Some of you reading this will be my regular readers here on StarCityGames.com. To you, welcome to something a little different. Hopefully, there will be some useful bits and pieces for you to dip into over the coming few weeks. However, the M10 Academy isn’t really aimed at you. You’ve already read hundreds or even thousands of articles about Magic theory. Most of you have played in hundreds of Sanctioned tournaments. Most of you have ambitions to play on the Pro Tour one day, and plenty of you have already had that privilege.
What I want from you is to send the players who are less experienced than you to come look at this article and the rest of the series. If I do this right, the series will be a permanent work of reference for the player who knows a little about the game, has a good idea about most of the basics, but hasn’t had the chance to explore the huge world of strategy and complexities the game has to offer.
Please, please, please, to all of you who have been led by a friendly hand in your early Magic experiences, send them here to read at their leisure. It’s in all our interests to get players into the game, and it’s a big old Internet out there if you’re trying to find out just why Thoughtseize might be better than Duress, or why Auras have the capacity for inherent card disadvantage, or why Wrath of God costing six seems like a bad deal. Sometimes.
You get the idea. Bring them to the water’s edge, and hopefully I’ll give them something to quench their thirst.
To those of you coming here for the first time, welcome. My name is Richard Hagon, and I spend my life watching the best players in the world play Magic. A while back on magicthegathering.com, a series was commissioned called the Magic Academy. If you haven’t read it, you really should, because it’s a fantastic learning tool, and can open your eyes to a world of possibilities. At the time of writing, M10 is about to be released around the world. It’s a set that R&D (that’s Research and Development) have put together to showcase everything that’s great about the game.
In this series, I’m going to go through the M10 set card by card. There is nothing new in this, per se. Some of the smartest people in the game have been producing set reviews since the internet grew into adolescence. But although I’m going to talk about every card, I’m not going to assume that you already know about every Constructed deck there’s ever been, or why a card should be considered for the Faeries mirror. After all, you might not even have heard of the Faeries deck (it’s a Black and Blue deck with plenty of counterspells, and it wins with creatures that are, generally speaking, Faeries.)
I’m not going to attempt to cover every angle of every card. One of the great strengths of Magic is that any given card can find many homes in many decks, and do different things in each of them. With every new set that comes out, each card that already exists will wax and wane in popularity and power level, so while I’ll certainly attempt to explain why certain cards might not be very powerful, I’ll always look to see under what circumstances they might be good.
Nor is this guide meant to be a bible that will unlock the mystical secrets of deckbuilding or card design. Rather, it’s designed to show you some of the wonders of the game that many newer players only dimly glimpse as they work their way through the staggering weight of cards and mechanics and tactics and strategies and decks and history that’s out there.
This, then, is meant to be an eye-opener. I’ll give you the tools to go out and evaluate new cards in the future, and help you to dip your toe into the spectacular world of Magic strategy. Many of the things I’m going to talk about briefly here have been the subject of countless articles online, and many of them can be found within the archives on this very website. If the M10 Academy can show you just a fraction of the wonders of the game we all love here, then I’ve succeeded more than I could have hoped.
Enjoy.
Sincerely,
R.
July 2009.
Prelude
Historically, the Core Set has come out every so often to refresh the game, and push it in subtly new directions. The first set was called Alpha, followed by Beta and Revised. Then the ‘Editions’ came along — 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th. Along the way, somebody came up with the idea of calling them the Core Sets, the cards that form the bedrock of the game.
Alongside these Core or Base sets have been a string of expansions that have varied hugely in flavor, mechanics, power level and popularity. Typically, three expansions come out every year, and together form a coherent whole quite apart from whatever the current Core set happens to be. As you’ve probably already discovered, Magic is played in a whole lot of different ways, which are called Formats. Whilst there are hundreds of variations of the game played by communities around the world, the most popular have been codified and are officially watched over by the governing body of the game, the DCI. This community of judges and rulesmakers ensure that everyone at a Sanctioned event (that’s an event run with the knowledge of Wizards of the Coast, the people that make the game) gets the same fair and friendly experience. The Formats that are most popular, and therefore the ones you’re likely to find yourself playing most often, are:
Draft
This is incredibly popular, especially amongst the community that plays Magic Online, the computer version of the game. You play with three unopened boosters. Each player opens their first booster, and selects one card, then passes on the rest to the player on their left. They then select a card from the set just passed from their right. Eventually, they’ll have a whole booster worth of picks. The second pack passes to the right, and the last pack back to the left. Eventually, all players have 45 cards in front of them, most often including three basic land, because they tend to get passed last in a pack.
Then you have to build a deck of at least 40 cards, which can include as many basic land as you like. Because you’re always making choices about which card you want for your pile, Draft is incredibly skillful. It’s also true that many decks can seem very powerful, because it’s possible to pick lots of cards that work well together — we call this synergy — and put together a certain style of deck, which is known as an Archetype. This might be lots of quick creatures, a deck with lots of removal spells and card-draw plus counterspells, huge fat monsters…most successful Draft decks have a Plan, and finding the right cards to fulfill that Plan once you’ve worked out what that Plan is…well, that’s the skill of Draft.
Sealed Deck
Like Draft, this Format is considered to be Limited, because you are, literally, limited as to what cards you can play. In Draft, it’s the cards you pick, but in Sealed, you get the cards you’re given at the start of the day, and have to work with those. Typically, you get six boosters of product, which might come from a single set like M10, or possibly a couple of boosters of each set from a given year (or Block, as it’s known.) Right now, a Sealed deck might be two boosters of Shards Of Alara, two boosters of Conflux, and two boosters of Alara Reborn. Once again, you have to build a 40 card deck minimum. Some players play with more, but for all kinds of math reasons, that’s generally not a great idea. You’re allowed as many basic land as you want for your deck, just like Draft, so you can play as many of the five colors as you like. However, getting the right land for your deck is a major artform all by itself, and the more colors you play with, the harder it is to find the lands to cast them at the right time.
Sealed Deck play is dominated by creatures. While spells are often more powerful than any particular creature, it’s in the nature of the game that spells only happen once, and then go to the graveyard, whereas monsters can turn sideways and attack and block turn after turn after turn. In Sealed games, you will often find both players very low on cards, looking to the top of their library for help in the form of some enormous monster or killer spell to swing the game their way. We call this ‘topdeck’ mode, because it’s what’s on top of the deck that’s going to determine the outcome.
Sealed is also a great environment for so-called ‘bombs’, which are individual cards that are extremely powerful in the Format. They may not be great when it comes to some of the Constructed Formats, but it’s in Sealed where big creatures, ideally with some kind of evasive capability, like Flying, thrive.
Draft and Sealed are the two primary Limited Formats. There are variations for two players, like Winston Draft, and there’s a thriving community for something called Cube Drafting, which is where a specific pool of very powerful cards from the history of the game are used to create ‘booster packs’. It’s kind of a Magic ‘Greatest Hits’ Draft. That brings us to the Constructed Formats, where you need to bring your own deck with you to play in the tournament.
Block Constructed
I mentioned earlier that most of the time, Magic has three sets, or expansions, every year. The Magic year generally begins in October with the release of the latest frontline set (in October 2008 this was Shards of Alara), and then it’s followed up by the middle expansion (Conflux in 2009) and the finisher of the Block (Alara Reborn, 2009). Block Constructed means that you have to build a deck of 60 cards or more, which only use cards from those three sets. All Constructed Formats allow you to play up to four copies of any one card, which greatly adds to the consistency of decks. Sometimes those sets will include reprints from previous expansions of the game. That’s fine. You’re allowed to play with a card with any version of the art or expansion symbol on the card, as long as it appears within the current Block.
You’re also allowed — and you are strongly encouraged to do this — to bring an additional 15 cards with you, which you have apart from your Main Deck. This is known as your Sideboard, and you’re allowed to swap cards in and out of your Main Deck from your Sideboard in between games. This can give you a huge edge over an unprepared opponent as you bring in cards that are really good against them. Sideboards typically contain cards that are extremely powerful in very specific situations. They aren’t often terribly versatile, but when they get the job done, it stays done. And one more thing, while we’re here. Although you can have any Legal cards in your Sideboard, the restriction of four per card includes your Sideboard, so if you’re playing three copies of Celestial Purge in your maindeck, you can only have one more sitting on the bench.
Like all Constructed Formats, Block decks tend to fall into one of three categories. Aggro, or Aggressive, decks act just the way they sound — they come out of the gate quickly, and try to get the job done sooner rather than later. At the other end of the spectrum come the Control decks, which look to nullify whatever threats are coming your way, and then win when all resistance has been swept away. Then there are the Combo, or Combination, decks. These try to put together a series of cards — usually two or three — that in combination (hence the name) enable you to win the game. This will often be via some crazy method involving infinite turns, or infinite mana, or decking your opponent (making them draw their entire deck. If you have to draw a card and you can’t do so, you lose the game.)
There’s a fourth kind of deck, which is mostly known as Mid-Range, because it can be both Aggro and Control, depending on the matchup. These decks are notoriously difficult to play, because they don’t have the advantage of being very good at one particular thing. Instead, they get by being the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, and it’s often the ‘master of one’ that wins the tournament.
Standard
By far and away, this is the most popular Constructed Format, and it’s here that M10 will have the most impact (probably). The Standard environment has a big change every Fall when the new major expansion comes out. In 2009, that set will be Zendikar. When Zendikar arrives on the scene, all the sets from two years before — in this case Lorwyn, Morningtide, Shadowmoor and Eventide — will leave Standard. This is known as Rotating Out. As the second and third part of the Zendikar Block comes out in 2010, they’ll get added to the Standard list, until eventually, just before the Fall expansion of 2010, Standard will look like this:
Shards of Alara
Conflux
Alara Reborn
Zendikar
‘Long’
‘Prosper’ (the placeholder names for the forthcoming sets)
M10
So, basically, two years of cards go into making the Standard card pool. You can play any card from any of these sets in Standard tournaments. You can probably see why Standard is so popular. Every few months, a new set gets added to the mix, and you get to play with all of last year’s cards and this year’s. As each expansion is released, the Standard environment becomes fundamentally more powerful, since each strategy has more cards to choose from to find the best configuration.
Extended
So what happens when cards leave Standard? Is there still a way to play with them? Yep, the next stage up the evolutionary ladder is a Format called Extended. To put it mildly, this is a significant step up from Standard, because in Extended you get to play with cards from the last seven years. That’s an awful lot of choices. As a result, it doesn’t matter whether you’re playing Aggro, Control, or Combo, the fact is that your deck is going to be super-powerful. It’s often possible to kill an opponent in the first few turns in Extended, and Combo decks in particular can be devastating. Although Extended has a steep learning curve when you’re fairly new to the game, it can give you a fantastic look into the history of the game, and playing with such powerful decks can be very exciting.
You might be thinking that the list of sets in Standard is pretty daunting, with well over 1,000 cards available to you. Well, try this lot on for size:
Mirrodin
Darksteel
Fifth Dawn
Champions Of Kamigawa
Betrayers Of Kamigawa
Saviors Of Kamigawa
Ravnica
Guildpact
Dissension
Coldsnap
Time Spiral
Planar Chaos
Future Sight
Lorwyn
Morningtide
Shadowmoor
Eventide
Shards of Alara
Conflux
Alara Reborn
8th Edition
9th Edition
10th Edition
M10
Every single card in every single one of those sets is available to play in Extended. Just the twenty-four sets to wade through then. Make no mistake, heading into the wilds of Extended is a big commitment if you want to do it from the ground up. Thankfully, many of the best decks are thoroughly well-known within the community, and long-time players are often willing to lend out a complete Extended deck that’s likely to be at least competitive. It does, though, I trust, give you an indication of just how powerful and efficient cards need to be if they’re going to make a serious impact on a Format with this many cards to choose from.
Legacy and Vintage
These two are jointly known as the Eternal Formats, because they use more or less every card that’s ever been made. There are exceptions, because some of the earliest cards were so immensely powerful, the DCI have ruled that it makes sense either to be allowed to only play one of them (this is known as Restricted) or to outlaw their use all together (Banned). You can probably see where the ‘Banned and Restricted’ list gets its name. In Vintage especially, death can come as early as Turn One, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a quick game. Vintage is unlike any other Magic Format, and you should definitely take the opportunity if a friend is willing to let you play with their Vintage deck, which can often be worth thousands of dollars.
Overview
Starting with Sealed Deck, and passing through Draft, Block Constructed, Standard, Extended, Legacy and Vintage, it’s a general rule of thumb that the power level increases through the Formats. As more and more cards get introduced into the next level up, each card has to fight harder to justify its inclusion in your deck. That’s why we’ll talk about some cards in M10 as being ‘good for Limited’, or ‘Standard level’. That’s not to say that they might not have a use in Vintage or Extended, but it’s likely that there have been other cards printed that are mostly better.
At its heart, Magic is a game of getting ‘bang for your buck’. In other words, you want the most possible benefit from each of your cards for the least possible cost. Just like buying a car or a house, there are bargains to be had if you know what to look for, and there are some cards that most people wouldn’t touch that could turn out to be the perfect fit for your deck. It’s the constant re-evaluation of every card in the game, every card in your deck, and the ebb and flow of a match situation, that makes Magic such a rich and varied gaming experience. It won’t surprise you to learn that I think it’s the best game on Earth, and the fact that you’re reading this means that you’re at least ready to take the next step.
Deep breath time. Here comes….
White
If you’re following along at home, now might be a good time to dig out your 2010 Core Set Player’s Guide, because we’re going to be referencing cards almost non-stop. For the more passive amongst you, feel free to read what I have to say about each card while you’re checking it out for yourself. For those of you who like more of an interactive approach, go ahead and make yourself some notes on the first few cards in the set. What do they do? What could they do? Are they any good? Why? You get the idea. Once you’ve got a few thoughts, come and compare them to mine. If you’ve thought of all of mine and got plenty more of your own, congratulations. And if most of my information is new to you, then that’s exactly why you’re in the right place to get more out of the game. Congratulations to you too!
Assuming that you’ve played a few games already, an assumption I’m absolutely going to make, then you’ve spotted that there are five colors in the game — White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. Over the years, each color has gradually been defined, refined, and re-defined in terms of both flavor (what fantasy influences are brought to bear on the color) and mechanics (what the color can actually do in the game world.
While there are only a few things that each color gets to do exclusively, it’s fair to say that there are lots of things that they do better than the other colors. Although it’s sometimes tough to see the bigger picture from a single card, or even a group of them, as you continue to play you’ll begin to see the kind of things that each of the colors are best-known for, and consequently the best at doing in-game.
If you look at the back of any Magic card, you’ll see the Magic color wheel set out. Since time immemorial, sets have been numbered in color wheel order, beginning with White, and then moving round clockwise through Blue, Black, Red and finally to Green. Each color is set up to have two allied colors and two enemy colors. Whilst it’s certainly possible and indeed desirable sometimes to build decks featuring opposing colors, it’s also true that there is a tendency for allied color decks to work more smoothly together.
White, sitting at the top of the color wheel, has Green and Blue as its Allies and Black and Red as its enemies. Rather than attempt to give you my own version of what White is and does, here’s the way the Player’s Guide describes it:
“White’s focus is the power of community. When everyone works together toward a common goal, they can accomplish far more than any of them could individually.
White is the primary defensive color. If you can’t lose the game, that must mean you’ll win it, right? Its defensive tactics include cards that excel at blocking, cards that prevent big chunks of damage, and cards that shut down opposing creatures before they can attack. In addition, some white creatures have Vigilance, which allows them to attack without tapping — meaning they’re always ready to block! Put enough of these cards together in the same deck, and you could negate your opponent’s entire strategy.
Although white prides itself on defense, it can certainly flex its offensive muscle as well. A community that bands together to fight is an army. Disciplined, powerful, and efficient, the Soldiers in this set are good on their own — but they’re truly impressive when they come out in numbers. Like any good army, these Soldiers support one another. Add in some across-the-board boosts, and the might of your military will be unstoppable.”
Got all that? Good. Time to meet our first card:
We begin with a Planeswalker. We begin with a Mythic Rare. And we begin with a really powerful card. Planeswalkers are a relatively new addition to the game, so even the most long-in-the-tooth veterans have only been playing with them for a couple of years. Like all Planeswalkers, Ajani does three things. He begins with 4 loyalty counters, and if that ever drops to zero — something your opponents are highly likely to want to accomplish — he decides he wasn’t so loyal to you after all, and heads off to the graveyard. In order to help keep him around, he has a +1 loyalty ability, which gains you some life.
Whilst little bits of lifegain here and there can be significant, for the most part this first ability is about keeping him, rather than you, alive. In tournament play, it’s the middle ability that sees most frequent use. The last ability — known as the Ultimate on all the Planeswalkers — isn’t something you see very often. Sure, there’s a neat synergy to gaining some life and thus making your Avatar huge, but that middle ability is where it’s at.
In any kind of Limited game, putting a +1/+1 counter on all your guys can be a huge swing in the balance of onboard (i.e. on the Battlefield) power. Giving your men Vigilance ensures you won’t be beaten on the backswing (when your opponent has their chance to attack) because, like the Player’s Guide says, they won’t have to tap to attack, negating one of the most basic rules of Magic. Creatures tap to attack, and that means they can’t block on the opposing turn. Not with Ajani Goldmane around.
The rules for Planeswalkers mean that you only get to do one of the abilities each turn, and even then only once. Although that keeps things vaguely in the realms of manageable if you’re unfortunate enough to have to face Ajani across the table, the fact that you can do this multiple turns in a row has made him a real hit, not only in Limited, but in Standard too. Any time you open one in Limited you should be feeling very happy, not least because they’re highly sought after by many players, and you should be able to trade for some other good cards you’re looking for.
I’ve long held the belief that there’s never been a stupid Magic player, because quite frankly, stupid people couldn’t cope with something this complicated that was meant to be fun. Stupid people deal with hideous complexity all the time in real life (like tax returns for example), but they rarely choose to confront this sort of thing on their day off. Therefore, I’m going to assume that you are smart, and that, even after the limited amount of time you’ve been playing the game, you can think of some scenarios where gaining seven life could be a good thing.
In case you’re stuck trying to get the cogs whirring, being about to be dead is usually the first one that springs to mind. You’re on 3 life, and your opponent is hitting you for 5 damage. Angel’s Mercy to the rescue, you don’t die. Now that’s all well and good, but here’s the problem. You gained a big seven life, but still took five damage. The result of all that attacking by them and Angel’s Mercy-ing by you is that you’re on five life. Unless you do something right now, you’re going to die next turn to the exact same attack you were going to die to last turn.
This highlights the fundamental problem with lifegain. It’s true that not dying is good, but not dying is only good if you get to do it forever (ie by still being alive at the end of the game when your opponent bites the dust.) Anything less than that is just a pyrrhic victory. There’s a well-known saying: ‘Look how long it took me to kill him.’ There are no prizes for dying slowly in Magic, and if you want to start every game with four Angel’s Mercy in your deck, I’m quite happy to kill you slowly.
So why would you play this card? In a Sealed Deck, it might enable you to win a Race, where both players are hitting the other hard and expecting to get their opponent to zero first. At that point, an unexpected seven point bonus could be the game. In Constructed terms, lifegain is a more complicated affair. Lightning Bolt is a fine example of a red burn spell, and can deal you three damage for just one mana. If you’re trying to stay alive, one Angel’s Mercy more than negates a pair of Lightning Bolts, effectively gaining you a card (one card of yours dealt with two cards of theirs.) That said, from a historical perspective, lifegain either has to be exceptional to make Constructed play, or be an incidental part of a card, like Solemn Offering, which we’ll see later. Angel’s Mercy is probably neither, but seven life is quite a lot…
This is a card that rewards loyalty to your color. In Sealed deck that’s quite hard to pull off, because you’re going to want plenty of powerful spells, and when you’re given a bunch spread across all five colors, making plains your dominant land is tricky. If you can pull it off however, you can give your creature a huge boost, and quite likely make it unblockable as it takes to the skies. Just as crucial, it’s inherent in the design of the game that the power and toughness of flyers is slightly lower than that of similarly costed ground pounders. In other words, while I might get a 3/3 for 3G, or even a 4/4, a blue flyer might be only a 2/2 with an ability. That means that putting Armored Ascension on pretty much anything that moves is going to make you the biggest winged beastie on the table.
What’s the downside, apart from the commitment to playing lots of plains (which is fine if you have plenty of white cards to support that strategy in Sealed, or if you’re Drafting White)? Fundamental to all Auras is the possibility of what we call Card Disadvantage. That’s where one of their cards gets to take out two of yours. So, you have your 2/1 Elite Vanguard, and three plains and an island in play. You aim Armored Ascension at it, hoping to make it a 5/4 Flying monster of doom, but your opponent responds with Ignite Disorder, killing it before the Aura can get near it. Both your Elite Vanguard and your Armored Ascension go to the graveyard, which he got to do at the cost of one measly Ignite Disorder.
As a result, Auras are worth treating with care. It’s a great idea to play around possible spells your opponent might have, casting your Auras when they’re tapped out for example. At least that way they have to try and deal with your 5/4 Flyer, and if they can kill something that dangerous, you have to just shrug and say fair play. Some Auras are really powerful, and this one can certainly get out of hand, since every additional Plains you lay continues to grow your threat, but they all come at a price.
One of the reasons Wizards makes cards Mythic Rares is that you’d soon get fed up of losing to them in Limited play. This way, you only get to see them, well, rarely, and that’s a good thing, as many of them tend to dominate proceedings. This is mostly achieved by giving Mythics stats that you shouldn’t really get for the cost. Baneslayer Angel is a good example of this. For five mana, you might expect something like a 4/4 Flyer (this is what you get in blue with Air Elemental, for example.) You’re already ahead therefore with your 5/5. First Strike means that it’s going to be nearly impossible to block in a way that your opponents get to kill it, because even against multiple flying blockers the First Strike will take a terrible toll. To put this in context, you’d need FIVE Wind Drakes to kill the Baneslayer. (If you ever get this precise game situation, I really want to meet you.)
Lifelink is a nice ability that enables you to stay out of range while you’re stoving your opponent’s face in, but it’s largely icing on the cake. Then we get to the Protection bit. To many new players, Protection is a complicated ability. The good news is, it’s a complicated ability for veteran players too! Seriously, though, there’s a nice handy mnemonic to help us remember what Protection does. Because they Protect you, you are in their D-E-B-T. Here’s how that works:
D is for Damage. Whatever the card has Protection from (Demons and Dragons in this case) can’t deal your card Damage. Whenever it tries to deal damage to the Protection monster, that damage is reduced to zero.
E is for Enchantment. If you have Protection from Blue for example, no Blue Enchantment can be put on your card.
B is for Blocking. Your card cannot be Blocked by a card that you have Protection from.
T is for Target. Your card can’t be Targeted by a card that you have Protection from.
Take Black Knight for example. He has Protection from White, and that means that he can’t be dealt damage, can’t be enchanted, can’t be blocked, and can’t be targeted by anything White.
It’s true to say that Protection from an entire color is rather more extensive than simply Demons and Dragons, but it’s also true that these creature types tend to be very big and nasty, so being able to block a huge Dragon all day and never die is good times. That’s always assuming you need to be on Defense. In any kind of Limited game, this is likely to be superb for you. Although Draft is generally a bit quicker than Sealed (that’s to say that a typical game lasts fewer turns), the Lifelink helps to offset a quick start by your opponent, and Lifelink happens when you block as well as when you attack, so at the very least, you’re likely to be buying yourself some time. This is a card that you’ll love to open, and pray your opponents don’t have.
Something White has had for many years in the game is the ability to tap a creature, or more accurately a target creature, which occasionally makes a difference. Kalonian Behemoth is an example of a creature that has the ability Shroud, which means it can’t be targeted. Against that, the humble Blinding Mage has to take a step back. Most of the time, though, a single White mana and tapping your Mage is enough to ‘turn off’ an opposing creature for a while.
This has so many applications it’s untrue. If you’re behind in the race, and your opponent has a big monster, simply activate the Mage to tap it. The best time to do this is once you’re inside combat, right before the Declare Attackers step. Doing it then ensures that they don’t get to ambush you by making an even bigger monster with Haste that can attack immediately. Once you’re inside combat, the chances are that you won’t get a nasty shock. Maybe you have your ground defences sewn up, but have no way to deal with a flyer. Blinding Mage taps things with wings just as well as it taps things without.
If you’re in a decent position in the game, ‘tappers,’ as they’re known, can help you keep the pressure on. If you’re the one with the flyer that’s attacking for two every turn, as soon as they make a flyer, you can tap it during your combat, before they can use it as a blocker. That said, if you’re prepared to hold off a little, the ideal time to tap a potential blocker is at the end of their turn, so you start your turn with everything available.
Now you will have spotted that you only get to do this tapping thing once in each turn cycle (that’s the sum total of your turn and your opponent’s turn.) Mostly, you’ll activate it on the same player’s turn each time, because that’s the ‘mode’ your in (stopping something attacking in his turn, or stopping something blocking in yours.) However, tappers are great at finishing games in Limited, because once you decide you’re in position to win, you can activate it twice in quick succession. Let them attack, and then use it at the end of their turn to tap one possible blocker, and then you immediately get to untap, ready to use the Mage again to get rid of a second possible blocker. At that point, you should be able to send a swarm of unstoppable death into the Red Zone. (Incidentally, this term — the Red Zone — is basically borrowed from American Football, and represents the trenches where combat takes place, somewhere in the middle of the table between the two players. While the entire table may be the Battlefield, it’s in the Red Zone that most Limited games get decided.)
In conclusion, tappers are an extremely useful part of White’s armory. It’s irritating to opponents when you’re on offense, and can utterly switch off their biggest threat on defense. Much in demand in Draft, and a beating in Sealed.
We’ve seen how useful giving our creatures Vigilance can be when we looked at Ajani Goldmane. Captain of the Watch doesn’t need any help, he has the ability to stay untapped when he attacks regardless. Paying six mana for a 3/3 would be considered disastrous, and the fact that the Captain is Rare tends to suggest he must be a lot better than that. And, of course, he is.
In terms of flavor, this card is a home run. We’d expect the Watch to be vigilant, and they are. We’d expect the Captain to be an inspirational leader, and he is, giving all other Soldiers +1/+1 and Vigilance too. And finally, you’d expect the Captain to bring troops with him when he comes on duty, and he does, providing three 1/1 Soldiers when he comes onto the battlefield. It’s worth remembering that those Soldiers, although listed on the card as being 1/1s, are instantly stiffened into Vigilant 2/2s with the Captain’s other abilities. If the Captain dies, they’ll go back to being 1/1s, and they won’t have Vigilance, and at that point they’re very unexciting.
A footnote to this card is that the whole idea of creatures that ‘unzip’ (i.e. turn themselves into more than just one creature, in this case four in total) is a relatively new development. Traditionally, it’s been the spells that generate multiple effects, essentially behaving as more than one card. Largely thanks to the vision of Aaron Forsythe, the director of R&D, modern-day creatures increasingly have the ability to mimic the power of killer spells, and in particular, they manage to avoid falling foul of a single piece of removal (a card that kills a creature).
In most cases, the fewer applications a card has (that’s to say the fewer things it can do), the cheaper it’s going to be. That’s to be expected, since versatility comes at a cost. Celestial Purge is a great example of a card that can be described as ‘narrow’ in application. That doesn’t make it bad, it just means that there’s quite a lot of things that it doesn’t do, and sometimes you’re going to badly wish it did. That said, let’s not worry too much about the things it can’t do — getting rid of Green monsters for example — let’s focus on the things it can, because it does those things rather well.
At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking it reads ‘kill a black or red monster’, since a lot of the time that’s effectively what it’s going to do, but Magic is a game where it pays to pay attention to the subtleties of the card text, and imagine not only what it’s likely to do, but what it can do, however unlikely the circumstances.
Celestial Purge has two strong plus points beyond the simple ‘get rid of a creature’. First, and arguably most significantly, the card you Exile doesn’t have to be a creature at all. As long as the card (and if it’s on the battlefield we call it a ‘permanent’) is red or black, you can deal with it. A nasty Black or Red enchantment? It dies to Celestial Purge. A Black Artifact maybe? That too, bites the dust. It’s worth remembering however, that although a Swamp looks like it’s black, and a Mountain looks like it’s red, as far as the game is concerned, they aren’t. That means you won’t be destroying basic lands with the Purge. Sorry about that.
The second bonus to the card is that you get to Exile the permanent rather than just destroy it. When you Exile a card, it doesn’t go to the graveyard like normal when a card ‘dies’, but instead it gets sent off somewhere much further away, somewhere it’s very tough to come back from (although a few cards can make this happen.) Some decks thrive on bringing cards back from the graveyard. This is known as a Re-animator strategy, and has a strong flavor of assorted Zombies and Ghouls rising once more to terrorise your neighbourhood (or something.) In addition, the keyword Unearth is specifically designed to bring cards back for an encore on the battlefield, and handily, that keyword is based in Blue, Red and Black, meaning that you’ll sometimes get added value out of Exiling the card.
Another factor to consider is the prevalence of gold cards in whatever Format you’re playing. As of now, Alara Reborn is the first ever set to consist of 100% gold cards, menaning that every card belongs to more than one color. That means there are going to be many more ‘Black’ or ‘Red’ cards running around, thus raising the value of Celestial Purge.
Overall, Celestial Purge is the kind of card that goes into Sideboards for Constructed play. If Black and Red decks are popular — and there have been plenty of successful decks in tournament play that have combined the two — then the Purge is a very cheap, instant-speed answer to a wide variety of threats. It’s the kind of card that Pro deckbuilders are delighted to see in their toolkit.
…
Alright, let’s take a deep breath. So far, we’ve looked at just seven of the more than 10,000 cards that exist in the game. Believe me when I say that there is lots to say about pretty much all of them, but if you haven’t been playing for long, there’s a ton of information and ideas for you to process before we resume hostilities next week.
In general, from now on I’ll be tackling one color from M10 each week. In truth, these aren’t the kind of articles that you should read all in one sitting, although if that floats your boat, go ahead. If the M10 Academy had existed when I was just starting to learn about the game, I would probably look to treat it as a kind of ‘Junior Encyclopedia’. Whenever I was puzzled by an M10 card, I’d go and find it in the Academy, and see if I can find some clues.
It’s worth reiterating that many of the concepts that I’ve alluded to, and the dozens that are coming in future weeks, have been the subject of years of study by some of the smartest people on Earth. If you think Card Disadvantage is something you haven’t quite grasped at the first try, many of us are still discovering new things about it after fifteen years in the game.
Learn at your own pace. Question everything, and talk to everyone who has already taken this journey you’re embarking on now. Whatever you do, have fun, and enjoy the best game in the world.
Until next week, as ever, thanks for reading…
R.