Hey, zoners! Grandpa here, welcoming you to the General Zone's review of Gatecrash. The Gatecrash release is nearly upon us and it is time again for set reviews to fill up the pages of all your favorite internets! In this series I will be going through Gatecrash card by card, sharing my thoughts on the cards that have a shot of making it in Commander. Unlike other set reviews, this review is broken down by the role a card plays instead of what color it is or what guild it belongs to. Note that I will not talk about any cards that I deem totally unplayable or cards that have simply been reprinted (of which there are a staggering number).
In this first segment we will talking about THREATS. A threat is a card that makes you win the game. Durrr. So, all the planeswalkers, non-legendary beaters, and general win conditions!
This card is going to be a solid rare in limited, but really isn't the kind of thing you are looking for in constructed. The body is a little too small. The price tag is a little too big for what you get. It is a very slow clock. It requires a bunch of other creatures to really be effective. Worst of all it can't even give your team evasion. If this were a 6/6 that gave your attackers ALL of those abilities plus Flying or Protection from the color of your choice, then we would be in business. People will play this. It isn't going to be good.
Frontline Medic is really more of a utility creature than a threat, but I will include on this list anyway. It has a decent body, a decent price tag, and two decent abilities. Card is pretty solid, but nothing special. It is sure to run up a price tag in Standard, where it is much more useful, but it will be a rare sight at the casual tables.
This new iteration of Gideon is definitely in offense mode. He has upgraded from protecting people from Eldrazi to smashing in faces in Ravnica. This is a powerful 4 CMC planeswalker and cannot be ignored. Unlike other pdubs he doesn't really generate incremental advantage, or distract your opponent from attacking you. What Gideon does do is turn into a huge, under-costed, attacker and kill your opponent very quickly. He has recieved a major upgrade in that his creature form is now Indestructible AND can't be damaged, making it much harder to deal with. He also has an ultimate ability now, which as usual, pretty much wins the game all on its own. Unfortunately,
Dreadbore,
Vraska, and a new pdubs board sweeper exist nowadays, so Champion of Justice is unlikely to be as good as Jura was in his hayday, but make no mistake! This card is a game winner and should be treated as such.
Sweet, a new cycle of huge rare monsters! Perfect for EDH right, Grandpa!? No. Not even close. Look at this card. It is about 50 miles behind
Elesh Norn,
Iona,
Angel of Serenity,
Avacyn and probably even
Sun Titan. This card is obivously geared towards multiplayer, but it is pretty awful in a 1v1. You need to be picking off 3+ relevant threats in order for this card to be worth playing, and even then a 4/7 durdler isn't exactly a clock in a 4+ person game. People will play the snot out of this card. It will be fine, but it isn't as good as it looks. Swords is the OG. It can't be beat. Pretty soon this cards hype will wear off and people will go back to
Mindslaver locking you to death.
This is a little bit more like it. Diluvian is to
Snapcaster mage what Luminate is to
Nekrataal. I think we all know which one of those cards sees more competitive play. Heck, half the time you are probably going to be using it to cast a couple removal spells anyway. This card has potential to gain much more card advantage than any of its cycle-mates and adds flexibility. It can actually be functionally equivalent to the other primordials in some circumstances.
Compare to
Sphinx of Uthuun: Diluvian will be at least good, but most often better. In a 1v1, this guy still probably isn't making it, but it has potential. In multiplayer this card stands way above comparable big mana threats. It can compete with
Frosty,
Stormtide, and
Kederekt, aka. some of the best in the business.
Enter the Infinite, eh? Yea, I guess I'd like to. What is there to say about this card? It is begging to be broken and you instantly win if you can solve that puzzle. R&D is pumping out way too many of these guys lately, but I like them just the same. They are interesting and easily abused. They are the degenerate spice I like to put on all my tasty Commander decks.
Here is a short list of cards that I want to combine this with.
Rooftop Storm,
Omniscience,
Laboratory Maniac,
Grapeshot/
Ignite Memories.
Simic Manipulator is the latest in the long line of
Old Men. It seems fine....ish. Let's be realistic. It is only ever going to be stealing utility guys and small beaters. That might be enough to make it playable, but it takes way too long to charge up and thanks to the intervening 'if' clause, you can't just throw out ten 2/2's all at once and get bunch of counters. Having to spend the counters is kind of a let down as well.
Beguiler of Wills builds into taking more and more powerful stuff, this moves in the opposite direction. It has potential to be a beater by itself, but who really cares about a 6/7 in Commander. Get me a rewrite of this cards text box and it might do some good work.
I know somebody with a Chisei deck who can probably use this card...
OH LORD, we've got a card. This card reminds me a lot of
Spitting Image, a card that I play literally all the time. This is a very sick general hoser and win condition all wrapped into a pretty reasonable card. It is a bit on the expensive side, but you don't need a whole lot to make it worth the price. Kill your general, swing, copy my dude. Done. The best part, and what really pushes this into the stratosphere, is that you can copy artifacts. Copy
Thran Dynamo?
Caged Sun? Big game. This is a much safer investment because your opponent will most likely have to answer the token artifacts one at a time, unlike token creatures. The main take away that we have from Cipher is: Hexproof is the runaway winner in the battle for best keyword. New kid on the block and he has already ruined the game.
This card is enhanced by super sweet art, but I don't understand the flavor of Cipher at all, or the flavor of stealing an inanimate objects identity. Oh well.
I am a huge fan of this type of effect. Mana doublers are strong incentives to go mono color and Black has the pick of the litter. It seems that Extort will have its biggest impact in limited, but you are often confined on mana in limited. This guy will let you pay for multiple Extort triggers per spell and kill very quickly. In Commander, this guy is going to be a Black staple. It is worth playing without Extort, but it is going to drain an opponent for at least a couple life over the course of the game as a bonus. Sweet.
Well, it is certainly big. So that is a thing. It has evasion, which is a good sign. It has reasonable stats for a beater. Unfortunately, if you are connecting with your 7/7 the added bonus could be a ham sandwich; you're probably going to win anyway. I like this card a lot, but I don't think it is going to be quite as good as I want it to be. If Titan's have taught us anything it is this: ETB triggers are way better than combat damage triggers; repeatable or not. If this had Haste? Bomb. Shroud? Windmill slam! He definitely a good guy, and the kind of card I can get behind. I would have liked to see this design be Legendary and pushed just a little bit further. CMC 6, for example.
Slumlord? Awesome. I have a long standing theory that MTG would be a way cooler game if the story and flavor centered around urban gang warfare (in a non-fantasy setting). Ravnica is, of course, right up my alley. This guy is a sweet cross over of things I like.
This is a reasonable Black token producer and will likely see play in decks with that theme, as well as Rats decks. Notably, this guy is a rogue, which is an important creature type if you recall the power of some of the Prowl cards.
This is a game winner that's for sure, but it is situational. It is less likely to break the game open than Diluvian, but in the late-late, landing this should pretty much be game. UL made the comparison to
Sheoldred, which I think fits. That card is pretty good and this one should be as well. Not much to say: draw it, slam it, profit.
Wight of Precint Six is pretty sweet. In limited this guy is just better than
Boneyard Wurm, right? In constructed you can assemble a game plan that bins your opponents creatures for value, like Life's Finale. Either way, this is pretty much just a Black
Tarmogoyf in Commander. It's not great early, but it gets MUCH BIGGER, and it is harder to hate out because many opponents will not want to exile their own graveyards. I am really excited to see this card in action. It is possible I am giving it too much credit, but a 5-7 power guy for two isn't kidding around and that is just scratching the surface. This is spot on the curve where I think lurghoyfs really belong. Thankfully he gets to be a zombie, which is relevant.
What the what? This is some guy. You're not going to trigger the insta-win all that often, but who cares? You get to keep what you steal. AND you steal EVERYTHING at once. That should be a significant swing in resources, tempo, and the board state. Voltron decks have to watch out. Red now has a powerful tool against one of the most popular strategies in the format. If enough cards like this get printed Red might just move out of last place on the color ranking....but I doubt it.
The bonus here is that this card is pretty much unplayable in every other format so the price is sure to stay low. Feel free to pick up extras; this card will make great trade material with Commander players for years to come.
Where was this card during Scars Block? Sometimes I feel like these cards just get out of place.
Primordial beasticks! This card is...strange. I am pretty sure it is playable and probably even good, but how good? I have no idea. My first impression was to say that it was worse than both Zealous Conscripts and Insurrection. I think that is accurate, but it is unlikely to matter, if you have multiple opponents, one of them is likely dead after you attack. So how good is a card that eliminates your most threatening opponent? Pretty good I'd wager. I like where this card is positioned for now; only time will tell if it is a real threat capable of becoming a staple. I have a place in my Maelstrom Wanderer deck ready for this man.
And there are actually multiple good red threats from a set for the first time in a while. Score?!
One thing is for sure. You can always use more bacon.
Kewl! More huge bugs. This corrects the major problem that
Spawnwrithe had: it was just too small to be effective late in the game. This is a big enough bruiser to survive combat and connect for value, but I don't think that is enough to make it really playable. It is so expensive, and you don' really get what you pay for. It doesn'ty really kill them all that fast, doesn't interact favorably with removal, and exposes you to losing to wrath effects. This is not the kind of threat I like to go all in on. It reminds me of Liege of the Tangle, except slightly safer at the cost of being about 10x slower. Reminder: Liege is not good. Really at all. Don't fall for the trap.
Have you been reading anything I say? Un-play-a-bull!
On a related note, the Bloodrush mechanic adds some interesting variety to creature based decks and might just make pump spells playable in constructed, including EDH, but it is going to have to be worth the cost. This isn't even close.
The last of the primordials. Kind of like the last of the mohecans, this guy is going down, but not without a fight. UL correctly pointed out to me that it is closer to Terastodon than to Acidic Slime, which is some good ground to cover, but I don't think it gets all the way there. Again, you need more than a couple relevant targets for this to be exciting. Blowing up a bunch of one person's land is way sweeter than blowing up one of each person's lands, getting a forest is a nice bonus, but once you have 7 mana, you shouldn't really need that much more. It's like I always say, if your going to go to all the effort to cast a giant fatty, then you might as well win the game. I don't think this really gets there. Reach is also not even valuable enough to be called a bonus, although I would accept Reach + Trample.
Hey everybody, it's
dudez unbound! This card is bad and it should feel bad. Haste is a nice kick back for the tokens, but it is just too slow to be called a win condition.
Bitterblossom, this is not.
This card sits in an awkward no man's land between swarm token decks and voltron Equip decks. I am not sure either of those archetypes needed another do-nothing investichantment.
And muster counters? Really. What in the-
Boom! Here comes the FYAAAAAAAAHHHH! I am all 'bout this card. This is an interesting way to make
Reality Spasm into a R/W card and really nails the design space hard. I like the power level this was pushed to. It should see play in a variety of archetypes across multiple formats.
It reminds me most of
Rolling Thunder, a powerhouse card in pauper formats and an occasional cube inclusion.
That said, it can get pretty expensive pretty fast. Killing a guy and silencing your opponent is still a pretty spicy deal and occasionally you will just tap their team and kill them. Seems sweet. Imagine how terrible this would be as a Sorcery.
Everybody likes a little challenge, right? Actually, no. I don't, but this isn't really a challenge. You kick Rite of Rep and win. Yay for silly 2 card insta-win combos.
I don't like when degenerate combos like this enter the format. It just makes things unhealthy and pushes tons of fun decks and cards out of playability. I am excited to see that this is in G/U, a color scheme I love to play, but it is also one that already has several infinite mana/spell combos and loops. Plus, it is backed up by premier threats and counter magic. If you have to make a 2 card kill combo (which I am not in favor of) you could at least spread them around to the less fortunate colors. Like, Red.
This is an interesting idea. A self-powered
Lord of Extinction in a new color space. Fun. Probably not all that good, but fun. It has the added utility of being a mill engine for niche theme decks that care about that sort of thing. Not my cup of tea. What can I say, I like my games to be competitive. Which is to say I don't want to play a bunch of silly nonsense cards that don't really do anything. I am down with 25/25 creatures though. Que me up a couple of those bad boys.
I am interested to see if these new mill cards are going to juice the strategy up enough to make mill-you a thing in Commander. The power level of mill cards has definitely spiked recently and the theme has been featured prominently in recent sets. It is definitely moving in the right direction. Which I think is very cool. I think any format where mill-you is tier one competitive is bound to be interesting and good for the game. The deeper the strategy pool goes the better it is. Maybe aberration is destined for bigger things that
Glimpse the Unthinkable casual decks.
This card is insanely powerful and beautifully costed. R/G stompy is traditionally very weak in Commander; Domri should bring some much needed power to players who are starving for competitive level cards.
I have mentioned the following complaint several times over the past few weeks all over the blogosphere, but it bears repeating here. This card
feels Simic. Think about it. +1 you perform an experiment with an unknown outcome to try and create a new creature. -2 you test your new creature by battling it against some existing critter to see who is tougher. For the ultimate, you have pretty much completed the monster genome project and you redesign every species to be the Predator. Sometimes it feels like the creative team does a bad job. Sometimes is feels like they don't even do their job at all.
I am down with
Bob. Card is great. It is one of only a handful of cards in Magic that costs 2 and provides steady card advantage. Like other cards in this category it is way over-powered and pretty broken. It is both an early threat and inevitability. It creates interesting tension in game play because of how it interact with BOTH players life totals and the sub-game of card advantage.
Let's get one thing straight. This card is not Bob. Not even close. In fact, this card is terrible. If you build your deck with this card in mind then you will pretty easily be able to break the symmetry of the life loss, but you are also getting extra cards that are inherently weaker than your opponents extra cards and are likely to lose as a result. 6 drops are almost always better than similar 2 drops. This card just isn't doing it for me. I can maybe see it in some sort of weird Grixis group hug deck that doesn't care about winning and is only playable in multiplayer. Exactly the kind of deck I NEVER PLAY.
Why? 6 for a 5/5 flyer? Triple color requirement? Orzhov angels have really fallen off since we last saw them. What is the up-side of this card? You can re-buy it...some of the time...for full price? No thanks.
Here is what we can do: Keep the art and the casting cost. Make it 6/6, give it Lifelink, Deathtouch, and a relevant comes into play ability and clear out that ridiculous token shenanigans and just let my buy it back straight up...for WBB.
This is easily one of the weakest mythics I have seen in a while.
This is kind of small balling it for Commander.
Windbrisking is hard enough to do anyway and you get a free spell out of it. This attacks along the way, but when you do trigger it, the free spell you get is
Lightning Helix. Which isn't terrible mind you, but it isn't anything to get excited about. I would be surprised and a little embarrassed if this becomes a format staple.
Foundry champion is equally weak. These are really just limited rares. Bombs in sealed, great curve toppers in draft, but they aren't going to cut it in the big leagues. I love me some ETB removal, but you have to work pretty hard to make this a
FTK.
FTK is a marginal playable, btw. This card is below the EDH poverty line.
This guy seems okay to me. He is a couple bagels short of a dozen, but you have to expect that R&D would take their time making Fight into an evergreen mechanic. They played it a little too safe on this one. It would be cool if thus were a bit bigger or, actually even a bit smaller. If this were a 2/2 for 2RG or similar I would be pretty excited about it. As it stands, it is pretty much garuanteed to gobble something up when it comes in and gives you a huge advantage in creature match ups.
The problem is that beating creature decks isn't really accomplished by playing more creatures...you usually want to play less. Board sweeps, counters, removal...this guy isn't breaking the format anytime soon.
I already talked at length about this guy. My opinion of him has improved slightly since then, but not by much. The creature half isn't all that exciting. The pump spell is going to be lethal most of the time, but you have to commit to the potential of getting 2-for-1'd in the process. That's why pump spells don't see much play.
The interesting development is going to be in poison strategies. Effectively, poison decks just got 10 or so new lethal pump spells to use, which is kind of hot, but that wasn't holding them back before. They need better threats to pump up, not better pump spells.
Same as above, I already spoke about this guy during my spoiler article. Nothing real exciting here. Not a real 6 drop for fair decks. It does enable the
mindslaver lock in a new color combination, which is very exciting for the format (not), but it takes a clear board to get it running. If that sounds like something you are into, then give it a try. I am going to be waiting for someone else to break this card before I start playing with it.
Overrun effects make good surprise win conditions in token decks. This card fits that mold pretty well. It is a bit on the expensive side and doesn't grant Trample, two glaring weaknesses, but that won't stop this card from seeing some play. I am looking forward to seeing what a instant speed pump like this means for the format. Suddenly attacking into a pile of chump blockers isn't as safe as it used to be. Interesting card, but not going to change much about the format.
I will probably be main decking this is my budget
Edric deck on modo. I don't see the price on this card ever getting out of control.
Now their dead...now they aren't! Yea this card is real. Stylish. Big mana sorcery. Pretty much wins on the spot. Commander is the place for that kind of nonsense right? This card maks for a pretty spicy win condition and you can expect to see it in a lot of different decks. I am not going to tell you that resolving giant sorceries is the best way to win, but it is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I love
Army of the Damned! Boom zombie army! How cool is that? This card scratches the same itch, but takes a little more work to set up.
I think this card is actually well positioned in Commander because it is surprisingly flexible. It is very valuable at x=2. Even more so at x=4. At x>6 I don't see how you could manage to lose. The fact that this kill card can stretch to be a mid game value card is huge for its playability.
Lamesies. This card is substantially worse than
Hellrider, in my opinion. No Haste? It is completely blockable and has no Trample...weird. What is the point of it growing in the first place? You aren't ever going to hit them with it. Removal really makes some cards look bad. This is one of those cards.
At first glance I thought it put a counter on every attacking creature; that might have been something to look at.
Phew! That was quite the marathon. Well that is it for part one of the Gatecrash review. I'll be back in the next installment with a discussion of the answer cards in the set. In the meantime, leave a comment! Tell me what you think about the cards in Commander. Do you agree/disagree? Or is there something I didn't mention that you think is worthy of consideration? Speak up zoners! GG out!
