Dollar Menu Dynamite, Part 5

Tired of playing the same old cards? It can be strategically beneficial to know your deck inside and out, but if you're just playing casual games with your friends, it can also get kind of boring. There's a real element of fun in your own deck surprising you now and then, and there's no better way to encourage the process than trying out a new card or two. Of course, you can't afford to swap out your power cards all the time - or can you? As part of the Dollar Menu Dynamite series, we have here a list of ten cards that can be picked up for a dollar or less yet can make a big impact on the board. Find one that piques your interest and try it on for size!

Dollar Menu Dynamite, Part 4

There's nothing like the thrill of discovering a forgotten card that offers considerable power for cheap. After languishing forgotten, you're free to polish it off like any other gem and bring it to the table. Enter the Dollar Menu Dynamite series, which showcases a number of cards you may not be familiar with, each costing one dollar or less on the open market. Who says you have to break the bank to bring some serious power to the gaming table?

Predator 2: The Death of a Premise

So, now this is happening.

Anyone getting tanked up to make a moral judgment about this criticism should consider that the auteurs of this harlequin fetus have a job in paradise creating entertainment products to sell at a markup. Their asses are covered, their motivations a mixture of personal creative ambition and company direction, and like any object d’art put forth for our consumption, and to consume our hard-earned dollars, it is the fairest of games. Fairer, indeed, than Magic itself.

It was with the weariness of a weathered pack animal that I slumped upon seeing the M14 Sliver reboot. It is not just that it’s unnecessary, ill-advised, implicitly insulting. It’s that creativity has found no purchase on the dull edifice of this undertaking. It precedes M14 like a corpse floating headlong down the Nile, fly-blown and crocodile-bitten, leaving us to wonder what homogenized horrors may yet come.

Slivers with male and female characteristics? (Can sexualization be far behind? Is the Sarah Kerrigan of Slivers on the horizon? Or is one Glissa enough?)

Sliver generals, ranks within the collective? Slivers in clothing?

A menacing Sliver planeswalker dropping one-liners on token-generation Sorceries?

“You’re about to get a bad case of... the hives.”

The mind reels and rebels.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the admission that this doesn’t matter. A set is no museum exhibit but a collection of mass-produced game pieces, and if the rooks and pawns carry the benzine stink of the industrial process, they will still play readily enough. The art itself is expertly done. In a year, nobody will care. We are just here to get on the record, you and I, that we may one day link back to this combined outcry of voices, having suffered for too lengthy an interval the release of sneering, talking slivers that look like Donkey Kong. Today is our Independence Day.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, look at this piece of shit:

Dollar Menu Dynamite, Part 3

There's no need to choose between paying for lunch or a new power card for your favourite casual deck - expand your horizons somewhat and you can have both! A couple years ago I started a tentative feature called Dollar Menu Dynamite, which offered suggestions for underrated and underplayed cards that can be had for one dollar or less. Well, wouldn't you know it, those fine folks in Seattle just keep on printing cards... and as there are ever more options, that has the side effect of meaning that older cards have more to replace them. Likewise, as new strategies become popular, old cards that happen to synergize with (or fiercely oppose) such strategies are suddenly given a new lease on life. Here, then, I have another ten cards for the budget-minded gamer, all of them easy to acquire, a buck or less, and able to bring plenty of havoc to the gaming table.

All Rise

White weenie is a classic decktype, and it's always getting new tools to work with. That said, it's always got its classic weaknesses, too. White's great at coming in fast with efficient weenies, cheap combat tricks and the best removal you can find. In a slower paced setting, however - such as any multiplayer game - suddenly that might not cut it. In my experience, white can have trouble closing out these sorts of games; I'm all for hashing it out with creatures and removal for a while, but games do have to end at some point and I'm not exactly itching for a three-hour standstill. I don't like resorting to an "I-win" combo, but I do like the option of something above and beyond turning dudes sideways and hoping for the best. The big finishers you can find, citing Akroma as a classic example, can knock some heads in... but mass removal is the classic weakness of aggressive decks, and your big finisher makes you no more resilient to one than any of your cheaper guys. Can't we rely on some metric a little deeper than just being a fat flyer?

Hungry For Mana

Careful of needy creatures.

Let's say you're making a lean, mean Boros deck. When selecting creatures along your curve, you pick Figure of Destiny, Frenzied Goblin, Sunhome Guildmage, Truefire Paladin, Boros Reckoner and Brion Stoutarm to top it off. Individually, all of these are strong creatures and well worth using. However, you have a very serious problem on your hands. Why's that? In order to be fully effective, each of them needs mana invested past their original casting cost. If you're paying into your creatures, it ties up mana that could be spent on new creatures along your curve. It's up to you whether turning Figure of Destiny into a 4/4 or playing Boros Reckoner is better, and maybe you like always having options, but ideally the creatures in your hand won't be fighting for mana with the ones in play.

Really, I wouldn't run more than four mana-dependent creatures in a creature-heavy deck. Even then, it's preferable to have their abilities open as a "mana sink" rather than necessary for the card to be at all worthwhile. It's easy to look at Student of Warfare and think "gosh, a 4/4 with double strike for just one mana! What a house!" But it's not just one mana, is it? Sure, paying in installments is better than all at once, but you have to pony up 8 mana eventually to get that kind of size. Playing her turn one, then leveling twice and attacking with a 3/3 first striker is very aggressive, but are you really better off in the long term (or as long a term as a white weenie deck will be viewing) than if you had played Isamaru turn one and Accorder Paladin turn two? Not if your opponent is holding a Lightning Bolt, I'll say that much.

Likewise, try for independent creatures.  Let's say you have an elf deck. Elves, like many tribes, feature guys who power up/are powered up by the presence of other creatures of the same type. While the synergy of stacking these creatures together can quickly add up, you should try to mostly have creatures who will still be effective on their own. Jagged-Scar Archers is a powerful 3-drop, but if the board has been wiped and you topdeck it late game... well, it suddenly won't seem so impressive. A lot of very nasty 4-drops - Drove of Elves, Elvish Promenade, Heedless One, Wirewood Channeler - won't perform unless your board is already pretty stuffy. They only are any good if you're already winning or at least doing well. I wouldn't say Elvish Champion is necessarily a win-more card, even if he needs buddies to be more than a green Scathe Zombies, but try to have some guys who can dig you out of trouble.

Thought Police

We've outlined a number of ways to screw around with the rules of Magic over the years, all viewable under this heading if you so desire. The thing is, most of these exist in the realm of the purely theoretical - the type of circumstances that would only ever line up if some little stinker deliberately set out to do so. Fun to think about, but not the type of thing that will ever come up in an actual game.

Today, however, we're going to look at a bit of a rules snafu that is of particular interest because it is a situation that can easily happen in a real Magic tournament: it involves two cards that are both played regularly!

So first, we have Brainstorm. It's played quite a lot based on how powerful and versatile it is, but the effect is fairly simple: draw three cards and then put two back. Then you have another card played in Legacy quite a bit, and that's Sylvan Library.

The Library is something you might need to consider for a minute, seeing as it has had a few changes in wording over the years. As is often the goal (I hope,) the most recent oracle text makes it pretty clear how the card operates. You draw two extra cards during your draw step, and then of all the cards you've drawn this turn (which should usually be three, seeing as you have your normal draw step plus the two extra from the Library) you have to put two back or pay 4 life apiece to keep the extras. Again, a strong card, but not too tricky to understand.

Now, the problem is that these two cards interact in an odd way that may not be immediately apparent. If you have a Sylvan Library in play and then cast a Brainstorm during your upkeep, you will have to call a judge over to resolve this part of the turn. Yeah, no kidding. This is because Brainstorm permits you to put ANY two cards from your hand back on top of your library - they need not be from among the three cards Brainstorm drew you. Because of this, it could potentially be strategically important for an opponent to not know whether a card you put back is one you just drew or already had in your hand.

But then, when Sylvan Library triggers, you draw two extra cards and have the option to put any card you drew this turn back on top of your library. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal since those cards will generally be the usual plus the two extra from the library. However, the cards you drew from Brainstorm are also cards you drew this turn. So now it suddenly can't be clear whether or not a card you're placing back on top is one you drew with Brainstorm earlier in the turn. Because of this, you have to call a judge over solely to watch your hand of cards and confirm you aren't cheating, which is fairly ridiculous.