Sunday, August 20, 2017

Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Game

Phasing's back??


It's back!

Not having exactly had a stellar record as far as being a drawback, this newest offering instead focuses on one of phasing's better aspects: as a defensive maneuver! Teferi's Protection phases out all of your permanents, keeping them safe and sound from any removal imaginable, while likewise enchanting you with Progenitus's Embrace so nobody can lay a finger on you while your stuff isn't there to protect you. In essence, YOU phase out as well.

Now, being able to skip out on things for a turn is nice, but it's a shame how all good things must come to an end. You really want to play it safe? Just opt out of the game!

Enter the rather unique Lethal Vapors, which allows you to skip as many turns as you please. Remember the infuriating Chronatog and Stasis lock from way back when? Same idea, but it's arguably an even harder lock to break. Simply activate Lethal Vapors's ability right after you play it, then without passing priority, activate it again in response to the last activation an arbitrarily large number of times. The destroying of Lethal Vapors is part of the effect, not the cost, so you can stack as many time skips as you could possibly want this way. Having skipped your next 500-odd turns, play Teferi's Protection. You have Protection from everything until your next turn, which remember, is not going to be for a very long time. You can now sit back and watch.

At this point your opponent will play out the rest of the game with an opponent whom he can't damage, target, or generally affect in any way. Probably most players will concede at this point rather than face a slow death by decking. Especially interesting, however, is if you pull this in a multiplayer game - it's functionally the same as being the guy kicked out first, except after everyone else is done slugging it out, you're still declared the winner no matter what. This could be a cruel bit of fun if you're in the mood to play on your 3DS but still win a big Magic game while you're at it. Heck, you could go play another Magic game while silently winning that first one!

Important note: if your opponent is wise to what you're about to do, he can unfortunately answer every turn-skip you activate with one of his own. That's where our friend Grand Abolisher comes in, preventing anyone but you from activating the Vapors the turn you play it! Another alternative is Claws of Gix - since you always gain priority right after adding something to the stack, you can immediately follow up your 500 turn-skips by sacrificing the Vapors. Seeing as the sacrifice is the activation cost on Claws of Gix, nobody can respond to that either! Who knew not playing Magic could be so much fun?

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Card in Review - Spy Kit

Sometimes you see an open-ended card designed to be played with... but with no set goal in mind. As we saw previously, Enchanted Evening has a million potential little synergies with anything that even remotely looks at enchantments. Sun Titan's list of demands are pretty modest at "must be a permanent and 3 or less mana." Other times, however, there's a card that will only work with very... particular synergies in mind.