I generally hate being wrong. I often stick to talking about things I know or hedge heavily when discussing things other than known facts or pure matters of opinion. It’s safe and easy to write about my favorite cards. That’s just my opinion. I talk about what happens to grab me, and I know they’ll be cards I can talk about and don’t have to worry that I might look stupid later on. I mentioned last week that I can get stuck in my own head rather than thinking about the real world while looking at new cards. Today in an effort to realign my parameters with the real world, I’m going to try to accurately predict the cards that will see the most play in Constructed. This will be something of a hybrid between immediate and long term and different formats. I need a little wiggle room.

1. Mana Confluence

I’m fairly certain that any three-color deck in Standard that has any interest in aggression will play four of this card. The important question in determining just how much play this card sees is whether two-color aggro decks end up playing it as well. I think it’s very difficult to know that now because it will depend on what land cycles are in M15 and the next block. If all the lands come into play tapped, Mana Confluence will almost certainly be a staple of two-color aggro decks. If we end up with particularly good mana in Standard next year, this card will see less play than the Temples, but I’m not optimistic about that. There’s also the possibility that the mana will be good enough that people will often want to play more than two colors, and Mana Confluence would shine in that world as well.

2. Temple of Malady

It’s easy for lands to be the most played cards, and to me the difficult question is just figuring out the order between them. G/B and U/R are both fairly popular color combinations, but I have to give the edge to G/B at the moment. The colors work very strongly together on graveyard synergies in both Ravnica block and Theros block, and Abrupt Decay is a really well positioned card in Standard that I think was just waiting for better mana. Also, "The Rock" style decks have historically had issues with having an abundance of narrow cards and a need to draw the right ones in the right matchups, so a Temple is a particularly good fit for these decks.

Any green land that enters the battlefield tapped suffers from the problem that it can’t cast a mana creature on turn 1, but that’s less important in current Standard than it generally has been in the past thanks to Sylvan Caryatid and the fact that Elvish Mystic is the only mana creature that costs G. Font of Fertility has some chance of increasing the cost of tapped lands, but that’s more of a problem for Font of Fertility than for the lands due to our lack of alternatives.

3. Temple of Epiphany

The Izzet cards in Ravnica block are a lot weaker than the Golgari cards in Ravnica block, but blue and red have always played well together. In Legacy and Modern we see an abundance of U/R combo decks, and the Modern decks might even be interested in playing Temple of Epiphany.

In Standard we’ve seen some U/W/R alternatives to Esper Control in the past, but I’m not sure that the red offerings are really competitive with black at the moment. Thoughtseize is a really important card. Still, the deck will absolutely see play.

I’m down enough on U/R at the moment that I’m tempted to put this lower on the list, but there’s no single other card I’m so confident in that I can comfortably put it above an excellent dual land. And it’s very hard to know what colors pairs will be good after rotation.

4. Athreos, God of Passage

It’s possible my bias is showing through here, as I do love a good Orzhov deck, and while it seems kind of insane to me to choose a gold card, especially a narrow one that basically needs to be in a creature deck as the most played spell, I just have similar concerns about most of the other cards proving to be particularly narrow and am optimistic about the power level of both this card and the decks it supports.

The fact that it can be splashed into a white or black aggressive deck or can be fully utilized in a balanced W/B deck is important since it allows the card to be successful if either color is, giving it potential flexibility over some kinds of monocolored cards if it’s powerful enough to splash for. Aside from those aggressive decks, it’s also great if we end up with the tools for a more grindy W/B deck.

The fact that it returns the creatures to play rather than regenerating them is huge, as it allows decks to be built around exploiting the death triggers of cheap creatures. Forcing an opponent to pay life to stop you from looping some kind of trigger on a one-drop is great, and Athreos really rewards building decks that can do that since the opponent might otherwise be able to merely ignore your small creatures rather than having to try to kill them.

I suppose in reality that makes having an effect that lets you sacrifice cheap creatures for real value more important than having creatures that do something when they die, but that’s even better. Personally, I’m hoping this means I get to play Bubbling Cauldron and Dictate of Erebos, but I’m flexible.

5. Banishing Light

This card is roughly as good as Oblivion Ring. The text is slightly different—you can’t remove your own permanents, which means you never have to, but there are corner cases where you’ll want to and can’t. Also, you can’t do any stack tricks with this, but realistically that almost never came up with Oblivion Ring anyway since it’s much harder to do useful stack tricks with an enchantment than a creature.

There are some things that will minimize the amount of play this card sees. First of all, Detention Sphere is still in the format for now and generally better. On the other hand, even if you can cast both, Detention Sphere isn’t always better. I generally haven’t been a fan of the "Detention Sphere is worse than Oblivion Ring because Detention Sphere can’t remove Detention Sphere" argument because it goes both ways. If your opponent has Detention Sphere, they can remove your Oblivion Ring with it, but they couldn’t remove your Detention Sphere, so Detention Sphere is both better and worse in ways that generally seem to balance out.

The issue is that there are a lot of decks in Standard where Detention Sphere makes up almost half of their relevant permanents. If you have a lot of relevant permanents such that their Detention Spheres always have targets but yours might rarely have non Detention Sphere targets, you might need Banishing Light so that you can remove their Detention Spheres with a card that would otherwise be dead, having no other target than Detention Sphere.

That was all probably a little hard to follow. The point is that you want Detention Sphere if it’s one of your only permanents and Banishing Light if opposing Detention Spheres already have plenty of targets and you’re worried that yours might not.

Given the popularity of U/W/x Control decks with few other permanents, this sounds like Banishing Light should be extremely popular. It even answers Athreos, God of Passage, the spell I think might be the most played in the set, not to mention other hard to remove permanents like Thassa, God of the Sea and Underworld Connections. The problem relative to Oblivion Ring is that we now live in a world where half of Standard is an enchantment block, so getting your Banishing Light blown up by Destructive Revelry or Deicide at an inopportune time might become the expected outcome.

6. Deicide

If we’re giving full credit for sideboard inclusions, there’s a chance this will turn out to be the most played card in the set. Between Gods, Detention Sphere, Banishing Light, Underworld Connections, enchantment creatures of all varieties, and who knows what else, most decks have great targets for this. The upside is real but not the point, and I do think Erase would be better. But that’s not an option in Standard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if literally every white deck next month has at least two copies of Deicide in the sideboard.

There’s a little competition from cards like Glare of Heresy and Revoke Existence that often do similar jobs, but I think we’ll find that being an Instant is a lot more valuable than killing the few nonenchantment artifacts that see play and that there are enough nonwhite enchantments that you can’t rely on Glare of Heresy to answer enchantments (though Glare of Heresy will keep seeing play, just not in a competing role with Deicide).

In fact, thinking about it more I’m fairly confident that more different decklists will contain at least one Deicide in the 75 than any other card in the set, so I suppose it’s clear that I’m not giving full credit for sideboard inclusion.

7. Eidolon of the Great Revel

RR is a very restrictive casting cost. This card will essentially only be played in mono-red decks or red decks with a very small splash (white for Warleader’s Helix seems like the most likely). That said, it seems great to me in Mono-Red Aggro. There’s some chance that the desire to play creatures that cost 1R to support Burning-Tree Emissary will keep this card down until Burning-Tree Emissary rotates, but after that this has to be one of the first two-drops red decks play.

There are times where this will backfire, but I think the biggest advantage of this over Pyrostatic Pillar as a maindeck card is that you can’t get locked under it by a bigger creature deck as easily because you can just chump block with it and go back to casting spells. I think this card will function very differently than Pyrostatic Pillar most of the time. Usually you’ll play this, and your opponent will take damage to play a creature or spell that trades with it. Then you’ll play something else, and this will have essentially been a 2/2 that Shocks your opponent when it comes into play. But of course it’s much better than that because it forces them to deal with it rather than doing something else or they’ll continue getting Shocked.

8. Battlefield Thaumaturge

I’m skeptical of this one. When I first saw it, I didn’t even think of it as a serious Constructed card, just an enabler for this set’s mechanic, strive, which generally didn’t seem good enough. Then I realized that it makes spells that target your opponent’s creatures cheaper as well, and now I think it might spawn some very different decks than we’ve seen. I’d love if this guy brought about U/B or U/R tempo decks that use it and some other aggressive creatures to remove opponent’s creatures while developing a board.

It’d be particularly awesome to see a decklist that starts with four copies of Battlefield Thaumaturge, four copies of Goblin Electromancer, and four copies Young Pyromancer. Maybe we could even get Nivmagus Elemental and Hidden Strings in there, but that part is not necessary. I’d be similarly happy to see it with Pain Seer and Silence the Believers (or all of these cards together).

I wish there was just a little more support for it, like some reasonable cantrips that it could turn into good cards—maybe something like Electrolyze—but you never know what the future might hold for Battlefield Thaumaturge.

9. Dictate of Kruphix

I think this card is pretty awesome. I’m not confident the support is there in Standard at the moment, but it’s possible that this is good enough in some kind of aggressive blue deck with a lot of cheap tempo plays (maybe with Battlefield Thaumaturge). It’s an amazing tool for the Howling Mine / Time Warp decks in Modern. I don’t know if it’s enough to make them good, but it’s exactly what they want.

The primary upside of this over Howling Mine is obviously that you get to go first, which is kind of like making it a cantrip, but it’s also worth noting that given the phenomenally clunky nature of spells in Esper Control decks, this might just make a reasonable instant speed threat to play at the end of their turn. The next question is whether we want to get really cute by building a deck that tries to keep both this and Notion Thief in play.

If we’re building a Notion Thief deck, remember that Dictate of Kruphix isn’t the only support that breaks the card against decks that normally don’t care—Whispering Madness is still in the format and absolutely game breaking with Notion Thief. And while we’re at it, Master of the Feast has a relatively minimal drawback if we’re already under Dictate of Kruphix and also plays perfectly with Notion Thief and Whispering Madness. It even gives you an evasive creature to cypher Whisper Madness onto.

Add Fate Unraveler to really go crazy, though at that point we probably have a few too many fours.

10. Prophetic Flamespeaker

There are a lot of cards I could reasonably put here, but I think each of them have serious problems, Prophetic Flamespeaker included.

The easiest home for this is Mono-Red Aggro of course, where it offers a slightly slow threat that the opponent absolutely has to deal with immediately. That’s fine but boring, and I don’t know if it’s better than Chandra’s Phoenix in a deck that doesn’t really want many threes.

The real question is whether any kind of Prophetic Flamespeaker deck can take off. Remember when I was talking about Battlefield Thaumaturge and Hidden Strings? Well let me tell you how much fun that deck could have with Prophetic Flamespeaker. If you put Hidden Strings on this guy with an expensive instant, hero, inspired creature, Nivmagus Elemental, or basically anything else in play, you’re really living the dream.

Alternatively, you could just put this is in a R/G deck and try to bloodrush it or a R/W deck and try to put Madcap Skills or Ethereal Armor on it.

This covers ten of the 25-30 cards I consider particularly noteworthy in Journey into Nyx, so there are some notable omissions. Iroas, God of Victory for example could be outstanding, but I’m a little gun shy of the four-mana W/x God when there’s a perfectly serviceable three-mana W/x God in Athreos. Launch the Fleet is pretty awesome with heroes or Spear of Heliod, but I’ve been burned before by counting on heroes. Plus Spear of Heliod now has even more competition at three.

Eidolon of Blossoms has some great upside, and the insurance of getting a card is pretty great. But I think there’s a very real chance the card is just too slow. Master of the Feast is popular, but I think it’s largely overrated. That drawback is real. While you can build around it, I doubt that particular deck is likely to be one of the best, and the drawback gets a lot worse once people side in instant speed enchantment removal to really punish you.

This set is interesting. It has a lot of awesome cards, but it has nothing that I’m just sure will be a Modern staple or anything. Journey into Nyx does a great job of being much cooler than Born of the Gods, but it remains to be seen how much better it actually is long term. That said, with 25-30 cards that caught my attention, there’s certainly a chance.