New Phrexia: Back in Black

Set reviews are pretty common on these here intrawebz.  So, rather than bore you all with another long-winded take on why Karn is probably unplayable and Mental Misstep will change the face of legacy, i figure i'd live up to the blog's name and take a look at the black cards only.  I'll mostly be looking at standard, since it's what most people care about, but i'll also consider limited.

Blind Zealot: This card seems pretty awesome in a black aggro draft deck.  The problem is that in MSS, that generally means Infect but maybe there are the tools to change that in the new format.  I'm not convinced, but this still seems like a solid draft pick in the middle of the pack.  In terms of standard, this seems like a worse Gatekeeper, with a decent upside of being unblockable by some/most decks.  A semi-unblockable 2/2 for 3 might be good with some recursion, but it probably doesn't do enough on its own.

Caress of Phyrexia: Pretty close to being Strictly Worse than Sign in Blood. One more card for far more than double the cost.  Card advantage/draw is great, but the price is far too high here, and is probably worse in draft that it is in standard, due to prominence of Infect.

Chancellor of the Dross: This seems pretty hillarious in something like EDH if you get it in your opener.  In standard it's far too expensive for a french vanilla 6/6 flier.  In draft it's obviously pretty solid, especially if the slowdown we saw in MSS continues into MSN (so is this what Wizards refers to when they talk about the new Magic Online?  MSN?  Rumbled!).  There are better bombs to first pick from this set, and the decent leyline effect is negated by having a seven mana card in your opening hand, but a 6/6 lifelink flier is hard to pass P1P1.

Dementia Bat: I guess i should leave the puns to LSV, but you really would have to be demented to play this in anything but limited.  Even there it's filler at best.  Nine mana for a Mind Rot on a 'meh' body?  I really hope i never have to run this.

Despise: Sweet; Inquisition for Walkers and Creatures.  This seems like an absolute auto-include in any black decks.  Maybe not a four-of, since Inquisition is better against low curve/no walker decks but you'll probably want four between the main and the side.  For black players this might be the most important card of the set.  As for limited, since it hits creatures this might actually be playable, which is rare for a duress effect.  I wouldn't try and take it early, but i'd be happy to wheel one.

Dismember: I'm not as excited as everyone else about this card.  For black players the extra -1/-1 isn't much better than Grasp since there aren't many five toughness threats played in standard right now.  For other colours, well... is killing a Thrun worth four life?  Is killing a Titan worth 2-for-1-ing yourself AND taking four damage anyway (possibly seven if it's an Inferno)?  In limited this card will be excellent but i still expect to see it mostly in black decks.  Like all the Phyrexian mana cards, though, it gets better against Infect.

Enslave: Cool, Mind Control in black.  Like any MC effect, this is obviously solid in limited, but will probably see zero standard play.  The cost is high, and black has much better ways to deal with creatures.  Looking forward to seeing someone cast this on a Vatmother and hopefully in a deck with Caress of Phyrexia.

Entomber Exarch: Gravediggers are generally playable in limited, and this one has some versatility to boot.  Granted, i can't see the second clause being used often, there are always corner cases (maybe you have an empty graveyard).  In standard this will be the same as every Gravedigger, unless someone needs an alternate win condition for their Megrim (Liliana's Caress, whatever) deck...

Evil Presence: Urborg for extreme budget EDH players?  Yeah, this is unplayable everywhere.

Geth's Verdict: I tend to overvalue cards that make your opponent sac creatures, but this one seems pretty legitimate.  In standard there aren't enough decks where shroud is relevant enough for this to be good, but in draft this could be okay.  The loss of life is a vaguely relevant upside with Phyrexian mana around, but be aware of the downsides in a format where expendable creatures abound.

Glistening Oil: Tainted Strike is somewhat playable in MSS as a finisher in a deck that couldn’t quite get the critical mass of Infect creatures.  This card is closer to Phyresis, which was never playable in any format.  The built-in recursion is nice but mentioning this in the same sentence as Rancor seems laughable, and so is any deck that plays this.

Grim Affliction: This seems okay in Limited, where it goes into basically any deck thanks to the abundance of one toughness creatures.  It’s marginally better in an infect deck, of course, but I’d rather have almost any other black removal spell.  As for standard – no.

Ichor Explosion: If you’re looking for a wrath effect in black in standard, clearly this is not the card you want.  Even in limited, seven mana is a lot for a conditional card that kills your stuff as well.  This kind of card is the downside of drafting the last set first because in pack three you will have a better idea of whether your deck wants this card or not.  Expect to wheel this in a decent pack with good players.

Life’s Finale: This seems like a pretty huge blowout in limited.  Wrathing for six with an upside has proven to be good already in this format thanks to Phyrexian Rebirth.  In certain board states this is probably even better.  Removing all villain’s on-board threats AND three that haven’t been cast yet seems insanely good.  In standard this is probably too slow, and there are better things to do with six mana nowadays, if you hadn’t noticed.

Mortis Dogs: This seems like pure limited filler.  You should get it late in the pack, which is nice, and I expect to see at least one case of a killing his own Dogs to drain the last few points in a stalemate.

Parasitic Implant: Clunky removal and even clunkier combos with a card like Mortis Dogs above does not make a good card.  Run this if you’re light on removal but you don’t need to pick it high like you do with good removal.

Phyrexian Obliterator: Wellllllll… is it good enough to bring back our beloved control deck?  On its own, probably not, I’m afraid.  There are other tools, but this card alone won’t make or break a deck.  That said, it is good, and it can only be played in mono black for obvious reasons.  Being a 5/5 on turn four is obviously great, but in a world of titans, ‘dies to removal’ is huge.  This leaves nothing behind after being ‘Throated’ but if it sticks around for a turn or two it will warp the game around it.  Even dying to a Titan is probably beneficial for you since sacrificing six permanents is back-breaking.  In draft you’ll probably windmill slam this for value, and then try desperately to draft mono black.  In standard, as much as I want this card to be amazing, I really can’t say how good it is yet.  Then again, if it isn’t tier one, I can at least get them a little cheaper #banmythics

Pith Driller: This seems reasonable but not great.  If it had infect this would be awesome, but without it… meh, killing a Myr on turns four-through-five is not very exciting, neither is a 2/4 body.  Less Driller Killer and more Filler Driller.

Postmortem Lunge: This seems like a sometimes better/sometimes worse take on last set’s Morbid Plunder.  It’s better if you’re getting back an evasive guy but getting back anything else for this cost is not really worth it.  Moreso than most reanimate effects, this one really scales with the quality of your creatures and is probably not first pickable in draft.

Praetor’s Grasp:  I hate using smilies in any article, but… what the heck o_O  This card seems awful.  Maybe I’m missing something, but even out of the board in game two in limited, this does almost nothing.  I guess if your opponent’s deck has just one win condition… you’re probably going to win anyway because they don’t know how to build a draft deck.  I expect Tom to open at least six of these in his packs over the next year or so.

Reaper of Sheoldred: First-pickable in a weak pack, this card seems pretty solid to me.  Obviously it’s not constructed-viable but in limited this is an awesome reach card for the infect deck.  Even as a blocker it has inevitability and as an attacker it’s always getting in for one unless they have removal.

Sheoldred, the Whispering One: In limited this is the windmill slam for black in this set.  This is what you get for seven mana, and it’s definitely worth it.  In standard is loses to Titans and will probably never see play unless mono black becomes a deck, since it’s pretty sick in the mirror.  Personally though, I’m eyeing up a black EDH deck.

Surgical Extraction: Seems like all of the contentious cards from this set are in black.  I’ll just go with Alexander Shearer’s article from last week: “How to Waste two Life at Instant Speed.”  There’s not much more to add; this card is bad.

Toxic Nim: Bleh, I’m not a fan of infect, and this just seems overpriced to me.  Regenerate for one black seems good but even in limited there are better things to do with six mana.  Left alone, this is going to eat through the opponent’s board pretty quickly, but it dies to EVERYTHING and is a liability in the infect mirror: Tap six, play Toxic Nim, say go. Opponent casts Virulent Wound, timewalks you.

Vault Skirge: Cute design, right?  You pay two life to get it in play in an off-colour deck, then it gets the life back… eventually.  The art is cool, the frame is sweet, the card, however, is awful.  With infect, this would be a strict upgrade from Plague Stinger, without infect it’s close to strictly worse.

Whisper Specter: I exspecter (sorry…) this to be 15^th pick on a regular basis.  Specters are very hit and miss, but this is definitely the latter.  Three mana for a 1/1 that only makes villain discard if you sacrifice it?  Awful.

SC2: The Gathering

So here it is, the result of hours of brainstorming, designing and fixing... not to mention googling for decent pics.  I thought of making an SC2 set for Magic when i first stumbled across Magic Set Editor a few months ago.  It's taken me this long mostly due to laziness/more important things to do.

My main goal was to capture the flavour of SC2 within the constraints of Magic.  This is more of a challenge than i first imagined.  I came up with at least three different versions of Bunker, for example, before i settled on the current one.  Tanks and Vikings caused similar issues but i opted for a Figure of Destiny-style which seems fairly good.  Sadly the Viking 2nd mode seems fairly uselesss, but i guess it plays around Pistus Strike... meh.

Oh, yeah, i realise that i didn't format the token-creators properly but a lot of these cards were already very wordy and i think i can get away with it since this is just a fun set that nobody is actually going to play.  Well, you could print them off i guess, but you can use common sense to realise that the Broodling token is probably the one used by the Broodlord, right?

The rarities may seem somewhat random, that's because they are... sort of.  I was torn between rarity based on card power in Magic and rarity based on army composition in SC2.  In the end i think it ended up about 50/50 but you can probably just ignore them.

The first thing i did was to give each race a colour identity.  I had a feeling that it would help to define the races if they were limited to certain colours.  This does mean that i sort of ignored the colour pie in some cases, but, as i said, this set is more about capturing SC2 than it is about strictly obeying the rules of Magic.

Blue/White seemed pretty obvious for Protoss because they feel very religious (Templars and Zealots) - something often asociated with White Magic (Clerics and Paladins).  They are also viewed as a kind of 'higher race' and psionic energy melds very nicely into Blue.

I went with Green/White for Terran because, like Protoss, Terran are very much an ordered, hierarchical society which fits White perfectly.  They're also human, which is mostly a White race in Magic.  Green represents the fact that they come from Earth originally, and unforunately little else.  Red feels a bit more terran-y but i wanted to save that for Zerg, since the chaotic nature of red seems much more appropriate there.

Zerg ended up with the dark/evil combination of Red/Black.  I originally considered Black/Green for the corrupted nature aspect of the race but i just felt that, overall, the random, chaotic nature was more red than green.  The swam style is at least well established in both red and green (goblins/saprolings/elves) so that wasn't an issue.  Black seemed obvious since the Zerg are clearly the bad guys in SC2 and their units - all insects and slavering, hellish beasts - feel very Black.

I should probably explain the keywords in case they aren't clear.

Cloaking: "This creature  is unblockable and receives no combat damage when blocking."
'Cloaking' is pretty self-explanatory but i felt i did a good job of capturing it within rules of Magic.  It is obviously similar to effects like Fear or Intimidate but defintely keeps the SC2 style, i think.

Cliffwalk: "This creature can be blocked by creatures with flying but it can only deal damage to creatures without flying."
Colossus was another problematic unit to capture - in the end i invented a keyword (Cliffwalk) just for it.  As you can see if you view the images, it can be blocked by flying creatures (since this is usually the best counter in SC2) but cannot attack them.  I think that works pretty well.
  
Cloaking: "Creatures controlled by opponents lose Cloaking."
Reveal is just the answer to Cloaking.  Although i haven't really designed this set with balance in mind, Cloaking would be pretty powerful without some kind of counter.  Lukily, SC2 provides it in a way that transfers easily to Magic.  I simply made it so that a permanent with Reveal removes Cloaking from other permanents.

Energize: "This creature enters the battlefield with N energy counters on it."
Units with energy were also quite a headache.  To begin with i had a handful of cards that featured novels-worth of text refering to counters.  A keyword was clearly necessary and i came up with Energize.  This makes a permanent enter the battlefield with N counters on it.  You can remove counters to activate an ability or you tap that permanent to add another counter - this mirrors the recharging of energy, though it is not perfect because most units in SC2 can still attack without energy, they just can't use their abilities.  Overall i quite like this design, though it is not a perfect mirror of the SC2 universe.

Economy
Expansions are an important part of SC2 and it was something i wanted to do a good job on.  It's very difficult, though, to make a land or artifact (these seemed like the best choices for bases/expansions) that represents its SC2 coutnerpart particularly well.  I chose each race's colour identity early on (yes, i broke the colour pie quite a lot here, but that wasn't important to me) but just making a dual land for each race seemed pretty uninspired.  I'm not sure if my solutions are perfect but they definitely 'feel' more Starcraft-y to me.  The terran system in particular may be a little clunky but i like the idea of worker tokens and i think they work fairly well.

In case you missed the link at the top, here are the cards.

Next up, i'm working on a more ambitious WoW set.  I'm trying to do what i did with SC2 - capture the flavour - while also making it balanced.  This means roughly equal colour and, relatively balanced power levels among each race as well as colour.  I'm also aiming for Eastern Kingdoms, as it's called, to have a full set of cards rather than just the 52 in SC2.  Labour of love ain't the half of it.

Creepy love

Although the psychotypes of Magic are fairly useful, i think everyone has their pet cards.  Whether they're good or not is sometimes just completely irrelevant - Conley Wood's apparently love for Wee Dragonauts is a good example.  My own is currently Cerebral Eruption and i had a bit of a thing for Bestial Menace back when Worldwake was released.  But as the spoilers for New Phyrexia begin to trickle in, i've fallen for another card that may or may not be terrilble, and it's a bug...

For those of you who can't read Japanese - so that's me - here is the translation.  This might be a pretty sweet answer to all those broken-ass Planeswalkers and FUCK YEAH! it's not a mythic!  It goes in any deck too, although it's obviously optimal in a black-heavy deck... maybe something like mono black control?!  With Sword of F&F around we probably won't see it become a real deck but I can dream.  It seems like it might make some pretty huge waves in limited too, sucking out poison or just removing charge counters: it's all upside.  Of course, one toughness is a big draw back, but the fact that this is a one-drop means it's flexible enough that it might get some damage in.  In standard, it's probably a sideboard card at best, but a pretty fun one.

Anyway, the art is pretty sweet.  So far all of the art from New Phyrexia looks great to me, and definitely fits the theme of the set very nicely.  Despite Karn being pretty underwhelming, at least to me, i'm already pretty excited about the new set... roll on May!