is quite the warping card, moving the baseline for one-mana damage spells up from the old level of a perfectly serviceable Shock. Galvanic Blast divides its damage capability over time in an excellent way. In the early turns, a Shock is good enough, and later when you need more damage, the artifacts have had time to show up. This will no doubt be a staple of artifact decks that can expect to get to metalcraft reliably.
★★★
Stop thinking about what you’d do if you had a hammer. Think about if you had two or three.
This is a poor man’s Kor Duelist or a richer man’s second copy. Cards are a valuable thing, so one doesn’t want to waste them on equipment cards that don’t provide at least enough of a boost to make double strike a superior bonus to two power. However, having both available allows equipment decks to reliably get one or both and focus in on their strategy while playing colors that are a natural fit. It’s too bad the cheap equipment to make this happen isn’t there.
★★
Sitting on a pile of gold requires turning all the gold into a pile.
When this activates, chances are very high that Hoard-Smelter Dragon will be on the attack — at which point there are any number of more deadly things Dragons have been known to do. However, this can potentially do double duty as a large man and as a way to mop up artifacts that stand in the way of such an attack, either directly or indirectly (by enabling card drawing or large mana activations). It’s a special case, but it could happen.
★★★★
I could Koth up an endless stream of puns here, but you deserve better.
A message to all those going completely crazy over how this might have to be banned because it’s so ridiculous: Take a deeeep breath. Relax. Have some water.
It’s not a bad card, but you’re lucky I don’t wager on such things because that would be some absurdly easy money. This isn’t even close to the best planeswalker, which will continue to be Jace, the Mind Sculptor. He’s certainly top ten in the set, but this set’s power level is puny.
The best and most popular planeswalkers succeed because their abilities work together and are all compatible with a consistent overall strategy while being generally useful in a wide variety of situations. Jace, the Mind Sculptor has an incredibly powerful set of abilities, but it also is extremely versatile and a great fit for many decks.
Koth has powerful abilities, but they don’t cohere properly and aren’t as general as they need to be. Koth’s first ability is not consistent with a defensive strategy, as it provides essentially no defense while building towards its ultimate — unlike Elspeth, Knight-Errant, Jace, or Ajani Vengeant. In particular, Koth doesn’t protect itself on the first turn it’s in play in preparation to use the second ability.
That second ability is the main attraction, but it only comes into its own if you can afford to wait a turn, and the ultimate ability is clearly a game winner in time but isn’t quite the shutdown effect of other ultimates. The bigger problem with both of these abilities is that they force Koth to only take part in mono-red decks that don’t use lands that aren’t either Mountains or lands that turn into Mountains.
This is going to limit the amount of play Koth gets in a similar fashion to the far more impressive Kargan Dragonlord. The ability to use those two cards as a base raises the chance that Koth will impress, but those who think this is going to become a universal staple are fooling themselves.
Think of this as two cards: Koth, the Sandstalker and Koth, the Worldquaker.
If you want to play the Sandstalker, that’s a solid card. Occasionally you use the other two abilities, but nothing involved is special.
If you want to play the Worldquaker, that’s great if you pull it off, but you’ll get little out of the Sandstalker. My guess is that there will be a good mono-red deck in Standard that has some great cards in it with this and Dragonlord as the stars. However it will be relatively easy to deal with for those who care to do so. Other uses of Koth will be minimal, and everyone will feel deeply silly they made so much of a fuss.
If I’m wrong — which, of course, I’m not — feel free to throw this in my face.
★★
Even from the grave, some cannot resist the pull of the shiny.
Vengevine has set the new standard for what an unkillable creature can be. This is a slightly worse deal the first time through and requires payment on subsequent rounds — so much so that you’re saving a card but aren’t saving much mana, and the best times for Vengevine tend to involve mana efficiency. Putting this into the graveyard with Fauna Shaman doesn’t even seem impressive. Being able to bring the Phoenix back indefinitely can be a big plus in the right matchup, but with so many permanent solutions out there and so many engines that can overpower a respectable creature, the world no longer has a place for cards like this.
★★★
That’s the goblin answer to everything. Smashing and more goblins.
With both Memnite and Mox Opal available, this can be a good way to get a quick offensive going, especially if there are ways to pump them up later. However, there’s a real problem of this clashing with metalcraft. If you’re sacrificing artifacts, then you won’t trigger, and that makes the other cards you’re trying to exploit with all those artifacts problematic.
Instead, this is likely to go in a deck that doesn’t go for metalcraft and instead views this as a mini-combo. That means Mox Opal is out, though, so other than Memnite, there aren’t good sacrifice targets that come to mind. The power is there if such targets exist.
★★
Terrain wasn’t meant to be melted. The truly dedicated don’t let that stop them.
Molten Rain was this card done right, but land destruction hasn’t been in the game’s good graces for some time. This is closer to an Avalanche Riders but without the flexibility. This could still potentially round out a land destruction strategy, but I doubt the rest of that deck is ever coming back.
★★
It hurts to think about it.
The only way this is going to happen is if metalcraft is reliable, and you’re filling your opponent’s hand up enough that this will do serious damage — in which case, this could become another Runeflare Trap and work in exactly the situations where it’d do enough to be worth bothering. It also provides an option to draw a new hand if the current one isn’t getting the job done. In which case, it’s overpriced, but when you need it most after the first few turns, the extra cost is relatively minor.
★
The real question is why he gives the gear back.
Most opponents won’t have equipment at all, let alone equipment worth taking. Even if they do, it’s probably still a lousy deal. A question to ponder is why this set seems to want to care so much about equipment when it doesn’t deliver the goods.
★
All you have to do is point something shiny in the right direction.
There will certainly be times you’d give him haste, but turn 2 will not generally be one of them. He’s part of the huge army of Limited filler this set has to offer.
★★
No one has ever figured out what they do with the scrap metal.
This type of creature wants to cost three mana rather than four. The larger body is partial compensation, but this isn’t the right package all that often. If there’s nothing better available, sure, but I’d assume that there will usually be better.
★
At this point there’s Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium…
Anything I’d say, I’ve said many times before. Move along.
★★
Some people have no respect for the classics.
This card sends a clear message, and that message is: we’re making an artifact set and have no intention of letting removal spoil our party. Sure, we’ll make it available, but we’ll be damned if we’re going to make it good enough to use unless things are starting to get out of hand.
★★
They can’t move on their own like they used to.
One-drops in red aren’t the strongest, and this has the capability to have a lot of impact. It’s conceivable it could get into the conversation. It can be used with equipment and/or lords to set up reasonably priced direct damage, or it can be used to pick off enemy creatures for three mana, which is especially reasonable against mana creatures. Later in the game, it gives you something to do with all the extra mana.
It may not be pretty, but it can get the job done, and at this price, that’s not something I’m willing to come down on too hard.
★★
Seriously?
When the necessary searching is successful, and this works, it’s magical.
The problem is that if you miss the sweet spot, no one’s going to feel much of an impact. All you’ll do is force them to hide what they’re doing by searching for what they need when it should’ve been your turn, and that is profoundly unsatisfying.
Â
The presence of Koth of the Hammer changes the nature of red. Defensive strategies used to be the most reliable way to deal with decks full of cheap red creatures and burn spells. Kargan Dragonlord threw a monkey wrench in that tactic by allowing such decks to often overpower decks with far higher mana curves at essentially no cost.
Koth of the Hammer will give them yet another angle to do so, again at very little cost. The problem with both cards is that they’re highly insular.
There are two decks that can run them: You can run a descendant of
Sligh
or you can run a descendant of
Ponza. That’s it. Try anything else and your mana can’t provide the heat.
For anyone wanting red to play well with others, there’s a metalcraft subtheme of Kuldotha Phoenix, Kuldotha Rebirth and Galvanic Blast and the wild-card Furnace Celebration. But if red is going to shine, chances are it’ll have to do so on its own.