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Black Enchantments & Maze Running

Bennie goes over the black enchantments he came up with for “You Make the Card” and shares his thoughts on some Dragon’s Maze cards he’s excited about.

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I had a great time at the Commander tournament featuring only Modern-legal sets (but still the regular Commander banned list) last Saturday. We even got to give away another Bennie Smith Spirit of EDH Haymaker Award! I’ll have a recap of the day along with the winner’s decklist next week.

This week, I’m dying to talk about You Make the Card and Dragon’s Maze!

I really love this part of the You Make the Card program. I mean, every Magic player has dreams of being able to make Magic cards, and there’s no doubt that Mark Rosewater, Aaron Forsythe, and many other guys at Wizards are some of the luckiest people on the planet—getting paid well to do something they love. How many of us can say the same?

And yet, if my phone rang and it was Aaron on the other end offering me a job in R&D, I doubt I’d be able to take it because I’d have to move to Washington state. I wouldn’t say I loved my job, but I make a good living at it and have deep roots here on the East Coast. The offer would have to be pretty amazing to make it worthwhile, but why would they? There are a ton of guys who could do as well or better than I could but would be able to move out there tomorrow.

So this week provides a small chance to achieve some level of immortality within this game we love by being the "lead designer" for card text on our sweet new black enchantment.

I was a little freaked out when the announcement came Monday that we had just three days to submit our card text ideas, but thankfully I was feeling pretty sure that regular ol’ enchantment was going to win out over Aura and had already begun sketching out some ideas.

First was the idea of an evil tapestry with various threads woven together to provide its possessor dark power, sort of like the Picture of Dorian Gray but a tapestry of cloth instead of a painting. The enchantment would have two different elements that woven together could provide different elements of dark power. I was inspired by Skullclamp, Blood Artist, and Fecundity.

Tapestry of Power

All creatures you control get +1/-1

Whenever a creature you control dies, draw a card and lose 1 life

Tapestry of Blood

All creatures get +1/-1

Whenever a creature dies, gain 1 life and your opponent loses 1 life

Tapestry of Power II

All creatures get +1/-1

Whenever a creature dies, its controller draws a card and loses 1 life

Tapestry of Life and Death

All creatures you control get +1/-1

Sacrifice a creature:  regenerate target creature

As you can see, there are a few subtle different "dials" you can turn here to try out different things, and I like that some of these that affect all creatures can be used to hose tokens while boosting your own bigger creatures or perhaps hosing sweepers or making sweepers more powerful. Plus, they all feel very much like black cards.

Then I was thinking of interesting and splashy enchantments and immediately thought of Form of the Dragon, which is so full of flavor and also good enough to have shown up in competitive decks. Then I thought about Form of the Squirrel, which was an obvious riff on the Dragon form but definitely not something that would have made a splash in a non-Un set.

But while turning into a 1/1 Squirrel wasn’t quite impressive, what about turning into a 1/1 Skeleton, which would definitely be quite black? Okay, sure—that’s not really impressive either. But could we figure out a way to make it actually good? How could we make an enchantment that turned a player into 1/1 Skeleton with the Skeleton’s resilience and resistance to death?

Skeletal Form

At the beginning of your upkeep, Skeletal Form deals 1 damage to target creature or player.

At the end of each turn, your life total becomes 1.

Whenever you lose life, you may pay {B} to prevent that life loss.

If you would lose the game, sacrifice Skeletal Form instead. Your life total becomes 1.

My vision was a card that would only cost maybe 1B (like a Skeleton), leaving you plenty of black mana open to try and keep yourself from dying, and a card that would clearly be a sweet homage to Form of the Dragon while being quite different and quite "black." 

Then I was thinking of the various "Lich" cards that have cropped up in Magic sets over time and just how terrible most of them are outside of weird and convoluted combo decks. My gaming background is steeped in Dungeons & Dragons—I DMed for quite a while years back and still get together and play with my friends most every Monday night—so when I think of a Lich I think of a powerful evil creature to be feared, not some fragile glass cannon. So I wanted to make a Lich card that would make a control player’s—or even a midrange player’s—eyes light up with the allure of dark power. But I also wanted to stay true to the Magic "Lich" theme by having "you lose the game" somewhere on the card and cooked up this:

Eye of the Lich

Shuffle your library, then exile fifteen cards face down. You may play one of these cards each turn. If you are dealt damage, shuffle one of these cards back into your library. If there are no more cards removed this way in Exile, you lose the game.

If Eye of the Lich leaves play, lose half your life.

A lot of weird things going on here, but basically the flavor was inspired by D&D’s old "Eye of Vecna." The idea is that you enchant a Lich’s eye embedded in your own eye socket to unlock its great power but it also leaves you vulnerable to great risk. Perhaps the Eye lets you see into the future—represented by the exiled cards from your library—and lets you pull resources from the future into the present day to help you amass great power. But the longer you utilize that power, the greater risk you run of letting the Eye consume you. Before that happens, if you can somehow pluck out the Eye by destroying it—under great pain represented by half your life—you can wiggle out of the "you lose the game" clause, saving your soul from annihilation (AKA losing the game).

Limiting this to playing one card each turn and also translating damage dealt into shuffling cards back into your library (rather than putting them into the graveyard) I think goes a long way towards preventing this from spawning a degenerate combo deck. For instance, if someone casts Vampiric Tutor for a combo piece, you can Bolt them and force them to shuffle their library.

I like the tension between utilizing the cards in exile and counting down to your own potential destruction.

Lastly, I thought of perhaps an interesting and "black" spin on capturing an ally of my opponent and using him—consuming him—to fuel my own evil ambition. Control Magic a creature…or even a planeswalker!

Circle of Blood

Exile target creature or Planewalkers and add a blood counter to Circle of Blood for each toughness or loyalty counter on exiled card.

Whenever you are dealt damage, remove a blood counter: prevent that damage and draw a card.

I particularly like this black and evil way to defile a planeswalker, but I fear that this space might not be something that R&D or Creative wants to do. So I ran the other ideas by Robby Rothe, of MTG Color Pie fame and quite the student of Magic design, and asked for his opinions on these cards before I chose one to submit.

Even though I really loved the subtle coolness of transforming into a Skeleton, enduring the laughs long enough to get the last laugh, he pointed out that it just wasn’t flashy enough. "How many Skeletons do you see on Halloween compared to Iron Mans?" Considering Wizards is having to comb through thousands of admissions, going for subtle coolness is probably not the best way to go. Robby thought that Eye of the Lich would stand out, and I have to agree with him even if I’m sad I can’t toss my other babies into the mix.

So Eye of the Lich is what I submitted this week. Wish me luck! And if somehow the text gets selected as a choice in the next round of voting, please vote for it!

Okay, now on to Dragon’s Maze!

As some of you know, when asked by folks what my all-time favorite Magic set is, I always answer "the most recent set," which sounds like a cop-out, but it’s really true. There’s a reason why I’ve loved Magic since I started playing nearly twenty years ago and have never gotten burned out or tired of it.

It’s because they keep making cool new cards to play with!

As spoiler season unfolds, we’re regaled with tantalizing teases of what the new set is bringing to the table. Sure, it’s more prudent to not get too excited about cards until the whole set is spoiled and we can better grok what shape our new metagame might acquire…

But I can’t help it. I see a new card, and I start to salivate. I’m like Wizards’ own Pavlov dog and, Magic cards are my bell.

Voice of Resurgence

When I first read this card, I was totally stoked. The card text just screams awesome Bennie card.

Then I saw the rarity. Mythic! Then I saw the casting cost. Two!

An awesome two-drop with decent stats and stuffed to the gills with powerful effects plus mythic rare in a small/third set of a block…

Oh, my aching wallet!

I went ahead and pulled the trigger on my preorder. I mean, there’s no way that I’m not playing the hell out of a playset of these things for at least the next year and a half, and I think chances are high it’s going to be good in Modern and Legacy. I’ll even play this bad boy in Commander. Sure, it’s possible that I’ll lose something in terms of sheer investment when these rotate out of Standard, but I have a hunch that it will hold value and perhaps even gain value. Even if it doesn’t, though, I’ll have gained a ton of playing value out of it.

Now, I really hope the existence of this card doesn’t herald the coming rotation of Thragtusk since it’s got a bit of a Thragtusk feel to it. I actually have high hopes that Thragtusk will be around for another cycle because I’m fairly convinced a big part of why we have such a healthy and diverse metagame is in large part due to our Beast friend. I wrote a whole article about it, so check it out.

While I will probably being playing Thragtusks in the same deck as Voice of Resurgence while they’re in the same format together, they really do different things. Thragtusk provides insane resistance to removal, is easy to cast, and provides a life buffer and a significant board presence all on his own.

Voice of Resurgence provides resistance to dying, is not so easy to cast, and isn’t really all that threatening on its own. What Voice of Resurgence actually is, though, is a pretty nice hate bear with some subtle sweetness in the right decks.

I’ve long been a proponent of giving more colors the ability to significantly interact with opponents in all phases of the game, and that has typically been done with instants and cards with flash. My favorite color, green, long struggled with a dearth of cards that could do that, but that’s certainly turned around in recent years with some strong instants and creatures with flash.

Voice of Resurgence attacks decks with high levels of instants and flash by making the ability much less appealing, sometimes even forcing players to play their instants on their own turn—casting an Searing Spear at an attacking Voice of Resurgence could be a disaster if you can’t also handle the 2/2s left behind that could potentially get a lot bigger when more creatures hit the board. It also makes a pretty sweet target for Equipment, turning the tables on what is often a "blowout" when someone responds to the equip cost with an instant.

The icing on the cake of course is that you can still play your own instants and flash cards with impunity if you’re the only one with Voice of Resurgence, unlike other sweet hate bears like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben.

What I really love about Voice of Resurgence is how much better it gets the more creatures you have on the board. If you’ve got three, four, or even more creatures on the board, suddenly blocking or being blocked by Voice of Resurgence becomes a scary proposition given the size of the token it will leave behind.

Blood Scrivener

Yes, lots of people are pretty high on this card as a pretty good two-drop for the Zombie decks out there that have been looking for a decent two-drop that wasn’t Blood Artist. I like it for that reason and a few others. First, I think it provides any deck where it’s already a decent choice the ability to overcome a mulligan much easier than other decks and can allow you to mulligan much more aggressively and know you’ve got a good shot to recover. I also think it’s a potent sideboard against slower controlling decks that try to win the attrition game with card advantage.

Lastly, it seems like he goes with Lotleth Troll like peanut butter goes with chocolate. My man the Troll is a really amazing card that I’ve struggled to be impressed with, so maybe Blood Scrivener is the undead spellcaster he’s been waiting for.

Deadbridge Chant

I want to love this card. I really do. It’s Golgari, so it’s for my people! But having to pay six mana and wait a whole turn at least to begin to possibly get significant advantage from this card has me worried this is squarely casual material. That said, I’ll probably give this a whirl in a midrange Zombie deck and see what happens.

My poor, unused Charmbreaker Devils really wish this card cost five mana instead of six…

Rot Farm Skeleton

Is it just me or does this seem like a pretty solid anti-control card?

Sire of Insanity

Speaking of anti-control, I’m in the "Thinks Sire of Insanity Is Awesome" camp. I was around when we had Mindslicer, which was a brutal card against control decks if you could get the thing to die. Sometimes, control decks were able to just take the lumps from Mindslicer without ever killing it and just win the game, which could get frustrating, and sometimes when Mindslicer died you were left with no threats on the board and were left in a topdecking contest against a deck with card drawing.

Sire of Insanity gives you Mindslicer on steroids—you get the effect every single turn while leaving you a Craw Wurm on the table to beat down. Flash decks and Sphinx’s Revelation got you down? This guy can be your answer.

Tajic, Blade of the Legion

I’ve got a confession to make. I really don’t like Huntmaster of the Fells. Sometimes he’s insanely good, and sometimes he’s just terrible. For four mana, I want more bang for my buck. So whenever I brew up an idea with Naya, I never put Huntmaster in my decks. Then I look at other Naya decks that all have Huntmasters and feel like I’m making a big mistake.

Tajic, on the other hand, is just the four-drop I’m looking for! He plays incredible defense against creatures, laughs off most removal, and if he’s got two buddies to attack with, he’s a monster! I can’t wait to slap a Rancor on this guy and pair him up with Ulvenwald Tracker while I still can!

Tell me, what cool cards from Dragon’s Maze have gotten you excited? Let me know in the comments below.

Okay, I guess I better wrap things up for now. Next week I’ll go over the Commander tournament, but the week after that I’ll finally have the whole spoiler to start brewing up some sweet new decklists! Y’all have a great weekend.

Take care,

Bennie

starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com

Make sure to follow my Twitter feed (@blairwitchgreen). I check it often so feel free to send me feedback, ideas, and random thoughts. I’ve also created a Facebook page where I’ll be posting up deck ideas and will happily discuss Magic, life, or anything else you want to talk about!

New to Commander?
If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

My current Commander decks (and links to decklists):

Previous Commander decks currently on hiatus: