This week in the Academy, we get the rest of the Red cards out of the way. We discover the difference between two and three, the difference between Lightning and Lightning, we Shatter some illusions, and preach the virtues of patience. Let’s get started.
Plus point number one to this, is that it’s Instant. From the other side of the table, even if you try to factor it into your combat calculations, what tends to happen is that you say, ‘ok, if you have the Fury, my guy dies’. That makes this an actual piece of removal under many circumstances.
Plus point number two is the cost — at one mana, we’ve got nothing to complain about, and there’s also a tiny little ruse you can do with cards like this. Suppose you’re playing Sealed, and have two forests, three mountains, and a plains on the board. You don’t have Kindled Fury in hand, nor Lightning Bolt, but you wouldn’t mind your opponent thinking you have. You tap both forests and all three mountains to cast your five-drop spell, leaving your plains open, but at the last moment, you adjust, leaving the one red open instead. Why you did that is something your better opponents will be taking notice of. Let’s be clear, this is a really small play that will only pay dividends occasionally, but every so often, they’ll attack differently, or even not at all, because of what you’ve represented by visibly deliberately leaving your red mana open.
The downside is obvious — it’s utterly useless if you have no monsters in play. Except, of course, if they have an Illusionary Servant in play, when you get to kill it just by targeting it. Usually, cards like this don’t see a lot of play, even in lower Limited echelons, but judging by M10 Drafts on Magic Online, this is seeing plenty. Bear it in mind against the Red mage.
‘Bear it in mind against the Red mage’ applies in spades to this card. Rarely are cards so utterly single-minded and utterly without variation. Other than propping up a creaky chair or using one to write a shopping list on, I can’t think of a single creative use for Lava Axe.
It deals five damage, at Sorcery speed, to your opponent. Oh, all right then, here’s the single creative use for Lava Axe — deal five damage to yourself. Awesome.
To be fair, the severe non-versatility isn’t the central point of this card. The five damage is. Since the card doesn’t impact the battlefield, it’s generally overlooked in Draft, meaning that you have ample opportunity to pick these up late in the day. If you have a fast Red-White deck, packed with Silvercoat Lions and Veteran Armorsmiths and Stormfront Pegasus(sussusses), having multiples of these can push you over the top.
More often, you’re much better off playing an actual monster, that does all those good monstery things like attacking and blocking. More than most cards, Lava Axe is one that you can make successful for you, but it won’t be successful for you by accident. You need to position it in the right deck. Carefully.
‘Format-defining’ is a big claim, and almost always incorrect. Even so, Lightning Bolt is the kind of card that gets into that discussion. In Limited, where the pace is rather more forgiving, this isn’t actually that great a card, despite its efficiency. It needs help, after all, to kill any given big monster, and as such, it fails dismally compared to something like Doom Blade.
It’s in Constructed that this is so influential. This card belongs in history to the very start of the game, when cards were arguably at their most brutal, and powerful. Three damage without downside at Instant speed for a solitary Red mana is a phenomenal deal, and guarantees that four of these go straight into any deck with removal or burn as a theme.
That then has repercussions around other decks. Lightning Bolt is ready to rumble from Turn 1, and has the chance to speed up the Format by switching to ‘in your face’ burn mode. Whatever monsters you choose to play, they either need to be Bolt-proof, or perhaps not essential to your plans. If Control is your option, you need to deal with the fact that their Burn spells are going to be cheaper than your Counterspells, and that’s never good news for a Control player.
‘Format-defining’ really is a big claim, but this is a major addition to the Standard environment, and another quality weapon in an even bigger gene pool, Extended.
Lightning apparently can strike twice, but ‘Lightning’ is about all this shares with the previous entry. I’ve never, ever seen this make a Constructed decklist, and it tends to go very late in Draft as well. In a way, that’s surprising, since it has two nice things going for it.
The first is four power. That sets it comfortably out in front of the weenies and the middle of the pack, and into the same range as cards like Serra Angel or Air Elemental or Stampeding Rhino. Given that it isn’t a great card, it can deal with a surprising range of actually good monsters coming across the battlefield.
The second bit of good news is Haste, making this an ideal candidate for a topdeck when the battlefield’s empty. Four mana for four damage, plus taking out the next monster they put in the way, is a very good deal.
The problem comes on the back end, where one toughness is ultra-vulnerable, and the Haste ability is only a temporary solution to this. Weakness and Sparkmage Apprentice can take this out after one throw of the dice, and it says a lot that something entirely average like a Sage Owl can happily trade for this without breaking stride, and that’s without even looking to other thoroughly average cards like Wall Of Bone or Drudge Skeletons, either of which won’t even be forced to trade.
Starting to suspect this isn’t very good? You’re right, it isn’t.
This is an interesting kind of card, in that it’s easy to see opportunities for it to be good, and yet it isn’t easy to see how you can get to those situations where the opportunities arise. Apart from some high-end Rare stuff, Red doesn’t take to the air very well, and this does, so although a 3/3 Flyer isn’t something Blue would get especially excited about, the fact that Red is the ‘manufacturer’ makes it a nice addition to the Red cast list.
It’s the middle ability that’s most interesting, and most problematic in manoeuvring it into position. If you happen to be facing an aggressive opponent, this takes care of business beautifully, being both halves of the ‘stabilise and take control’ equation. Three damage is enough to take out most parts of the early game, and if you’ve started with this in your opening hand, you’ll have played cautiously, actively inviting your opponent onto the front foot.
What you might not like is the three damage to both players, since there’s a fundamental disconnect between wanting to be on the defensive and wanting to reduce both life totals simultaneously. Since this damage happens whenever Magma Phoenix hits the bin, it isn’t the best monster to treat as a finisher. Really, 5/5 is the gold standard for a big fat monster to close the deal, and they don’t generally hurt you when things go wrong.
If it’s a little too vulnerable for Constructed, it’s also awkward in Limited. If you have time to cast it, and start using it, your opponents have time to start making monsters it can’t kill. Yes, you can put it in front of a 6/6, and the 6/6 will die when your Phoenix goes up in flames, but you’ll still take three damage, and if you want to bring it back, you’ll mostly be spending an entire turn to do so, often an entire turn you won’t have.
It looks like it could be so much more, but it mostly ends up as a 3/3 Flyer in a color that’s happy to have one.
One of the ultimate symmetrical cards, this has been around forever. As a lesson in how to turn symmetry to your one-sided advantage, this is a great teaching tool, though not necessarily a great card. Here are some of the things we can do:
Make sure we play this in a hyper-aggressive deck, so that when it comes time for them to stabilise, our opponents discover that casting Planar Cleansing has a very nasty downside. Handily complementing our previous idea, make sure our deck is full of cheap spells. If we cast Elite Vanguard, and they cast Essence Scatter, that’s a race we’re winning. Still dovetailing nicely, let’s put some burn spells in our deck. We’ll cast Lightning Bolt and deal you three. You want to cast Safe Passage? Oops, you took three anyway.
Everything so far has been about making our opponents take damage, but there are ways to mitigate the downside for our own life total. Finding alternate ways to cast spells is the obvious one, using Artifact mana to cast our spells. Then there’s damage prevention spells. If only Guardian Seraph didn’t have that tedious ‘opponent controls’ wording, we’d be on a winner, since the one damage would be prevented every time. If we’re facing a Manabarbs, then Guardian Seraph gets the job done every time.
Although less optimal — it’s much better to make your opponents dead than you to be not dead — you could always add some kind of lifegain package to your deck, either by playing lifegain cards that are cheaper in cost than the life they grant you (Angel’s Mercy nets +3 life for example), or by making sure the monsters you play have lifelink built-in (something many players are happy to do with a card like the magnificent Baneslayer Angel).
This is the kind of card that tinkering deckbuilders love to fool around with, since there are so many fun approaches to making it work. If you’re interested in deckbuilding, this is a tremendous card to spend some time with.
And this isn’t.
Aside from being the 93rd card that can kill Illusionary Servant (a message I feel has now been successfully conveyed, therefore meaning I shall cease to reference the ‘target’ and ‘Illusionary Servant’ interaction), this is a straight-forward Limited card that looks to punch through the last few points of damage once your deck has been overmatched. In Sealed, this is a perfectly viable strategy, since it’s a slow enough Format that players tend to get their board-dominating bombs into place, and those bombs tend to utterly, er, dominate the board. Once down, all thought of attacking through them is often snuffed out, so a simple card like Panic Attack can unlock the defences just long enough to sneak in the victory.
Once upon a time, this card was Blue, which frankly was a little bit naughty, since Blue had so many other goodies to play with. It sits much more cosily in Red, where you too can now join the approximately six million people who have managed to make mistakes with this card. Yes, when it comes to demonstrating that you’re new to the game of Magic, nothing screams louder than the moment when your opponent says, ‘Your go’ and you go right ahead and untap with an active Prodigal Pyromancer in play.
Boys and girls, this card, this one right here, is the reason God invented the end of turn step. It’s there precisely so that you can look around the battlefield, check to see if there’s anything that needs a little ‘prodding’ (like a Merfolk Looter for example), and if there isn’t, ‘ping’ your opponent for one damage.
Unless you are a very lucky person, you are going to lose games you should have won because you misplayed with this card. Remembering what to do with this card is right up there in my Life Fundamentals list, which goes something like this:
Drug Dealing — Have I remembered that Malaysia has an unsympathetic approach?
Driving — Do I have enough fuel to get where I’m going?
Adultery — Am I sure she’s really eighteen, and not my second cousin?
End of Turn — Do I have an active Prodigal Pyromancer?
The use of ‘I’ in the previous list in no way reflects my real life. Except the last three.
Here are two numbers. Your task is to work out whether they’re the same, or different. Here they are:
Two.
Three.
Yes, they’re different, and in Magic, the difference between two damage and three damage is absolutely huge. Pyroclasm, as you will have spotted, deals two damage to everything. That’s fine in Sealed, and potentially amazing in Draft, where you can find yourself facing a White-Green deck packed with small men, a Blue-Black deck packed with small Black men and two-toughness Blue flyers, or a Red mage who’s playing with Lightning Elemental because they haven’t read The Academy, and Prodigal Pyromancer because they have.
Conventional wisdom says that Constructed is the place where this absolutely kicks ass, because sweeping the early board for only two mana is a terrific play. Turn 1 Goldmeadow Stalwart, turn 2 another pair of 2/2s, two mana later they’re all in the bin. Three for one, easy-peasy.
Conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and this is where the difference between two and three comes home to roost. Against an army of 2/2s, Pyroclasm fits the bill perfectly, but against 3/3s… not so much. That’s where you turn to a card like Firespout. Well, actually Firespout, come to think of it. Although it costs more, it does more too, and the lesson here is that you have to know the field you’re likely to face before you can work out whether you need your boardsweeper to deal two (Pyroclasm), three (Firespout) or infinite (Wrath Of God/Planar Cleansing).
I really want to get somebody else to write this entry, because I loathe 1/1s with (essentially) no abilities. I don’t care that it only costs one. I don’t care that it has Haste. I just hate it.
That doesn’t help us learn, though, so I’ll try and set this aside for a moment, and point out that this is as quick a Turn 1 as you’re likely to get from a creature. I’ll point out that if you wait a turn to cast it on Turn 2, you can ‘turn on’ your Jackal Familiar that you laid Turn 1.
I’ll point out that this trades with some powerfully-better monsters, like Elite Vanguard, and plenty of 1/1s that are mostly being played for abilities, but which could nibble away at your life if left unopposed. It even trades with Lightning Elemental (which says a bunch about that particular card).
I’ll also point out that it’s a (surprise!) Goblin, which interacts with things like Goblin Chieftain (meaning it can REALLY attack the turn it comes onto the battlefield), or Siege-Gang Commander, at which point it actually becomes rather good.
I’ll point out that Goblin decks like a card like Coat of Arms, and that this fits in really well on the curve, because your one-drops (depending on the format) aren’t exactly queuing up round the block.
I’ll point out that some Constructed decks have used Raging Goblin to good effect.
And now I’ll go right back to hating it, if that’s all right with you.
This is one of the relatively few cards that reward the Red mage for the degree of commitment they show to the color. Armored Ascension did this for White, while Black, as we’ve seen, is heaving with cards that work best when you’re prepared to be utterly Black. This card, though, isn’t primarily a reward for the Red mage. Oh no. This card is a ‘hands-off’ to the other colors.
A few years ago, the Lorwyn Block pulled off one of the greatest Draft design ‘tricks’ ever. By making decks depend on so-called Tribal synergies (where the Elves, Goblins, Giants, Kithkin, Merfolk and so on all worked best within their own grouping), it was possible for Draft decks to be stupendously powerful, because the cards that were going to be good in your deck didn’t have a home elsewhere.
Everyone loves removal, and that’s something that Red is traditionally really good at. The problem is, even in a deck that features 9 Islands and 8 Forests out of a 40-card Limited deck, there’s very little downside to changing that to 8 Islands, 7 Forests and 2 Mountains if you happen to open a couple of Lightning Bolts in packs two and three. Earthquake, Fireball, Pyroclasm….with just a single Red mana commitment, these are all viable pickings for other decks.
Seismic Strike gets around this, since no other deck is going to go to all the trouble of splashing a card that’s going to do a couple of points of damage at best. What’s particularly neat about the design is that not only does this allow the heavy Red player to get this piece of removal late(ish) in Draft, it’s also really, really good for them. A mono-Red player could certainly expect to kill a 5/5 with it, putting it on a par with the best removal in the set.
An obviously narrow card, Shatter is a card that ends up in Constructed Sideboards when there isn’t anything better available, and usually, there’s something better available. Red and Green often go together, and Green has access to cards like Naturalize, which adds the versatility to go after Enchantments as well as Artifacts. Then you’ve got cards like Ancient Grudge, which give you the chance to go after multiples. Only rarely, therefore, does Shatter make the cut.
In Limited, this is a card you’ll be grateful to have in your Sideboard when you’ve just been defeated by a Platinum Angel, a Rod of Ruin, or maybe a Whispersilk Cloak, which is seeing a bucketload of play in Draft online.
Newer players will often gravitate towards playing cards like this in their Sealed Maindeck, on the basis that they don’t want to go into battle without an answer to Artifacts. If you’re playing Mirrodin Block, that’s a good plan. Most of the time, it isn’t, and that’s because the math doesn’t justify it.
You might indeed get beaten by one of those Artifacts I’ve mentioned in Game 1, and your Shatter sitting forlornly in the Sideboard is going to make you regret not playing it. The fact is, though, that Artifacts begin at Uncommon in M10, where Whispersilk Cloak and Rod of Ruin shouldn’t often determine the whole game, even if they ultimately deliver the end stroke. At Rare, you’re mostly dealing with irritants like Pithing Needle, Magebane Armor, or conceivably Coat of Arms (at a stretch). Platinum Angel is Mythic, and you expect to lose to Mythics occasionally, and the one Mythic Artifact you really want to bin — Darksteel Colossus — doesn’t go down to Shatter anyway.
This little analysis is something you should do every time a new set comes out. Work out how many sensible targets there are for your Artifact and/or Enchantment removal, check their rarity, and then see how often your Shatter is going to be a dead card in your main deck.
This time around, it’s never going to be in your starting 40, unless your Draft went badly wrong.
Here’s the kind of Flyer that Red excels at. It’s enormous, it’s Rare, and it ends games in a hurry. It suffers from the thing that all (non-Shroud) monsters suffer from — a well-timed piece of removal — but other than that, which you can do little about anyway, the worst case for this is that it takes down something like a Wind Drake and Snapping Drake as a two-for-one.
Much more likely, it obliterates their one remaining flyer, and then obliterates their life total. You’re automatically in the eight-to-ten damage range as soon as you cast it, and it’s almost unthinkable that two hits won’t get the job done. Apart from the double Red commitment, nothing is going to give you a pause before slamming this into your Sealed deck, and working out what other 39 cards are going with it.
In terms of flavor, Goblins are often seen as the comedic face of Magic, with powerhouse cards like Mogg Fanatic, Goblin Warchief, or Goblin Sharpshooter the exception rather than the rule. Siege-Gang Commander is right near the top of the pile.
We’ve seen how cards that ‘explode’ multiple permanents onto the battlefield can be really tough to deal with, and this brings three playmates along for the ride. Whereas Captain Of The Watch delivers teammates with a direct punch as 2/2s (while it’s still around), Siege-Gang only brings you 1/1s. What these 1/1s provide, however, is the ability to do some exploding of their own.
Although you’ll probably have to wait until your following turn to take advantage, simply because you won’t have spare mana, two mana at a time allows you to hurl the tokens at opposing monsters or direct into the opponent’s face. Siege-Gang isn’t particular, in that it doesn’t insist on using just the tokens. Any Goblin will do, and that means the playability of cards like Raging Goblin improve, as well as presenting a nice bonus for already-playable cards like Goblin Piker.
If you happen to have Goblin Chieftain and Siege-Gang Commander in the same Sealed Pool, you’re in for happy times, because the Chieftain effectively allows you to dump nine power of Haste Goblins into play for just five mana. The Siege-Gang weighs in at 3/3, and all the 1/1s become 2/2s. Losing from that position is going to be very hard.
In fact, this type of interaction is so hard to lose from that players flirt with it from time to time in Constructed. You really do get a lot for your five mana, but as always with Constructed, five mana is where you want to be doing things that are positively obscene, and a Siege-Gang plus three doesn’t always qualify.
I’m fairly sure there’s a Karate Kid reference waiting to happen, but as Captain Kirk might have said, discretion is the better part of velour, so I’ll leave it.
Patience. That’s what this card requires, heaps and heaps of patience.
When you open up with a Turn 1 monster, you might be tempted to lay this Turn 2, and deal a bonus one to the dome. Please don’t do this. Patience.
When they cast Awakener Druid, you might be tempted to kill it, and then use the Sparkmage Apprentice to block the resulting Treefolk for a turn. This isn’t hideous, but really, please don’t do this. Patience.
When they open up with Raging Goblin, you might fancy offing it at the earliest opportunity. For the love of God, please don’t do this. Patience.
Soul Warden, Stormfront Pegasus, Merfolk Looter, Child Of Night, Kelinore Bat, Royal Assassin, Prodigal Pyromancer, Viashino Spearhunter, Birds Of Paradise, Elvish Piper, Llanowar Elves.
That’s a list of eleven one-toughness monsters that you’re going to want to put in the bin, and only four of them (Stormfront Pegasus, Child Of Night, Kelinore Bat and Viashino Spearhunter) are likely to get involved in combat, making them candidates for cards like Assassinate or Divine Verdict.
There is a time for casting Sparkmage Apprentice when they have nothing on board, and that’s when they’re at one, or maybe two, life. Other than that, what you really need for optimising this card, is… oh what was it again?… Oh yeah…
Patience.
This card looks a little complicated, and it is, but before we embark on what it’s good for, let’s remind ourselves that a 3/4 for four mana is absolutely fine, a clear upgrade on the identically-priced Canyon Minotaur, which we assessed last week as an almost-always playable. Sometimes, therefore, we can just ignore all that wordy stuff in the text box, and do the good old-fashioned stuff like attacking and blocking.
Still, if we want to get even better value from our man here, we need to explore all that wordiness. First off, you need to be sure that you don’t mind the creature you select dying, because that’s going to happen come end of turn, barring some bizarre Indestructibility sequence. Initially, we have a restriction of two toughness, so the real heavy-hitters are out of range. That might seem a bit lame, but it’s actually a deliberate design choice.
This card isn’t meant to let you hurl something enormous at your opponent (how would the Giant pick the creature up?). Instead, it’s meant to let you take a small monster from obscurity, launch it into orbit, where it gets to tangle with an unsuspecting flyer, which it crashes into at terminal velocity. Flavorwise, this is awesome, blended beautifully by both card art and flavor text.
If we want to win, though, we don’t do it through flavor, we do it through cheating the system. There are two ways we can do this with Stone Giant. First, and simplest, is to make the Stone Giant more powerful. Stick an Unholy Strength on him, and you can allow him to fling four toughness of guy into battle. That brings something like a Craw Wurm into play.
You might be wondering why we wouldn’t just be attacking our opponent with a 5/5 Stone Giant, and that would be a good thing to be wondering. The second way to cheat the system is much more efficient.
The way Stone Giant works, once it has ‘picked up’ the target creature, it doesn’t bother to complain about any excess weight that might turn up later on. In other words, if you target your Vampire Aristocrat, which has two toughness, Stone Giant will have done its work no matter how many creatures you subsequently sacrifice to the Aristocrat. Let your Goblin Piker take to the air as a 2/1, and then cast Giant Growth to make it a 5/4. Let’s state this clearly:
The game checks that your target creature is legal (ie has toughness less than Stone Giants power) once and once only. From that point on, your creature will have Flying until end of turn regardless of how its toughness increases.
See? It was worth reading all that text. And don’t forget, just to keep him happy, Stone Giant likes to attack and block too.
If you’re reasonably new to the game, this tip isn’t something you’re going to find the mental spare capacity to use for quite some time, if most people I know are any guide. To start with, Magic is absolutely not a ‘game of inches’. You’ll be losing games by not attacking with unblockable guys, not pointing a lethal Fireball at your opponent, trying to Negate a creature, and any of the millions of ways the game has to make you look and feel foolish.
Eventually though, you’ll stop doing these things, and then the game becomes a much tighter contest, and at the highest levels it can be very hard to find a genuine edge. That’s why Draft is such a popular Format among the best in the world, because there’s so much room for outplaying your opponents before you even finish building your deck. So what does this have to do with Trumpet Blast?
Well, one thing Pros do really well is imagine the possibilities. All the possibilities. When your opponent attacks, and you have bigger men, you should be screaming ‘trick’ at yourself, and working out exactly how variations on a theme of Kindled Fury, Giant Growth, Trumpet Blast et al are going to impact you. Needless to say, if you let maybe three monsters through, this is going to put a massive dent in your life total.
What Pros do is keep a running total in their heads of cards like this while they’re drafting. Because it’s fundamentally not that great a proposition, there’s a good chance that you’ll get the chance to see every copy there is in any given Draft, since they may easily be left in the pack as late as pack eight, which is the last one you’ll get to see. As a Common, there are, on average, 2.4 copies in any given Draft, which in reality means mostly two or three copies per Draft. Count them as you see them, and if you play someone playing Red, be ready.
You may not be equipped to deal with the card directly. Perhaps you have no counterspell, or Instant removal to counteract some of the negative impact. What you can do, however, is set yourself a life total that you aren’t ideally prepared to drop below. An unblocked pair of Wind Drakes is eight damage with Trumpet Blast. As you can tell, although this isn’t quite as ‘oops, I win’ as a card like Sleep, it can still easily wreck you. Not nice, so be prepared.
Elite Vanguard is a 2/1 for one mana.
Coral Merfolk is a 2/1 for two mana.
Viashino Spearhunter is a 2/1 for three mana.
In Sealed, Viashino Spearhunter is the best, almost every time.
In Draft, Elite Vanguard can be good, but it’s against exactly that kind of deck that Viashino Spearhunter shines, totally shutting down an offence that consists of Vanguards and Veteran Swordmsiths and Silvercoat Lions.
In Constructed, three mana is just too high a price to pay, even for First Strike. In part, this is because Constructed involved far less monster on monster interaction, and partly it’s due to the fundamental speed of Constructed. But in Limited, First Strike is a cracking ability, and makes this well worth playing.
Wall Of Fire
As we’ve gone through the colors, the Walls have been getting better. White brought us Wall Of Faith, which was hard to kill, but couldn’t actually bin anything coming at it. Neither could Wall Of Frost in Blue, although it did put anything brave enough to tangle with it into cryonic suspension for a turn. When we reached Black, Wall Of Bone delivered the ability to off an opposing monster, provided it had a single point of toughness.
That brings us to Wall Of Fire, and this doesn’t mess around. With enough Red mana, almost anything can be sent packing, and the chances are you won’t have to spend a turn pumping all your mana into this, because in the early and midgame nothing is going to want to get involved with this. That represents a huge potential saving on your life total, and against an aggressive opening of one and two-drops from your opponent, a Turn 3 Wall Of Fire practically comes complete with the sound effects of the brakes being applied. Comfortably the best of the bunch.
I’m writing this entry at one in the morning, so maybe my overall fatigue is showing, but I honestly get a headache just looking at all that rules text. By definition, something has to have the largest amount of legalese attached to it, and this, please God, is it. Seventy words is a hell of a lot to wade through, especially for a card that has almost no conceivable use in Limited.
Constructed is a different matter though. It’s not often that a card refers to ‘permanents’ rather than a specific subset like creatures or Artifacts and so on. That gives us the chance to out-permanent our opponents. What we’re looking for is permanents that we don’t desperately care about losing. If you’ve had a look at the work Jacob van Lunen has been doing on a budget Warp World deck, you’ve seen that he uses cards like Trace Of Abundance and Fertile Ground to help get up to eight mana, and also then to be redundant permanents when the Warp World hits.
>From there, it’s all about having a ton of entering the battlefield abilities, whether it’s lifegain (Kitchen Finks), dealing damage (Murderous Redcap), drawing cards (Elvish Visionary, Regal Force), creating more permanents for a subsequent Warp World (Siege-Gang Commander), or having five damage to spray around on top of a 5/5 Flying beatstick (Bogardan Hellkite).
The massive amounts of synergy in Jake’s decks are a thing of beauty, and in its way, so is Warp World. I just wish it didn’t take so long to tell us about it.
Yes, it’s my mouth, because it’s now quarter past one in the morning. In terms of playability at a serious level, it’s possible that we’ve saved the worst for last. We all know by now that five mana is the point that you want really good things to happen. Your opponent sacrificing one of their land, when they should have a minimum of four in play at the time (barring manascrew), absolutely doesn’t equate to something really good.
You don’t even get to choose what land they get rid of, so if they have four Mountains and a lone Plains, there’s no prizes for guessing that they won’t be without White mana when Yawning Fissure resolves.
Neither of these truly reflects the fundamental problem of Land Destruction, or LD as it’s known. Put simply, as soon as your opponent has enough mana to cast their crucial spells, all your efforts are at an end. Given that some decks are going to get cracking with one and two mana, you can see how impossibly far off five mana seems.
The way round that is to pack your deck with LD spells, the idea being to blow up a land via mana acceleration on Turn 2 (with a three casting cost LD spell), Turns Three, Four, and Five, by which time you’ve probably/possibly dealt with all the land they started with in their opening hand. You meanwhile, are up to four or five mana. What makes LD so awkward is that you must take advantage of that mana advantage, and every time you draw another LD spell, you’re not getting closer to winning.
Historically, the last time LD was good involved a Turn One Slith Firewalker via Chrome Mox, and backing it up with a string of LD, with the game ending before the opponent could force their way out of the screw. Slith Firewalker and Chrome Mox were in Mirrodin, and left Standard several years ago.
Fans of LD, the good times are not back again, at least not judging by Yawning Fissure.
…
Next week, we set to work on the final color, Green, including one of the best mana producers of all time, the best Planeswalker by a country mile, and a lifegain spell that I would actually rather burn down my house than play.
Until next week, as ever, thanks for reading…
R.