Yearn to Burn

The cycle of finales from War of the Spark are variable as any X-spell is, but are clearly intended for the late-game big play with that X ≥ 10 clause. There is already no shortage of mana-heavy spells that can blow the game wide open, but what intrigues me about one of the finales is what happens if it's in fact played for as small a return as possible.

I'm sure the Timmies out there are wringing their hands with the thoughts of getting to replay Time Stretch and Searing Wind from the graveyard three times each, but that's not the type of situation that's going to regularly come up in competitive play. So if cost is an issue, what happens when you only pay 1 for X?

Mono-red burn decks have been around since day one and still have a showing in even Type 1 play. These decks are often built around many cheap spells that do as much damage as possible, aiming to maximize that magic formula of three-damage-for-one-mana. So for a measly three mana, Finale of Promise could recycle a Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning from your graveyard for six damage! Not a bad addition of firepower to these strategies, seeing as their cards in the graveyard are generally fodder for Grim Lavamancer at best.

Consider playing Monastery Swiftspear on turn one, Lightning Bolt and Lava Spike on turn two, then Finale of Promise on turn three: since you do indeed cast the cards from your graveyard with the Finale (as well as the Finale itself!), each instance triggers Prowess for the Swiftspear. This means you can do those 20 necessary points of damage in three turns and with only four cards. That got you burn players salivating, didn't it?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the ultra secret tech that all burn decks were waiting for and it will become a new staple of all legacy burn decks because... well, it won't. But it's certainly a powerful option if you can get the right setup with enough Lightning Bolt variants. Nevermind that the three cast triggers means the Finale can immediately bring back Arclight Phoenix with essentially one card, meaning this could even have potential in Standard. Even the casual format would appreciate six damage off of Guttersnipe in addition to whatever spells you cast from the graveyard. Of course, if you really want to capitalize on working smarter rather than harder, you could Finale for 0 to cast Ancestral Visions and Evermind out of your graveyard. Two red for four cards isn't so bad, now is it?

Card in Review - Overlaid Terrain

Between forums, up-to-the-minute strategy articles and online repositories for decklists, it's easier than ever to tap into the well of fine-tuned net tech. Everyone in a play environment will know the best cards, the strongest strategies and the most degenerate combos to look out for. More often than not, the top 8s in high-level play will be a series of mirror matches, with each player running a slight variation of the same damn deck once it's identified as the most optimal choice. We end up seeing the same cards over and over, always being used in the same ways as part of the same strategies.

By gum, one gets tired of optimized play after a while. I want to see some rubbish!

In today's episode of Card in Review, we're also dipping our toes into the well of Bad Card Made Good - a feature that hasn't been given a nod in a long time but which is often one of the most fun exercises in deckbuilding. So who's the lucky loser for today's feature?

Card in Review - Tamanoa

If you think of a burn deck, you've probably got a very specific picture in your head. Get as many 3-damage-for-1-mana spells as you can in a single deck and round it out with some classics like Fireblast and Ball Lightning: you're trying to go as fast as possible here. Cards like Jackal Pup, Flame Rift and Barbarian Ring damage you while you're at it? Hey, no problem, so long as your opponent's life total hits 0 faster. There might not be much in the way of complexity involved, but the purest burn deck is going to be speed, speed, speed - and to hell with the consequences.

Why only have one way of doing things, though? By gum, if No-mar decks can make do without Dromar and Necro decks can exist without Necropotence, then there must be a way to do Burn without a self-destructive bent.

Card in Review - Haakon, Stromgald Scourge

While throwing creatures at your opponent's face is a good time, nothing's more frustrating than having them killed off. Between blockers, kill spells and you occasionally being forced to chump-block, it's not often a critter can stick to the board for long. So rather than try to fight the inevitable, why not embrace it? If they die, so be it - bring them back as many times as you need!

Sounds a little lofty, doesn't it? We can't all be Nether Spirit. Well, so long as you don't mind cavalry charges, you can play all of your creatures from your graveyard just as easily as from your hand - while your crucial card is in play, that is. If you're picturing some mana-hungry behemoth like Debtors' Knell or Sheoldred, worry not. All you need is 3 paltry mana and a little creative deckbuilding, and the Dead Men of Dunharrow will be yours to command!

Ability Salad

Deep down inside, we're all a little bit of a Timmy.

Protest all you want, but we all shared in that special joy when Akroma, Angel of Wrath was first printed. It was really a precedent set by Spirit of the Night, and other creatures such as Sphinx of the Steel Wind followed in their footsteps - simpletons that we are, we love creatures that are a big stack of abilities.

Of course, having a creature that fearsome in combat and that hard to kill necessitates something of an exorbitant mana cost, and it's unlikely to see play outside of reanimation effects - in which case you might be better off with something truly oppressive, like Iona. So how do we accomplish something similar?

Well, there are a number of "Akroma lite" creatures, with a decent handful of abilities on a smaller body for a commensurately smaller cost. Kjeldoran Skyknight, Vampire Nighthawk, and the more recent Aerial Responder all have three helpful combat abilities but won't set you back more than three mana for your trouble. Pumping one of said creatures up will leave you with a fearsome combatant, but is three abilities really enough? That's only a starting point, if you ask me!

Thankfully, throughout Magic's history there have been a number of cards that allow you to pile abilities from multiple sources onto a single creature, letting several Akroma lite-types Voltron together into a truly fearsome foe - or better yet, all share in the glory of each other's tasty keywords. With the reveal of the most recent member of this exclusive club, the Majestic Myriarch, here then is a chart detailing the various cards that let you combine abilities as well as which ones they have access to.

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?

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.

Card in Review - Necrotic Ooze

Since at least the days of Weatherlight, seeing an opponent dumping creatures into his graveyard en masse is reasonable cause for alarm. Most likely, you have to worry about some or all of those creatures being brought into play, often circumventing their mana costs along the way. But what happens if reanimation isn't the plan? What if the graveyard is exactly where they're intended to stay, and you in fact have to worry about something more fearsome than any or all of the creatures there... because it's in fact all of them at once?

Card in Review - Enchanted Evening

Did you know Urza's block was supposed to be "the enchantment block"? It's true. Between Tolarian Academy, Metal Worker, Copper Gnomes and the like, everyone had artifice on the mind. But think about Replenish, Opalescence, the various "song" enchantments, the veiled creatures... they had certainly put in the work, we just all missed it. Apparently to get the enchantment theme across, you really have to hit a Magic player over the head with it. So what better way to make sure it's completely clear than by making everything an enchantment?

Card in Review - Nacatl War-Pride

Top-down designs are often the most fun, but likewise it's a treacherous terrain to navigate. When a card is designed with a concept in mind first, sometimes the implications of that concept can have loose ends once it's put to print. I'm not talking about such lofty concepts as giving a bird flying or a giant better stats than a human. I mean textbox-filling nonsense that communicates a cool idea - and if that idea is easy to take advantage of or build around, so much so the better.

Card in Review - Sunforger

The flavourful nature of Magic: the Gathering means that every action in the game (theoretically) is a metaphor for something larger. The players are spell-slinging planeswalkers, their hands (not that kind) are repertoires of spells, creatures are summoned magically, etc. Even some pieces of the game's terminology - such as 'library', 'graveyard' and the more recent addition 'exile' - are inherently illustrative. The card Memory Erosion represent the loss of your cards via the literal deconstruction of your synapses. Spellbook lets you hold any number of cards because it's a physical space to store or record any number of spells you like. It's not faultless, but when they work in the boundaries, it's quite quaint. Got it? Good.

Now then, how would you like your spell-slinging to not originate from some wimpy book, but rather a molten, glowing, skull-fracturing Mjolnir?

Moonmist

Moonmist is an interesting little card. It's most obvious use is for turning all of your werewolves into their crinos form stronger form and then completely swinging combat. Most people stop looking there, though, relegating it as a cute little tribal support card. Take a closer look, though: the card is quite generously worded. The first sentence is simply "transform all humans," full stop - whether they're werewolves or not. What else can this accomplish, then?

Card in Review - Liquimetal Coating

Colour pie got you down? Sure, we all have our favourite colours in Magic, but they all have their shortcomings. Green can't flat-out destroy creatures, black can't remove artifacts, red is helpless against enchantments... or perhaps not. There is now a way for red to get at any enchantment that displeases it, as well as any other type of permanent, including creatures and planeswalkers, without needing to fling so much as a single point of damage. Sounds ridiculous? You would do well to remember that it's not only red cards that can be played in a mono-red deck: artifacts can always come along for the ride as well.

The Eternal Ski Jump

A peculiar interaction occurred to me, engendered by the unique qualities of Assault Suit as discussed last week. We've all seen creatures with activated abilities that last until end of turn, and we've all seen activated abilities that can be activated only once per turn. The humble Goblin Ski Patrol, however, is rather unique on a couple accounts.

As its oracle wording can attest, when you activate the Ski Patrol's ability, it gets +2/+0 and flying... forever. Not until the end of the turn, not until your next turn, until the goddamn sun goes out. Much like the permanent Riding the Dilu Horse, nothing short of leaving play undoes the bonus: because of course, why should it matter? You're sacrificing the Goblin at the end of the turn anyway. And just to ensure you don't try to double up by pumping four (or more) mana into him, you can only activate the ability once. But again, real estate for card text is precious, so there's no point making the addendum that this can only happen once per turn - you can only activate the ability once per game, period. Overall, the card gets the desired effect: he can go off a ski jump for one glorious attack before getting crushed to death by impact.

...unless he has the proper safety gear, that is. As you'll recall from the last article, if you activate the Goblin Ski Patrol and he has an Assault Suit equipped, he's not going anywhere at the end of the turn. At this point you can proceed to do whatever other tricks your want with the Suit, because for the rest of eternity you have a 3/1 flying Goblin, perpetually caught in the most radical ski jump ever. There's no card, counter or other marker to denote that he has the boost: ya just gotta remember. How often do you see that in the game, hmm?

Card in Review - Assault Suit

Magic is a game of synergies. The most effective decks time and again seem to involve several powerful cards that can roughly replicate what the others do. A control deck might not particularly favour a Dissipate over a Dissolve in the late game, and a dedicated burn deck will take Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and Lava Spike all on equal footing. Decks that are too focused on a particular card - most often seen in EDH decks that are helpless without their commander out - are too delicate, and will fall apart if their key card is removed in a way that a more modular deck wouldn't. (I don't mean Modular decks, mind you.)

That said, don't you sometimes just see a card that's so interesting that you want to build around it?

Welcome to Card in Review, a new feature here that, rather than looking at some aspect of the game as a whole, will pick one open-ended card and analyze all sorts of tricks that can be done with it, both general and specific.

What card are we selecting for this first foray into the world of tunnel vision?

Obscure Tricks with Abilities

I'm not sure why I'm posting this, but it feels like something that I want to share. There are some things abilities do that are not commonly used. Generally this is due to lack of opportunity, but I'm sure sometimes due to ignorance. There are also some combinations that are not regularly noticed. Things like Flample and First strike + Deathtouch are obvious and need not be covered here.

Let's Hear It For Mogg Bombers

My first-ever goblin deck, loosely speaking, existed around the year 2000 - somewhat before dedicated goblin decks were truly viable as a competitive entity. The deck essentially consisted of every card that said "goblin" on it I could find in the 10-cent bins. For a while this meant that the biggest creature in the deck was the 3/2 Goblin Cavaliers, and heaven help you if he dropped while both Goblin Shrine and Goblin Caves were out. Not long before the deck was dismantled and reborn under the newfound legitimacy of Onslaught block, however, there was the addition of a new biggest lunk on the block: the mighty Mogg Bombers.

I pretty soon found out that the Bombers weren't all that. For one thing, they hardly ever functioned as a creature. In the low-power, just-starting-out environment of mediocre critters crashing into each other, generally your opponent would play a creature the next turn and blow him up. If not, well, then I would drop some real nasty tech like Kyren Sniper or Goblin Flotilla and blow my own Mogg Bombers up - because what, I'm going to stop playing creatures in the goblin deck? I guess more often than not I was left wondering why I would work with the Bombers when Lightning Bolt was a quarter the mana, instant speed, and could be pointed at creatures. Even in such a weak deck, he always felt like he underperformed.

Recently, though, some rules clarifications have helped to highlight just how the Bombers's unusual ability can be tuned to your advantage. Under closer inspection, they can be quite handy after all - and no, not as a creature!

So because sacrificing the Bombers is part of an effect and NOT a cost, it will absolutely trigger multiple times if multiple creatures show up at the same time. Dragon Fodder will get you two creatures as well as six points of damage to your opponent's face for just two mana. Siege-Gang Commander ups the ante to a staggering twelve damage, and he's right on curve after you play the Bombers. Have even more mana to spend? Goblin Offensive amounts to a very unusual Fireball that grants quadratic damage for your mana. If your opponent has even a middling army, a Mogg Infestation will hit him for six damage for each creature he has - take that, elf decks! Of course, since you don't want your opponent to prematurely detonate your Bombers by dropping some chump on his turn, it's best to set them off the turn you play them - and for the sake of speed, that means finding some way to drop multiple creatures without costing mana. Krenko is the perfect setup, immediately turning your four mana into a Lava Spike for each goblin you control.

The other handy thing about Mogg Bombers is that, like all creatures, if they come into play at the same time as someone or someones else, they will recognize all those other creatures coming into play. Exempli gratia, you bring back Mogg Bombers and three other creatures into play with Twilight's Call, he sees three other creatures came into play and immediately bins himself to nail your opponent for nine damage. Patriarch's Bidding has been successfully pairing with goblin decks for years, and can quickly kill your opponent on the spot if you used Buried Alive to grab three Bombers.

How do you tie both of these handy tenets together? There's no better way than a kicked Rite of Replication - 5 triggers from the mogg you target, plus 4 each for all of the copies coming into play, means a total of 75 damage to your opponent's face. That should sort him out, yeah?

Double Negatives

Think back to grade four math class. Remember when negative numbers were dropped in your lap, and all the wild implications of adding negative numbers resulting in a decrease, or how subtracting negative numbers and the magic of the double negative results in a net increase? Well, Magic is a numbers-based game, and sometimes the unexpected implications of combined signifiers can have very interesting results.

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that creatures can have negative power. If you hit a Bouncing Beebles with Shrink, they're going to have -3 power for the turn, not just zero. Normally this is of no consequence, since a creature with negative power will still assign zero damage, but for our purposes today it's key that the game still tracks negative values of power. The trick is to find some use for a creature's power rather than just assigning combat damage.

Here's an easy example to start us off: consider Auriok Bladewarden. He can tap to pump a creature up - the bigger he is, the bigger a boost he gives. But what happens if you hit him with Chant of the Skifsang? Now he's got -12 power. He can still add his power to another creature, but what happens if you add negative twelve to a number? Why, it goes down by twelve! He can tap to give any creature a staggering -12/-12! You've achieved a mini-Visara in blue and white that can start firing off as early as turn three. Why use the Chant as a weak form of removal when you can transform it into a fearsome death cannon? Rabble-Rouser can serve in a less lethal capacity in red, letting you fog your opponent's whole board every attack. The result is kind of a colorshifted Dawnstrider (that doesn't even require a discard)... how very un-red!

Of course, adding negative values is pretty crafty, but there's nothing quite like a double negative to result in an unexpected boost. Giving a creature -13 power is a pretty hefty drop, but why settle for the double digits? Our favourite accidental monkeys, Hyalopterous Lemure and Viscid Lemures, can lower their power at will as often as you want. So if you lower a Lemure to -500 power, you can then sacrifice it to Ichor Explosion in order to... give every creature +500/+500! That's a pretty wild board state. If the seven mana for the Explosion is a little too hefty, Call for Blood can be had more cheaply and will probably be a win if you throw the bonus at your Invisible Stalker.

While the usually-fatal practice of reducing a creature's toughness is costed around par with most other removal, reducing power is generally a lesser solution and thus costed much more cheaply. So why not take advantage of this fact? There's no greater thrill than bamboozling your opponent with a rules interaction that makes sense but would never occur to the average player. Just don't be too surprised when suddenly everyone wants to trade you for your copies of Disorient and Constricting Tendrils.

Mana Abilities, Take Two

As we recently covered, the strictness of mana abilities can lead to some pretty bizarre consequences in very specific circumstances. A few more examples are gathered here, largely due to Chromatic Sphere featuring a mana ability that also causes you to draw a card.

Korlash, Heir to Blackblade and his fellow cards with Grandeur have an ability that involves discarding a copy of a card with the same name. What you might not have known is that it's actually possible to discard Korlash to himself. With a Suppression Field in play, his ability requires both mana and a discard to activate. Activate the ability of Words of Wind, then announce Korlash's ability. The quirkiness happens when you try to use a Chromatic Sphere's mana ability to pay for Korlash's ability - because remember, players can't respond to mana abilities, and they can be activated while paying for costs. So while paying for Korlash's ability (which costs "2, discard a card named Korlash, Heir to Blackblade",) activate Chromatic Sphere, replace the resulting card draw by returning Korlash to your hand, and then discard the card you just returned to your hand to finish paying the cost. Whoa! What happened there?

If you want to kick it old school rules-wise, it's possible to temporarily dip to 0 life or less while using mana abilities to pay for something. For example, with Words of Worship active, you can activate Tarnished Citadel and Chromatic Sphere to pay for a spell (might I suggest Repay in Kind?) and temporarily drop below 0 life until the Words replaces the card draw and brings you back to the realm of the living. After all, a player doesn't lose if they're only dead in between the checks on state-based effects. It almost feels like the old Mirror Universe ploy!

Because of the unique nature of mana abilities, Chromatic Sphere leads to many odd situations. If you control one plus a way to feed it mana, a Thought Lash and a Laboratory Maniac, you can win the game without ever giving your opponent a chance to respond - no Stifle, no Angel's Grace, nothing! Unlike the other combos listed, this one is good enough to actually win games at a tournament level... though be advised that it will result in no end of entertaining judge calls.

Mana Abilities

In order to play spells in Magic, you usually have to pay for them with mana, usually generated by using some kind of "mana ability." Island has a mana ability, Black Lotus has a mana ability, Skirge Familiar has a mana ability. In 1997, tourney hopeful David Mills was disqualified from the finals of Pro Tour: Los Angeles for announcing spells and then using the mana abilities to pay for them after, which isn't an uncommon practice. This led to history's only Magic riot, as a group of furious neckbeards stormed the stage during the awards ceremony and demanded justice for Mills. The judges relented and awarded Mills a second-place prize, and proceeded to change the rules so that it became legal to activate a mana ability while paying costs. Now the rules state that a player can't do anything in response to a mana ability, so nothing can disrupt said mana ability once it's started.

This brings us to Caged Sun, a card that doesn't really work. As hinted at with the prior examples, all mana abilities are activated (i.e. pay cost: do effect) with the sole exception of Caged Sun, which is triggered (i.e. when trigger, then effect.) The rulings on Caged Sun state that it does have a mana ability nonetheless, as otherwise this would create some awkwardness when playing spells with the Sun in play. In summary, Caged Sun has a mana ability that adds mana to your mana pool whenever a land adds mana to your mana pool. Okay, not too complex. The rules start to break down when Caged Sun itself becomes a land, however. This can be accomplished by combining a few cards...

March of the Machines makes all artifacts into creatures, so Caged Sun is now an artifact creature. (You starting to notice how often this card comes up in these articles?)
Artificial Evolution or Xenograft make your creatures into a chosen creature type, so Caged Sun can become an "Artifact Creature - Saproling."
Life and Limb makes all saprolings into lands, so Caged Sun is at last an "Artifact Creature Land - Saproling Forest."

So at this point, Caged Sun has a mana ability that effectively reads "Whenever Caged Sun adds mana to your mana pool, add one mana of that colour to your mana pool." Neither player is allowed to do anything until this loop completes, so the players sit there helplessly as the game repeats itself ad nauseum. At this point, the game is nothing less than a draw.

Caged Sun is a fun example of the problems potentially caused by type-changing effects, and also the looming threat of infinite loops. An infamous type-change conflict exists by combining Humility and Opalescence, which causes Humility to lose the ability that causes it to lose all abilities. But wait... then that would mean... yeah, things get kind of confused.