For those of us who eagerly anticipate the rotation of the Standard format every autumn, the summer set marks the beginning of the “last fling,” the frantic scurrying to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of the cards that will soon be lost to rotation.
I go through this every year. I try and squeeze in extra Friday Night Magics as rotation starts to loom closer, to get one more shot at playing with the random cards that I spurned during the two years they were legal. Well, except for Mind’s Desire …
I played the heck out of Twiddle Desire in Standard FNMs, all the way through the birth and then complete dominance of Affinity. I was unflappable. I was stoic. I was an idiot who lost about 80 DCI points. But man, I still love Desire to this day. Too bad you can’t actually play it anywhere …
… I’ve just discovered that Mind’s Desire isn’t banned in EDH. EDH brainstorming will commence immediately after this column is written!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. I get so torn up about losing cards that I work them into every FNM deck that I play for a good two months, always changing them up from week to week just to get one last good romp in the hay with them. Right before Time Spiral rotated, I played a discard deck based around The Rack, I played Mishra, Artificer Prodigy, I built every snow deck I could think of (Coldsnap rotated here too). Leading up to the last rotation, I built decks around each of the Lorwyn and Morningtide tribes, and probably around all of the color hybrids from Shadowmoor and Eventide. Heck, I found an old article of mine from when Odyssey came out talking about how I had to stop using Accumulated Knowledge.
It’s not that I’m afraid of the new. It’s more like I’m afraid I missed something. I’m afraid we’ll get to an Extended format where some two-dollar rare is suddenly part of the most powerful deck and going for fifty bucks, and I won’t have tried to play it BEFORE it was good. (Thankfully I build a Dark Depths deck before there was a Hexmage.) I don’t want to WIN with everything – I just want to be able to say “I played with everything.”
So we’re coming up on Shards block rotating out, but this year it’s more than that. We have the whole “base set rotation” to contend with now, and that’s forefront in my mind since we just had M11 come out and be reviewed by every pundit with a keyboard. Authors for miles and megabytes of bandwidth are talking about how M11 might be the best base set ever, about how it far eclipses the bold steps taken in M10!
And all I keep thinking is, if M10 is going away in three months, what am I going to have missed out on?
Djinn of Wishes was the first card I sought out in M10, and I picked one up at the Pre-Release. Why? Because noteworthy (if irregular) Magic podcaster Nick Bonham (who records Djinn’s Playground on MTGcast) is a big part of the Denver Magic scene, and I wanted to pick one up and get it signed by Denver’s own Djinn of Wishes. I grabbed one, and he signed and mutilated it in a way that I can’t show to my grandmother, but I still put it into every Blue-based EDH deck that I build.
Let’s face it – for a guy who is missing out on playing with Mind’s Desire, for a guy who has an Intet EDH deck as his go-to guy, Djinn of Wishes has that same “roll of the dice” freebie feel. Living off a free spell off the top of the deck? It’s a bit of a rush. It’s everything I love about Magic – the blowout, the randomness, the amazing victory, the bad beat – all potentially rolled into one card.
But the Djinn came and went, and when the Eldrazi showed up, everyone thought about Brilliant Ultimatum as a “free” way to cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, and no one showed the Djinn any love. Why was that? Would you pick a 4/4 flyer with easy casting costs, or a seven-mana, three-color sorcery, if you thought you could manipulate the top of your deck enough to get a free Emrakul?
And now M11, with all its scrying, has given us even more tools to help set up that amazing blowout freebie.
Creatures (8)
Lands (23)
Spells (29)
Rare Cost Summary:
Djinn of Wishes ($0.59 x 4 = $2.36)
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ($5.99 x 3 = $17.97)
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre ($7.99 x 1 = $7.99)
Rare You Could Add, If You Had ‘Em: This deck benefits from Jace, the Mind Sculptor’s brainstorming ability much like the Brilliant Ultimatum deck did. I guess you know it’s bad when even a “fun deck” would benefit from a 75-dollar rare.
I never understood the flavor of Magebane Armor. What, exactly, was so baneful to mages about removing flying from the wearer? Or was it the fact that you couldn’t Lightning Bolt him or Prodigal Pyromancer him? I would have thought that +4 toughness would have seen to that. I guess, flavor-wise, it’s pretty good – a planeswalker can’t zap him, but if he wanders into battle with a Craw Wurm, he’s still likely to get eaten. But I’m kinda bummed that you can still Doom Blade the guy.
That being said, Magebane Armor is still a pretty decent piece of equipment. +2/+4 for five total mana is a lot better than I think it got credit for, and there really isn’t a ton of flying out there anyways. You can still send an equipped soldier token into the air with Elspeth*, and if you really need a 7/9 Baneslayer Angel, then you can run her into whatever small bodies are littering the other side of the battlefield.
Sure, I get that Behemoth Sledge gives your guy lifelink which can be pretty important, and Basilisk Collar does degenerate things with pingers, but Magebane Armor is a fairly inexpensive piece of equipment that’s just not seeing play.
Creatures (20)
Lands (21)
Spells (19)
Rare Cost Summary:
Armament Master ($0.75 x 4 = $3.00)
Stoneforge Mystic ($3.99 x 4 = $15.96)
Conqueror’s Pledge ($1.49 x 2 = $2.98)
Magebane Armor ($0.59 x 4 = $2.36)
Hedron Matrix ($0.59 x 1 = $0.59)
Quietus Spike ($1.49 x 1 = $1.49)
Sword of Vengeance ($3.99 x 2 = $7.98)
Emeria, the Sky Ruin ($1.49 x 4 = $5.96)
The goal of this deck? To assemble some sort of single monstrosity, Voltron-style, then tuck it under a Whispersilk Cloak and whack your opponent in the face. To death. Kor Duelist is probably the fastest way to achieve 20 damage, but there’s plenty of equipment to fetch out and build with, and you have the Armament Master plus Conqueror’s Pledge “combo” to fall back on as well.
* Please send all rules corrections into the forums. I gotta give you guys some reason to post in there, right?
I’m interested in playing around with this guy and Mitotic Slime, and seeing what other beneficial “goes to the graveyard” guys I might be able to find to pair up with them. Red and Green don’t exactly have the best tools for dealing with Planeswalkers, and this might be a fun way to (maybe) kill them off. Maybe?
Like most people, I saw Mirror of Fate and thought about Doomsday. The ability to order X cards on top of your library must surely be abusable! But Doomsday had a couple of things going for it: one, it started with your library rather than with exiled cards, which is a lot easier (since cards all start in your library), and two, Doomsday had a lot more ridiculous things that you could pair with it to affect a one-turn kill.
Let’s not think about the win condition quite yet; how do you get the cards exiled in the first place so that you can grab them with the Mirror? Well, thanks to deckstorming accomplice Rick Ashby, I have more than one man’s share of Selective Memory cards. Let’s just say that Selective Memory is really funny when paired with Warp World, up until your opponent lets Selective Memory resolve and then counters Warp World. Doh. But Selective Memory DOES exile all the non-lands in your library, which means you can then access all the non-lands in your library with the Mirror.
So then the question becomes, what magical combination of cards could you stack with a Mirror to get that magical victory?
I imagine you could do 1x 5-power creature + 4x Time Warp. That’s effectively a kill.
Creatures (2)
Lands (24)
Spells (34)
Rare Cost Summary:
Selective Memory ($0.59 x 4 = $2.36)
Mirror of Fate ($0.59 x 3 = $1.77)
Time Warp ($6.99 x 4 = $27.96)
Sphinx of Jwar Isle ($1.49 x 2 = $2.98)
Banefire ($2.49 x 1 = $2.49)
Earthquake ($1.99 x 2 = $3.98)
Mind Spring ($0.99 x 2 = $1.98)
This deck needs to survive until it can cobble together the two pieces to “build” its Doomsday. It’s possible that black would have been a better second-color choice, but I went ahead with red because I liked the idea of having Banefire around as card #6 in a Mirror stack to finish off any opponent that can somehow survive being bashed by a Sphinx for 20. Relic of Progenitus made it in because I could see needing to drop a Sphinx early on or having to cast Time Warp to develop your board – and the Relic allows you to selectively move things in your graveyard out to where you can grab them with the Mirror later. I’d probably make my stack:
Sphinx of Jwar Isle
Time Warp
Time Warp
Time Warp
Time Warp
Banefire
Mirror of Fate
Because, who knows, you might need to “go off” a second time. It could happen. That actually looks like a lot of fun.
I Give This Set An M10
It’s a tribute to the designers and developers of M10 that I can do this article and actually struggle to find cards to talk about. Take a look at the rares from M10 some time. They not only printed a lot of great original cards that saw a bunch of roleplayer play like Great Sable Stage, Elvish Archdruid, the new dual lands like Glacial Fortress, and Honor of the Pure, but they also printed cards that established a niche in other formats (Hive Mind), cards that established what ‘combo’ was for Standard (Open the Vaults), and cards that were just a lot of fun when you got to use them in formats that were suited for their particular talents (like Lurking Predators in EDH). On top of that, they reprinted cards that actually found homes in competitive decks like Siege-Gang Commander, Ball Lightning, Earthquake, Mind Spring, Polymorph, Time Spiral, all the Planeswalkers, and Pithing Needle. Hit-or-miss ratios for sets are very fickle things, but I think M10 had enough hits to keep Casey Kasem comin’ back. It will be interesting to see how the M11 retrospective goes in a year – will we be amazed at the cards that saw play from M11, forgetting all about M10, or will we look back at the beginning of this yearly base-set cycle and think about “the good old days?”
What are you going to miss from M10? Whatever it is, give it one last spin around the block before it retires in October. It deserves to be remembered fondly.
Until next week…
Dave
dave dot massive at gmail and davemassive at twitter and facebook