By my reckoning, there’s a whopping great 28 Black cards left to talk about. I’m assuming by now that none of you are new to this whole Academy thing, but as always, take your time, and think how you can get the best out of even the humblest of cards. Here we go…
Built into the game is the idea that spells are inherently more powerful than monsters, in terms of one-shot impact. Creatures are designed to hit turn after turn, block, trade, activate more than once, and so on. Not so spells, which generally head straight for the graveyard once they’ve done their thing. What that tends to mean is that their thing can be pretty powerful.
First up, Duress gives us information, specifically the whole hand of our opponent. As long as you’re sensible and write it all down, you can spend the next few turns knowing a fair amount about what they can do, can’t do, and what they might do. This is all useful, but wouldn’t be enough on its own to justify Duress as a decent spell. The fact that it costs just one mana means that (provided you’re playing the maximum four copies in Constructed) you have a decent chance of being able to open the game on a Duress. Apart from the information we’ve already spoken about, why would you want to?
Well, you might think that ‘noncreature, nonland’ is pretty prohibitive, and in Sealed or even Draft you’re mostly going to be right. That’s not to say that there isn’t a case for Duress there. A former World Player of the Year, Tomaharu Saitou of Japan, is on record as saying he loves Duress in M10 Draft, because in that Format ‘noncreature, nonland’ usually equates to ‘removal spell.’ Constructed though is where the real application lies. There are plenty of decks that run very few creatures and lots of spells, and these are the ones you want to target.
Of course, some of these decks are going to have countermagic, and may not want you getting near their game-winning spells. Well, that’s why Duress is so good at one mana — it has the chance, especially when you’re going first (‘on the play’), to sneak under the radar before the Control player has the chance to get a counterspell ready. Even if they do counter it, you’re wearing them down, trading a Duress which would have taken a card of your choice for a card of their choice. They still lose a card.
That’s why Discard is such a chore for Control players to deal with. They can play single one-for-one countermagic because they have Card Advantage spells in their deck, which allow them to reload and pull away from the opposition. Against Discard, as soon as they fail to counter, you have the chance to take away one of those Card Advantage spells. Plus, with the information you gain from the Duress, you can pick your time to cast the spells that you really want to resolve, knowing they have no counterspells left.
Duress is also a fine card against Combo decks. We’ve seen how cards like Fabricate and Diabolic Tutor often force you to wait until your next turn to actually cast the spell you’ve searched out. While Constructed Formats often have powerful search (or ‘tutor’) effects which allow the Combo player to get the job done in a single turn, it’s also true that Combo decks are usually incredibly tightly built, with mana acceleration, tutors, and the Combo pieces themselves. That usually means very little room for countermagic, so your ability to disrupt them with Duress in the early turns is considerable, stealing any of the three elements the deck needs to function.
Another way that information about their hand gets put to good use is when you combine Duress with cards from older sets, like Cabal Therapy. With Duress the first part of a one-two punch, you know that your Cabal Therapy is going to hit. That combination has been massively successful down the years in Constructed, and Duress is one of the first places a Black mage turns to when considering building a Control deck.
If cards arrived on the battlefield with a loudspeaker blaring their theme song, Gravedigger’s would be something like, ‘Let’s Go Round Again.’ Removal spells in Limited that kill more than one creature are unusual, and very powerful. For the most part, the benefit of a removal spell is that it might cost less than the creature it’s killing, or just that the creature it kills is extremely powerful. Killing a Dragon Whelp that’s about to deal you five damage with a Divine Verdict is a good deal to be sure, but it’s still a one-for-one trade in pure card advantage terms.
What Gravedigger does is effectively nullify an earlier piece of removal from your opponent. This is highly gratifying when you’ve been bashing away for a few turns with something like a Howling Banshee (more in a bit on this), they kill it, and you cast Gravedigger to bring it back. Plus, as a 2/2, Gravedigger isn’t utterly without merit.
As a Common, Gravedigger is going to turn up in multiples in Draft, and that means all sorts of circular fun. Your good guy dies. Cast Gravedigger. Recast good guy. Your Gravedigger dies. Cast second Gravedigger, returning first Gravedigger. Now they know that even if they kill your good guy for a second time, it’s coming back around. Truly, Gravedigger is a terrific little Common that you can play with all day and never get bored. It’s the absolute embodiment of decent recursion for Limited fun.
One of the things that Rare cards sometimes get to do are unusual effects that are pretty complicated, and that would quickly stop being fun if they were turning up every other game. At five mana, and Rare, you would expect Haunting Echoes to do a lot. And it does… sort of. Just as we can almost always find a situation where a card has at least some merit, we can also readily find the scenario where a card doesn’t do a lot or indeed nothing relevant at all.
In Limited, the times Haunting Echoes will do nothing relevant at all are ‘almost always.’ An opposing graveyard will often have only three or four cards in it, even late in the game, because each one of those likely represents a removal spell of some kind, and removal doesn’t grow on trees. Add in the fact that even in Draft multiples are most often spread amongst the eight players, rather than congregated in one, and you can quickly see that the likelihood of Haunting Echoes actually finding more copies is negligible.
In other words, Haunting Echoes is the card you open in your Sealed Pool, sigh bitterly that it isn’t a Hypnotic Specter, and then stick it back in your Pool, praying desperately that it might have a home in Constructed.
It does.
In Constructed, most decks are packed to the gunnels with three and four copies of individual cards. A Turn 1 Duress might take out something like a Cruel Ultimatum from a Control player. As the game goes on, he casts a few counterspells, and a removal spell to sweep the board clear. You cast Haunting Echoes. A whole bunch of things get to happen at this point on a strategic level, and not all of them are readily apparent until you’ve played with the card.
First off, you get to Exile what’s in the graveyard. Most of the time this won’t mean much, depending on the Format, but a card with Flashback can be played out of the graveyard, but not if it’s been Exiled. Not that Gravedigger itself tends to feature in Constructed, but once the creatures are Exiled, they can’t be dug back up either.
Then comes the good bit — searching through the library, pulling out all the copies. Although you’ll do it at the same time, that’s actually two things you get to do, not one. Searching through the library means you know every single card your opponent can draw for the rest of the game. That’s a huge information advantage. If you know the Format Metagame well, you can probably tell what cards they brought in from their Sideboard against you for Game 2, and can use that information to inform your Sideboard for Game 3.
Now we’re actually Exiling the cards out of the library. Depending on how deep we are into the game, it’s entirely possible that there are quite a few key cards already in the graveyard. Well, they better not be totally key, because you’re stealing all the other copies. Or are you? That’s where another useful benefit comes along. Suppose you have a good clue about the makeup of the opposing deck, or that it’s Game Three and you’ve pulled off the Haunting Echoes trick in Game 2. With a little bit of thought, you can work out at least some of the opposing hand, by working out what’s missing from the library as you work your way through.
Once you’ve taken out all those cards, there are two huge problems for your opponent. First, there are far fewer relevant cards than they would want left in their library with which to win the game. In fact, the Holy Grail version is when you strip out every single possible route to victory. That might sound unlikely, but old school Control decks will frequently have very few actual threats, and it’s entirely possible that you can make a Combo player discard a copy of their kill spell, then Haunting Echoes away the others.
Even if that doesn’t happen, your opponent has the additional problem of finding those remaining threats. Remember, all the basic land cards get left in the deck, and, some older Formats aside, even the non-basic ones are unlikely to have found their way to your graveyard. In other words, their remaining deck is going to be much more land-heavy than it was designed to be. Not only will the card quality of their deck have decreased, their likelihood of finding something other than land will also have gone down.
Before we leave Haunting Echoes, you’d be right to think I love cards like this. Some of the finest stories in the game come from cards like this, either because of stealing everything, or because you still managed to win with what was left. And that’s the bit to be careful about. Haunting Echoes doesn’t help your board position, nor does it get involved with their hand, nor does it completely stop them drawing something useful and killing you with it. At five mana and Sorcery speed, you’re looking towards a cost where you want a significant swing towards you winning the game, and sometimes Echoes just doesn’t deliver that. You wade through their deck, and then they kill you anyway with what they had in hand.
Now that I’ve warned you, if you’re still excited, go back a couple of weeks and read again about Traumatize…
We already know that a 3/3 for four mana is known as a Hill Giant, and that in plenty of Limited games, Hill Giants are good. Hill Giants that can fly are therefore really good for Limited. Since the ability happens whether we want it to or not, it’s worth exploring the ups and downs. We begin with one simple fact. The ability is symmetrical. It does exactly the same damage to both players. What we need to do is work that symmetry to our advantage. Here are some upsides:
Yes, we each get dealt 3 damage, but on our side there’s a 3/3 Flyer on the board. One turn later, and many times they will be a total of six points lower than when we cast it. This might not be a big deal if they’re well ahead in the race, but a lot of times, dropping someone from 10 to 7 and then threatening them with a 3/3 Flyer is a big deal.
Another plus is when life is really low for them. At three or less, they’re just dead as it hits the battlefield, and the 4-6 range leaves them dead the following turn unless they have an answer to the Flyer.
A third plus is your knowledge of the card in your deck. How does that help? Surely, you always know the cards in your deck? That’s true, but knowing about the Banshee allows you to plan ahead in a way that’s harder for your opponent to do. As the game progresses, you’ll be trying to get them to three life, not zero, because you know that puts them in range of the Banshee. Similarly, you’ll try to avoid going as low as three, because that effectively turns off your chance to play it. You’ll play with cards like Harm’s Way or Safe Passage subtly differently in some situations, simply because you know what is, or might be, coming.
This idea goes further, because in your head you’re both beginning the game at 17 life. Of course, the Howling Banshee may not appear, but you always have a plan in mind that involves it arriving. Since three life can often equate to a full turn, your opponent may misjudge how far advanced the game is. Suppose they have a big creature, and a Mind Spring. We’ve already discussed how it can be difficult to find the time to spend a turn casting Mind Spring. If they think they’re in little danger, they may effectively run themselves out of turns. They cast the Mind Spring, ready to set up for the long game, and the long game doesn’t happen.
All these are upsides, but there is, of course, the flipside.
At 3 life, you can’t cast this, unless they are too, when you can force an unlikely draw scenario. (If both players hit zero life simultaneously, the duel is declared a draw.) If you need a blocker because you’re being run over, paying three life for the privilege isn’t something you want to be doing. Sometimes shortening the game can be a good thing, but not if you’re looking for answers. Losing an entire turn means you get one less chance to find something useful on top of your deck.
Frankly, none of the downsides are reasons not to play the card if you’re going to be Black in Limited. 3/3 Flyers are straight-up good anyway, and a 3/3 Flyer in Black for just four mana is a proper bargain. A 3/3 Flyer in Black for four mana that might just kill your opponent before it even attacks is an absolute steal, and explains why Howling Banshee is Uncommon.
There are few things more dangerous in Magic than mana acceleration, because the game is based on the idea of getting one extra mana per turn, so that on Turn 3 you get three mana to play with, five on Turn 5, and so on. Dark Ritual was a card from some early sets in the game that allowed you to turn one mana into three mana. Since you got one mana on Turn 1, a Swamp plus a Dark Ritual frequently equalled a Turn 1 2/2 Flying Hypnotic Specter that made your opponent discard every time it hit. Since many opening turns on the other side might be ‘Plains, go’ or ‘Island, go’ and so on, this opening Turn frequently took players a long way towards winning the game.
Long-time readers will have either gone all warm and fuzzy inside about that last paragraph, or their blood pressure will have risen sharply, depending on outlook. Thankfully/sadly, those days are very much part of the game’s history, and ‘cheating’ your way to a Turn 1 Hypnotic Specter just doesn’t happen.
Whenever it hit play, though, it was always the ability that people played it for, since a 2/2 isn’t terribly exciting. I’m sure you can see that even a single swipe through the air is problematic for your opponent.
Hypnotic Specter is undeniably good in Limited, but everyone is trying to play Flyers, and mostly succeeding, and there’s no way past a Wind Drake or some such, making it relatively difficult to get the Specter online. However, in Constructed you have the luxury of making it a central theme of your deck, and if you’re playing cards like Duress, Mind Rot, Liliana Vess and so on, the Hypnotic Specter is all part of a wider plan designed to utterly disrupt the opposing plan.
Over the years, the Specter has teetered on and around the cusp of Constructed playability, because a 2/2 Flyer for three is really pretty ordinary. The ability, in the right deck, isn’t.
Hypnotic Specter is Rare. Kelinore Bat is Common. Can you spot the differences? The fact is, though, that observing that Ferrari F1 cars are better than Nissan Micras may be true, but doesn’t get us very far. Most of the time, your Sealed Pool is going to have a card like Kelinore Bat, and most of the time, you won’t see a Hypnotic Specter for weeks at a time.
Whereas the Specter is on the brink of Constructed play, that isn’t the case with the Bat. The Bat sits on the dividing line between Sealed and Draft. The one toughness in particular is problematic, because not only does it die to almost any monster worthy of the name (and cards like Acolyte of Xathrid aren’t worthy of the name, they’re just an Activated Ability with some skin attached), but the Bat also dies to absolutely any form of piddling removal. Prodigal Pyromancer, Sparkmage Apprentice… it’s depressing when you have to put a two-power flyer into the bin just for that.
That’s why it won’t always be good news for Draft. In Sealed, you can afford to be much more interested in the two power than the one toughness, and you’re going to see them in Sealed time after time after time.
The wild child girl of the night, LV is the Black Planeswalker. Since Ajani Goldmane in White and Jace Beleren in Blue are both pretty spicy, we’re looking for lots of goodies from Liliana. One thing she has in common with the other two Planeswalkers we’ve met so far is that her Ultimate final ability is basically irrelevant. In order to get up to eight Loyalty, she has to force your opponent (or, in exceptional circumstances, you) to discard a bunch of cards. By the time she’s taken three cards out of their hand, without being touched by the opposing forces, you absolutely should be on the point of winning. That said, in a lengthy game of Limited that features them discarding multiple monsters, having them all on your side of the table is indeed a way to make the game cease rapidly thereafter.
However, Liliana has a problem peculiar to her. Ajani Goldmane makes all your monsters look good, regardless of their fundamental quality. They all benefit from the middle ability. As for Jace Beleren, drawing cards is always beneficial, even if you’re seeing unwanted land. Liliana’s first ability doesn’t always achieve a lot. If she arrives late game, your opponent may already be playing off the top of their deck, and although you can still target them and gain a Loyalty, that’s all you’re gaining.
Perhaps it’s the middle ability we should be getting excited about? Since it begins with one of our ‘alert’ words — Search — there’s reason to start getting interested. Like Diabolic Tutor, Liliana is willing to fetch us anything we require, but unlike the Diabolic Tutor, that card doesn’t go into our hand. If we positively need an answer straight away, she doesn’t help, since the card goes on top of the library. For some reason, this is the kind of information that players have a hard time remembering. ‘I fetch a card, do I get it now or next turn?’ … ‘Search for a land, put it into play… oh wait, no, put it into my hand.’ I see this all the time at sub-Pro level (and even occasionally there) and it surprises me, because where the card goes really matters.
Having it sent to the top of your library isn’t great news, and nor is the fact that you reduce Liliana to three Loyalty to do so. Three is well within range of many monsters, and plenty of burn spells, so if you want Liliana to hang around, using her Tutor middle ability isn’t often going to be the way to do it.
If you can keep her around, you’re starting to get good mana value out of her with a second Tutor effect, since if you only manage one, you’re paying more mana than Diabolic Tutor for a lesser effect. Then comes the major downside, which is that Discard never affects the board position. If you’re getting beaten about the head, spending what’s likely to be an entire turn on a Tutor better get you the real goods. Something like a Planar Cleansing, perhaps.
You can probably tell that I’m ambivalent about Liliana, and that’s because, tease that she is, she frequently flatters only to disappoint. Few Constructed decks have found a legitimate use for her, and although you sometimes won’t mind spending a bit too much on a Tutor effect or two in Limited, as Planeswalkers go, she’s a little bit less than the sum of her parts would suggest.
‘Draw a card.’ ‘Search.’ ‘Destroy.’ ‘One mana.’ These are all things that draw our attention towards possibility, since gaining card advantage, finding bombs, removing threats and doing things cheaply are all good things in the game. Whereas these might be termed ‘alerts,’ there are also phrases that ring ‘alarm bells,’ and the phrase ‘1/1 for three mana’ is certainly one of them.
At one mana, 1/1s are poor, and need at the very least to have a semi-useful ability attached, like Zephyr Sprite. At 1/1 for two mana, you want the ability to be really good. Merfolk Looter passes this test, Alluring Siren probably doesn’t. At three mana for a 1/1, you really do want something good. Does Looming Shade deliver?
The good news is clearly that this is no ordinary 1/1, although it has those stats a bit more often than you’d probably like. In Sealed, if you can get it to trade for a biggish monster then you’ve done fine. The turn after you cast it, you might well be able to make it a 4/4, and that’s the sort of range where you can take down most things (like a Craw Wurm, for example.)
Ironically, although the Format speeds up in Draft, Looming Shade tends to get a bit better. The evidence is stacking up that Black really likes to play with its own kind, and there are lots of benefits to so doing. That means playing with a lot of Swamps, and that in turn means the Shade can get very big very quickly. Even if Black is your primary Sealed color, you’re going to have seven or eight Swamps. In Draft, you can potentially end up almost mono-Black, and suddenly you’ve got fourteen or fifteen Swamps. Not only does that help on offense, where you have maybe a 7/7 threat available, but it does introduce the option of keeping your powder dry, pumping it to 4/4 on attack, and keeping three Swamps back to take it out of range of a burn spell.
One final note. It’s really important to understand exactly what kind of threat your Looming Shade represents to the opponent, because every time you sink tons of mana into it, you’re taking that mana away from something else you might be doing that turn. ‘Take three extra damage, my opponent skips their turn’ is functionally something that players are going to be willing to do, setting you back a turn. If your Looming Shade plan is indeed causing them problems, all well and good, but you need to make sure that’s the case before your hard-earned mana goes down the pump route.
I don’t know where you come from, but here in the UK homelessness is a real problem. Otherwise perfectly normal human beings wandering the streets, friendless, vulnerable, alone, hungry, and just desperately in search of a place to lay their head, comforted by the sense of belonging.
Homelessness is a big problem in Magic too, where otherwise perfectly normal cards are wandering the cupboards, friendless, vulnerable, alone, hungry, and just desperately in search of a place to lay their head, comforted by the sense of belonging.
Megrim has been homeless for a very long time.
There are only really four homes that Megrim could go to — Sealed, Draft, Constructed, and Multiplayer (the last refuge of the damned. Cards, not players, he says hastily).
In Sealed, you get no choice about what cards you’re given, and in six boosters there aren’t going to be many discard spells. Even if you randomly opened both Hypnotic Specter and Liliana Vess in the Rare/Mythic slots, and got a couple of Common Duress and Mind Rot, you can still only expect to see two or three of these in the course of a Sealed game running 7-10 turns. That’s not really enough to justify a slot for Megrim.
In Draft, you’ve got more things going for you, since those Commons are going to be around in multiples more readily, and variance means that sometimes there will be as many as four or five that you could get your hands on. However, then you have to deal with actually Drafting the Megrim in the first place, and at Uncommon, there’s only going to be one in the entire Draft most of the time. Add in the fact that Draft is a quicker Format, and you find that spending a turn and a card to get Megrim into play, solely for the purpose of making at most a quarter of your spells a bit better is indefensible.
In Constructed? Well, this is where Megrim raises its bowed head in supplication. Surely, it pleads, you can find me a home when you can play as many discard spells as you like? It’s right to get a bit more hopeful, since you can indeed get a critical mass of discard into your deck. As we’ve seen though, discard doesn’t affect the board position in any way. If you’re on the draw (going second in the game) and they open up with Goldmeadow Harrier, Knight of Meadowgrain and then Spectral Procession (a 1-2-3 weapon of choice for the White Weenie player), spending your Turn 3 casting Megrim before aiming Mind Rot at them on Turn 4 is going to spell D-E-A-D, and not for your opponent.
If you’re following along at home, you’ve probably spotted that the answer to this opening is something like Infest, which would wipe the board clear. Okay, so we have Infest in our deck. In fact, killing creatures in general seems like a good plan, and now we’re a mono-Black Control deck. Frankly, we now have many better ways to kill our opponent than a mini-Combo, trying to force them to take damage discarding cards they don’t have! See, whereas we can target our opponent with Liliana Vess and get a Loyalty counter whether they actually discard or not, Megrim only triggers when they actually discard a card, not just when we demand that they do. If Mind Rot finds only one card in their hand, Megrim will deal them just two damage, not four. Sorry Megrim, time to try the charity cases…
In Multiplayer, Megrim has the chance to impact lots of players, and finding at least someone with cards in hand is highly likely. The trouble with this is that Multiplayer is absolutely ram-packed with expensive to cast Rares that do utterly foolish things once they hit play. When there are six cards against you, casting Duress and Mind Rot in the same turn gets rid of half of them. Try that in a five player Multiplayer game, and you’ve spent two of your cards whilst still facing maybe twenty-five around the table. In Multiplayer, cards that affect, or at least threaten to affect, everyone, are the order of the day.
And so a perfectly nice, well-designed, neatly-costed Megrim hunkers down once more, slouching off into the night, still nurturing the secret hope that one day — just one day — it might find a place to call its own.
Magic is packed full of cards that mirror each other. Sometimes they can be years and years apart — what if we gave Black a version of that famous White spell? – but sometimes they nestle right together for all to see. Mind Rot is the counterpart to Divination, and just like Divination, it creates card advantage, but this time in a negative way.
Divination saw us begin with two cards in each hand. Divination left our hand (down to one) and then draw two cards (up to three). We ended Divination one card ahead of our opponent. Mind Rot is the negative image of this. Imagine we again start with two cards in each hand. Mind Rot leaves our hand (down to one) and then they discard two cards (down to zero.) We lead 1-0, and have again created card advantage.
Early in the Limited game, this can prove awkward to opponents, because they don’t necessarily have spare mana they can afford to bin. That increases the likelihood that you’ll effectively have turned Mind Rot into some form of countermagic or removal, as their spell or creature hits the graveyard.
I’ve called Mind Rot the negative image of Divination, and players talk about cards in those kind of terms all the time — this card is just a reprint of so-and-so — but that analysis presents dangers. Is Mind Rot actually just a negative copy of Divination? No, it isn’t, for one very small but occasionally crucial reason. Divination says that you draw two cards. However bizarre the circumstances, even if you want to, you can’t give those cards to your opponent. If you can’t think of circumstances where you’d want that to happen, don’t worry, because there aren’t many, but they do exist in the twilight corners of the game, like when they have two cards left in their library….
As for Mind Rot, the game gives you the choice of who has to discard. Again, the overwhelming majority of the time this is going straight at your opponent, but just occasionally, you’ll get to win games because you know that Mind Rot is in fact subtly different to the wording style of Divination. Suppose you have a huge Kalonian Behemoth in hand, a spare Swamp, and a Rise From The Grave. Unfortunately, you have no Green mana at all. A bit of creative thinking later, and you’ve discarded your Behemoth and Swamp to the graveyard. Next turn, Rise From The Grave puts your 9/9 Shroud monster into play.
Most people tend not to bother you with this kind of information, since it’s going to occur so infrequently. However, Magic is a game full of thousands and thousands of ‘so infrequently’, and if you play for a while, you’re going to find yourself winning and losing games in inconsequential ways just like this.
Like Mind Rot, the Mind Shatter involves a target player, so you can once again target yourself should you feel the need. In reality, this card almost always reads, ‘target opponent discards their hand.’ By Turn 5, this involves the discard of three cards, and unless they’ve been missing land drops or have cast virtually nothing, this represents all their worldly goods more often than not.
One of the difficulties with playing Mind Shatter is that you never want to see it once the initial job of depleting the opposing hand has been accomplished. Like all its discard friends, it achieves precisely nothing if they have no cards in hand, yet you’re morally obliged to play multiples of them if you want to bomb out their hand on schedule. That makes Mind Shatter a difficult spell to place. In Sealed, it can be really good, as long as you’re not too far behind on the board when you cast it, but Constructed has found it hard to find a decent use for it. Against Aggro decks, they’ve already substantively emptied their hand by the time you tap out to ditch the last couple of cards, and against Control, they’ve often got a one-for-one piece of Countermagic, meaning it struggles to resolve. All in all, there are many Rares you’d rather be opening.
Another scalable card, few miserable experiences compare with casting Nightmare as a 1/1 Flyer for six mana. Yes, Nightmare continues the theme of Black wanting to find as many Swamps as it can to power out its naughtiness. In Sealed, the fourth Swamp is the cusp between ‘fine’ and ‘actively good’. A 3/3 Flyer for any mana is a threat, and at six mana it’s overcosted but still useful. Once it’s a 4/4, there aren’t many single cards that can live with it, and once you’re above that, you’re into legitimate powerhouse Rare territory.
Where Nightmare can really shine is where you open, or get passed one, early in a Draft, where you can actively pursue a mono-Black strategy. With seventeen Swamps in your deck, this is a guy that arrives as a 6/6 Flyer, and just keeps on getting bigger.
It’s also worth nothing that, if the Nightmare is on the other side of the table and you’re working out how to kill it, don’t let them untap. You can’t respond to a player laying a land, and as soon as the next Swamp arrives, the Nightmare has changed to a higher power and toughness — there’s no window for you to kill it as an ‘old’ 3/3 before it becomes a ‘new’ 4/4. There are times for being cute with removal, but having a Lightning Bolt in hand and a 3/3 Nightmare in play for them isn’t likely to be one of them.
This is a lovely card to exist, because it allows enquiring minds to answer the question, ‘What would it be like if I could play as many as I like?’ Now, admittedly, they didn’t print ‘A deck can have any number of cards named either Channel or Fireball’, but if you love casual play, sooner or later you’re going to try out the Rats.
And you’ll discover that they are indeed Relentless.
Relentlessly crap.
Only when you have three of them in play do they even begin to resemble good value, and yet you still have to protect the whole team, because just one chink in the armor can spell doom for the whole lot. Quite frankly, the best thing about a Relentless Rats deck is that you’re the first guy in the room to fill out the decklist at the tournament. It’s all downhill from there.
Rise From The Grave
Occasionally, Research & Development decide that a particular effect doesn’t belong in a color that’s had the ability for a while, or even that the effect shouldn’t be in the game at all. More often, they will look to ‘fix’ an ability by making its cost either prohibitive or at the least, exorbitant.
We’ve talked before about Black being the color of Recursion, bringing things back from the graveyard. We’ve talked about Exhume, getting an enormous monster into play as early as Turn Two. That just isn’t happening with Rise From The Grave. Much as only overweight middle aged men get to drive two-seater sports cars, it takes a while to save up for a Rise From The Grave, and a ton of Constructed Magic is well advanced into the mid-late game by Turn Five.
That said, the idea of stealing the best creature anywhere in sight, including the opponent’s graveyard, is a tremendously exciting one, and is the stuff of tall tales. Using their phenomenal Mythic Rare to kill them is one of the world’s finer pleasures, and I recommend playing this in Sealed just for that experience alone.
At worst, there’s usually some kind of worthwhile monster in a graveyard, and even if it’s something like a humble Wind Drake — about the lowest form of threat I can think of that people actually reach out with removal to bin — you end up with a 2/2 Flyer in play. Never mind that you paid a bit much for it, there’ll be plenty of times when the value skyrockets, and while it might feel filthy to steal their Mythic Rare, getting your own comedy bomb to Rise From The Grave feels every bit as filthy. In Sealed, this is one of the reasons to drive 100 miles to your local tournament. It will indeed sustain you through many tedious late-night drives home. Sure, you went 2-5, but when you resurrected their Bogardan Hellkite… Good times.
At various points in a Limited game, monsters are going to acquire great big painted bullseyes on them, because they represent a threat, and removal used to bring them down is removal well-spent. Depending on how advanced the game is, even the humblest creature can get that ‘must-kill’ sign, because if you don’t deal with a 1/1 Flyer and you’re at one life, that’s a lethal threat right there.
Some cards come with the bullseye already attached, and, as 1/1s go, few have it painted on so thoroughly as Royal Assassin. Put simply, he dominates the board for as long as he’s around. Yes, if your opponent has multiple men to attack with, he can still take a toll on your life total. Even so, every time he does so, one of his attackers won’t get as far as dealing damage, because it will have been thoroughly assassinated during combat.
There are exceptions to this. Vigilant monsters like Serra Angel don’t satisfy the ‘tapped’ requirement, while Shroud monsters are by their nature impossible to target. To be honest, you won’t often get to activate the Assassin, since there are only a few occasions where it will be in your opponent’s interest to attack into its waiting clutches. When a 1/1 can basically change the entire nature of a duel on its own, simply by the threat of its activation, you know you have a powerful ally on your team.
If that’s not enough, there are some naughty ways you can abuse it. Sleep should basically win you games alone, but the fact remains that all their monsters become tapped and stay that way for a while. Seems like an opportunity not to be missed. Then there’s Blinding Mage, and together these two are a monstrous Limited Combo.
I say Limited, simply because they’re both vulnerable monsters, and there are more efficient ways of doing bad things to your opponent for the mana in Constructed. Back in Sealed, though, this is tremendous, and will be terminated with extreme prejudice any time your opponent can possibly do so. A great guy to have on your team, and a proper headache to play against.
This is the kind of card that mostly only exists for flavor and for collectors. Although you may be interested in either of these, it’s a good bet that you’ve found your way to starcitygames.com in part because you like to play at a decent level. Playing at a decent level may well turn out to be incompatible with playing with Sanguine Bond.
As a piece of flavor, it’s delightful. A blood link flowing between the living that’s dying into the living dead that feed off life….very neat, and just the kind of thing that would exist in a world of Magic. However, five is a lot of mana for any card that does nothing. Nothing. Not one thing. Sometime later in the game it might do something, but to start with — you know what I’m going to say — nothing.
Trying to put together enough ‘lifeswing’ cards in Limited is a real uphill task. In Sealed, that’s because you simply won’t have enough. There’s Tendrils Of Corruption and Child Of Night at Common, and the Uncommon Consume Spirit. Child Of Night is relatively easy to pick up in Draft, but both the others are legitimately Good Cards that even people who aren’t going to play them are scared of, so you might struggle to get plenty of those.
Plus, you have to actually Draft the Sanguine Bond in the first place, and there are so, so many better cards. Really, the only way you could do this is if you took it first pick as a challenge to yourself, and tried to build the super-unlikely Draft-winning Sanguine Bond deck, where you randomly pick up five copies of Angel’s Mercy and a Mythic Rare Baneslayer Angel. Thing is, though, running a marathon backwards and blindfolded is also a challenge, but that doesn’t mean you should try it.
I’ve got one in my folder, and that’s exactly the number I ever hope to see.
Sign In Blood
Oh, oh, oh, there’s so much to like about this card. Having just put myself through the mill of trying to find nice things to say about Sanguine Bond, I actually felt myself smile as I saw what was coming next.
This card is cheap. That’s good. In a Black Control deck for Constructed, you frequently want to do nothing on Turn Two other than lay a second Swamp, so casting Sign In Blood doesn’t corrupt your plans. Later on in the game, finding two mana spare is quite doable.
Divination is decent, and this costs a whole mana less. That’s an awesome deal. Of course, because the Blue ‘corporation’ is the prime manufacturer of card drawing, you have to pay a little bit extra in terms of that two life, but I’m here to tell you that exchanging two life for two cards is so breathtakingly awesome I’m even doing a little dance about it as I type.
Let me explain, because I know lots of newer players have a real problem with cards that hurt them (just wait until we get to Goblin Artillery, one of the best Limited spells ever printed). Here’s the thing. Magic is a game of resources. You fight to keep their monsters off the board, and yours efficiently hitting their life total. You cast spells to try and draw you extra cards, or make them lose theirs. You attempt to use your mana efficiently, getting the best value out of every turn, and getting the best deal you can on each spell you cast, aiming it at the most appropriate monster, saving it for the best time, and so on.
Creatures, spells, and lands — these are the core resources of your game. But you also have another resource — your life total. For the most part, converting your life total into another resource is something that happens only rarely in a game, but when it does it can be amazingly powerful, because for the most part, it’s only one player who manages to access that resource.
Suppose you open the game with Sign In Blood on Turn 2 and Turn 3. All by yourself, you’ve put my life total from 20 down to 16. That’s bad, right? Well, nobody wants to die, and 16 is closer to death than 20, sure. But just think what an advantage you’ve got. Your opponent started with seven cards in hand, and so did you. In exchange for starting on 16, you effectively started the game on ELEVEN cards. That’s an incredible +4 on your opponent. Sure, they’ve put a Wall Of Bone and a Warpath Ghoul into play, and you’ll have to deal with them in due course. Meanwhile, you’ve got a completely full hand.
Many, many times in a game, it will all come down to +1 either way. In a series of monster trade-offs, the one monster that can’t be dealt with is the winner. You know for sure that when you’ve dealt with whatever they have, you’ve got cards over, and those are the cards you’re going to win the game with. They may still be on twenty life, but you’ve managed to buy a ton of powerful stuff just for a few measly life points.
Consider this: What’s the difference between winning a duel at twenty life and winning a game at one life? Apart from (possibly) your heart rate and blood pressure, none. Any time you can utilise this fabulous resource to further your game state, you’re doing something truly awesome. If you’re still not convinced, take a couple of Magic Intro packs. One player starts with seven cards, the other draws two extra cards on turns 2 and 3. Player one starts at 20 life, the other at 16. I absolutely guarantee that Player 2 is a massive favorite. Massive.
Few things excite Pro Magic players more than drawing extra cards, and getting to use your life total to do it — that’s why Sign In Blood is a shoe-in for Constructed play, and any time you see the chance to abuse your life total for another kind of advantage, you should take it very, very seriously.
And then you should get your opponent to two life, and target them…
This is another of those cards that it’s easy to see what it does, but not necessarily whether it’s any good. The name is pretty descriptive, and the idea is that your opponent will slowly wither away before your very eyes as the slow life loss mounts up turn by turn.
The reality is probably a bit more awkward. If your opponent is at one life when you cast this, they better have Enchantment removal at instant speed, or some way of killing the creature you Enchant, otherwise They Be Dead. Finding the creature you want to put it on is the awkward bit. If it’s a Flyer that’s busy kicking you to death in the skies, chances are your opponent will ignore this utterly and continue the beats. One life loss per turn isn’t much of a Clock. If their monster is small, you’re effectively making it unblockable, because why would you want to block and kill it? I suppose you might want to stick it on a big fat Wall, because that more or less forces them into using a removal spell on it themselves if they want to stem the bleeding.
A lot of the time, they won’t feel the need to stem the bleeding (to state the bleeding obvious.)
Tendrils Of Corruption
Tendrils Of Corruption gives you a very good very bad feeling.
I’ve seen grown men weep when this has been used against them. Actual grown men. Actually weeping. Magic has many funky, cool, inventive, smart, unusual, clever and awesome ways to die, but it has some cruel ways too. Tendrils Of Corruption can’t actually kill you, because it only targets a creature, but functionally it’s the knife through the heart of anyone who has tried unsuccessfully to punch through a mono-Black Control deck.
Tendrils is so good because it fits right in to the ‘more Swamp’ ideology. Dealing four damage for four mana at Instant speed isn’t shabby at all. Gaining four life while you do it is a kick in the teeth for an Aggro deck, setting them back by as much as two turns (you kill their guy, so no damage this turn, and gain four life, which cancels out the damage you took last turn).
That’s when it’s four mana. Historically, mono-Black has had ways to ensure that it has an absolute ton of Swamps, either because the game has gone long, or because it has cards that turn all its lands into Swamps for just this purpose. A four mana Instant that kills a monster and gains you nine life is utterly insane, and an absolute cornerstone of Black Constructed removal. This is the card that Black players get with something like Diabolic Tutor when they’re in trouble. ‘Oh look, I’m almost dea… oh wait, I’m on 13, my mistake.’
Mono-Black Control hasn’t always been a great Constructed deck, because sometimes it just gets flattened before the big Tendrils can take it out of range again. Even so, if you’re a new-ish player who wants to play in Friday Night Magic, sometime soon you should play with the power of the Tendrils. As I say, it’s a very good very bad feeling.
Another card that doesn’t impact the game immediately, Underworld Dreams is as Black as Black gets, because you’re never putting this in any kind of deck unless you’re firmly committed to the dark side. Since it works every time your opponent draws a card, you want to cast this as early as possible, and with that triple Black mana requirement, you’re going to struggle to make it on turn three or even four/five unless you have a strong Swamp presence in your deck. Thankfully, as we’ve seen throughout the Black cards, the color positively rewards those who are faithful, so there are plenty of cards that work well with making this commitment.
Enchantment removal isn’t something that all players will run in their Sealed main deck, and a few unfortunates may not even have access to any out of the Sideboard. This makes Underworld Dreams a genuine threat, because doing an accumulated six, eight, maybe ten points of damage across a game for a card that costs just three mana is fantastic value.
In Constructed, this is exactly the kind of card that can give Control players fits, although you may have to work quite hard to make it stick. Start off with a Duress or two, maybe a Mind Rot, and then sneak this through while they have no countermagic. At this point, they’re in a spot of bother, since Control decks are quite happy to trade one-for-one, because they have all those lovely spells that gain card advantage later on.
Drawing Divination, then casting it, drawing into a Mind Spring and then casting that the following turn for four cards seems amazing. Doing all that, and taking a sum total of eight damage for the privilege (two draw steps, two from the Divination, and four from the Mind Spring) isn’t something they’re going to want to do.
In part because of that triple Black requirement, and the shape of the Metagame, this isn’t a card that has seen a ton of Constructed play. It is, however, exactly the kind of card you might want to look to exploit with, for example, Howling Mine…
If doing two extra points of damage is going to kill your opponent, Unholy Strength is clearly good. Okay, I’ve run out of ways in which Unholy Strength is good. There are two ways that you might be thinking it’s good, but I’m going to suggest that those thoughts are naughty, and should be quashed.
Scenario one is where they have a huge flyer, and you have a smaller monster. If you give your Snapping Drake +2+1 with Unholy Strength, you do give it enough power to down a 5/5 Nightmare, or a 4/4 Air Elemental. It’s true that getting a major threat out of your hair is a good thing, but it’s also true that you want to do this, ideally, on a one-for-one basis. Casting Unholy Strength in this scenario is an acknowledgement that they deserve a two-for-one trade because their monster is so good. They lose their guy, you lose yours and the Unholy Strength.
You might be tempted to think that this isn’t much of a bad deal, since the Unholy Strength only costs one mana, but the mana cost is misleading. It’s the entire card you freely put in the bin that makes this such an unfunny scenario. There are times when giving away two-for-ones are essential, and if I need to put a Wind Drake and a Stormfront Pegasus in front of an Air Elemental, then I’ll do it and be glad to see the back of the 4/4. The difference is, I’m not expecting to have to do that when I put those flyers into my deck. Part of the purpose of a card like Unholy Strength is exactly that disappointing form of card disadvantage.
Scenario two is more positive, where you beef up your man on offense. A Veteran Armorsmith on Turn 2 is a nice monster. Making it a 4/4 on Turn 3 is a beating. There are two problems with this, although the first is slightly disingenuous.
First, wouldn’t it be better — most of the time — to have an actual 4/4 monster in the deck, rather than a monster, like Frankenstein’s, made up of other bits and pieces? The reason I say this is slightly disingenuous is that there’s a good bet you’re playing with the 4/4 anyway, but the underlying point is sound — Unholy Strength isn’t a monster, or a way to directly kill a monster, it’s just a way to improve a monster, and at the huge cost of a card.
The second problem is much more straightforward. If your Armorsmith dies to a Doom Blade, you’ve traded one-for-one. If you voluntarily stick a second card on it (the Unholy Strength), you’ve just directly offered your opponent a two-for-one if they have a piece of removal. Two-for-ones are a massive deal in Limited, where card advantage is hard to come by. Remember the bullseye we said was sitting on Royal Assassin? Sticking Unholy Strength on something positively screams ‘put me in the bin, and it’ll really help you out.’
The rules of Magic changed moderately recently. Reading this in 2015, you don’t need to know this. Contrary to what some people would have you believe, you don’t need to know this in 2009 either. All you need to know is that this is how the rules work:
Once damage gets dealt, there’s no opportunity to sacrifice a creature to make Vampire Aristocrat bigger.
That’s a really important fact to know, so we’ll even give it to you again:
Once damage gets dealt, there’s no opportunity to sacrifice a creature to make Vampire Aristocrat bigger.
What you’re going to do is make your attacks or blocks, and then before damage gets dealt, sacrifice the monsters that were going to get beaten up anyway to make your Aristocrat bigger, either to deal more damage with it, or simply to get its toughness high enough to avoid dying.
Where this becomes a potent threat is where you have single spells that hurl out multiple creatures in the form of tokens. Something like Dragon Fodder, or Spectral Procession, works brilliantly with the Aristocrat, because they make him twice as big as they are themselves. In other words, every one power you sacrifice from the 1/1 tokens becomes two extra damage from the Aristocrat.
In Constructed, this type of creature is useful because it’s what’s known in the trade as a ‘sacrifice outlet.’ This basically means that you can dump whatever you like into your graveyard without having to discard it, or getting it into play and then dying. Crucially, you can do this as many times as you like, since there’s no tapping involved. Although a pretty specialized part of the game, sacrifice outlets allow you to help Combo decks along, or Re-animator strategies, so are cards that you’ll occasionally see.
If we were in the business of giving cards a mark out of ten, you’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to give the art on this a ten. My God, VN looks scary. Sadly, nobody ever won a game of tournament Magic based on the scariness of the artwork (something Rebecca Guay is probably grateful for, since most of her wonderful art is as scary as cheese slices. Grateful. Cheese slices…) Anyway, as Mythic Rares go, this is tremendously disappointing.
3/3 for four mana is a Hill Giant, an acceptable Common type of monster. That’s four mana that’s really easy to cast. Triple Black makes it super hard to cast in Sealed. The only plus side is, why would you want to cast it anyway? It’s a strictly inferior monster to almost anything at the upper end of things, has a reasonably serious drawback in that your opponent gets to see what’s coming every single turn, and will turn into something worthwhile, at best, 60% of the time.
Just to clarify, and this is something newer players tend to find out to their cost, Swamps are not Black. They look Black, they have a Black mana symbol on them, they produce Black mana, and are used to cast Black spells.
They are not Black. They are colorless, like all basic lands.
This means that even if you are a mono-Black deck, the 17/18 Swamps in your 40 card deck are going to be colorless, and therefore 40-45% of the time, Vampire Nocturnus is just a Hill Giant. A Mythic Rare Hill Giant.
If you have the time, there will be a fantastically entertaining casual deck waiting to be built, featuring Black and White Cards, some Holy and Unholy Strengths and other creature Enchantments, a bunch of Vampires, and four copies of Undead Slayer. Since you’ll spend a lot of time trying to make this deck good, I’ll even give you the title for it: ‘Buffing The Vampire Slayer.’
Wall Of Bone
Like any Magic card, Wall Of Bone has a bunch of statistics, some of which are useful to us. Only two concern us here. The first is the Black mana activation in the text box. That makes Wall Of Bone a card that doesn’t care as much about its relatively-weedy toughness as it might, because, when it’s going to die, you can Regenerate it. (For more on this, see Drudge Skeletons, from last week.)
Then comes the really important stat, the number 1 right near the bottom. Yes, unlike Wall Of Faith in White or Wall Of Frost in Blue, Black does something properly beneficial with its Wall — kill things. Well, when I say ‘kill things’, that’s not quite what I mean. There are more than twenty monsters in M10 with a single point of toughness, but as we’ve been discovering, most of them get played for their abilities rather than their power and toughness, so they often won’t be getting involved in combat. What Wall Of Bone does for you therefore is act as a real deterrent to smaller monsters attacking with impunity. You can run an Elite Vanguard into Wall Of Faith all day, and it will just bounce off. Wall Of Bone means it’s not going anywhere.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a Wall Of Bone appear in a Constructed deck, and it’s been a long time since Rolling Stones was around. Still, because it regenerates, and occasionally keeps the opposing team honest, this is a solid, if unspectacular, card, the kind of card that buys us time to find our outstanding ‘super-Black’ cards.
Solid, if unspectacular. Turns out that phrase was useful again. Actually, that’s short-changing the Ghoul a little, since Black isn’t really expected to be banging down decent monsters in this slot. If you’ve spent your first couple of turns laying land, and want to spend turn three casting Divination, seeing a Warpath Ghoul add to the Child Of Night already in play might make you revise your plans.
It’s the three power that makes it a decent card, because it can appear on an empty board and represent a good chunk of damage over a couple of turns, before trading with something strictly better like a Zombie Goliath or Centaur Courser. At Common, there’ll be a few in your next Draft, and precisely because they’re only solid rather than great, you can probably corral most of them.
Solid, if unspectacular. Wow, this writing gig’s really easy! The flipside to Unholy Strength, this is better in so many ways, most of them spelled d-e-a-d spells dead. The twenty-plus monsters with one toughness are straight-up in the bin with this, for only one mana. When you remember that these include such major irritants as Birds Of Paradise, Prodigal Pyromancer, Merfolk Looter, and a fast-start Elite Vanguard (and that’s just the first four that spring to mind), this is a really good Limited deal.
That’s before we get to the first bit, where you seriously reduce the hitting power of something when you can’t actually use it as 100% removal. Knocking two power off something is actually a big deal, because turning 3/3 into 1/2 is changing a bruiser into a ballet dancer. A 5/5 Flyer is a massive threat. A 3/4 Flyer gives you a much better chance of survival, and falls underneath the big brigade which begin at Serra Angel and Air Elemental at 4/4.
Oh, and it kills Illusionary Servant. Seriously, for one mana in Limited play, what more could you want? (Those of you who answered ‘Lightning Bolt’ have the correct response. Well done.)
One day, the creative team will lose their collective minds, and press the ‘go’ button on a card called ‘Balls Of Steel.’ Amongst other things, the thought of that keeps me warm during the long Winter nights. Also potentially called ‘All-In,’ these are the kind of cards that really require you to win with them or meet a grizzly, miserable death. Along the way, you’re praying desperately for them to get you over the line, realizing that you are a hair’s breadth away from destruction, even as you’re pounding your opponent in a savage fashion.
Xathrid Demon comes straight out of the Balls Of Steel cupboard.
7/7 is really exciting. Flying is exciting. Trample is exciting. All this for six mana is exciting. Opening this in a Sealed pool while your neighbor opens Vampire Nocturnus is something I’d be comfortable using to justify the existence of God, a God of cards who likes me very much and who never forgets the time our neighbor really ticked him off. If you opened Vampire Nocturnus, and your neighbor got this, that’s the cue to pack up and go home because, my friends, it’s not your day.
But Xathrid Demon — and in flavor terms this is irresistible — comes with some nasty terms and conditions attached, the bits that lead to squeaky bum time. (Americans, do you have squeaky bum time in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Just asking.)
Unless you have some strange way to give the Demon haste, meaning it can attack immediately without the chore of Summoning Sickness, the first thing you’ll have to do is fuel the fire by sacrificing a creature. Oh, and not the Xathrid Demon either. That’s an escape clause that the Demon lawyers have locked down tight. Once you’ve done that, all the things we were excited about are ours for the turn. Take seven points out of their miserable hide, and go back to praying.
It turns out that Xathrid Demon doesn’t like to be disappointed. You better make sure you have a creature ready to dump when your Upkeep comes around, or he is going to turn on you in the worst way. Petulant toddlers or Pro Magic players post-manascrew have got nothing on this guy. First off, he folds his horns across his chest and explains that you broke the rules, and he’s on a break. A break that’s likely to leave you very, very dead, as seven points come off your life total. Because it’s life lost, you can’t even prevent the ‘damage’ with things like Safe Passage.
I love this card, because it comes with one of the more delicious little subgames in Magic. Can you still have a viable sacrifice when your turn comes round again? And once you’ve played with or against this a few times, believe me, you’ll come to understand the entirely made-up Magic keyword, Clench…
Do we end with a bang, or a whimper? Neither. There are many better cards at five mana, but not at Common. With four power, the Goliath has the chance to tangle with plenty of substantial monsters, actively face down a slew of smaller ones, and be a fast Clock when the board is clear late game and both players are in topdeck mode.
Due to their potential to be outclassed, you wouldn’t want to put your faith in running too many of them, but this is exactly the kind of Common you’re going to see all the time, going about its business quietly and usefully.
…
And so, finally, we reach the end of the Black line. The tales of destruction continue next week, as we head into the color of fire, Red.
As ever, however you choose to use the Academy to improve your Magic, thanks for reading…
R.