I’d like to begin the Academy this week with a Health and Safety announcement. It has come to my attention that some of you have been attempting to read entire articles in one go. This is almost certainly bad for you, and it’s certainly bad for your Magic. The Academy isn’t like your typical article. Quite apart from the fact that it weighs in at vast reams of words, each card is meant to be a small ‘story’ all to itself.
Just as you would with a Dictionary or Encyclopaedia, take your time. Go to entries that stir your curiosity or imagination. Look up the cards that you’ve seen in Event Coverage, and try to work out why they’re so successful. Be contrary — go and look for what you think are the worst cards, and see whether you’ve forgotten ways that they might turn out to be useful.
Above all, the Academy is there to help you think. In a way, it doesn’t matter where that thinking takes you, because, although there are some Right and Wrong answers in the game (Mountain are not often optimal in a mono-Green deck), the real skill in the game lies in teasing out the finest of tiny decisions.
If you decide to read just a couple of cards a day, it’s entirely possible that you’ll be confronted by more ideas and history and strategy and theory and opinion than is technically good for you. However you choose to use the Academy, enjoy the learning curve.
R.
With White and Blue now safely behind us, the shape of the whole set is starting to come into focus. It should have been readily apparent that the two ‘Corporations’ we’ve looked at so far are substantially different in the services they offer the discerning Mage.
Now we turn our attention to the color that sits in the middle of the color wheel, Black. Let’s find out what the official Player’s Guide has to say about this darkest of the arts:
Black specializes in killing creatures, no matter how big. Some black spells channel your allegiance to black into death — the more Swamps you have, the deadlier they are. But black doesn’t stop at killing the body. It also excels at killing the mind by forcibly ripping spells out of your opponent’s hand. As if that weren’t cruel enough (because nothing’s ever cruel enough to black), try playing the enchantment Megrim: it deals 2 damage to your opponent for each discarded card.
‘Power at any price’ is black’s motto. When you’re making deals with a Demon, everything’s a bargaining chip. You’ll trade life and sacrifice creatures to access that power. And then there’s Xathrid Demon itself. This gargantuan creature will make short work of your opponent if you keep feeding it creatures. Fail to do so, and it’ll make short work of you. High risk, high reward. Have you got the guts to walk on the dark side?
So let’s fix a few of the key ingredients in our mind before we get to work. First, killing creatures. Second, lots of discard. Third, high risk creatures with huge upside. That’ll do for now. Let’s wade in…
Acolyte Of Xathrid
In many ways, Black is philosophically the flip side of White. One obvious example is that you’d expect White to gain you life, while Black would be about the business of your opponent losing theirs. Just because they’re opposites, though, doesn’t mean they’re equals.
The object of the game, as you doubtless recall, is to make your opponent dead. Whilst gaining life yourself can be translated into the time and turns you need to accomplish this in some other way, it’s very much an indirect approach to winning. Your opponent losing life isn’t. While we’re here, let’s make the important distinction between the two major ways that a player’s life total goes down.
Most commonly, we have ‘damage’. Sometimes that’s combat damage, which is what happens when a creature hits you for two, and sometimes that’s direct damage, like when a Lightning Bolt jolts your skull for three. In both these cases, the game is aware of the method by which your life total is being reduced, and lots of cards interact with that term ‘damage’.
We’ve already seen several cards in the Academy that are quite interested in damage. Safe Passage prevents all damage that would be dealt to you and creatures you control this turn. Harm’s Way is a similarly useful damage prevention spell.
Neither of these are any use whatsoever against Acolyte of Xathrid. See, the Acolyte employs an entirely different way of reducing the life total — life loss. This is 100% not the same as damage. This is a really important distinction, and costs players lots of frustration early on. Once again, life loss and damage are two entirely different things that have the same result — you being closer to death.
The reason the distinction is so important is precisely because those damage prevention spells don’t work against life loss. For that to happen, they would need to say things like, ‘You cannot lose life this turn’. They don’t. In terms of flavor, damage prevention is all about saying, ‘You’re about to hurt me, and I’d like not to be hurt, so here’s my protection.’ Life loss is far more insidious. It’s about sucking the life right out of you, and as we’ll see, sometimes that life that you lose gets channelled into your opponent in a real double whammy.
Meanwhile, you should bear in mind that dealing with a card that forces you to lose a life is tougher to counteract than one that forces you to take one damage. There are lots of cards that revolve around the prevention or redistribution of damage. Cards that interact on a life level are far fewer, and as such deserve a little corner of your mind, so that you’re aware of them, and how they interact. Because of the insidious nature of life loss, this is the kind of card that can win games at a Sealed level. Any card that can repeatedly lower an opposing life total without having to get involved in the messy business of combat is something worth considering.
A lot of players just starting out in the game love Black, because it has plenty of cards that are easy to understand, clearly have relatively narrow uses, and tend to do exactly what they set out to do. Assassinate is such a card.
There aren’t many ways you can play Assassinate wrong. It happens on your turn, and there’s only two places it can happen — in your Main Phase before combat, or in your second Main Phase, after combat. That’s it. In order to cast it, there has to be a tapped creature in play. If nothing in play is tapped, Assassinate is staying in your hand. Assassinate is sneaky, looking to kill a creature ‘while their back’s turned.’ If they’re untapped, they’re on the lookout, and you have to wait.
What else is there to say about a nice, clean card like Assassinate? Well, it targets, and that means you won’t be aiming this at a Shroud creature, like Mist Leopard. Tapped or untapped, that Leopard is always on the lookout for trouble. ‘Destroy’ means that the creature can Regenerate, which won’t happen to you that often, but does mean it’s a little less deadified than with a card like Celestial Purge, which Exiles rather than Destroys.
Oh, and one more thing. Most of the time, the reason a creature will be tapped is because it’s just attacked you. Most of the time isn’t all the time, though, and there are certainly ways — like an active Blinding Mage for example — that mean you can force a monster to tap before spending a nice, clean, easily understood three mana to Put. It. In. The. Bin. And that’s something you’ll always enjoy doing in Limited play.
One way that the color wheel has changed over the years is in the relationship between Black and White. There was a period — and we’re well back in the last century here — where Black Weenie was very much a viable counterpart to White Weenie. You could choose whether to play as the Good Guys or the Bad Guys, but Magic has moved away from that idea. You may take the view that sucking the living essence out of a pretty little Soul Warden before making a pact with multiple Demons qualifies you for the Naughty Corner, but Magic no longer takes that view.
As a result, the number of powerful small Black monsters has decreased down the years, meaning that White is now the main repository of screaming quickness. That means that White Knight has seen a lot more play down the years, while Black Knight hasn’t found an obvious Constructed home. In Limited play, of course, it remains seriously good news. In terms of attacking, the First Strike ability is worth an extra point of power as far as potential blockers are concerned, since any vanilla 2/2 will die to your First Striker.
For the full benefit of what Protection means, going and reading the entry on White Knight is a good plan, because there are significant upsides to this pretty complicated ability. However, having the ability to read is something you should all have (and if not, this sentence probably won’t reach your cerebral cortex), and the wording is right there on the card:
‘This creature can’t be blocked, targeted, dealt damage, or enchanted, by anything white.’
An easy way to remember it : D-E-B-T. That’s Damage, Enchant, Block, Target. Simples. (Don’t worry foreigners, that was one for the Brits.)
We’ve talked before about Grizzly Bears, the generic name for 2/2 monsters that cost two and have no abilities. At four mana, a generic name for a 3/3 with no ability is a Hill Giant, named after that Red card from Alpha. A lot of the time, Bog Wraith is going to be a Hill Giant. As such, it’s never going to be exciting, but we’ve learned that not everything useful has to be exciting. Like a can-opener.
The usefulness that Hill Giants have in a Format is something you can’t quickly determine, since it very much depends on how fast the Format is. Against bucketloads of 2/1s and 2/2s that cost sufficiently little mana to actually get played (and that’s the important bit — the efficiency rather than the power and toughness) a Hill Giant represents a substantial roadblock, since it will pick off one of these every turn and live. If cards like Elite Vanguard and Silvercoat Lion aren’t seeing much play, Hill Giants tend to go down in value, because they’re no longer sitting ‘above’ the small monsters, they’re sitting ‘below’ the big ones, like Stampeding Rhino or Craw Wurm.
So far, we’ve just looked at Bog Wraith as if it’s a Hill Giant, but of course it does have an ability, Swampwalk. As long as your opponent controls a Swamp, this is unblockable. When that condition is met, this is a sizeable threat. Phantom Warrior, the Blue card that’s unblockable automatically, can kill you from 12 life in six turns. Bog Wraith can do that from the same position in four, and that two turn difference is a lifetime in a game of Magic.
Clearly, the chances of Swampwalk being relevant are much higher in Sealed than Draft, since players tend to spread themselves across a minimum of two colors, and usually at least have a third as a splash (a minimal investment with one or two lands of that color.) In Draft, you’ll play plenty of opponents without Swamps, but this is still a decent card to have in your Sideboard, because it’s a legitimate threat when appropriate. Constructed? Don’t think I’ve ever seen it played competitively. Don’t think you will, either.
We looked at Merfolk Sovereign in Blue, and this is the big bad boss of the Zombies for Black. Just like the Sovereign, the Reaper dispenses favors to his/her/its acolytes, in the form of a +1/+1 bonus. Also just like the Sovereign, there aren’t many candidates for the bonus to matter. Gravedigger, Warpath Ghoul and Zombie Goliath are your lot in M10. That said, all three of those are Common, which means you might be able to pick up four or five between them during a Draft.
Remember that, on average, there are 2.4 of each Common in an all-M10 Draft (because there are approx. 100 Commons, and in total there are 10 per pack. 10 x 24 = 240, therefore 2.4 of each Common is the average.) Clearly, just like the fabled ‘2.4 children’ of statistical family averages, it doesn’t work like this, but you can certainly expect to see maybe seven or eight of these three Commons in total in a typical Draft. Your chances of getting all of them are pretty slim, especially as Gravedigger has a very powerful effect beyond its power and toughness. Still, if you get the Cemetery Reaper early, you have the chance to find a few cards that make it worthwhile.
Except…
Except, Cemetery Reaper is so stratospherically better than Merfolk Sovereign, it isn’t even funny. Cemetery Reaper is its very own Zombie army, as long as you’ve been thoughtful enough to kill a few things along the way. Remember how we were just talking about the positioning of 3/3s with regard to Bog Wraith? How about if we could create a 3/3, at the end of our opponent’s turn, for one mana less than Bog Wraith, and we could Exile something from (preferably) their graveyard, ensuring that they couldn’t recur it with something like Gravedigger? Wouldn’t that just be an utter Limited beating?
It would.
If you’re still puzzled about the Hill Giant reference, you’re absolutely right that it says on the card that you get a 2/2 Zombie. But it also says on the card that other Zombie creatures you control get +1/+1. In this way, Cemetery Reaper behaves just like Captain Of The Watch in White. Should your Cemetery Reaper die, they will all revert to the 2/2s that they began life as, but in the meantime, a source of ongoing 3/3 monsters is the kind of thing that wins Limited games time after time after time.
Incidentally, just as it’s worth taking the time to peer through the database to take a look at the Merfolk that are available in various Formats, you should probably do the same with Zombies. Unlike Merfolk, Zombies don’t have that much of a Constructed pedigree, but the fact that the Reaper isn’t Legendary, meaning that you can have multiples of them in play at once, probably means that at the very least you can have a ton of fun at a more casual level.
Child Of Night
There are advantages to being on the side of ‘good’, and one of them is that a 2/1 monster costs one mana (Elite Vanguard), not two (Child of Night). Of course, Child of Night has Lifelink built in, so you are getting a bit more bang for your buck. The question with Child of Night is, ‘How much is that Lifelink worth?’
On the plus side, if you go into battle against an Elite Vanguard that’s hit you for two on turn two, not only do you get to trade with it, you effectively wipe out that turn two hit, since you gain the two life back. I’m currently at Grand Prix: Brighton, which has just featured an entire day of M10 Sealed Deck action, and it was interesting, and a little surprising, to find just how relevant lifegain seems to be. In addition to the Child of Night, you’ve got Soul Wardens aplenty, four life off Solemn Offering, a cycle of Artifacts which people have clearly failed to understand are utterly hideous (I’m giving you this information several weeks early, so be grateful), and pretty much every Baneslayer Angel in the building got played, so there was lifegain there too.
What this all amounts to is that getting yourself some lifegain is better in M10 than it has been in some other Formats down the years. Wilfully playing lifegain just so you can get to the lategame is pretty dicey, since Sealed sees many players with good high-end cards, but this is a surprisingly effective early drop.
Here we are with a prime example of the philosophy of Black. Not only does Consume Spirit utterly mess with a monster or an opponent, it grants you lifegain at the same time. As a scalable card — meaning you can play it at many different costs, as suits your strategic needs — this is obviously versatile, and you shouldn’t dismiss the low-end possibilities. In tight games, spending three mana to finish off a creature, whilst gaining you one life, can take you out of range of their next attack, and win you the game.
More realistically, this is the kind of card that is going to seriously swing the game your way. Certainly monsters in the 2-3 toughness range should be fair game. Perhaps this is the point that we should pause and examine the mana costs involved.
X1B
Spend only black mana on X.
That’s what it says. Let’s start in reverse. We need one Black straight away. That doesn’t have to come from a Swamp, although it frequently will of course. If you have a non-basic land that produced black, or an artifact, that’s fine. The next bit of the equation, the 1 generic mana, can come from any kind of mana source. A Llanowar Elves is a great way to find the generic mana, since it doesn’t eat into your capacity for generating black for the important bit — the X factor.
Once we get there, the sky’s the limit, but we shouldn’t get carried away. In Sealed, we’re likely to run 8 Swamps at most, and one of those will have gone on the front end of the spell. Assuming we’re in the midgame, perhaps around turn six when there’s a proper threat that wants dealing with, we might have four Swamps in play, with two more of other colors. That means dealing 3 damage, and gaining 3 life.
While that’s a perfectly good deal for five mana, it certainly isn’t a serious threat killer. For that, you need to have half a dozen black mana available, and that basically takes you out of Sealed, and into Draft, or possibly even into Constructed. Of all the colors, Black is the one that has the most obvious internal synergy. This is the first of several cards that actively reward you for having access to tons of black, much as Armored Ascension implores you to have tons of Plains. (I nearly said ‘mountains of Plains,’ but realised that might not be entirely illuminatory.)
Mono-Black decks have a proud history down the years, and have a wide variety of styles, ranging from screaming Aggro through to the hardest of hardcore ‘kill everything that moves’ Control decks. Consume Spirit fits right into that latter idea, because it does more than one thing — not only does it axe a threat, it reverses damage you’ve taken earlier in the game, giving you more time to assume control of the match.
There have been some pretty deep ideas hurled at you through the Academy, but I can’t leave Consume Spirit without one that may well seem obvious to you, until precisely the moment you get this wrong.
‘Or player.’
Two of the finest words in Magic. If you play often enough, and you’re tired or distracted enough, there will come a time when you’re facing down an enormous monster, desperate to find an answer. You draw your savior, the Consume Spirit. You triumphantly splurge it for five damage… and realise your opponent was on four life. You will think this will never happen to you. I’d love to think the Academy would help with that. Really, though, I just wanted you to know you’re going to feel like an idiot when, not if, this happens.
Constructed players love simplicity, because simplicity in a card often equates to a nice, juicy, cheap casting cost. Nothing says ‘get off my table’ more competently than a Deathmark aimed at a Green or White creature. At just one mana, it’s unreasonable to expect this to be Instant, but that’s rarely a problem, since Haste is an unusual ability that tends not to translate into Constructed that often, outside a handful of cards.
Much of the time, you won’t even notice that one mana you spend on your turn, since you’re likely to have enough spare to cover what else you need to do, especially given that Deathmark is basically going to sit in a reactive, or Control, deck.
What’s particularly nice about a card like Deathmark is that, because of its cheapness, you’re never going to sit with multiples in your hand unable to cast them. As a result, players will often put the full four allowed into a Sideboard, ready to come and mess with the plans of Green and White decks.
The only downside to this is when the environment (the cards in the Format) move away from single creatures. When Tarmogoyf was all the rage — and it was one of the best creatures of all time — a single black mana would deal with it. A Serra Angel or Baneslayer Angel both fall to Deathmark. What has less concerns are cards like Spectral Procession, which generate three 1/1 flyers off a single card, or Cloudgoat Ranger, which again comes with bonus men attached. Trading one card of yours — Deathmark — for a portion of one of theirs — part of a Spectral Procession — isn’t great.
The conclusion? Ruthlessly efficient, tremendously good, Deathmark is a card that will always be in your pile to consider every time you build a Sideboard for a Constructed deck. It’s really, really good.
Because of just told you that Deathmark is really, really good, I feel I’m on a bit of a roll, and want to tell you that Diabolic Tutor is really, really good, but I’m going to stop just short of that.
Let’s talk about all the good things. For four mana, you can search — there’s that super-powerful word again — your library for any card. Any card. Let’s see how powerful that could be:
Missing a color of mana? DT fetches your missing basic.
Need Enchantment removal? DT gets Solemn Offering.
Want some mana acceleration to your big guys? Maybe Borderland Ranger.
Kill a guy? DT sets up Doom Blade.
Need a flyer? Wind Drake into hand please.
They’re on 3 life? Lightning Bolt for the win.
Where’s your bomb rare? Baneslayer Angel at your service.
In every conceivable situation, Diabolic Tutor gets you the absolute best card you could possibly have, in your hand. Every time. I get excited just typing it.
There is a downside however. Four mana is a lot, for two reasons. First of all, you’re unlikely to be able to cast whatever you fetch on the same turn. Sure, you might be able to go fetch a Deathmark or something similar, but for the most part, you’re going to have to spend a whole turn waiting. That makes Diabolic Tutor plus the tutored card a two turn combo.
The second problem is closely allied to the first. Yes, you probably have to wait a turn to cast your spell, but just as importantly, you’re spending an entire turn effectively swapping one card for another. You don’t get to make monsters that turn. You don’t get to kill monsters that turn. You just get to make your hand better, and hope you’re not too far behind when you get to untap again.
In Limited, finding the window of opportunity to spend a turn doing this can often be found very easily, especially in Sealed play. Draft is actually the most problematic Format to make it work, since it’s usually faster/more powerful than Sealed, and you don’t have the Constructed luxury of setting up your deck to make the time to cast and abuse it.
At the basic level, for four mana, Diabolic Tutor ‘turns into’ the card of your dreams, whatever that might be. All you have to do is work out whether four mana is a price you can afford to pay.
For the same price as Deathmark, you once again get to do something very specific. Whether you’d want to do that something very specific is a different issue. If we start with Limited, it’s clear that the answer depends very much on what you think you might be able to get back. In Sealed, you’ll have maybe as many as 18 possible monsters that could be in your graveyard. The trouble is, the better your monster, the less likely it is to be in the graveyard, because hopefully your opponent is having trouble dealing with it.
Having said that, there are few more delicious, psychologically deflating cards than this, when your opponent spends an eternity trying to kill your big monster, finally puts two monsters and a Lightning Bolt in front of your Enormous Baloth, only to see it recast the following turn. Now that’s a proper use for a Disentomb.
What’s less clear is whether getting back your Centaur Courser, or Children Of Night, or Siege Mastodon, is a result worthy of a space in your deck. Again, we come back to the fact that somehow they already put your guy in the bin (barring some odd discard cases).
We’ve talked before about Re-animator strategies being all about getting hugely-costed monsters direct from the graveyard onto the battlefield. Disentomb doesn’t do this, and in the brutal world of Constructed, where every card is precious, it’s hard to see a way that you can justify it.
The cheapness continues, but boy oh boy, this one delivers. Not only is this fabulous removal at a Limited level, where 80% of monsters simply die, it’s sufficiently cheap that it’s all over Constructed right now. If you’re reading this sometime after October 2009, you shouldn’t automatically assume that just because everyone’s playing with Doom Blade now you should play it tomorrow or the day after.
Although the definition of ‘non-black’ never changes, the quantity of cards that applies to absolutely does. Periodically, Magic runs through so-called ‘Gold’ sets, which have some, many, or all cards that are multicolor, meaning that they cut across the color wheel. Right now (Summer 2009), we’re coming to the end of an entire year dominated by multicolor cards, and the final set in the Shards of Alara block, Alara Reborn, is entirely populated by gold cards. At those times, ‘non-black’ can apply to an alarmingly small portion of the population, because if it costs GRB (that’s one Green, one Red, and one Black mana) it’s Black. If it costs WUB (White, Blue, Black) it’s Black. Any time a Black mana symbol appears in the casting cost, no matter what else it is, it’s black.
In Constructed terms, you simply need to look at what decks are popular. There’s very little current use for monster-based black decks, so you aren’t going to find it as a dead card too often. Even if such a deck did rise to prominence, you would basically sit Doom Blade in your Sideboard, ready to beef up your anti-creature arsenal in games two and three.
As things stand, though, Doom Blade is truly splendid.
We’ve already seen plenty of creatures in M10, so we should be starting to get a feeling of what we should be paying for a certain power and toughness, and what would represent a good deal. At 2/2 for three mana, Dread Warlock is massively overcosted in terms of Constructed, so everything that follows is very much about Limited play.
There are many elegant things about Magic. Most of the major abilities definitely qualify. An ability like Fear is pretty elegant. It means that a creature can’t be blocked except by Black or Artifact creatures. Why those two groups? Well, black creatures aren’t scared by scary things, they just go ahead and be scary right back. Or invite each other round for coffee. And artifacts? Well, they’re just things, so they don’t really have emotions like wanting to hide under the bed.
The ability on Dread Warlock is not elegant. Fortunately, you don’t care about that, because what you care about is winning games of Magic. In Limited play, Fear can be a proper little irritant, along with all the other variations on a theme of being hard to block/unblockable. Whilst it might be an inelegant mouthful, the ability on Dread Warlock is a small but useful upgrade on Fear, since Artifact creatures won’t be getting involved either. Perhaps they could have called the ability SuperScary.
Perhaps not.
I’m going to kick off with exactly what it says on the card about the Regenerate ability:
The next time this creature would be destroyed this turn, it isn’t. Instead tap it, remove all damage from it, and remove it from combat.
This card is a minefield of broken promises and missed opportunities for the newer player, but I’ll try to cover all the bases.
How are creatures destroyed? Generally, by having damage on them equal or greater than their toughness. That’s frequently due to combat, either whilst blocking, or being blocked. There might be some additional source of damage involved, like a Seismic Strike. Then they might find themselves the target of a card, like the Doom Blade we’ve just seen. That destroys — it says so right there on the card.
The Regenerate ability is designed to prevent your guy dying at all, since it never goes anywhere near your graveyard. Ever. Let’s suppose your Drudge Skeletons blocks a Centaur Courser. You have to set things up before you get as far as damage, because otherwise your Skeletons will die. This is an important note for experienced players too — there is no opportunity to Regenerate your Skeletons once damage is dealt. It’s. Just. Dead.
To make this work, you have to spend a Black mana earlier in the turn, effectively setting up a shield around your guy. That way, when the Courser deals the Skeletons lethal damage, which satisfies the ‘would be destroyed this turn’ bit, you’re under way, and instead of destroying it, your shield works and the now-tapped Skeletons get to stay in play.
Now let’s suppose that your opponent really wants your Skeletons dead. We’ll run exactly the same example as before, with you spending a black mana earlier in the turn to set up the Regenerate ability. Once the shield is used, that particular Regenerate ability has gone away. If our opponent then aims a Lightning Bolt at the Skeletons, we need to respond by spending another Black mana to make a new shield, otherwise they will die. This pattern can go on for as long as you have Black mana and they have ways to kill your guy.
Now let’s talk about the phrase ‘in response.’ When you spend the Black mana, the shield doesn’t come online immediately. Your opponent has a chance to respond, so if that’s your only black mana, and they aim the Lightning Bolt in response, your Skeletons will hit the bin. You can avoid that scenario by having multiple black mana available, since you have a window of your own to respond to their burn spell. If this is causing you a headache, I genuinely advise walking away for a little while, and then coming back and starting again — slowly.
Now we get to talk about the times when that Regenerate ability just won’t work no matter what. The first of these is against a card like Celestial Purge. As we know, Exile and Destroy are two different things, and Regenerate only works against something that attempts to Destroy your guy. You can still put black mana into your guy if you feel the urge, but it won’t be saved.
The other time that Regenerate gets you nowhere is when your opponent manages to reduce the Skeleton’s toughness to zero. That is absolutely not the same as being dealt lethal damage, since it directly affects the base toughness of your man. If they Enchant your Drudge Skeletons with Weakness, your Skeletons are done. This isn’t ‘destroying’ them, the game just puts them in the bin for having zero toughness.
The good news is that many of these scenarios only occur rarely, and for the most part you will spend many happy hours blocking enormous Green monsters with your inconsequential little Black regenerator, take no damage (unless they have Trample), and spend a Black mana to Regenerate. You will feel good about this, and your opponent will wish they were playing Weakness.
…
We’ve done a few cards less than normal this week, what with Great Britain Nationals and Grand Prix: Brighton to contend with, but there’s still plenty to think about before a bumper crop of entertainment coming your way next week, as we go to town on the rest of the Black cards.
Until then, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.