There you have it. Soak it all in. Let it seep into the cracks. What do we think? This is the Ice Age printing of the card. I began playing shortly after the release of this set, but I had all but forgotten of this card until recently. I, like so many others, just saw it as a relic. An out of date artifact (pun completely intended). Many great old cards have been updated to make them more functional, play better with the rules, or just read more cleanly. Sometimes they turn sorceries into instants or vice versa. Sometimes they make an effect symmetrical or break it's symmetry. Cheaper or more expensive. Whatever the game needs, I suppose.
This card got conspicuously replaced with Ponder during Lorwyn. Which, I am fine with. I don't always like the cards they choose to reprint and I am sworn to destroy functional reprints...but spiritual reprints, for some reason, I love. Let's take a look at what they did.
Same cost. Single blue, some of the most powerful cards ever printed have this mana cost. I like it.
Still sorcery speed. Which I also, like. Making cards like this an instant is a huge tick up in power level, but they are best used when they get cast during your main phase anyway, so let's just go ahead and keep it at sorcery.
Black border. There is no longer an alternative to this, but white boarders still haunt the value of many older cards, so this is an important distinction.
Modern card frame. Which I do think it better for the game, from a marketing perspective. Although, I like to use the original printing of a card whenever possible, so I play with a lot of old borders.
The art is...pretty much equivalent. Random, abstract nonsense. Not a fan. Still not better than Stasis.
What about the text box? Well it removes the targeting restriction, which marginally helps to protect it from getting countered, but lowers the functionality by not being able to point it at your opponents library. you draw the card immediately, which is a strict upgrade. Both in terms of helping to dig for gas and for pure readability.
You may be wondering at this point: "Sure, Grandpa, but who cares?" Well children, because this card is absolutely nuts. I use to have a deck-building rule that went like this: I would always start out with a Brainstorm, a Mind Stone, and a Nevinyrral's Disk. No matter what my strategy was in EDH I always found I could make use of library manipulation, mana rocks, and insurance policies. I have evolved this thought process over time and things have come a long way for magic since the old days. Cards have been pushed in every direction. One thing that I have never lost my taste for is the library manipulation. The better your decks get, the less you need insurance against getting behind. The better your decks get the less you care about slow colorless mana sources. But the better your decks get, the more value you generate off of a well timed card draw spell.
On a closely related note, as I have grown as a player, in skill and experience, I find more and more value in the variability of skill testing cards. Many magic theorists agree that Brainstorm is the hardest card to play correctly and there are many cards in the brainstorm family that all work slightly differently, but require high levels of skill to utilize correctly. The further I develop my knowledge of the game, the more of my wins and losses I ascribe to proper uses of these skill-testing cards.
It is no coincidence then that I have started to play just about as many of these kinds of cards in my blue decks as I can. I'm cutting mana, sources, threats, removal, just about anything to get my hands on another 'card-planning' cantrip. I swear by them and I want to recommend to everyone that they should play a bunch of them too...but I won't. I know not everyone can make these cards work, but only practice will improve that. For more on this concept I urge you to read this article, which now motivates much of the advice I am giving new players that I encounter: The casual competitive magic player.
At least I finally got around to posting some under-thought thoughts. It was about time. Goodnight children.
PASS it around.
There's a lot to agree and disagree with here.
ReplyDeleteBrainstorm is definitely excellent, but I can't say the same about Ponder and its similar relatives.
Playing one-off spells on your turn and trying to card plan seem particularly horrible in any deck where you effectively eliminate one-ofs in order to increase cantrips, which only increase the value of the cards you're searching for, ultimately having to go all-in on that specific card to supplant the unnecessary amount of lib-manip.
To me, the deck with say, multiple versions of Doom Blade or Naturalize will ALWAYS be better than the deck with enough cantrips to dig for the singleton copies of these cards.
I also agree that cantrips aren't easy to use correctly- but I don't think that being able to use them right would make me a "better player," just a luckier one. Timing is everything, and cantrips are momentum cards meant to function as difference-makers when the board is tight, which means that you have to be able to find a nice place in the game where you can afford to durdle with yourself to avoid losing the game.
So philosophically, you also have to keep yourself in check.
What I mean is that cantrips can't become a "crutch" in your deck when you don't have a land in your hand on turn 3.
Which is the biggest problem I find with them. By cutting land for these cards, you're really only shooting yourself in the foot.
Honestly, the thought of playing a ton of cantrips and having to use them to dig for lands just makes me want to stick my finger down my throat and hug a toilet.
However, I can see the advantage of including maybe 1 or 2 in your deck.
In my Kiyomaro EDH, I play Scout's Warning, and I've found in the latter half of the game, being able to draw a card and flash in one of my dudes is a pretty potent little trick.
The previously mentioned Brainstorm is really good in many situations, especially when you've got a fetch land to tuck away unnecessary cards.
If we're talking about Portent here, one of its advantages is that you can get free info off of another person's library, which could also be considered semi-disruption and knowledge for better planning against an unknown deck and player.
However, I just can't see any justification in cutting multiple copies of removal and the like. Most players won't ever be consistently lucky enough to find what they need within the top few cards of their library.
Additionally, most halfway decent EDH players will and should be able to understand the nature of constant digging, and if they're leery of infinite combos, will hate you off the table before you can do that.
I guess I just don't see how there's any advantage be had in running a bunch of cantrips versus cards like Top, actual card draw spells, and even green mana ramp, which thins the deck beautifully.