Deadly Approach

Have you seen the new card Dragon's Approach? I'm kind of a sucker for that wacky "you can have any number of this card in your deck" ability, even if it does get a little less unique every time they take another crack at it. Still, this is the first card to do it that isn't a creature, so that's certainly an interesting little wrinkle on the formula. I also appreciate that the card can contribute at least somewhat to your strategy on its own - that is, it's not useless if you don't draw many multiples of itself. The innovator Relentless Rats and somewhat more lax Rat Colony are mostly useless until you have multiples out, getting better the more there are with no ceiling. Shadowborn Apostle wants a very specific number, but until you get six out and activate them, no matter how many you draw, you're still just putting down vanilla 1/1s. Not bad if you're pumping out saproling tokens, not quite so good if each one is costing you a card from your hand.

Dragon's Approach leans more towards the latter style, where each card does what it does, but if you happen to get a whole bunch together, you get a very hefty bonus as payoff. If you cast your fifth copy of Dragon's Approach, you get to pull any dragon from your library straight into play - a creature type that needs no introduction in terms of casting a shadow over the board. Note that you need not necessarily have played all five of those copies, however - dump four into your graveyard via Faithless Looting, Tome Scour or anything else and the first one you play will immediately fire off.

The thing is... I say who needs a dragon to search up for Dragon's Approach to pay off? Dragonstorm and even Zirilan of the Claw have been pulling that trick for decades; the real unique ability on offer is having 30 of the same sorcery in your deck. Just garnish a big stack of them with Locket of Yesterdays to bring down their mana cost and Pyromancer Ascension to quickly double the damage you're dishing out. You'll be blasting your opponent's head off with six damage for one red mana in no time. It's about the journey, not the destination!

Creatures
2 Hellkite Overlord

Spells
24 Dragon's Approach
4 Faithless Looting
2 Harness the Storm
3 Locket of Yesterdays
4 Pyromancer Ascension
1 Thrumming Stone

Land
16 Mountain
4 Ramunap Ruins

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 - 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!

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

A Scribe About Tribes

Tribes? Ho boy, Slivers are gonna pop up in here.

Basically, there are a crapload of tribes - especially with Wizards' recent fanatical need to convert more and more of the ubiquitous one-ofs (Gone is the possibility to make an Uncle Istvan deck. No longer may you craft a Niall-Silvain tribal deck. People-of-the-woods deck? Forget it.) Some tribes have a lot of cohesion; some have a little. For instance, most spiders can block flyers, and most imps can fly... or at least jump well. (To be printed, an imp at least has to be able to touch the rim, not just the net.) That is pretty much not the tribes in question today. I mean tribes with something more coherent in common - typically a block thing - that is just theirs. Furthermore, I'm talking about the ones that I remember as I write this post, not all of them.

Basically, mechanically-connected tribes lie somewhere along a three-sided continuum. A contrinuum. One point is made of ones that, because of the nature of their mechanical connection, work really well together. Example: Slivers. The other point is made of ones that don't have tons of natural synergy, but at least got a few lord cards. Example: samurai. The last point is made of ones that don't work well together, or even actively work against each other. Example: licids. Naturally I made a licids deck anyhow.

Okay, so first up in order of recall is Chimeras. There were like, four of these guys, but when I actually played with whatever set these losers were in I didn't know about one of them, so I thought there were three. Anyway, these guys - Lead-Belly Chimera, Tin-Wing Chimera, Iron-Heart Chimera, and Some Other Chimera are all 2/2 for 4 with some keyword ability, and you can sacrifice them to permanently give another chimera +2/+2 and the keyword ability. It doesn't transfer on, though, so if you sacrifice the 4/4 chimera with two keyword abilities, it only passes on the one it naturally has.
Anyways, I have a brain dysfunction that makes me need to craft synergistic decks, sometimes possessing me to run a deck loaded up with these colorless rejects. Among the most obvious problem with such a deck is that all 16 (of course you're playing 4 of each of them) of your creatures cost 4 mana, and all are only 2/2. On their own, each chimera is worse than an existing creature that costs two mana. For Chimeras done right, see Modular.

Now, the one we all saw coming - Slivers. It seems every time they print a new batch of Slivers, I like them a bit less. When I started playing, only one set of slivers had been released, and I was so crazy for them. Like every other player on the planet, I totally wanted to be the sliver guy. Everyone wanted Sliver Queen, but of course the real prize was Crystalline Sliver. I'll admit I didn't make my Sliver deck until the second batch came out, but they're still better than any Time Spiral nonsense. Now there's so many slivers that you can totally play a one-colour Sliver deck, which seems weird to me, since that means it will be hard to play that Sliver Queen which you are bound by law to include. It also bugs the heck outta me that the only Vigilance sliver is blue. What the heck, people.

I am basically the only guy with fond memories of licids. Licids are fellows that start out as creatures, but each has a tap ability that turns them into rules problems. When Ravnica hit, I joked that they should bring back licids for the Orzhov, because they're a rules nightmare, which combines a white thing - rules - with a black thing - nightmares. Licids are probably the only tribe where the creature depicted on the card is not the most prominent thing in the art. Also, despite being the size of my hand, half of the licids can kill a bear... so you know they're badasses.
What they're not badass at is working together, as my former licid deck totally proved. A very unexciting thing to enchant with say, Quickening Licid is another licid, because making a french vanilla creature out of two of your creatures is not the most exciting thing to do. Also, if you use the enchanted licid's ability, the one riding on it just dies. My favorite use for licids has very little to do with actually enchanting anything. See, when a licid becomes an enchantment, it stops being a creature. So you can block with a licid, then, with damage on the stack, tap him to turn him into a creature enchantment. Then the guy you were targeting gets bolted and your licid dies anyway, because the ability is worded in a way that it isn't countered if the target dies. Yeah, licids rule.

Spikes, like Spike Soldier were okay, I suppose. While there are 21 cards with "spike" in the name, there were only ten of these guys until they printed another one in Time Spiral. Spikes work together sorta well, in the sense that some of them have other uses for the +1/+1 counters that can be moved between them, and if you move a counter to a spike, you can move it off later. A spike deck (of course I have a spike deck) has basically the same problem as a licid deck - there's no discernible way to win. None of your spikes have evasion. I guess you could use your spikes to pile counters onto another, better creature, but there are a plethora of better ways to pump up a creature than to pay 2 mana to move counters one at a time to it.
There's also Spike Cannibal, which is either some sort of +1/+1 counter hoser or something you put in a apike deck despite the fact that it's a different color so that you can lose all of your more-or-less efficiently costed guys and get one big guy. With no evasion or anything. Who is instantly destroyed by a crappy removal card.
I believe if the spikes were printed today, most of them would be just a little stronger or a little more interesting; they had the misfortune to be born during a period when green really sucked and nobody cared. (That is, most of the history of the game.) For spikes done right, see Graft.

Atogs are all about "Sacrifice whatever: this guy gets +2/+2 until end of turn." You can't build an atog deck for three reasons. Firstly, none of the atogs want to be in a deck with other atogs. They want to be in a deck with whatever the heck random thing or concept they feed on. Secondly, you have the choice between either not playing the strongest atog or being a jerk by playing one of the best creatures in the history of ever in casual. Finally, if you're playing an atog deck, you sort of feel like you should be playing their lord, which is one of the worst creatures ever. Don't play Atogatog. Don't you do it.

Rebels search up. Mercenaries search down. In a rebel deck, you can use your weak creature to find a bigger one. In a mercenary deck, you can tap your big guy to find... something smaller. You mostly have to hardcast everything. In a rebel deck, you need hardcast only your first guy. This is why rebel decks are badass and mercenary decks suck. It's a pity, because the mercenaries themselves are much cooler. The mercenaries also had better toolbox cards in general. Nonetheless, Lin-Sivvi is one of the very few creatures to ever have been banned in any format. I don't know that mercenaries were even constructed playable. Two other notes: one of the strongest white tribes of all time is called "rebels"; I don't think of rebellion as a particularly white thing. Secondly, the card Mercenaries itself is white, and set a precedent for mercenaries by sucking.

Zuberas were a cheap tribe to build around, because none are rare and all of the normal ones are common. Furthermore, I swear that something was up with the print run, because every pack of Champions I've ever opened with had like, nine of them in there. Basically, the goal of the Zubera deck was to get all of your creatures killed at once. But first you wanted to get as many of the suckers out there at once as possible. The right way to do this was to play a lot of card drawing and stuff and to not be afraid to take some hits while you waited to Wrath everything away. The wrong way is Followed Footsteps, but I don't care.

You know what? I'm not going to write about Samurai.

Ninjas were cool, because you got to feel all sneaky, even though it was really always like "well, Betrayers came out two months ago, and he's got four blue and black lands untapped, and he's attacking with an Ornithoptor or Sage Owl, two cards that people never play with for no reason. I wonder what's going to happen?" Higure, the Still Wind was an extremely cool first for a lord: rather than just giving his tribe +1/+1, he had two abilities that synergize extremely well with two things that all ninjas have in common: they want to be in your hand, and they want to not be blocked when they attack. Many later lords do this as well, and it's really cool.