Welcome back. Last time, we got the ball rolling by looking at the first few cards from M10. This time, we kick into high gear with a detailed look at all the rest of the White cards. If you’re a newer player, this is aimed absolutely at you, but don’t feel you have to wade through the whole thing at once. Play with the cards. Form some opinions, and then come have a look at the entries that particularly interest you. However you choose to use the M10 Academy, have fun.
Another removal spell, this costs twice as much as Celestial Purge, and has a very different set of restrictions. On the plus side, it gets to kill anything that attacks, no matter what color, and no matter how big. When your opponent is attacking for the win with a huge Nightmare, Divine Verdict robs them during combat. It’s less exciting when it comes to killing a blocker, because once your creature becomes blocked, it stays blocked, and that means you have to wait at least another turn before you can get the damage you wanted through (unless you have a monster with Trample, which is a fantastic ability that tends to go to Green monsters. We’ll get there eventually.)
It gets worse. Plenty of creatures are best when they don’t get involved in combat at all. Blinding Mage can sit and tap a monster all day, and your Divine Verdict will never touch it. Indeed, high-level players will sometimes decline the opportunity to attack a defenceless opponent with something like Blinding Mage, precisely because they don’t want it to fall victim to cards like Divine Verdict or Assassinate.
In short, the drawbacks are sufficient that this kind of card rarely sees Constructed play, but in Sealed, every bit of removal helps, and sooner or later they’re likely to get involved in combat, and then you deliver the Verdict.
When a card has no abilities, and is literally just a power and toughness for a given cost, we call it a ‘vanilla’ creature. While that accurately reflects that it’s not too exotic, and won’t have you reaching for the rulebook too often, you should examine the numbers carefully. This has exactly the same stats as Savannah Lions, which was a key part of many White Constructed decks.
It turns out that putting two power into play on the first turn is a very powerful opening, and is the first step in a ‘weenie rush’ strategy that looks to make lots of cheap monsters and smash face very, very quickly. In Sealed, you won’t see that many of them running around, since they’re Uncommon, and Sealed is slow enough that small monsters quickly get outclassed. In Draft, they’re likely to form part of an Aggressive deck based in White, often with support from Red for removal.
It’s in Constructed that they’re really likely to shine. Remember that, unlike Limited play, when you bring your own deck to the tournament you’re allowed to play up to four copies of any one card. That means four chances to see Elite Vanguard in your opening hand of seven cards. Right now, a small White deck is very popular, called Kithkin, based on the tribe from the Lorwyn Block. In those sets, you get cards like Goldmeadow Stalwart, which also has two power for just one mana (with a possible drawback, but don’t worry about that for now.) Suddenly, you have eight cards that would make a great start to your gameplan of quick monsters and kill, kill, kill.
Any time a card does more than it ‘should’ for its cost, it gets to go on the shortlist of playable cards for Constructed. Elite Vanguard fits that nicely.
When veteran players are feeling a bit sniffy about a card, they might describe it as ‘situational.’ In literal terms, this is a daft thing to say, since every card in the game is situational, since it has variable usefulness in assorted, yes, situations. But what old-timers mean when they say that is that the situations where the card is good aren’t likely to be that many. It’s rarely an authentic answer to a problem, and is more often a partial or temporary solution.
If you’re getting beaten to death by an enormous flyer, putting it on top of your opponent’s library is basically going to amount to a single turn reprieve. Your opponent will just recast it, and go right back to smashing you to death. Essentially, you’ve discarded a card, and are back at square one. That’s not good.
I said earlier that Excommunicate offers a temporary solution, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want – Tempo. This is a strategic subject that has been endlessly discussed by some of the greatest theorists of the game, and now isn’t the time to give you chapter and verse. The important thing to grasp is that sometimes simply putting your opponent back a turn is sufficient.
Suppose you have a 4/4 Air Elemental, and your opponent is at 10. He makes his own Air Elemental. After you Excommunicate it, he’s on 6, and will almost certainly die to an alpha strike the following turn. (An Alpha Strike is where you turn all your creatures sideways in an attempt to finish the game in one gigantic attack.) Although it’s true that he can just recast his flyer, that costs him five mana just like it did on the previous turn, and that means that he probably won’t be able to do anything else, like make more flyers to answer the Wind Drake you’ve cast on the same turn as the Excommunicate.
Excommunicate is a Tempo card, plain and simple. It’s horrible when you’re behind, but can seal the deal when you’re ahead. Oh, and casting multiples in succession is likely to make even the mildest of opponents threaten bodily harm to your person. You have been warned.
These kind of instants are known as ‘combat tricks,’ because that’s mostly when they’re used to best effect. You attack with a group of 2/2s, they block with a group of 2/2s and – ta da! – your 2/2s are really 3/3s, and all their guys die. Sweet. Of course, it doesn’t always happen like that. If you’re a good player, you’re aware of the kind of tricks your opponent might be up to, and the more you play the more you’ll become aware of what a trap ‘smells’ like, if you will.
One of the good things about Glorious Charge is that it only costs two mana, so you should still be able to do most of what you want on your own turn and still be able to leave the two mana ‘open’ (i.e. untapped and ready to call upon). It’s also true that it has uses outside combat. Suppose your opponent casts Pyroclasm. Both your 2/2s will die. Glorious Charge stops that happening, turning them into temporary 3/3s until the Pyroclasm damage goes away. One thing to avoid for the most part is to simply cast this early in a Sealed game to get a few extra damage through. Combat tricks are precious commodities, and putting your opponent from 17 to 13 rather than 15 is most often irrelevant. Putting your opponent to either two or zero… now that’s the time for a Glorious Charge.
After a while playing the game, you’ll be able to guess what kind of abilities certain cards have, and it’s no surprise that a Sentinel has Vigilance, meaning it gets to attack and still be ready to defend the following turn. Flyers with only one power are pretty unexciting, so the virtue to this card is the three toughness, meaning it can fend off any 2/2 flyer without getting its feathers in a twist. Even in Limited, this sort of thing is pretty mediocre, but any kind of evasion is useful in Sealed play, so it’s probably playable there.
Here’s where you see the rarity system coming to the fore. We’ve just looked at the Griffin Sentinel. It’s a Common card. Next up is Guardian Seraph, which is Rare. For just one mana more than the Sentinel, you turn 1/3 into 3/4, and in exchange for the admittedly nice Vigilance, you get to prevent the first point of damage anything deals to you. The fact that it can come down as early as turn 4 means that this is a legitimate threat in Limited, and can quickly outclass opponents unless deadified. A really nice Limited card. [It also has some use in Constructed, if your opponent is relying on attacking with lots of small men. — Craig.]
Traditionally, this kind of small trick has been strictly for Limited use. However, even though it only costs one, it can do potentially devastating things on the battlefield. In essence, it gets to act as a kind of spell reflector, sending damage spinning off in a direction your opponent hopefully won’t like. You get to turn their removal spell against one of their own creatures at a tiny cost. It’s also worth noting the two words ‘or player’ near the end. Play enough online, and you’re going to find yourself winning games with cards like this, as their burn spell ‘accidentally’ puts them to zero.
Holy Strength has been around for as long as Magic has been around, and most of the time that Magic has been around, Holy Strength has been rubbish. How come? Isn’t +1/+2 worth something? And isn’t a single White mana as cheap as it gets? Well, first of all, yes, one mana is very cheap (and there have only ever been a handful of cards out of more than 10,000 in the game that have actually cost no mana). And yes, +1/+2 makes your creature a bit more of a hitter and a lot tougher to kill with creature-on-creature damage. The trouble is, just like Armored Ascension, you open yourself up to putting two of your cards in the graveyard for just one of theirs. By most measures, Assassinate isn’t a particularly exciting piece of removal, but after one hit from your Holy Strength guy, it gets to put both your cards in the bin.
Just like any card in the game, there are times when Holy Strength could be good. Having a 3/3 flyer facing down a 4/4 flyer turns the math in your favor if you make your man a 4/5. Getting in a couple of bonus points of damage in a race can be valuable. So it’s not that Holy Strength has no uses, as the team at Wizards work incredibly hard to make sure that every card has some role to play, but most of the time, even in Sealed play, there are going to be other cards that clamor more loudly to be included in your deck.
There have been plenty of cards down the years that grant +1/+1 bonuses across the board. Indeed, that phrase ‘across the board’ was historically highly appropriate, since the card that started it all, Crusade, granted its gift right the way across the battlefield, and if that meant all the opposing creatures getting better right along with yours, too bad.
Glorious Anthem improved on Crusade (apart from us losing the ability to count the number of Knights in the original artwork) by ensuring that the bonus only came our way. Now we get Honor of the Pure, weighing in at a seriously exciting two mana. Why is that exciting? Well, remember how we talked about Elite Vanguard costing just one, like Goldmeadow Stalwart, and how that was going to be a nice start for our rush deck? Well, on turn 3, it’s possible that we can drop Honor of the Pure and get a cheeky extra man onto the battlefield play as well. With Glorious Anthem, that was your whole turn 3 right there.
This is the kind of card that’s best in Constructed, where you can tailor your deck to best take advantage of it. In Sealed play, you’ll almost certainly be running creatures in other colors, so this won’t impact those at all. In addition, because Limited is so creature-heavy, any time you play a spell that isn’t a removal spell you need to consider very carefully whether it’s worth a place in your deck. On its own, Honor of the Pure will never attack your opponent, or block. It’s only as good as the creatures you already have in play, and they have to be White. In Constructed, the phrase ‘White creatures’ might as well read ‘your creatures,’ because you’re going to make sure that all your little men are White to take full advantage.
With all the exciting cards for White Weenie already in Standard, making little White men not so little seems like good times.
I guess it makes sense that a creature with Indestructibility would be Indestructible, and it turns out that Indestructible is a Keyword in Magic. So what does it mean? Let’s take it from the card:
‘Effects that say destroy don’t destroy that permanent. An indestructible creature can’t be destroyed by damage.’
Okay, so we’re basically saying an Indestructible guy is tough to kill. That’s fine, but to many people Indestructible smacks of immortality, and that certainly isn’t the case in Magic. There are all sorts of ways for an Indestructible creature to bite the dust. We’ve met a few of them already. Can you Excommunicate him back to the top of the library? Yep. Oh, and Indestructibility would go to the graveyard at that point. Can you cast Celestial Purge on the creature? Assuming it’s Black or Red, you certainly can. It might look like your Indestructible man is being destroyed, but Celestial Purge Exiles, it doesn’t destroy. A card like Fleshbag Marauder insists that you sacrifice a creature. If your only creature is Indestructible, that’s the one that has to go. And if the creature’s toughness ever hits zero, maybe with Weakness? That’s the end of it too.
Believe me, I didn’t have to think hard to come up with ways to get rid of this super-powerful Indestructible monstrosity. If you’re going to play with a card like this, even in Sealed, you need to have a very specific and compelling reason for doing so. Chances are, you’ll have neither.
Lifelink
I’d like to think that many of you reading this are completely unaware that some rules got kicked around when M10 got released. The good news is that Lifelink almost certainly works exactly the way you think it will. Here’s the wording on the card:
‘Damage dealt by the creature also causes its controller to gain that much life.’
Simple really. It’s a kind of Magic version of the Cole Porter song, ‘I Get A Kick Out of You,’ which probably marks me out as older than I’d care to admit. It doesn’t matter whether your creature is attacking or blocking, the lifegain still happens, and it all happens at the same time as whatever other damage would be dealt. So, if you’re at 3 life, and about to be hit for 5 damage, but have also blocked with a 3/3 with Lifelink, at the end of combat you’ll be sitting on exactly 1 life.
It’s fair to say that Lifelink is often a minor ability within the game. It’s the kind of ability that most often comes attached to a creature already as part of its appeal, like Baneslayer Angel. Having to spend an entire card just to graft this ability onto one of your creatures is probably a waste of a card, even at the lowest power levels of the game. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to find a home for it though…
A lot of times in the game, you’ll find that a powerful ability almost never resolves, because the opponent is going to do everything short of cutting off their right arm to make sure it doesn’t happen. In those cases, it’s the simple threat of the ability coming to fruition that is so powerful and game-altering. That’s the case, in Limited, with a card like Lightwielder Paladin. As we’ve noted, having First Strike makes a creature much tougher to kill through simple blocking. Should the Paladin ever make it through the defences, it gets to become Celestial Purge for a moment. And then he goes right back to being a nasty 4/4 First Striker. Faced with this, your Black/Red opponent is going to regularly throw bodies in front of the Paladin just to stop the ability kicking in.
Even when there’s nothing directly on the battlefield that screams ‘Exile me,’ the Paladin can still dominate an opponent, by preventing them casting anything until they can successfully neuter the Paladin threat. This is the kind of Limited card you expect to be Rare, and it is.
When you’re new to the game, it’s notoriously difficult to spot cards that belong in Combo decks. That’s because many elements of a Combination ‘Engine’ – that’s the cards that make the Combination actually work – are unusual cards that don’t see a lot of tournament play until somebody finally ‘cracks’ them and turns them into a killing machine. Even a casual glance shows us that Mesa Enchantress isn’t meant to get involved in combat. It has pretty weak toughness, and precisely no offensive capability.
What you’re looking for out of the Enchantress is the chance to build an entire deck around it. That’s probably going to comprise three elements. First, you’re going to need a ton of enchantments. That way, you’ll get to draw lots of cards off the Enchantress. In an ideal world, these Enchantments will be very cheap. In a perfect world, these Enchantments will be free. Thing is, the guys and girls that make the game are well aware what an ideal and a perfect world looks like, and are very careful to make you work very, very hard to achieve it.
In the absence of getting enchantments for free, you’re going to want a way to generate plenty of mana. Almost all Combo decks have ways to make waaayyyy more mana than the one land per turn you’re allowed to play. Usually this will involve casting spells that generate mana, but you won’t mind casting them, because the enchantments you’re casting with the mana are keeping your hand full via the Enchantress. In the best Combo decks, there will usually be a turn where you ‘go off.’ That means that you may very well be able to go infinite, potentially creating infinite mana, and using multiple Enchantresses to draw your entire deck.
That’s no good without the third part of the deck, the Kill. This might be something as simple as a Fireball, a spell with X in its cost that allows you to take advantage of a huge boatload of mana. Sometimes you’ll force your opponent to draw their entire deck and die that way. A card like Seismic Assault allows you to discard excess lands from your hand and turn them into 2 damage a time.
You may have spotted that I’ve been pretty vague about what cards go into a deck like this. The truth is, it’s entirely possible that any Mesa Enchantress deck will be poor, because the cards just aren’t there to support it. Even once you reach a critical mass of appropriate enchantments, it’s a good bet that the best decks around are going to have you for lunch and spit you out the other side. That said, just the exercise of trying to make a Combo deck can be very rewarding, even if it never makes the grade.
Open The Vaults
One of the enduring puzzles of Magic is how to make apparently symmetrical cards work almost entirely in your favor. Open The Vaults is such a card, since it returns all artifacts and enchantments to the battlefield, regardless of who owned them in the first place. The last thing you want to be doing is helping your opponent out. Fortunately, this is another card that you’ll be building your deck around. Indeed, it might go into a Mesa Enchantress deck, so that if your opponent kills off lots of your enchantments, you get to put them all back. Just one thing, though. Putting them onto the battlefield isn’t the same as casting them, so the Mesa Enchantress won’t trigger, and you won’t get to draw lots of cards.
Magic has a habit of throwing up cards like this from time to time. Most often, they’re an entertaining sideline for deckbuilders who like to solve challenges, with minimal regard to playability or power level. Occasionally, a card like this forms the basis of a new tournament deck, and absolutely destroys the opposition.
A beloved staple of White down the years, Pacifism is one of the purest cards in the set. It looks at a monster and says, ‘Peace out, man,’ or words to that effect. Making it unable to block is a significant upgrade over just attacking, because a fat monster on defence is still an issue you have to deal with. That said, all the bits of bad news that applied to Divine Verdict apply to Pacifism. If the opposing creature has abilities that are causing you grief, Pacifism will not save you. At the cost, though, this is one of the more efficient ways of neutering a marauding monster.
Getting a 1/4 for three mana is about right, although it’s hardly exciting. You might think that the ability is pretty neat, because it breaks the rule of only being able to block one creature with yours. Thing is, those situations don’t necessarily come up all that often. Particularly in Sealed play, games can often come down to a host of ground monsters staring warily across the table at each other, while a single flying monster or other serious threat goes about the business of winning the game. It isn’t that often that a group of, let’s say, four monsters attack, and you’re just desperate to put your Palace Guard in the way of all of them. Apart from anything else, as soon as you make your Palace Guard, your opponent is well aware of what it can do.
We’ve said before that simply the threat of something is sometimes as good as the actual ability, but realistically neither the threat nor the actual ability of the Guard is all that good. If it ever has a home, it’s going to be in a Sealed deck where you’re really short of decent monsters.
Your first response to this card should be along the lines of ‘wow.’ Your second response to this card should be along the lines of ‘hmm.’ Let’s take those one at a time, starting with the exciting bit. Magic is often a game of subtle manoeuvrings, as the players attempt to gain a small advantage in the game which they can carefully nurture into a game-winning position. Planar Cleansing laughs at this approach and drives a bus full of dynamite through all sorts of plans. It puts everything in the bin, or as close as has usefully been printed in a long time. Artifacts? Destroyed. Enchantments? Destroyed? Planeswalkers? Destroyed. That’s on top of the most frequently needed part. Creatures? Destroyed.
Of course, this is another of those apparently-symmetrical cards, so if you’re playing this, you’ll want to set up to get the full benefit. In Limited play, you’ll look to force your opponent to overextend onto the battlefield, making them lose as many cards as possible when you Cleanse. In Constructed, the task is somewhat easier, since the ideal home for these boardsweeping effects is a deck with very few creatures, or sometimes even none.
That said, the apparent bonus of being able to kill more than just creatures is potentially a significant downside. You see, there’s no way to reason with Planar Cleansing, since it really does leave nothing other than land standing. That means that you’re going to lose any Artifacts and Enchantments that you had in play as well as any creatures. Suddenly, your strategic options are being reduced.
One other thing to notice, which is something I’ve been holding off talking about for a bit. It looks like the casting cost is absolutely massive. I mean that in the sense that when you look at the card, the casting cost seems to go on forever. That’s because it costs 3WWW. That still amounts to six mana, which is a decent deal for something that kapows so much stuff. However, most cards in Magic require just a single colored mana, like Pacifism at 1W. The game doesn’t care how you pay for the second mana, it’s only the W that’s important.
Once you start having to pay two specifically White mana to pay for a card, like Lightwielder Paladin for example, it’s going to be harder to access that mana without difficulty. For the most part, the makers of the game have designed it so that the usual tradeoff is to make sure that the color(s) you require more than one of to cast the spells in your deck are your major colors. So, if I want to play Lightwielder Paladin and also Guardian Seraph in my Sealed deck, I’m almost certainly saying that White is my major color. Cards like Celestial Purge, meanwhile, are what we call ‘splashable,’ which means that you can afford to run it in your deck with only a few Plains to back it up.
Planar Cleansing takes the commitment to White to a whole new level. It virtually guarantees that only a major White player will run it in Sealed, absolutely guarantees this in Draft, and presents some awkward questions for Constructed. Why? Because the kind of decks that run very few creatures and want to wipe the board out tend to be based around Blue. We’ll see the kind of cards Blue has to offer in M10 later, but for now, be assured that Blue is the color of Control, and having to commit to not one, not two, but three White mana to get off your big boardsweeper is sometimes a big deal.
Why only sometimes? Well, every year the sets come with a variety of ways to ‘fix’ your mana. Sometimes a land will produce more than just one color of mana. Sometimes you can get any color you want as long as you cast a certain type of spell. Sometimes you can take one damage to get what you want. In recent times, it’s been possible to play Control decks that run all five colors of mana, and still cast previously unheard of combinations of three Blue (UUU) mana spells, double Black, double Green, double Red, and White, all in the same deck. Be assured that this was most definitely not the norm, and at the time of writing, the signs are pointing towards a more austere selection to choose from when helping us make our mana right.
So what to make of Planar Cleansing? This is the first time ever that a beloved card called Wrath Of God is not in the Core set. This is the replacement. Wrath of God only dealt with creatures, but it did so at a bargain basement price of 2WW, four mana in total. Variations on this theme have all been at around the six mana mark, and the closest comparison is with Akroma’s Vengeance, which did see a certain amount of play. Right now, the one place you can be confident having Planar Cleansing in your deck is if you’re playing Sealed, and you’re heavily White. There, it’s likely to be a beating, especially if your opponent doesn’t know you have it. Elsewhere? That’s a much more open question.
There have been dozens of 2/2 Flyers for four mana down the years, and almost all of them come with some kind of ability designed to make them better value than just a ‘vanilla’ creature. Incidentally, that term vanilla comes from the idea that it’s the most basic of ice cream flavors, and that it’s utterly unadventurous. Just like vanilla ice cream, plenty of people like vanilla creatures, and they can often be very good. Razorfoot Griffin has one of the nicer Limited abilities, meaning that it gets to tangle with any other non-First Striking 2-toughness flyer (or indeed opposing ground monster if the Griffin is on Defense) and survive. A decent Limited card.
Let’s talk a little about disappointment. Oh, now you think I don’t like the Pikemaster. Deckbuilding at the highest level is all about disappointment. You think you’ve found a great card for your current deck, or a card that’s about to send you in different directions. There have been more than 10,000 unique cards printed since the game began. Some of them, or indeed most of them, may not be available for the format you’re building for right now, but even the smallest formats have many hundreds of cards to choose from. Are you really sure that this is a special one?
Now the flipside. Particularly to start with, you should try out any and every crazy deck idea you can come up with. It doesn’t actually matter whether the deck is any good to start with, because in a lot of ways you learn far more from defeats than victories. Plus, things get a lot easier once you’ve started putting actual cards into actual decks, rather than just worrying your concoction won’t make the grade. In short, try, learn, and improve. That doesn’t alter the fact that disappointment is our constant companion, but remember that every card you take out of your deck for being unworthy takes you one step closer to the creation that might take you all the way to the Pro Tour, or at least as far as a couple of wins at Friday Night Magic.
So what about Rhox Pikemaster then? Before the card joins up with anything else, it’s a 3/3 First Strike dude for four mana. That’s really good value in Limited. It’s Uncommon, and a lot of powerful Limited effects sit in that slot. That’s because the Uncommon slot is where cards go when they’re too powerful in large numbers (so they can’t be Common), and not so foolish that you don’t want to see them take a hand reasonably often. Imagine a scenario where this was Common, and you’d Drafted a White Soldier deck. If you happened to have Captain of the Watch as well, you’d be in great shape. A cursory glance through the set shows us that there are only two Common Soldiers. We’ll get to them in a bit, but whenever you’re looking to exploit a certain Creature Type, do the math and see what you have to work with.
What about Constructed play? You can clearly see that you need to make plenty of Soldiers in your deck, so that they can benefit from being given First Strike. However, in Constructed, four mana is quite a lot. Remember I told you about Wrath of God, that killed every creature on the table for four mana? This 3/3 monster costs the same, and Lightning Bolt, which kills it, costs one mana. That’s not a good sign.
Here’s an example of a card that does one particular thing very, very well. If you have a monster, and your opponent is attacking, and you can block, there’s a very, very good chance that your guy is going to wind up bigger than their guy. Giant Growth gives a creature +3/+3 until end of turn, and that costs one mana too. Because White isn’t very good at directly reaching out and killing opposing men, and because the Allied colors for White are Blue and Green, which also struggle to kill opposing men, Righteousness is the sort of card that occasionally gets played in Sealed, because it functions as ‘Pseudo-Removal,’ in that, with a prevailing wind, it might take out a big guy on the other side. I said ‘might.’
It’s taken 28 cards, but I’ve reached a card where I have to pause and talk about the artwork. It’s entirely possible to play Magic using nothing other than a list of all the cards, some spare basic land, and a pen to write all over them. Nobody has ever won a game of Magic because of the art on a card, but millions of people around the world play, trade and collect in part because of it. Safe Passage is a great example of a melding of artwork, flavour, and gameplay. The concept is utterly biblical, and while we don’t have Moses to part the Red Sea, we do have an Angel to get the job done. Those hordes of Soldiers are about to be utterly fried, and you right along with them, and that’s exactly the scenario within a game that Safe Passage is going to be most useful.
Named after the original card that did this job, effects that negate damage, especially combat damage, are known as ‘Fog’ effects. Safe Passage is an upgrade to that, since it deals with all forms of damage throughout the turn, including so-called Burn spells, which are aimed directly at an opponent (thus giving them their other name of Direct Damage.) However, plenty of Burn spells, like Lightning Bolt, are Instants, so if you cast your Safe Passage, your opponent will still get a chance to respond before you get your shield in place.
Where this is likely to win you games is where you are in a race with your opponent, and you know that they are one turn further away from victory than they think. It’s often the case that the final turn in Sealed involves an Alpha Strike, and in the event that you don’t actually die as they intend, they’re often highly vulnerable to you on the backswing. That said, Fog cost a single mana, and this costs three, which probably rules it out of Constructed consideration. It’s possible that you might stick this into a Sideboard if decks are very popular that use enormous Direct Damage spells to kill you, like Fireball or Banefire, but that’s a stretch.
One of the most iconic spells in Magic history, this is one of the ultimate Angels, although no longer in terms of raw power. As so often, it’s the Vigilance that makes this so good in Limited. There are few more frustrating things in Sealed than making a huge threat that has to stay home to avoid defeat. Turn after turn your supposed-bomb just sits there, waiting for your opponent to finally draw a piece of removal and put an end to your misery. With Vigilance, you get to play both ways.
In a way, the wording on Vigilance is misleading, since ‘Attacking doesn’t cause this creature to tap’ has very little to do with the core of the ability. ‘This creature gets to block too!’ is nearer the mark. Incidentally, it’s an indicator of where Magic currently stands that the Angel, once a coveted Rare, is now a perfectly respectable Uncommon. If you play a few Limited events, you will get beaten by her, but there are many scarier threats out there, and that’s scary in and of itself.
Time for another vanilla creature, and this one isn’t very exciting. As we continue to explore the set, we’ll find increasing evidence of how different colors get a different deal for their mana. At five mana, a Green creature might easily be 5/5, and in the case of Ant Queen, with a fantastic ability too. Siege Mastodon gets utterly outclassed by this and many, many other cards at the cost.
It’s worth mentioning at this point the subtleties of big monsters with asymmetric power and toughness. 3/5, 4/4 and 5/3 all add up to eight units of ‘stuff’, but they behave very differently. Consider what happens to each of them when fighting against these monsters:
A 7/5, a 5/5, a 4/4, a 5/3 and a 3/5
A 3/5 monster dies to the 7/5 and the 5/5. It bounces off the 4/4 and 3/5 (meaning nobody dies) and it trades with the 5/3 (both die.)
A 4/4 monster dies to the 7/5 and the 5/5. It bounces off the 3/5, and it trades with the 4/4 and the 5/3.
A 5/3 trades with the 7/5, the 5/5, the 4/4, the 5/3 and the 3/5.
Against a wide selection of fat monsters, none of our three sets of stats get to make a clean kill whilst walking away. The 3/5 only gets an honorable trade with the 5/3, a stat the 4/4 improves on just barely, trading with two of the five. The 5/3 however takes down the lot.
This is a really important lesson. In Limited, five power defines a fattie. At 3/6, Siege Mastodon would be hugely better. At 5/3, Siege Mastodon would be hugely better. At 3/5, it’s really not exciting, and if you want further proof, it can’t even kill a Giant Spider. Every fat monster should have a Giant Spider for breakfast. This doesn’t.
One little footnote before we move on. How a monster performs in combat isn’t the only key to its overall usefulness. As an extreme example, if I had a monster with 1,000 power and 1 toughness, it’s basically true that it would be able to kill any creature in the game. It’s also true that it would die to virtually any creature in the game. Just as importantly, there would be a good chance that it would never get to attack or block, because any kind of removal spell would wipe it out.
In our examples above, the 5/3 came out as the best of the bunch because of its killing power. A 5/3 also dies to Lightning Bolt, which a 4/4 does not, so it turns out that the overall shape of the format (i.e. what specific cards are available to us) is something we need to consider too. Sorry. I never said Magic was simple, and anyone who tells you it is… they’re lying.
… Apparently, is golden, or so the saying goes. Deckbuilders instantly start shifting the mental gears when they see a cheap spell. Magic is such a ferocious game that every mana over zero needs to be weighed carefully, since there’s an increasing chance the game won’t be going on long enough for you to cast your enormous game-changing bomb. At one mana, Silence has the possibility of making an impact right from the start. But what impact?
The first thing to notice that separates Silence from almost everything else in the set is when you’re going to cast it. Its natural home is in one of the least-used parts of the game, the Upkeep. That’s the bit right before a player draws a card for the turn. Whose Upkeep though? The fact that this question even needs to be asked suggests that there’s versatility to the card.
Historically speaking, this sort of card has most often been used in your own Upkeep. Why might we want to stop opponents playing spells in our turn? The usual answer to this is if two factors converge. First, we’re playing some form of Combo deck, which as we know requires all the parts to be in place before it can deliver its nefarious knockout blow. Second, our opponent is playing some kind of Control deck, which typically is going to contain cards that negate ours in some way, or indeed Negate them in some way! To a Control deck, Silence simply has to be answered with some kind of counterspell, otherwise their hand is rendered irrelevant. It’s true to say that many, many battles have been fought down the years in the Upkeep, as Control and Combo decks go at it for the privilege of either resolving (succeeding in casting) or countering (stopping the casting) of a card like Silence.
Used in this way, Silence is both an insurance policy against a spanner in the works and a thinly-veiled threat of Combo carnage to come. Even if you don’t have the Combo in hand, your Control opponent is almost obliged to hurl a counterspell at your Silence. So why might we use it in our opponent’s Upkeep?
Suppose that we think we’re going to win on the following turn. We’ve managed to set up the top of our library so that we know we’re going to draw the final piece of our Combo. However, Combo decks are often very tightly designed, with very little room for extraneous moving parts beyond the Combo itself and the means to get us there. That means no room for Counterspells sometimes, and, but for Silence, would allow our opponents to play unmolested. Silence, then, gives us a chance of some interaction, and effectively giving us a pseudo-version of two consecutive turns. This doesn’t hold true if they’re busy smashing us with monsters, since they still get to attack, but Silence is often likely to be a Sideboard card that comes in after Game One to help us deal with the threat of Control decks, or even the Combo mirror match. (A mirror match is a bit what it sounds like – you taking on your own deck across the table. While few decks are actually identically put together, especially with successful tournament decks there tends to emerge a consensus on all but the last few, more esoteric and personal, choices.
Whether you’re using it to give yourself a little peace and quiet on your turn, or allowing you to put your feet up during theirs, Silence is a card with a track record in the game to suggest that it could indeed be golden.
Once upon a time, there was a card called Grizzly Bears. It cost 1G and was a vanilla 2/2. It was an utterly iconic card from the beginning of the game, and although it had no special abilities, players liked it because it was cheap, could attack and block, and generally do lots of useful things on the battlefield that didn’t require a ton of rules explanation. It killed, and was killed. This was a long time ago, and Grizzly Bears isn’t a card you can play with in Standard if you want to. Most people don’t, because we’re a demanding lot, and we want something with a little more flash most of the time, but forever more, two mana 2/2s with no abilities would be known as Grizzly Bears.
Once upon a time, there was a card called Cylian Elf. It cost 1G and was a vanilla 2/2. This particular once upon a time wasn’t that long ago. In fact, it was so recent that you can play with Cylian Elf in Standard if you want to. Most people don’t, because we’re a demanding lot, and we want something with a little more flash most of the time, but forever more, two mana 2/2s with no abilities would be known as Grizzly Bears.
Once upon a time, there was a card called Silvercoat Lion…
I said a while back that Lifegain was often best when it was an incidental effect of a card, a bonus if you will. Here’s a case in point. The reason you would play Solemn Offering in any kind of Format is if you wanted to make Artifacts or Enchantments go away. Four life is better than a kick in the teeth, and might easily equate to a single combat loss, but isn’t a reason to play the card. This is the first time that we’ve reached a card where the difference between being a Sorcery and an Instant is damagingly noticeable.
Let’s look at that for a moment. There are several advantages to Instants over Sorceries. First, we have much more versatility when we can play them. Upkeep, either player’s Main phase, during Combat, even during an End Step. That’s a lot of places Sorceries can’t go. Second, our ability to play an Instant in the opposing End Step gives us the chance to have our mana tapped – and therefore unable to help us react to events – for as short a time as possible. We are, after all, just about to untap. Third, Instants give our opponent less strategic options to respond with, and give us the best chance of maximising the return on our card.
Imagine for a moment that our opponent has a Silvermane Lion Enchanted with Holy Strength, making it a 3/4, and we have a Razorfoot Griffin. Now imagine if Solemn Offering was an Instant. Our opponent would attack, we would block, and then cast Solemn Offering at Instant speed, turning his Silvermane Lion back into a 2/2 and dying to our First Strike Razorfoot Griffin. Alas, Solemn Offering doesn’t let us do this, because it’s a Sorcery.
It gets worse, sports fans. Imagine both players have a bunch of monsters on the table, but nothing flies, so the game has got bogged down. Suddenly, your opponent taps four mana and casts Levitation. All his men fly! Eek. And the Solemn Offering sitting in your hand can do precisely nothing as his now-winged hordes fly over for the win. At Instant speed, all sorts of good things get to happen for you. He attacks, and before blockers you get rid of the Levitation. Suddenly, you have all kinds of favorable blocks waiting to happen. Alas, Solemn Offering doesn’t let us do this, because it’s a Sorcery.
Dispensing with an individual Artifact or Enchantment is something of a niche market in Magic. We’re back at that term ‘narrow’ again, and a bit like Celestial Purge, we want our narrow cards to be cheap and Instant. Sometimes we can’t get what we want, and you can be certain that Solemn Offering will be getting rid of pesky Enchantments at Sorcery speed in all kinds of Sealed play, and may well be Sideboarded in when it comes to Draft play against particular types of Artifact-heavy decks.(In the current Shards of Alara Draft format, Artifact Creatures play an important role, and yes, Solemn Offering gets rid of one.) However, in most wider formats, cheap and Instant is exactly what we can get, and that makes Solemn an Offering we are most likely to politely decline.
Historically, most cards that create creatures on the battlefield create a single creature. The card you play is that single creature. While that’s still true in the majority of cases, in recent years a new breed of creature has developed. We’ve seen one already, in Captain of the Watch. When he turns up, he brings his pals. Three of them, to be precise. Because of the way Soul Warden is worded – it doesn’t talk about casting creatures, only about them ‘entering the battlefield’ – it will trigger once for all four creatures contained in the single Captain of the Watch card. Already heavily played in major tournaments, cards like Spectral Procession (three creatures) and Cloudgoat Ranger and chums (a total of four creatures) all have the capacity to turbo-charge your Soul Warden.
These chunks of lifegain could be very useful against another White rush deck, and it goes without saying that a format like Sealed, where monsters rule, is a place where it can thrive. There’s even more goodness to come though. Remember how we talked about some Combo decks going infinite? With infinite mana, or the ability to draw their entire deck at will? Well, you can add to the list ‘create infinite monsters,’ since that’s something else that Combo decks use to put you to the sword. If you get Soul Warden into play, you can then (in addition to having an infinite army in play) reach infinite life. To be fair, the rules make you specify how much life you’d like to gain, since saying ‘infinity’ takes us into the realms of Hilbert’s Hotel, and nobody wants that in the middle of a game.
Most crucial of all, Soul Warden has the chance to come down on Turn 1, when the action is at its freshest, and the Warden has the most chance to send your life total soaring. It’s a card that has already seen a ton of play in assorted formats, and there’s every reason to suppose it will see play again at the highest tables in the world.
It’s basically true that you get what you pay for in Magic, and it’s also true that getting more than what you pay for is the constant goal of all successful deckbuilders and players. While we’re all excited by the top-of-the-range shiny goodnesses that sit in the Rare slot most of the time, there’s absolutely a place for the cheap and cheerful.
Stormfront Pegasus doesn’t have great numbers, especially on the back end. One toughness means that it dies to almost everything, but at just two mana it has exactly the same hitting power as a Razorfoot Griffin. Losing the second point of toughness isn’t actually that big a deal, since most things that can kill a one toughness monster can go the extra mile anyway.
This is exactly the sort of card you want to Draft multiples of, because you can very quickly have a beatdown army in the skies. Simple, effective, cheap. Thanks.
Tempest Of Light
Everything in the game is about tradeoffs. We’ve just spoken about the Stormfront Pegasus in comparison with Razorfoot Griffin. One of the best skills to develop in your analysis of the game is to work out where the tradeoffs between two closely-valued cards can work in your favor or against you. Let’s stack up Tempest Of Light with Solemn Offering.
Both cost three mana. Both have a single White mana requirement. Offering is a Sorcery (bad), Tempest is an Instant (good). Offering only kills one thing, Tempest can kill lots of things. This sounds like it should be a plus point for Tempest, but indiscriminate violence isn’t always a good thing, and maybe you’ll have Enchantments of your own you want to keep around, at which point the Tempest is useless. The Offering gains you life (good), Tempest doesn’t (bad). Offering gets to choose between an Artifact and Enchantment (versatile, so good), Tempest has no capacity to kill an Artifact (bad).
In reality, most of the time this isn’t going to be a true choice, since for any Constructed format you’ll have a host of options at your disposal that are rather more surgical in application than either of these. But let’s stick with it, since we might have this choice in a Sealed Deck one day. If we aren’t running any Enchantments of our own, and know that our opponent has several, the Tempest might be the better option. Most of the time though, despite its strategic drawback of being a Sorcery, the versatility of Solemn Offering, plus a marginal benefit from the Lifegain, means it will probably get the nod more often.
If we’re being utterly realistic, Tempest Of Light is a good example of a card that’s likely to sit in your folder at home, utterly unplayed, until the week after someone wins a Pro Tour Qualifier playing a Mesa Enchantress deck, and suddenly you’ll be wanting four of them for your Sideboard. Chances are that’s the only time they’ll see the light of day. Though not the Light Of Day. (That’s a Magic joke for the old-timers).
A couple of years ago, we went through a year of sets where, to quote the publicity, ‘Creature type matters.’ Actually, that probably isn’t a quote from the publicity, because the publicity is usually catchier than that. Still, for a year, it wasn’t just about what numbers your creatures had, but what creature type they belonged to. This is known in Magic as the Tribal mechanic, where cards benefit from being in the same space as their friends and neighbours. In flavor terms, this makes perfect sense. Whilst it’s reasonable that a Planeswalking duelist such as ourselves might easily summon a Centaur, a Druid, a Faerie, an Elf and a Giant all in one game, it follows that these disparate groups might not always work well together.
As far as I’m aware, R&D have yet to explore the design space where you get actively punished for playing the ‘wrong’ type of creatures in your deck, at least not explicitly, but they’ve certainly made plenty of good reasons for Tribal decks to take notice of powerful effects.
When you’re just working your way into the game, the creature type is one of the last things you look at, since it so rarely seems to impact performance. A 2/2 Silvermane Lion (creature type – Cat) will function almost identically once it’s in play to a Gravedigger (creature type – Zombie). Then along comes a card like Undead Slayer and ruins it all.
Part of the job of a core set is to help teach the fundamentals of the game to newer players, and Undead Slayer does an admirable job of forcing you to think about that little bit of text between the Artwork above and the text box below. There are probably three things you should be thinking about when evaluating this. First, and most obviously, how many Skeletons, Vampires, and Zombies are there?
While the question may be obvious, the answer may not be, since in wider formats than Limited we would need to consider which cards featuring these three creature types would be likely to get played. Realistically though, this card is in prime position in a Limited environment, so counting up the undead trio in M10 should give us a reasonable guide to how many targets an Undead Slayer is likely to have. You still have to consider whether they’re of sufficient quality to get played, however.
The second, and more crafty, thing to be exercising (or should that be exorcising, given the card?) your mind about is whether you can find a way to turn other creatures into a Skeleton, Vampire, or Zombie. Although a rare commodity, there are cards that have, down the years, messed around with creature type. Remember, the game is constantly checking for information like this, in the background if you will. Clearly the actual card will still state that Stormfront Pegasus has a creature type of – surprise! – Pegasus, but if you can turn it into one of the targetable three, you’re in business, and can send them packing.
And the third thing. Any tap ability that allows you to kill a monster is extremely powerful in Limited, where most removal spells tend to deal on a 1-to-1 basis. Their monster dies, your removal spell dies. It’s a quid pro quo. Undead Slayer breaks those rules, because when it taps, the Vampire bites (sorry) the dust, and your Slayer, being at least for now the chosen one (sorry again) gets to fight another day. That’s one of their cards dead for none of yours. Advantage you.
Veteran Armorsmith
Veteran Swordsmith
Given that, even without the twenty basic land in the set (there are four different art versions of each of the five basics), there are 229 cards in M10, you might be surprised to learn that this is by no means a large set. Past sets have often weighed in at 50% bigger at around the 350 mark, and that’s a lot of ideas to churn out every few months. Whatever the size of the expansion, some things never change, and one of them is the idea of Cycles. This is where each color gets their own flavorful version of an idea. Sometimes the Cycle doesn’t quite work, and that’s when you see fours, threes, and twos cropping up, that have clearly been cut from the same cloth. Nothing highlights this better than the two bookends, the Veteran Armorsmith and Swordsmith.
The elegance of these two in terms of design is outstanding. Both White, both Veterans (in name), both Human Soldiers (in creature type), both with a combined power and toughness of 5 (the Armorsmith is 2/3, the Swordsmith 3/2), both Common. They have complementary flavor text (the bit at the bottom that adds to the overall atmosphere of a card, without impacting game mechanics), and two stunning pieces of new artwork by Michael Komarck. Like the Lorwyn basic lands (go check them out sometime), these two pieces meld together, with both working in harmony in the same forge location.
Even their key ability is a mirror of each other. The Armorsmith increases toughness, while the Swordsmith grants +1 to power. Quite a lot of cards carry the condition ‘other [insert creature type here]’, which means that the printed power and toughness is correct, just like Captain Of The Watch is indeed a 3/3, not a 4/4. However, the fact that they’re both Common means that in Draft you can expect to see several, and if you happen to get two into play of the same Veteran simultaneously, they will grant their bonus to the other.
At 2/3 for two mana, the Armorsmith is a terrific deal, enabling it to tangle with all but the most deliriously impressive two-drops. Whereas a typical White two-drop might be a 2/2 with First Strike, or Vigilance, here the third point of toughness makes the Armorsmith come out ahead of those others. While no slouches on offense, a pair of these by Turn 3 as 2/4s represents a serious defensive setup.
At 3/2, and with its ability on the power side, the Swordsmith is on the aggressive side of the forge, but it comes at a serious cost. It is hard to convey how absolutely vast (VAST I tell you!) the difference is between two and three mana. As the game progresses, the laying of one land per turn (the basic rule of Magic) ensures that the power level, as well as the power-and-toughness level, of the cards goes up each turn. Whilst you don’t expect Common cards to be able to compete with the flashiest Rares, three mana is the kind of place you start to find heavy hitters, cards that are going to have a serious impact on the game. Veteran Swordsmith is by no means bad. It’s just that you don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking, ‘Well, it’s just one more mana.’ When it comes to mana and evaluating a card’s potential for deckbuilding, it’s never a question of ‘just.’ Never.
Going back a few years, any creature that couldn’t attack was a Wall, but that convention was restrictive in flavor terms. Thus Defender was born, with the dreaded definition ‘This creature can’t attack’. There may be a more miserable keyword, but I can’t think of one right now. See, even the weakest creature that’s in the deck for their abilities can, when the time is right, turn sideways and attack the opponent. Wall of Faith can never do that, no matter how desperate the situation.
So that’s the knock against Walls. The plus point is fairly considerable however, and it comes on the other end of the stats sheet. As you might imagine, Walls are tough. Wall Of Faith kicks off with a back end of five, and the ability built in allows you to send that toughness higher. In reality, almost nothing in the game within a Limited environment is going to chew its way through seven or eight toughness, and with a couple of White mana spare, that’s what confronts them.
A good way of approaching the evaluation of cards like this is to think of them in terms of lifegain. Assuming that your opponent is hitting you on the ground — Walls don’t get to block flyers unless the card explicitly says so (and yes, there are flying Walls in the game) — every time you block a monster, you’re gaining life equal to that monster’s power. Angel’s Mercy gains us seven life, and it’s easy to see that Wall Of Faith can easily get that back, and more, for the same cost.
At its absolute best, Wall Of Faith can successfully mock a monster that would otherwise be destroying you in short order — something like a Craw Wurm — and it can block it turn after turn after turn. Knowing that almost every Sealed Deck you’ll ever face will have some kind of fat monsters in them, this is the kind of card that gets included for Sealed play. You just have to hope those opposing threats don’t fly.
And so we reach the end of the White cards, with a fan favorite that has been an iconic part of the game for many years. Because there are relatively few cards of each color in M10 (41 of each of the five), it isn’t always easy to see the overarching themes of each color. That starts to become more apparent as you look at multiple sets together, building decks for Formats like Standard. However, cards like Elite Vanguard, Veteran Armorsmith, Silvercoat Lion and this White Knight hint at the fact that White has historically been great at churning out decks with lots of small, cheap and efficient monsters.
Collectively these decks are known as White Weenie, and every time a new set comes into the equation, players look to see what the latest version of the deck will look like. White Knight provides a great baseline for what a two-drop for White can do. At 2/2, it matches Silvercoat Lion. As a first ability, it gets First Strike, which as we know makes it significantly harder to block effectively. If that was it, it would compare hugely favorably with a card like Razorfoot Griffin, which charges you exactly double the mana for the privilege of getting a flyer.
White Knight does more than that, though. It also has Protection from Black. If you want a refresher course on Protection, have a look at the entry on Baneslayer Angel. Although the mechanic Protection works the same regardless of what you have Protection from, the value of that Protection can vary. Protection from Black is one of the best, largely because there’s plenty of Black removal spells, and they can’t target your White Knight. (That’s the T bit of D-E-B-T, remember?)
White Knight is the benchmark then when it comes to your turn two play. It won’t always get into your Constructed deck, because a card like Wizened Cenn might have more synergy or raw power, but there are certainly decks where it fits right in.
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And that wraps up the White cards. If there are particular cards that interest you in terms of Constructed, have a look around here on the site. You can be almost certain that if it’s good, one of our writers will have tried it out in a potential deck. Above all, feel free to try things out. Every time you play with a deck, you’re accumulating not only more knowledge about your deck and the individual cards in it, you’re also putting ‘miles on the clock,’ and learning more about our great game.
Until next time, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.