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 - Sun Titan

M11's Titans were interesting in that they were printed to try and fill two criteria:
1. If they were killed immediately, you weren't left with nothing for your six mana.
2. You never had to choose between attacking with your fatty or using its ability.

Wizards accomplished this by giving them a solid ability that activated when they showed up as well as every time they attacked, in addition to being a 6/6 with a nice evergreen ability for safe measure. This was ultimately successful - possibly even too successful. The problem with the titans is that they overshadowed most every other 5+ drop that was available. Why bother with Vorinclex when you could have already played a Primeval Titan and pulled out six lands? Sure Balefire Dragon wipes your opponent's entire board if he connects, but by the time you play him, Inferno Titan has dealt at least 12 damage.
Each one was a strategy in a box, providing both a creature big enough to win the game as well as support to protect it/yourself or ways to deal with your opponent's threats. Most worked on autopilot - there wasn't much strategy to go with Inferno Titan other than turning it sideways each turn - but a couple required you to build around. Sure Primeval Titan's power came from pulling out combinations of overpowered lands, but even if he's just vomiting basic lands onto the board he's helping you out. The most build-around titan was neither the strongest nor the weakest, but the one I found the most interesting.

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?

Customized Mages

Waging war on enemy planes can be a tiresome task, especially when you're working all by yourself. And, while each deck you build is different, the mages in charge of your library are always the same: 20 life, seven-card hands, one card drawn per turn. Ho hum. How about a little variety?
In this variant for Magic, you get to add a little flavour to your own abilities. Instead of representing yourself with one mage, you can assemble your own spellcasting team from two to, well, however-many-you-want mages. Each one has his own strengths and weaknesses but, combined, you've got a powerful circle of wizards to represent you.

Lawyer's Ploy

"Wait, I didn't pass priority!"
"It says 'you may,' so you missed the trigger!"
"That effect applies on Layer 4, not Layer 5!"
Seems every Magic player these days is also gearing up to be a rules lawyer, huh? Hey, every game has its rules and it's only fair for all those involved to follow them; I'm not trying to say otherwise. But would it kill some of these guys to just lighten up a bit? Every missed trigger has them jumping down your throat as if the Pro Tour was on the line. So how do you throw it back in the faces of these officious little pricks?

Forget rules lawyers and Magic judges, you're upping the stakes to real lawyers and real judges. How do you sap as much fun out of the game for your uptight opponent as he does for you? Treat him to a game with all the excitement of a Matlock rerun. You've got a witness, a bailiff, a jury, and even judge Isperia presiding. Tie up your foe's creatures in red tape and find him guilty of aggravated removal and direct damage. If your Stern Judge can't sweat 'im out, you can always time things out with a filibuster. And remember - it's not over until the Fall of the Gavel!

1001 Ways to Die: A Treatise on Removal

It's late and I'm bored, so I'm going to write something of a deckbuilding tidbit.

Generally people will decide what is the "best" removal and run a set or two of said cards to cover themselves. As Magic aggressively evolves and changes with each set, though, there is by now a vast multitude of threats to consider. Certainly, you can't answer all of them, but it's wise to be prepared for as wide a range as possible. I'll break removal into (broad, non-exhaustive) categories to give you an idea. Remember that this is all off the top of my head. No, I won't do any research for you animals.

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.