Green’s identity is rooted in the concept of growth. Its spells can grow more lands, gain you life, or even transform lands into creatures. Green spells often take the concept of growth very literally, increasing the size of some — ore all — of your creatures. Others call forth more creatures onto the battlefield. On a more basic level, green’s creatures are simply bigger and more diverse than any other color.
For a color that has such an affinity for creation, green is capable of a surprising amount of destruction as well. Green is especially harsh on artificial constructs, but creatures and lands are not spared from green’s wrath. If any problematic creature shows up that can’t simply be stomped in combat, Master of the Wild Hunt can send a pack of Wolves to hunt it down.
That’s the official word from the Player’s Guide on what Green is, and does. Let’s see how that pans out once we get to card level:
Sometimes Magic cards are almost like two cards in one. This is a prime example. Five mana for a 2/2 sounds like an awful lot, but in reality you’re paying for two cards stapled together. Creeping Mold has been in every Core Set since 5th Edition. For four mana, you get to destroy a target artifact, enchantment, or land, at Sorcery speed. This has, at various points down the years, been a very good Sideboard card in Constructed, and a useful addition in Limited, where it often functioned as a nasty piece of Land Destruction, robbing Sealed players of their third ‘splash’ color.
For one extra mana, Acidic Slime does exactly the same job, but gives you a 2/2 body afterwards. Would you pay one mana for a 2/2? Of course you would. To be fair, Creeping Mold is something you’d ‘want’ to pay around 3.5 mana for, since four is a little steep, and what stopped it being an excellent card rather than just a good one. Even so, however you slice it, you’re getting a bargain when you get to Slime someone. You can get miles of smiles out of slime, anagram fans.
If this had been named ‘The’ Ant Queen rather than the more prosaic Ant Queen, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was always destined to be a Mythic Rare. It isn’t, it’s your everyday Rare, and that means it’s going to turn up every two or three Drafts in someone’s pile, and that someone is usually going to end up playing it.
How can you go wrong with such a splendid card? As a vanilla 5/5 for five, you’d play this every day of the week, assuming you could meet the double Green requirement. Also assuming that you get to untap with this in play, you have the ability to make 2-3 men every turn. Every turn.
Although 1/1s are right at the bottom of the food chain, they provide all sorts of benefits. Have a Vampire Aristocrat? Each 1/1 donates two power to the cause. They have a Kalonian Behemoth? Two mana from the Ant Queen is enough to stop the Behemoth in its tracks. Put a few of these into a team block, and you’re getting rid of a Canyon Minotaur easily.
It’s true that they’re vulnerable to Pyroclasm, but so are half the actual monsters in the set. Look at the reverse, though. For the most part, removal trades one for one. When you spend four mana on a Divine Verdict to kill a Serra Angel, that’s great. Kill it with a Doom Blade, even better. But spending either of these cards on an Ant? Horrible, especially when two mana will make it as if you hadn’t squashed it anyway, as its replacement comes on line.
The only word of caution if you’re lucky enough to be playing with it rather than against it is concerning combat. 5/5 is a big asset to be sure, and there are times when you will want to pile on in and get your hands dirty. If you do, though, you considerably increase your risk of losing it. Divine Verdict wants it to attack, Assassinate wants it tapped, and even a humble Silvercoat Lion with an unlooked-for Giant Growth can get it dead. Chances are, this is going to win you the game if it lives for a few turns, so making it live for a few turns might well be your highest priority.
I’ve said before in this series that playing a monster on the basis that your opponent will have to kill it even though it isn’t very good is a really poor plan. Here, I’m going to tell you that playing a 1/1 for three mana is a really good idea, because your opponent will want to kill it, even though a 1/1 for three with no ability is rubbish.
That’s misleading, of course, because by the time Awakener Druid has actually landed on the battlefield, it’s already done its job, and its job is a really good one for you. In a tremendous combination of game mechanics and flavor, the Druid works his Magic and turns one of your humble Forests into a whopping great 4/5 Treefolk. But which Forest?
The requirements of what we generally refer to as Summoning Sickness means that the Forest you awaken has to have been in play under your control since the start of the turn. Sure, it wasn’t a creature back then, but it was a permanent in play under your control at the start of your turn, and that’s what turns it on. So, if you’re not going to tap out, target your ‘spare’ Forest, and then you can go straight into the red zone with it.
One of the benefits to a small monster is your ability to put it in the way of something enormous. This isn’t something you can do with Awakener Druid, since the moment it dies, the Treefolk goes right back to sleep. In game terms, that means it’s not a creature, can’t deal damage etc, so even if the Awakener Druid dies in the middle of combat, your Treefolk gets taken out of battle. It still stays on the battlefield, but it’s back to being a humble land.
Killing your Awakener Druid — your 1/1 for three mana — is going to be high on the agenda of your adversary, and as several people helpfully pointed out last week, pointing a Sparkmage Apprentice at an Awakener Druid is a tip top plan. I am, on occasion, an idiot, and it’s good that people are there to keep me facing in the right direction. For you, meantime, the right direction is playing with this guy, a tiny man with a big friend, and a big bullseye painted all over him.
Birds Of Paradise
Any idea what 5CG means? If you have, you’ve been playing the game for a long time, because that appellation hasn’t been in use for a good few years. 5CG stands for 5-Color Green, and this was the optimal Turn 1 play every time. Although it doesn’t have any power, making it worse than Llanowar Elves, the Birds can generate any color of mana you like, and that used to be absolutely amazing.
I say ‘used to be,’ because there were years when finding the mana to actually cast your Constructed decks properly were a proper chore, and Green wasn’t just the master of mana acceleration, it was the master of mana fixing, and the price for trying to run many colors any other way was very high.
As we close the Summer of 2009, we’re about to see the disappearance from Standard of some of the most amazing mana-fixing the game has seen, mana-fixing that has spawned any number of super-powerful four and five color decks, with barely a hint of Green anywhere near them. With Zendikar yet to be unveiled, it remains to be seen whether Green can regain its crown as the mana fixing worth playing, but the odds are currently against it.
But enough of the history lesson. Birds Of Paradise may not occupy quite such a powerful spot in the Metagame, but the fact remains that they produce any color of mana, and accelerate you from as early as Turn 2. In some ways, it’s the acceleration that’s more significant than the fixing. In Limited, it can help you get your splash color more easily, possibly allowing you to run one fewer basic of that color, but crucially it allows you to pull ahead. With Birds Of Paradise on Turn 1, your Turn 2 could be a Centaur Courser, and your game-winning Siege-Gang Commander hits on Turn 4, as do Serra Angel, Air Elemental or (why not?) Baneslayer Angel.
The acceleration alone means that, despite the zero power, this card remains a threat, and getting it off the board with a Lightning Bolt on Turn One is almost always going to be a quality plan. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and watch them pull ahead. There’s a reason you’re supposed to cast your spells in a ‘one land per turn’ curve, and this cheats. Remember the history. And then forget the history — it’s good now.
If it’s a 2/2 for three mana, and it’s Common, our expectations for busting the game wide open shouldn’t be high. Given that, this is an excellent little card. This is the perfect way to go search out your third splash color in Sealed. There are going to be times where you need to fetch your, let’s say, second Island for Illusionary Servant, or second Forest for Cudgel Troll, but mostly you’ll be able to go get a Mountain for your Fireball or Lightning Bolt, and that has an impact on your overall deck build.
As long as you understand the occasions this will malfunction, it’s possible to regard this card as functionally the same as your third color basic land when building. In other words, a manabase of 7 Forests, 7 Islands, and 3 Mountains can become 8/7/2, because, when you draw the Borderland Ranger, you’re effectively looking at your third Mountain.
It should be apparent that this is a sizeable advantage over the player whose third Mountain is exactly that. Your ‘third Mountain’ has a 2/2 body attached, allowing you to squeeze an extra creature into your deck.
Apart from the times when you have to smooth out your main colors (not terribly often), the other downsides are when you have no Green mana available (again, not very often) so can’t cast it, or they decide to aim Essence Scatter at it (not very often either), which prevents you searching your library.
All these ‘not very often’ scenarios certainly don’t add up to an excuse not to play this in Sealed if you’re Green, and not in Draft either. Smooth your mana, find your splash, thin your deck, have a 2/2… utility at its finest.
I’ve worked very hard, and I’ve found a home for this card. Build yourself a Jason Chan casual deck. Jason Chan? He’s the artist, and some people like to build decks using cards only realised by one particular artist. Jason has twenty cards to date, and before you can get your Twilight Shepherd, Wilt-Leaf Liege, and Spirit Of The Hearth online to win you the game, you might want to gain some life.
I hope you appreciate how hard I’m trying here. No Pro has ever played this in Sealed, no Pro has ever played this in Draft, no Pro has ever played this in Constructed, and they never will.
Why? Because five mana at Sorcery speed almost certainly means your entire turn. Because for five mana you want to make a massive impact on the game. Because effectively negating a single attack from your opponent’s Snapping Drake and Wind Drake can be done at Instant speed for one mana (Fog). Because five life isn’t very much. To paraphrase the Wizard of Oz, ‘because because because because because, because of the wonderful things it DOESN’T do.’
In terms of design, I love this card, because it does something that very few creatures do. Defenders can’t attack, sure. A card like Berserkers Of Blood Ridge is basically designed to never defend. For the most part, though, creatures sit there, ready to attack or defend, and behave the same way whichever they’re doing.
Bramble Creeper can defend. Against a 2/2 Silvercoat Lion, it gets in the way just fine. It’s still a poor blocker. Turn it around, though, and suddenly you have five power pounding towards the opponent. In M10 Sealed, where plenty of games come down to the last man standing, this represents a decent threat.
Still, just because it has a great design doesn’t make it a great card, and it isn’t. You want versatility wherever possible, and if you’re behind in the race, this is a horribly disappointing five mana. Yes, it’s Common, so comparing it to Baneslayer Angel (Mythic Rare) are unfair. But Beacon Behemoth is a Common from Conflux that’s a 5/3 for five mana, and can grant Vigilance. And Beacon Behemoth isn’t very good.
Any time you have a ‘vanilla’ monster — one with no game text other than power and toughness — your only consideration is whether it’s efficient. In other words, what does it cost? Back in the day, this card would cost you 1GG, which as we know is subtly but crucially different to 2G. In terms of Draft, it means you’re less likely to see it, because someone struggling for playables can make a relatively minor commitment to something like this, a Giant Growth and a Stampeding Rhino.
On the plus side, if you have it, it’s easier for you to cast, and you should be looking to make this reliably on Turn Three, since it gets outclassed in the late game. What it does really well is savagely mock all the 2/1s and 2/2s that are looking to be aggressive, and against a defensive opponent, provides a decent clock in the early game.
Our corporations analogy here works perfectly. For three mana, you get a very powerful, decently tough Centaur Courser from Green. Red gives you exactly the same card, but at four mana, in Canyon Minotaur. That’s a huge extra cost that translates into fewer options, more early damage against you, less chance to attack with it before being outclassed — it’s significantly worse. Black gives you Warpath Ghoul, which only has two toughness, and therefore dies to something mundane like a Goblin Piker. That’s never good news. White, which has good solid monsters, gives you a 3/2 with a decent ability (Veteran Swordsmith) or an irritating blocker (Palace Guard) while blue gives you the blocker without the irritating ability (Horned Turtle).
In other words, Centaur Courser is a great value card that will almost always serve you well, because it costs just what you want it to.
When Craw Wurm first saw the light of day in Alpha, the very first set, it was truly gigantic. You had so many 1/1s running around, the idea of teaming up with a friend and taking down the Craw Wurm with a double block was laughable. Nowadays, not so much. The six power is still good times, but four toughness is now below the industry standard for fat men, which rests more or less squarely at 5/5.
You will, of course, be quite happy about the power-heavy Wurm when it’s dominating the board, but be considerably less excited when you have to trade for a 4/1 Lightning Elemental that cost two mana less.
In Limited, the six power guarantees that this will always be a relevant addition to your ground forces, and knowing that it used to be better then doesn’t stop it being good now.
And this is why power isn’t the whole story. Craw Wurm is good, but it isn’t exciting. Cudgel Troll is new, it’s good, and it is exciting, oh yes. That ability to regenerate is amplified hugely compared to the already-useful equivalent ability on Wall Of Bone or Drudge Skeletons in Black. Here, you can expect to do a lot more than simply fend off an attacker. For the most part, you can expect to put that monster thoroughly in the bin, and yours to hang around.
Even better, Cudgel Troll frequently gets to go on offense itself, since vast swathes of opposing creatures get mown down by it, even without the regeneration ability. Add in the fact that an already-powerful regenerator is a fantastic place for good equipment to find a home, and you have an awesome all-round Common that wins games every which way.
This doesn’t win many games, but it does an awfully good job of stopping you losing them. For such an innocuous little card, it can have a massive impact on the game. Enormous Baloth? Not an issue, it dies to this. Serra Angel? Reach means you get to trade with that, too. About all that Deadly Recluse doesn’t do for you is provide First Strike, and that means the Common Razorfoot Griffin tends to bypass this, as does Baneslayer Angel (which bypasses most things, let’s face it.)
The main skill with this card is determining what a good deal looks like. Trading for a Canyon Minotaur seems poor, but could save you 6-9 life. If you’re going to ignore the Reach ability, then you probably want to aim your sights higher. It isn’t that you’ll actually get to kill their Craw Wurm, it’s just that their Craw Wurm is likely to stay at home if they fear the Recluse.
If you’re playing against a Deadly Recluse, there’s an elaborate little sub-game that can really give you the edge. Yes, your Craw Wurm is staying at home, but your Snapping Drake isn’t. Because the Craw Wurm is your biggest threat, the very presence of their Deadly Recluse has made your Snapping Drake ‘unblockable,’ since they won’t want that particular trade. Working out your perceived value of their Deadly Recluse, coupled with their own perception of the same — given that you both have ‘secret’ information about what might come later in the game i.e. what you both have in hand — this is one of the more fun aspects of M10 Limited, and anytime a Deadly Recluse is on the battlefield is a definite place you can outplay weaker opponents.
One of the more irritating aspects of almost every Magic player in history is their ability to construct a sequence of plays, either real or imaginary, that demonstrate the wonderful awesomeness that is their favorite card du jour. Prepare to be irritated then, because I can’t help giggling when I think about this perfectly plausible opening to an M10 Sealed game:
Turn 1 — Lay Forest, cast Llanowar Elves.
Turn 2 — Lay Forest, tap both lands and the Elves, cast Elvish Archdruid.
Turn 3 — Lay Forest, tap two for Elvish Visionary, draw a card from the Visionary (it’s your other Llanowar Elves), use the third Forest to cast Llanowar Elves, tap Elvish Archdruid to add four Green mana, cast Garruk Wildspeaker, add a Loyalty counter to Garruk, untap two Forests, tap those Forests and the first turn Llanowar Elves, cast Centaur Courser.
Turn 4 — Remove four Loyalty counters from Garruk, attack with a 5/5 Llanowar Elves, 5/5 Llanowar Elves, 4/4 Elvish Visionary, 5/5 Elvish Archdruid, and 6/6 Centaur Courser. All with Trample.
By using this as a Sealed example, I haven’t even begun to explore the possible foolishness that can ensue once you put this into a Constructed setting, where you’re allowed four copies of all these things in your deck, and don’t have to rely on finding those precise ingredients in your Sealed pool.
Of course, for every irritating Magic player with a sequence like this, there’s another irritating Magic player who answers the question, ‘What are you doing about all that then?’ with the words, ‘Pyroclasm. On Turn 2.’ That shouldn’t put you off from recognising the incredible potential of any card that can generate an abnormally large amount of mana.
In reality, it won’t be amazing all that often in Limited, because M10 is as hard on Elves as it is on Merfolk and Goblins — there just aren’t enough to regularly do explosively naughty things. However, even as a 2/2 mana accelerator for three, which it is all by itself, this is a perfectly fine addition to your base-Green Limited deck.
Sometime, though, when you have a bit of time, and want a chortle, put together one of the savagely quick Elf decklists you can find online, and prepare to be open-mouthed at the sheer effrontery of messing around with all that elicit mana. Glorious.
If a card is a 1/1 for four mana — not one, two, or three, but, Lord help us, FOUR mana — I probably want it to come with a coupon entitling the bearer to a lifetime of free sex. Despite opening many M10 boosters, no such coupon has appeared to be forthcoming from Elvish Piper, which means we have to consider it on its ‘merits’.
Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh, because she does have her uses. Initially, assuming she comes down on Turn 4, which let’s remember is really entering the mid-game in Limited, you’re probably hoping to turn her into a selective form of mana acceleration, spending just one Green mana to generate something that would normally cost quite a bit more. Or, ideally, about seven more, like a Bogardan Hellkite, or (let’s get greedy) ten more, like a Darksteel Colossus.
You might get to do this sort of thing once, and if you get either of those down, you’re probably in decent shape anyway, but the whole ‘cheating the mana for otherwise uncastable stuff’ is going to run out very quickly, because you’re only going to have one or two of these in your entire deck. That means it’s the second bit of usefulness that we’re mostly going to try and take advantage of.
Creatures get cast at Sorcery speed. They happen on your turn. When your opponent is thinking about what attacks to make, they have no fear of some horrible Insta-Giant getting involved. With an active Elvish Piper, that’s not the case, since you can let them declare their attackers, and then activate the Piper before blockers to create something seriously unpleasant that’s about to squash their plans.
Even if you don’t actually have something tasty to turn up unexpectedly, the Elvish Piper stands as a warning of what could happen if they’re not cautious, and that can sometimes translate to saving life from attacks that never happen.
I would never ever want to play this as a reliable means to wheel out stupidly expensive bombs. I would never ever want to play this unless I had some serious meat in my deck that was going to make combat a real headache for my opponent. But then, I would never ever want to play this without that coupon. And never seems awfully final.
Now here is a 1/1 I can get behind. M10, like most Core Sets before, and most probably Core Sets to come, tends towards Limited Formats that rely heftily on bomb Rares and Mythics to make your day. Admittedly, there are plenty of good cards elsewhere, such as the ‘Mythic Uncommon’ Mind Control, but in any case, finding your best cards and getting them played is a good plan.
Elvish Visionary helps you do this, at a spot on the mana curve where you won’t always be sacrificing too much in the way of tempo or aggression. If you have a Veteran Armorsmith, and have the Veteran Swordsmith to come Turn 3, then by all means wait a while, but a lot of the time, particularly in something like a Red-Green or Green-Black Draft deck, you might not have Goblin Piker or Child Of Night ready to go on Turn 2. Getting some kind of presence onto the battlefield, especially one that can incidentally deal with either Goblin Piker, Child Of Night or Coral Merfolk whilst simultaneously replacing itself in your hand, is a really good deal.
Although Constructed is a much less forgiving Format, even here the Visionary has a place. Sometimes it’s about casting it, as in the Elves deck that wants to piece together all the crucial elements as quickly as possible. Sometimes it’s just about the fact that it has an ‘enters the battlefield’ clause, which means that when you cast Warp World, and two of these turn up, you get two more cards into your hand.
All around, there’s much to like about it, even if you don’t have an Elvish Archdruid handy.
Given that Green is the ‘corporation’ that churns out bigger and better monsters than anybody else, you would expect this to outclass its Black counterpart, Bog Wraith. It doesn’t, and if you think that there’s not much difference between a 2/3 and a 3/3, you’re not thinking clearly. Suppose these hit on Turn 4, and your opponent is at 17, following a couple of quick early nibbles out of their life total.
Bog Wraith will end the game in six turns.
Emerald Oryx will end the game in nine turns.
That is a gigantic difference in terms of the pressure — perceived and actual — each card exerts on your opponent. Try playing against them, and you’ll quickly feel the difference. Take two a couple of times from the Oryx, and you’ll barely notice, as you go about your business of building towards your Shivan Dragon, or selection of Common Blue Flyers. Try it the other way, and as you write down ’14… 11…’ you realise that the next time you’ll be in single figures and with only three more chances to find an answer.
It used to be that cards like the Oryx made up for this by the fact that Forestwalk was the best of the Landwalk abilities, because ‘everyone’ played Green in Sealed, since this was the main way to make decks of three or more colors work. That’s far less true than it used to be, although it fluctuates from time to time, and now the excitement of a pseudo-unblockable two power guy for four mana isn’t that great.
Am I being harsh on the Oryx? Yes, and I wouldn’t want you to be put off entirely, because out of the Sideboard this can be great against a Green player. They won’t have limitless removal, and in the Green mirror, creatures stalls can often develop. Not a ton of removal… not a lot of flyers… regenerating Cudgel Trolls… this can definitely be a difference-maker. Just make sure their deck is set up for you to take advantage.
When we talk about cards like Royal Assassin and Goblin Artillery, we tend to talk about them as if they’re reusable removal. Well, they certainly can be, but being big enough negates the Artillery, and Vigilance renders the Assassin less than exciting. There are answers to Enormous Baloth too, featuring any number of direct removal spells like Doom Blade or Divine Verdict, and several deeply irritating regenerators, like Wall Of Bone, Drudge Skeletons, or Cudgel Troll.
Let’s focus on the positive though. There are going to be plenty of occasions where Enormous Baloth might as well have written on it, ‘Tap: Target opponent sacrifices a creature. Play this ability only during combat.’ 7/7 isn’t big, it isn’t even huge, it’s — oh yes it is — enormous, almost comically so, and putting enough power in the way to end it is a proper poser for most decks. Even if they do so, you’re probably looking at a 2 or more likely 3-for-1 trade, and that’s well on the way to game-ending many times over.
If they can’t muster a gangblock of doom to off it, they’re going to put something in the way every single turn until they run out, since taking seven damage is rarely an option they can consider for long. Time is your only real concern here, as you’d expect to pay a lot for a 7/7, and you do. Ideally, you want to play mana acceleration with this, making it a Turn 6 or even Turn 5 play, which is where most of the top notch action can be found. If you’re stuck with it at seven, it’s possible they’ll have established enough outclassed chaff to hurl them with gay abandon if front of it whilst continuing an air assault you’re ill-prepared to deal with.
As long as you remember to build your curve correctly, this can be one of the best pieces of Sealed removal Green can offer.
Magic players are a perverse lot, and you’ll find as you talk to more of us that there are certain ways we like to win games, certain ways we don’t mind dying, and certain cards that just irritate us for the most bizarre of reasons. Now, I don’t mind my removal spells being outclassed. If my Lightning Bolt can’t get your Craw Wurm, that’s okay, because you paid for a huge monster, and not all removal can reach out and kill just anything it likes. Fine. If your monster is Black, and I have a Doom Blade, I don’t find that frustrating, because Black is good at that kind of thing, and anyway, I’m playing Black too, so who am I to complain? Fine. I don’t mind when I can’t kill your monster because it’s got Shroud. I can appreciate sneaky. Sneaky is good. Fine.
Sit me in front of an opponent with a monster that I can’t kill just because it’s not doing anything drives me nuts. I’m prepared to make an exception for Divine Verdict, because there aren’t many creatures in the game that are going into your deck with the expectation of neither attacking nor blocking, so if you never attack with your Merfolk Sovereign, okay, that’s fine too.
But when I sit with Assassinate in hand, or Entangling Vines, and you calmly sit there killing me with your Sentinel Griffin, your Serra Angel, your Captain Of The Watch, and your ner-ner-ny-ner-ner Prodigal Pyromancer tapping for the merest blink of an eye to ping me out of existence, I start to think very bad thoughts indeed.
But that’s just me. Most monsters in the game attack. Most monsters in the game tap to attack, and stay that way until their next untap step. Most monsters die to Assassinate, and most monsters get similarly taken out of commission by Entangling Vines. If you’re playing Green in Limited, you’re going to find this a thoroughly worthwhile spell. Yes, a Naturalize means it isn’t quite as permanent as actually killing the monster, but this is Green we’re talking about, and removal doesn’t exactly grow on trees.
Oh, wait, yes it does.
It’s clear that Safe Passage is a lot better than Fog, but it costs a lot more, and quite specifically can act as a counterspell against any kind of damage-based removal, especially something like Tendrils Of Corruption, which Black players tend not to like seeing getting squashed. Some of the time, this gets used in exactly the same way as Safe Passage does — rendering a combat step null and void. Thing is, if you’ve ever seen someone cast Safe Passage in this way, they’re almost always looking like their Grandma just died.
At a fundamental level, Fog is bad news, because it involves you spending an entire card on something that doesn’t change the fundamentals of the game except in very narrow circumstances. Those circumstances involve you being about to win a race on the following turn, or drawing the winning card off the top of your deck that accomplishes the same thing.
Without that, Fog usually says, ‘No, not this turn, I’ll die next turn’ and who would want to play with a card like that? For those of a historical bent, it should be noted that the last truly good Fog-type effect was called Moment’s Peace, which should more accurately have been called Two Moment’s Peace, because you did indeed get to do it twice. Even that required it to belong to a seriously strange Constructed deck, so playing with the one-shot Fog is a real stretch at any level.
If you’re really sure there isn’t a better card for your Limited deck in your available options, it’s a good bet you haven’t weighed those other options very well. And if you lose a game to someone playing Fog, be grateful, because you’ll win far more games because they’re playing it than you’ll lose.
We end this week with the final Planeswalker of the bunch. So far:
We’ve seen the ‘oh-look-my-creatures-just-got-bigger-and-won’t-bother-tapping-to-attack-thanks’ Ajani Goldmane in White.
We’ve seen the ‘if-I-draw-ten-more-cards-than-you-surely-I’ve-won’ Jace Beleren in Blue.
We’ve seen the ‘decent-tutor-and-powerful-discard-and-teenage-fantasy’ Liliana Vess in Black.
We’ve seen the ‘actually-worth-getting-the-ultimate-ability-off-because-ten-is-a-lot’ Chandra Nalaar in Red.
And now we get Garruk Wildspeaker, the one who enters the Planeswalker Annual Dinner, raises an eyebrow, and the other four all scurry off to the corner and hide in case he gets agitated.
Make no mistake, this is one of the most savagely awesome cards ever. Admittedly, Garruk tends to need some creature support to be most effective, since his ultimate ability — giving +3+3 and Trample to all your monsters for a turn — is a bit of an empty gesture if there aren’t any creatures getting ready to get large. That’s about all that’s wrong though. Let’s look at what’s so, so right.
You need four mana to cast Garruk, but if you cast him on Turn 4, or Turn 3 with acceleration, he won’t necessarily be your whole turn. That’s because you’re highly likely to go straight to work with his first ability, untapping two land. This has two purposes. If you have something to do with the ‘bought-back’ mana, like a Runeclaw Bear or Elvish Visionary, Garruk has effectively cost you just two mana. That’s bonkers.
Critically, the Loyalty has swung up from three to four, and that means Garruk is already set fair to go Ultimate the following turn. If the two lands you untap happen to do more than just your regular basic, so much the better. Fertile Ground is the obvious M10 example, but there are others that allow your land to generate more than one mana.
Incidentally, do make sure that you untap the lands as soon as you’ve cast Garruk. If you’re tempted to cast something else on your turn before activating the first ability, you allow your opponent a window to respond to that other spell. That response might be a Lightning Bolt aimed at your head, redirected to Garruk, sending him packing before you can get him up to four Loyalty and out of Bolt range. If you activate his ability straight away, there’s no opportunity for an opponent to do this to you.
Sometimes, you’ll cast Garruk onto a battlefield that has ground monsters for your opponent, but not for you. In order to protect your Planeswalker investment therefore, you’re going to go to the second ability, and churn out a 3/3 Beast. If this is Turn 3 or 4, that’s usually enough to man the barricades, but you can always do this once more before building Garruk back up on subsequent Turns.
We saw whilst talking about Elvish Archdruid just how devastating the Ultimate ability can be on Garruk, but one of the best tests of a great card is what it does when it’s busy being rubbish. Here’s Garruk being rubbish:
Turn 4, lay your fourth Forest, cast Garruk as the only non-land permanent on your side. Make a 3/3 Beast. Use the Beast to block their 4/3 Cudgel Troll, which they regenerate. Untap, lay your fifth Forest, tap them all, use Garruk to untap two lands, cast Enormous Baloth on Turn 5.
And that’s him being bad.
Garruk screams power and majesty and trickery and aggression and control and threat and beauty and overwhelming brutality, and is just one of the most elegant, sophisticated, fabulous cards you could wish to see.
….
Well, we’re closing in, and the end is in sight. Next week, the final color gets put to bed, featuring the bit of Garruk that’s a card all by itself, the biggest monster you might actually play with in Limited, the walking embodiment of versatile (except it doesn’t walk), and several cards that make Blue mages wince in a satisfyingly painful fashion.
Until then, as ever, thanks for reading…
R.