I'm a little late to comment on the new D and D set, mostly because I didn't realize it was a real set. It's going to be in Standard and everything.
The cards in this set are a little underwhelming so far, at least the ones that I'm interested in, but the whole set hasn't been spoiled yet. Let's take a look.
Four is a lot of mana, and it's not particularly good on defense. But, Ebondeath looks phenomenal against any type of control strategy. We usually don't get a flash creature like this that has the potential to just end the game immediately like this, plus it's got some recursivity. Given you have time, I would imagine this is also pretty solid in a mirror match, if such a thing exists.
Ebondeath lives in a weird spot, where it's so geared towards one specific type of opponent and just okay against others, that it seems like more of a sideboard card. But, in a format with a wide variety of opponents, you want sideboard cards that can do work against multiple opponents as well, like Duress effects and Wrath effects. Ebondeath reminds me a little of Klothys, where it's a good one-of in the main deck, and the way that you make it work against decks that it isn't specifically made for is to make the rest of your deck more effective in that matchup. If Ebondeath is the stones against half the format and just okay against the other half, just tune your deck to be better against that other half.
Probably too slow, and also probably just not as good as the other five drops available. I think that this card would have been good a year or so ago, when Historic first came out. I would have loved to have Ob Nixilis Reignited or a similar effect, but at this point we're pretty far past that. I am having trouble imagining when I'd rather have this over something like Angrath or Eldest Reborn.
Probably a little less narrow than Cast Down these days, this might be the go-to Doom Blade effect for the format. That's not always something that's going to be useful, especially because the decks that have few creatures are likely to use stuff like Angels or Dragons as creatures. I still like Flunk more, but this might be a more maindeckable card, if that's something you're interested in.
This card excites me a lot. It reminds me of Finale of Eternity but I think it's more flexible and also has a more impressive ceiling. 1RRR to kill anything isn't that bad when you consider you have the ability to just go ham when you get to five or six mana. The problem, of course, is the triple red. Having said that, Shatterskull Smashing gets you part of the way, and another card that's in this set can help as well. If it can be set up to be reliably castable, then I like this as a 2-of in Historic Jund. That's a big ask for a 2-of, but we'll see.
I like graveyard hate, and I like creatures that gain life, but five mana is too much.
Great card. It costs a lot to activate it, but having a creature land with very little restriction like this is really nice. Whether or not it's going to work in a deck with Castle Locthwain remains to be seen, but if we are going for the Meteor Swarm deck, Locthwain might not be what we want anymore.
This card is definitely less powerful than Den of the Bugbear, but it might be better for two reasons. One, it can cast a Thoughtseize on turn one, something not even Castle Locthwain can do. Second, get a little graveyard hate thrown into your mana base for pretty much free, since black Treetop Village is something we're in the market for anyways. Add to that the extra point of toughness, which can be important in a format with Prismari Command, Kolaghan's Command, and Bonecrusher Giant.
~
Anyways, just threw this one together because I realized that this set was going to be legal and not some kind of weird supplemental product. Also, I made a video last weekend and have been having trouble with Youtube getting the quality settings to work the way I want it to. I'll keep working on it, but take a look if you're interested. Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment