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?

Dire Undercurrents: Traditional wisdom says that in order for a card to cantrip, you need to tack on an extra two mana. This underrated engine card makes every one of your blue creatures replace themselves for free! Making every creature card-neutral is a big leg up on card advantage, making you have little fear of removal. Now imagine dropping Shrieking Drake into an empty board: one blue mana to draw a card as often as you like. Any creature with Gating or a way to naturally bounce itself can equal big gains during a standstill. It triggers for tokens as well, meaning a Master of Waves or Homarid Spawning Bed can score you a ton of cards in a hurry. Note also that you can make any "target player" draw a card, meaning you can throw cards to a potential teammate or mill out an opponent as part of a combo. Now, the Undercurrents also lets you force a discard every time a black creature shows up, which can help keep your opponent's late-game card drawing in check alongside small, recursive threats like Gravecrawler or Nether Traitor. If you drop a creature that's both blue and black? Why, you basically won the lottery, getting a free Unhinge each time. Making all of your creatures a two- or three-for-one is the type of thing that should win any game that isn't already decided.

Faces of the Past: This forgotten card used to be a key component in many combo builds. With the growing power of tribal strategies and creatures in general these past years, however, it's probably only more potent now than it ever was! You can tap all of your creatures and sacrifice one of them to give the rest another go. Imagine tapping all of your elves for mana, chucking one of them onto Ashnod's Altar and then tapping the rest for even more. Things like Goblin Bombardment, Altar of Dementia and Phyrexian Altar give you free sacrifice outlets to keep reusing your creature's abilities. Combine a sac outlet with a creature that can create a token of its own type - anything from the lowly Thraben Doomsayer to the mighty Godsire - and you achieve an easy infinite loop. Faces of the Past is also handy for combating tribal decks: blow up an opponent's creature precombat and the rest are locked down for the turn. Of course, if you don't feel like messing around with tribal builds, we have access to Changelings now; a humble Mothdust Changeling can tap or untap every single creature on the board as you like. There are tons of combos one can unlock with Faces of the Past, and as a card you don't see anymore, it might not arouse much suspicion from an opponent until it's too late.

Corpse Harvester: A card I have great personal fondness for, Corpse Harvester can provide excellent late-game value to a slower, more grind-y style of zombie deck. He allows you to sacrifice any creature (not just a zombie! Hellooo, Reassembling Skeleton and thrull tokens) to get any zombie as well as a Swamp right into your hand - that's an automatic two-for-one for only two mana! It may sound a little limited in terms of what he can fetch, but the zombie tribe is surprisingly versatile enough that it can score card draw, ramp, life gain, direct damage, reanimation, recursion, graveyard hate, discard, combo hate, land destruction, enchantment removal, bounce, twiddling, token generation, board clearing, as well as lots and lots of removal. Don't miss that you also aren't limited to just getting basic Swamps, meaning dual lands and shock lands are on the table as well as Leechridden Swamp. Whatever your problem, there's a zombie to fix it!

Contested Cliffs: This was the card that singlehandedly made the red splash in Beast tribal decks worth it. Unlike the innovator Arena, the Cliffs let you choose both creatures that get in a fight, so you could always sidestep your foe's fatties to pick off his utility creatures. So long as you had a Beast larger than even one of his creatures, you got removal for three mana and no card cost every turn! R/G beasts also have a lot more fodder nowadays than in Onslaught block, including the pseudo-split card Ghor-Clan Rampager, the undercosted Spellbreaker Behemoth and even the tournament-killer Thragtusk. Beasts may not be the most iconic tribe around, but it's hard for any other tribe to get removal this consistent and hard to deal with!

Kuldotha Phoenix: The Phoenix has a solid chassis, improving on the classic Volcanic Dragon as a 4/4 with Flying and Haste for five mana. At triple red, though, it's colour-heavy enough that you'd be hard-pressed to play it in anything short of a mono-red deck. You can, however, also play it for no coloured at all if you're running an artifact-heavy build. Have a couple gizmos out on the table and the Phoenix can recur itself turn after turn for no cost other than four mana - now that's a bargain! Since it only requires colorless to recur, though, a sneaky player could even run it in a red-light (or entirely red-free!) deck, seeking to discard it to be recurred later. That kind of reliability is vital to long-term success, and thanks to the Phoenix's Haste, you can immediately attack each time it comes back even if it keeps being felled by removal or trading with blockers. It's been a long time since we've seen a self-recurring creature this reliable and this powerful!

Seht's Tiger: Voice of All could be a nightmare to deal with, ensuring Protection against whatever colour your opponent was running. Why not extend that ability to yourself? Seht's Tiger can prove to be a potent defensive tool: for one, Protection can stop all damage from the colour of your choice for a turn, making the Tiger a pseudo-Fog effect if you drop it mid-combat. Just block whatever creatures you can kill and nullify everything else. You can also prevent noncombat damage, blocking big X-spells like Hurricane or Banefire. What's especially interesting is negating anything that targets you, from discard to mill to the otherwise-foolproof Edict effects, acting as a pseudo-counterspell. It's also handy for knocking off any number of nasty enchantments stuck to you even if you're late to react, such as the various Curses introduced in Innistrad. If all else fails, you can still do all the old tricks with the fact that Seht's Tiger has Flash, including a surprise blocker or getting a pseudo-hasty attacker. You'll always have some use for it!

Ohran Viper: When the viper was new on the scene, it was hotly desired for providing such cheap and reliable card draw in green. That effect is a little more common now, but the viper is still a great card and can be picked up quite cheaply at this point. It's guaranteed to kill off any blocker and earns you a card if your opponent doesn't want to lose any of his precious creatures. Give it a power boost and maybe trample (something like Gaea's Embrace?) and you'll make every combat a lose-lose situation for your foe. 

Impromptu Raid: A more casual version of the classic Sneak Attack, Impromptu Raid can also pop out a creature for a single Haste-fueled turn, but off the top of your deck rather than your hand. It's more mana-intensive and less predictable, but it can also be played in a mono-green deck and doesn't actually deplete the cards you have access to. Three mana is still a bargain to swing with your enormous Worldspine Wurm or pop the comes-into-play ability of a Terastodon, and you can take the guessing out of the equation by setting up the top of your deck with Mirri's Guile, Sensei's Divining Top or the creature-on-demand Worldly Tutor. An especially rude pairing would be with Vengeful Pharaoh, who can keep blowing up your opponent's creatures and putting himself where the Raid wants him before taking another hasty 5-point swing and conveniently placing himself back in the grave. Don't forget that you can also use the Raid mid-combat for surprise blockers that can even use their tap abilities.

Crypt of Agadeem: Although not quite as easy to set up as the classic Cabal Coffers, the Crypt is both more forgiving and more reliable. Black is no stranger to filling its graveyard, but cards like Buried Alive or Stinkweed Imp can now contribute directly to your mana pool while they're at it. The Crypt isn't legendary, meaning you can tap multiples for truly obscene amounts of mana, and it even taps for black in the early game. It's the perfect way to pay for a game-swinging Rise of the Dark Realms!

Flickerform: What looks like a humble enchantment for dodging removal requires a serious reanalysis in these days of powerful creatures with comes-into-play abilities ripe for abuse. You can Flicker the selected creature on demand, bringing Flickerform itself along for the ride as well as any other enchantment you may have stuck on it. Four mana might sound pretty steep, but when it gets you another use of Sphinx of Uthuun, Sylvan Primordial, Rune-Scarred Demon, Angel of Despair or Thragtusk, you'll find it's more than worth it. You can even get another trigger on your Flight of Fancy, Knightly Valor or Galvanic Arc while you're at it!

 

Another day, another ten cards that can each be had for one dollar or less. The best part of playing a casual format with your friends is that any card from any era should be good to go, meaning forgotten gems that aren't legal for Type II and not cutthroat enough for Type I have a unique place at the kitchen table. Without demand in any sanctioned format, these cards can be had for cheap even if they're stronger than your average bear. Take advantage of this unique status and pick up any of these goodies that tickle your deck-building fancy!