It’s a pretty reasonable game. Your aggressive deck pushes into them until they stabilize. You’re playing an update of Cedric Phillips Vengeant Kithkin deck, and your opponent isn’t someone you know well enough to know what they’re playing. You drop the turn 1 Figure of Destiny, and they Thoughtseize away your Ajani Vengeant. A top-deck gives you a Goldmeadow Stalwart, you pump your Figure, drop the Stalwart (revealing a Knight of Meadowgrain). They sit back on their second land and wait. You drop your third land, and swing in for four, holding back on the pump lest they play elimination — they knock out your Figure anyway, and they drop to 14, and you drop the Knight and pass. Fulminator Mage drops on the other side, and you see your opponent think before knocking out your Rugged Prairie before letting you drop a potential Ajani Vengeant. A Wizened Cenn drops them to 8, but you don’t have another land. Their fourth land drops, and a Putrid Leech hits the table, with two mana open. Your hand is all Anthem, Ajani, and Spectral, and still no third mana, but you swing in, a second Terror knocking out your Cenn, and your Knight being eaten by a Leech. They’re at 4, you’re at 25, and things might have turned, but it won’t take much at all to convert this. They draw a card, drop a land, and cast Lord of Extinction. You count: Thoughtseize, Ajani Vengeant, Terror, Figure of Destiny, Fulminator Mage, Rugged Prairie, Terror, Wizened Cenn, Knight of Meadowgrain. You’re in luck, it’s only 9/9. They think for a second and almost swing in, but decide knocking you to 23 isn’t that hot. You draw one of the perfect pulls for the moment: a Rugged Prairie to cast the Spectral Procession in your hand, but you still can’t attack. They draw and think for a while… Down comes Graven Cairns. They tap their mana and cast Volcanic Fallout. The new cards in the yard since your last count: Spectral Procession, Goldmeadow Stalwart, Volcanic Fallout, and Putrid Leech — 13/13 for the Lord. A second Fulminator Mage takes out your Rugged Prairie (again), and the Lord of Extinction comes in for 15. Path to Exile, where are you now…
I got into an argument even before the set was released. My good friend I@n DeGraff and I were brainstorming cards from the new set when he brought up Lord of Extinction.
“What a red herring!” he laughed.
I didn’t know why he was laughing at the card; it was definitely on my short list. I challenged him on it.
“It doesn’t have trample, it doesn’t have evasion. It’s just this big guy that is going to get killed by anyone playing elimination, or chump-blocked. It’s no Spiritmonger.”
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s actually probably a lot better than Spiritmonger.
When we think about what it was that made Spiritmonger so awesome, it was generally that it was so hard to kill. Getting into a fight with it wouldn’t solve anything — it would just make the Spiritmonger more impressive. You could kill it, but this generally involved either killing with specific cards that were sneaky, like Terminate and Putrefy, or by getting absolutely lucky when they spent their full five mana on it, and having the appropriate amount of burn (plus perhaps their block in an attack) to damage it to death.
It’s going to be rare that this situation is at all different with regards to Lord of Extinction. Yes, yes, it can be absolutely killed by the specialized kill of the moment (Path to Exile/Terminate), but it isn’t particularly likely that you’re going to be seeing a Lord of Extinction burned out. The act of playing Magic interactively is naturally likely to fill up graveyards, and there is something very important about something that is just big, even if that is all that a creature has going for it.
Back when Evan Erwin asked the pros in attendance about what was the best creature in the format. The answers seemed inevitably split between two camps: “Tarmogoyf is the best creature” and “Tarmogoyf isn’t the best, no matter what other people say”. Zac Hill put it well:
“No. That’s stupid. Tarmogoyf is really good. Tarmogoyf is the best card in Future Sight, probably, and also the most overrated card in Future Sight. People put it into every deck, but they have to remember it’s a creature with Power and Toughness and that’s all it is; not every deck needs a dude with Power and Toughness. At the end of the day, he attacks and blocks — sometimes that isn’t good enough.”
PV echoed this: “Tarmogoyf is just a creature — it attacks, it blocks.”
While it’s absolutely true that creatures without any real abilities often don’t make the cut in the limited space we a lot ourselves in our 75 card lists, this is not a statement about the actual quality of a purely massive creature. On paper, Fusion Elemental is not that hot, but when you’re facing down an 8/8 in draft, it doesn’t matter that it is vanilla — it will quickly run you over if you don’t already have them on the ropes, and on nothing more than the fact that it is big.
I remember one game, really feeling like I couldn’t possibly lose. On turn 2, my Rip-Clan Crasher joined a Nacatl, and an Ember Weaver on the next turn. They dropped some minimal resistance and were down to 9 when they dropped their turn 5 Fusion Elemental. I could attack in for three and lose nearly my whole team. I could Maniacal Rage it, but that would still put me in a rough spot. I did it, dropped them to 4, and the swing back for 10 put me a hit from dead. A few turns later, I was.
Any big creature is a real problem. It’s not just the Progeniti and the Phyrexian Dreadnoughts. Huge/Huge means something. Even without trample, Phyrexian Dreadnought would be scary in play, trample just takes away the chump-blocking option. If we think about the truly monstrous creatures from Magic’s history, it seems easy to put Lord of Extinction right there with them.
Perhaps the mother of huge creatures, historically, is Psychatog. Generally speaking, when we think about what it means to be fighting against a Psychatog is that it can come down easily with counter-protection, and in a late game it will kill us with a single swing. It’s vulnerable to a whole host of elimination, of course, but that doesn’t stop it from having the skills of a Big Critter.
Moat or the Abyss? Pick your poison…
The big question that any opponent has to decide when they’re dealing with a creature like Psychatog or Lord of Extinction is this:
“Is that Big Creature going to be a Moat, or is it going to be the Abyss?”
A lot of the time, the answer is going to inevitably be, “I guess I’ll make your monster into the Abyss.” The best hope that the aggressive deck can have is that you’re so far back on your heels, that you won’t be able to reliably retaliate without the fear of death. In this situation, coming in with everything is liable to end the life of their best creature on the table, and in return, its life will be translated into damage from the other critters that are out there.
This, of course, quickly gets gummed up as subsequent turns add up. Once the Lord of Extinction player has gotten to untap, all manner of things can go to hell. That aggressive, all-in-attack was meant to accomplish a hearty six points of damage, but a single elimination spell made it into merely two. Devastation. Even without tricks, simply have other random bears around joining into chump block can be awful.
That’s because a sufficiently huge creature really is the Abyss. The amount of damage that it can deal makes the only reasonable response a chump block. For most creature decks, dealing with the Abyss is simply too much, in conjunction with any other resistance.
In a pure stand-off situation, the Lord of Extinction ends up playing Moat instead. Either unable to capitalize on the board situation or unable to risk something going wrong, the opposing deck decides to sit the attack phase out — at least with anyone that can’t simply evade the Lord of Extinction.
For the Lord of Extinction player, this is nearly as good as having either a Moat or the Abyss in play — and in some cases, better! While the opponent will initially have the choice between one or the other, either is generally incredibly rough on them. It’s not as though the problem isn’t potentially solvable by the opponent, it’s that the impact to the game is so huge that the problem must be addressed, unless the game is essentially already lost and the worst case between Moat and the Abyss won’t win the game on its own.
Super-Psychatog or the Abyss?
What is the size of a Psychatog, at least usually? This is not a rhetorical question. The answer is usually this: “in most cases, large enough to kill you in a single swing, and in rare cases, fairly small, but still a potential threat.” But where a Psychatog often has to work to get its size, typically a Lord of Extinction will already be that large or larger.
In the moment that it makes sense for the Lord of Extinction player to shift from the defensive to the offensive — a moment that can last as quickly as a turn, sometimes — it’s likely that, just like a Psychatog, it will possess sufficient power to be able to kill you in a single swing, and if not, probably only two.
Unlike a Psychatog, though, you can’t just “wait it out,” putting chumps in the way to wear the Psychatog down so that after you’re done resisting it, it won’t have the strength left in it to finish you off. No, in fact, you’re likely to have simply made the Lord all that more powerful. This puts you in the distinctly unpleasant position of literally sacrificing a creature a turn to the Lord.
This threatening position even works against decks that might potentially have a pretty solid life total. Take a Five-Color Control deck that has been sitting behind walls. Even at forty-something life, it’s reasonable to expect a Lord of Extinction to finish the game in only a few swings. Contrast this with an imaginary Psychatog that mystically wandered its way into a Standard game, which might not actually have the ability to finish the game.
In a race situation, even cards like the mythical Double Dragon, Broodmate Dragon, seem to be at a loss against this guy unless they’re already way ahead. Instead, they pretty much have to be able to rely on creature elim to have a chance. There, Broodmate Dragon’s mate helps it out immensely, but the fact remains that it is demanded.
Brian Kowal put it pretty well to me when he said, “Yeah, any creature that is a must kill is probably at least okay.”
Augmenting
The big disadvantages that Lord of Extinction actually has are pretty clear on their face. It costs five. It has no special abilities.
This means that unlike a Psychatog, it won’t get down on a very early turn. This also means that when it does drop down, it is likely to be in a moment when you are tapped out. Both of these factors make it far less likely to be considered as a super-strong candidate for a counter-spell deck.
Psychatog’s other major strength was that its discard powers could enable Madness or get a Wonder into the yard. Wonder, of course, could be deeply important because it could get around that problematic “how do we connect” issue.
There are numbers of ways to actually connect. Trample is probably the most reasonable of these. In Standard, for reasonable cards, that gives us the following list (if we’re being generous):
Behemoth Sledge
Colossal Might
Garruk Wildspeaker
Loxodon Warhammer
Overrun
Tower Above
The two new Alara Reborn cards require dipping into another color, and none of them really provide a huge “surprise” factor except for Colossal Might. That said, nearly every single one of them will change the Lord of Extinction into a killer after most mid-games that haven’t included Relic of Progenitus.
Fear cards might as well work the same way.
Aphotic Wisps
Mask of Riddles
Profane Command
This list is clearly smaller, but then again, Fear is a less commonly granted ability than Trample. Even here, I’m confident that both Mask of Riddles and Profane Command are strong enough in their own right to consider playing in decks, it just makes the Lord of Extinction all that more scary if a Profane Command can be attached to it. Heck, even a card like Whispersilk Cloak begins to look potentially appealing, albeit it almost certainly isn’t good enough to make the cut in any deck that is truly competitive.
Another strategy for making Lord of Extinction connect is to get rid of all of the creatures in the way. If the Lord has been acting as the Abyss already, this can be crippling if you’re aggressive going after your opponent’s creatures. Here, any kind of elimination is reasonable, but particularly reasonable are those cards that might get rid of a bunch of creatures at once. Be it Infest, Volcanic Fallout, Firespout, Maelstrom Pulse, or even something slower like Defiler of Souls, these cards work the double-duty of sweeping things out of the way while they grow “smaller” Lords that are only a mere 6/6 to 8/8.
The thing about these cards is that they are already cards that you’d want to be having access to in a deck like this. Trading one-for-one (or better) with an opponent is just another way to make sure that your Lord is going to be big when he finally hits the table, and that they are going to require a specialized elimination card if they want to kill him.
Of course, he still dies to all of those cards, fueling the attack, “he’s just a creature that attacks or blocks.”
The best way to handle this problem is to overwhelm it. There are a huge variety of ways to overwhelm elimination. The first is to get it out of your opponent’s hand. Mind Shatter, Hypnotic Specter, Raven’s Crime, and other cards can all be used to try to strip the card out so that you don’t actually have to drop your Lord of Extinction until you feel reasonably safe. They might still have it if you haven’t fully ripped down their hand, or they might top deck into it, but either way, you’ve made them work for it.
There is a simpler way, though.
Play creatures your opponent wants to kill.
It sounds simple, but it’s true. If you play enough creatures that your opponent is going to want to kill, they will use their elim on those creatures. Eventually the Jamie Wakefield maxim will catch up with them: “The last fattie that they can’t answer will kill them.”
What are these creatures that our opponent might want to kill? There are a ton of them. They’re usually called “Good Creatures”, and we try to put them into our decks. The fact of the matter is, people play cards like Path to Exile because they need to have answers to the early game of aggressive decks, and if they “save up” that Path for a Lord, they very well might be dead, sometimes. If the only creature you play that matters is Lord of Extinction, well, yes, those extra potent elim spells your opponent has laying around are going to be there to off the poor Lord. Bleed them out with other threats, and they might not have the Path/Terminate when they need it.
Really, there are very few cards that are played in Standard that answer Lord. To my mind, it’s very likely that he is going to be more important to Standard than Spiritmonger ever managed to do. This does not give Lord of Extinction the ubiquitous power of a Psychatog or a Tarmogoyf, but it certainly makes Lord of Extinction a real threat that is going to be worth picking up, wherever you can.
It’s the real deal folks. Get ready for it.
See you next week…