Some Days The Sea Is Still As Glass

There are a couple more interesting things out of the new set I wanted to touch on. Both of them are exciting, but I'm not sold that the power level is going to be there.

What I love about Huntmaster of the Fells is, well, a lot, but one of the important things is how it puts the opponent in a tough situation no matter what they do. If they have the removal spell for it, then you got an extra 2/2 token and some life points back, which is enough to either keep applying pressure or pad your life total. If they don't, you get to get up to all kinds of shenanigans with flipping the Huntmaster back and forth. Redcap Gutter-Dweller sort of has the same recipe, where if they are able to remove the creature, you still get the two rats, and if they don't, you start gaining more real card advantage the next turn.

The difference between this and Huntmaster, though, is that Huntmaster is an excellent defensive creature, even when the opponent has a removal spell for the Huntmaster itself. You can't say the same for Gutter-Dweller, the rats just don't amount to anything of value when you're on the back foot. I still haven't found a good Huntmaster clone for Pioneer or Explorer outside of Esika's Chariot. And while Chariot is great, it can't help you do any destructive interaction, it can only add to the board. Gutter-Dweller's card drawing ability is a great way to help find cards you need in matchups where you need specific answers. I think I'd like this more if the rats could block and it was a 2/3 or a 3/2, or maybe even a 2/2, than as it's printed. But the potential is there.

So, I talk a lot in this blog about flexibility. Flexibility is key in this type of deck, because you want your cards to be able to play different roles at different times. A card like Abrupt Decay can take out a creature, or it can take out a planeswalker or enchantment, whatever. It's likely to be good at different applications. Creatures are always fairly flexible, they can attack, block, use abilities, etc. The other form of flexibility that I look for is flexibility in mana cost, and when you can get a card that can be cast at multiple different times on your curve, you're helping yourself out in the long run, so long as that card is strong enough.

The thing about Magic deckbuilding is that you're grappling with the inherent randomness in the rules of the game. The ideal situation is you play a land and cast the most powerful spell you can every turn. But, not only will you not always have the land, you also won't always have a spell that utilizes all that mana. In general, a two mana spell on turn two and a two mana spell on turn three is going to be worse than an opposing two drop on two and three drop on three. The ability for a single card to occupy multiple spots on your curve in your decklist is a huge bonus. When you're playing a deck like this, that's less about its own synergies and more about doing what's needed at a given time, variable mana costs help ensure that your own fail rate is a lot less than the opponent's.

I can't really say for sure that I think Virtue of Persistence is going to be that good, but I love what's going on here. First, we have an effect that is absolutely worth two mana. Sometimes, these cards give you two bad options, but Locthwain Scorn should be effective at taking out any two drop creature, and the fact that it's -3/-3 instead of damage is a big deal, too. Clearly, that's not going to be amazing in every matchup, but it'll be at least serviceable against a lot of the creatures in the format, including Bonecrusher, both Fable chapters, Bloodtithe Harvester, and all the cheap aggro red creatures. The life gain is important as well.

The Virtue itself is not a great card in a matchup where the removal spell doesn't do anything, but not because it isn't powerful. It will be hard to get this through counters, and you won't always have seven mana, of course, but it is a must-answer threat. It doesn't have to be super-economical. The most important reason you can't play huge haymaker cards is because they are too slow against the rest of the format, and will be at their best in the exact matchups where you can expect Locthwain Scorn to be a blank.

I think the most interesting place to play Virtue of Persistence is in the midrange mirrors, where the removal spell will be usable, and the inevitability that Virtue gives you can help in the ultra late game, which would be undecided. It's kind of the best of both worlds, a huge threat that can be used for something else when you don't have the mana, and also a huge threat that can help itself get cast by keeping you alive long enough. In fact, I think this is great against Rakdos specifically. Fable tokens and Bonecrusher Giants need to get removed before they start attacking you, but doing so puts you down cards. Virtue alleviates this in a big way.

It's totally possible that Virtue either isn't good enough as an Adventure, that it's not good enough as an enchantment, or that Jegantha is too important in the format. There are always plenty of ways that new cards can be not good enough. The rate's not that amazing, but the recipe is fantastic. I think it's got potential, and I'm excited to give it a try.

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That's it for this set. The cards I like the best are Mosswood Dreadknight, Restless Cottage, and Virtue of Persistence. I like a lot of the designs here. It's like they took the theme of Throne of Eldraine and then actually tested the cards. The set comes out in a couple weeks, and I'd love to get a stream in trying out some new stuff. Follow me on Twitter for updates on that if you're interested. Thanks for reading.

I'd Like To Find The Proper Potion

Spoiler season is over, now it's time for spoiler season. As always, haven't played as much Magic as I'd hoped as of late, but we've got some cool or at least interesting things to talk about with the new set. I don't have any current list that I like, or a real grasp on a metagame, especially since the recent Historic Anthology, so I'll be talking in more of a macro sense with regard to these cards.

Also, there are leaks here, so continue with caution. I'm sure it will all be public soon enough.

A Pioneer card that I sort of like and wish we had access to in Explorer is Hissing Quagmire. It's not that three mana for a 2/2 deathtouch is blowing anyone's doors off, it's that it uses a land slot and can potentially trade for a spell out of the opponent, especially if you're in a defensive role. It also has just enough juice to pressure planeswalkers and throw down a little damage. Plenty of cards are capable of this sort of thing, but few of them also help your mana situation. Restless Cottage is something like a more aggressive version of Hissing Quagmire, which isn't actually what we're looking for all the time, even though its rate is a little better than Quagmire. Still, a utility land that also fixes mana is excellent, the graveyard hate is a nice touch, and four toughness dodges a lot of removal which helps you not get blown out in combat. What's nice is that you don't actually cut your Den of the Bugbears and Hive of the Eye Tyrants for it, you can replace those with, say, Blackcleave Cliffs and cut Ziatora's Proving Grounds if you like. Or, if you're not as worried about having lands that enter tapped, cut some Deathcap Glades or whatever.

Magma Spray, or whatever the newer version of that is called, is a useful enough card that having that plus a bonus is something worth checking out. And the bonus is great. I think that fulfilling the Bargain on stuff like this is going to be easier than it might seem because of Fable and Bloodtithe Harvester. You don't need to contort the deck to use it, and you wouldn't want to, but it's going to be a possibility fairly often. I could imagine a metagame where a couple of these are maindeckable, but more likely it's a sideboard card that's good against both cheap creatures and recursive creatures. (It doesn't say it on the card, but Bargain says you can sacrifice a creature, artifact, or token when you cast the spell to get the bonus, basically Kicker)

I think a Saga for 2G that starts off by making a 3/3 token would have to be pretty useless in chapters 2 and 3 to not see play. And, well, yeah I think it's kind of useless. I think this is pretty bonkers in a deck with Llanowar Elves, since you can cash them in for real threats, plus you can add mana with the chapter 2 trigger on the stack. Sometimes green three drops are the type of card where they're amazing if they get accelerated out with an Elf and just okay otherwise, and this seems like one of those cards. A tough sell in a world where Fable is legal.

This looks great, but probably a little too slow. I think that in Explorer, we won't often have enough time to cast the Adventure, then cast the Quirion Dryad, then get the bonus, and if you're not doing that consistently, I can't really imagine the other modes being strong enough. That's just my gut feeling, and what's funny is that I think I'd be more excited about this card in any other set, but the next card looks better to me, and they occupy the same space.

This card seems extremely pushed to me. Like, they just tacked on trample for fun, and they printed a souped-up Magma Spray to keep it in check. I don't know if intentionally pushed is going to translate into being good, but it's worth noting. Unlike the Questing Druid, just throwing a 3/2 onto the battlefield on turn 2 is going to be a fine way to keep up tempo a lot of the time, and drawing a card is usually much more useful than Riveteers Charming a card. I think this would be viable without the recursion clause, but that's the part that puts it into overdrive. Instead of missing your chance to get value off of it by casting it early, you can rebuy it when it dies and give yourself an unkillable card drawing machine. It won't work all the time, of course, but we're talking pretty huge amounts of card advantage if you can draw two cards and trade off with another. All with the flexibility of just being Watchwolf when your hand needs it to be. This looks like it could be excellent.

This is like a weird Goblin Rabblemaster that also has incidental graveyard hate. Maybe all this incidental graveyard hate is for Mosswood Dreadknight? Anyways, I can't really picture this being any better than all the other three drops we have access to, but if the three drop slot wasn't so crowded it might be worth trying. There's a certain amount of value to a reasonable rate creature that gives you a piece of cardboard, no matter how useless it is, kind of like Bloodtithe Harvester or Fable chapter 1, so I don't think it's crazy to play this card, it just doesn't seem that powerful or versatile.

Basically an OG Polukranos except it gets smaller when it fights something. I'd rather play the newer Polukranos (not the newest Polukranos. Jeez I hate when they keep re-making the same characters.)

So I want to preface that there are a lot of barriers to playing a card like this. First, you have to want to play four drops, which isn't always the case. Then, you have to be convinced that it's better than Sheoldred and Chandra for your four drop slot, which is a hard sell for me but not impossible. Then, you have to be convinced that it's better than Vraska, Esika's Chariot, Polukranos, etc plus Jegantha, which is an even harder sell for me, but that can be the case sometimes as well. If we can get past that, then there's actually a lot going on here that's great. The problem with losing out on Jegantha is that we lose a big chunk of our late game power, but the adventure spell helps make up for that. In the end, I just don't think the Dragon straight up is going to be what we want in Explorer. It's a fast, heavy-handed kind of format that can be hard to keep up with. I think you want your four drops to be good late game draws because they're just really strong cards, not because you can put mana into them to make them even stronger, unlike with cards lower on the curve. The opposing mid-late plays are going to hit so hard that you don't really have this kind of time.

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That's it so far. If anything else looks cool I might write about it here. Thanks for reading.