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Dross Harvester strikes me as one of the most interesting creatures in the set. Obviously you can’t just drop this into any deck and expect to succeed, but that’s a very impressive power-to-casting-cost ratio. The cool thing about this card is that he’s interesting when creatures are involved (if you can keep it to your advantage) and he’s also interesting against passive decks (which hopefully can’t race). Using him in each situation requires some specific preparation, however.

A turn 1 Dark Ritual doesn’t reach you to mana you couldn’t rely on – it just gets you there faster. By accelerating a player to things like eight mana on turn 6, you get a different effect, because somewhere around this time a player would often start missing land drops. Turn 1 Hypnotic Specter is very good, don’t get me wrong – but under normal circumstances, you have been able to cast it on turn 3 anyway. In Seething Song’s case, you can cast an Obliterate on turn 6 that might not otherwise have happened until something like turn 11. That’s a very big difference.

An extremely fast red deck with a low land-count could utilize the Goblin Charbelcher’s obviously powerful ability. I can see him finding a home in a deck that utilises deck-stacking techniques, such as Scroll Rack. How about as the kill in a creature-light deck with the new pseudo Oath of Druids/Gaea’s Blessing artifact, Proteus Staff? Make some guys with Raise the Alarm, speed through your deck looking for your only creature, then stack the cards that flew past so that there’s ten cards before you see a land mountain. Activate Charbelcher at an opportune time, win the game.

Considering how well you’ve got to pick your issues to use Molder Slug – or Glissa, Sunseeker or Creeping Mold or Deconstruct – I have to say that I really like the way this set’s anti-artifact options were designed. Players will have quite a few options to choose from, and those that best understand their deck’s strengths and needs are going to have significant advantage over those that don’t. In the past, there hasn’t often been this kind of functional overlap with so many cards. That kind of decision-making is very good for Constructed, and I hope we continue to see more of it in coming sets.

There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Shared Fate, but I’m just not convinced yet. The idea that a heavy control deck with plenty of multi-colored mana can cast this to stump an opponent while allowing you to cast their spells doesn’t make much sense to me, since your deck is going to provide them with the mana to cast your spells as they draw into the deck’s mana – so then it becomes a time issue. In fact, if you’re even a little behind on tempo this card could be fatal, since the opposing deck is less likely to have the answers you need. But along those lines, the real strength of the card may be as a kind of closer in a tempo deck….

With only a handful of weeks to go before we all wave goodbye to Wild Mongrel, Deep Analysis, and Mirari’s Wake, and say a very big”Hello” to Skyhunters, Bonesplitters, and Spikeshot Goblins, I’ve started to put a test gauntlet together for Champs. To help out, I’ve put a gauntlet together to test the new Mirrodin-based decks against.