Theros Set Review: Utility and Mana

Hey there Zoners! It's me Grandpa Growth. We're back for the final installment of the Theros set review. Today we are going to be balling out, talking about the remainder of the cards. That means the generic utility cards and stuff that gets your mana base looking all sexy.

First up we have something sharp and apparently also pointy. Glorious Anthem sees some play in token decks. Particularly builds like Ghave or Rhys, but also more fringe decks like Darien. Since this is just a strict upgrade in a singleton format I expect this to be replacing pretty much every copy of Anthem in every single deck. There are certainly better pump effects, but this has the added benefit of giving you a free Reciprocate every turn which is pretty sick. I like these legendary weapon cards; they play so well in longer, attrition-based games and they can provide so much incremental value. You can expect to be seeing quite a bit of them in the near future.

This one feels a little bit weird to me because the abilities don't really work all that well in tandem. If you have a big token army on offense you probably don't have a problem just throwing a soldier in front of their guys or whatever, but I like how this added versatility plays. It keeps this permanent relevant even in situations where the Anthem effect is no good.

This is a huge update to Coastal Piracy, although I am not sure that is relevant because it never saw much play. The first effect is insanely powerful. The 1 Drop Edric deck completely flipped the competitive format and made us all re-imagine what a decklist, and a single Magic card for that matter, can mean in a game of EDH. Flying Men really isn't a thing in Commander, but if you draw a card every time it hits, and it gets to hit early and often, then we are talking about a sick little one drop.

This is what synergy is all about. And this card has synergy. It is insane in the Aggro-Control decks that want it, but completely worthless outside of that archetype. The second ability lets you theoretically control the board and get your guys to connect and draw cards, but...let's be honest. If you are playing a good Edric deck, all your guys have evasion anyway and your opponent isn't ever going to resolve a spell so they certainly aren't going to be able to block ever. Also, why forks? Fish don't need forks. Silly creative team.

If you are part of the 'in crowd' then you will know that drawing cards is the hip thing that kids are doing these days. If you are even further 'in' you are probably playing Night's Whisper and Sign in Blood in your Black decks. Cheap card advantage wins games.

Early advantages can snowball as the game continues and they often prevent you from getting pinned down by disruption or a board stall. Being a whole turn slower than the two previously mentioned cards is a significant cost, but if you top deck this later in the game it is much more powerful. If you have ever cast Divination and been disappointed you'll know what I am talking about.

The same problem NEVER occurs when you cast Foresee. Even if the cards you end up with are just as bad, you had CHOICE, which is crucial. You DIDN'T have you draw two bricks followed by another two bricks, you get to skip the feel-bads. Scry allows you to orchestrate better sequencing to maximize the time-value of your plays. It allows you to see more cards and thus gain more information about your future draws and the composition of your deck. Even just from a purely psychological standpoint, this will result in you feeling better about your draws whether they are truly better or not. Sidenote: I find cognitive biases a fascinating area of study and one that has direct applications to the mastery of strategy games.

I have no shame about low hanging fruit. You can waste time feeling guilty or you can grab that mess OMNOMNOMNOM.

Soooo yea. Lifelink, eh? Honestly, the first line of text could read: "This is a meat popsicle" and I would still play this card. The activated ability is just that powerful. Rebuying creatures is an incredible way to punch through damage late in the game, generate card advantage when your opponent has to block, and in conjunction with the Lifelink it will keep you alive.

Black decks typically have no problems leveraging their life as a resource. Gaining big chunks of life is pretty cheap and its easy to turn that life into extra cards or Buyback on Slaughter, etc. I am very excited to play this because of its high power level and high level of synergy with cards like Necropotence, Dream Halls, and Geth.

Many mono Red builds include Fervor: Heartless Hidetsugu, Goblin Combo, Godo. So, in terms of power level and instant inclusion in existing decks, this card is a win. 3/3's are also pretty big for tokens, but sacrificing a Land is a high price to pay.

Even silly Red aggressive decks have ways to take advantage of extra mana and expensive late game spells that they want to be casting. I see this being most useful on an empty board where you control some equipment, just after a board sweep, for example. Making a token and suiting it up with a Sword is excellent value and very likely to get you back your 1 card down payment.

Finally, we have arrived! This isn't my favorite card, we will get to that later on, but it is assuredly the card that I will be playing the most from Theros. This is oozing value from every pore and I love it. I have never met an incremental advantage that I didn't like. I can't think of a Green deck that doesn't want this and there are a LOT of Green decks in Commander. Between The Stack, my spoiler articles and this Set Review I have given this card ample treatment so I will leave it at that for now.

This card is expensive, especially for a mana producer, but it has high upside. There are boards where it could conceivably produce upwards of ten mana in a mono Green deck and any card that produces multiple mana is subject to abuse in combo decks. Now, I don't actually think that this potential will be realized; this card is just a little bit too weak to see mainstream play in quality decklists

This is more like it. Fixes all five colors and blocks early threats. That is a lot of work from a mana dork. It reminds me especially of Sakura Tribe Elder in that it prevents some early damage and can solve all but the most intense mana problems.

While this is an upgrade on Birds of Paradise because it resists Mental Misstep and Lightning Bolt, but it still isn't good enough for Grandpa Growth because it dies to Wrath of God, which Tribe Elder and Rampant Growth can both safely ignore. I still expect this card to see a lot of play in multiple formats so the initial price tag could be a bit of a barrier.

 This will see play for the full length of its Standard legality, but if it can't make the jump to Modern the price boom should eventually come down, leaving more available copies for casual formats, where this card will enjoy a long and prosperous future.

This is kind of a dorky card and there are already plenty of cards with similar effects. This card may not see much play, but the ability to tap a Gaea's Cradle or Cabal Coffers multiple times in a turn is powerful enough that it is worth mentioning. I am unsure what effect this being a 1/2 instead of a 2/1 has on its playability, but I typically think of lower power as being worse for a creature regardless of its toughness.

On a separate note, this is a Satyr, which is one of my favorite mythical creatures so that is a plus in my book.

If Bow of Nylea isn't my favorite card then this certainly is. I love me some Fact or Fiction. I love it so much that I play it in literally every deck I own that can manage to put an Island in play. It is basically never bad. Five cards is so deep into your deck that you will almost always find something useful. I have Jhoira, Niv-Mizzet, Nicol Bolas, and Maelstrom Wanderer decks that can't wait to get a hold of this.

Unfortunately , this isn't fact, fiction, or Fact or Fiction, so let's go through some of the changes and what they mean. First, this card is more colors. It is harder to cast and forces you to play Red (you wanted to be playing Blue anyway, trust me). This restricts the card to only being played in these multicolor brews. As it happens this is one of the most powerful two-color combinations in Commander though, accounting for some of the top decks in the format.

Second, let's talk about the changes to the wording. Everything sucks. FoF allowed you to choose the better of the two stacks, yielding superior results essentially every time (assuming you make optimal decisions, which isn't a trivial assumption, mind you). Keep that parenthetical statement in mind, we will be returning to that idea.

Your opponent is most likely going to award you the worse of the two piles, barring some sort of multiplayer political chicanery. This makes it so that Steam Augury CAN brick where FoF never would. If you only flip one relevant card, no matter how devious your split is your opponent will be able to keep you from having it. In the situation where you flip over a good mix of relevant cards then it may make the choice difficult, that doesn't change the fact that your opponent now has the easier skill test.

With FoF they have to choose the split without knowledge of your hand. By forcing you to move first and making the split yourself you are giving your opponent information about what you value and what you may need. From a sheer numbers perspective, with FoF you only ever have two options, which makes choosing between them an easier task. With Augury you must make a choice that has a minimum of ten possible outcomes and the actual permutations of a five card set, where every card is unique and every split is legitimate, number well over a hundred. That is a lot of room to make mistakes ...which you will now be making instead of your opponent (as I hinted at above).

Overall, this card is substantially worse than its predecessor. Is it still good? Most likely yes. Remember that even bad versions of good cards are good because of the need for redundancy. Gifts Ungiven is very similar, but simply more powerful in this regard. The results are likely the same: you get the worst two cards from the available set, but I can think of a few stacks of cards where that is still quite good. I know I kind of went bananas about this card, but this is an area of game theory that is of keen interest to me and a topic that I will be visiting upon in greater depth in a future In General.

Colorless mana fixers are excellent, particularly when they provide card advantage. I make consistent use of both Armillary Sphere and Gem of Becoming. The fact that this can block, attack, carry equipment, and actually accelerates you on mana means that this card is poised to make something of a splash in both multicolor value decks and dedicated artifact theme decks.

I haven't talked about how much I hate the creative team for about thirty minutes while I have been writing this so I figure I am about due for a diatribe. Why is this an elk? Who makes these kinds of decisions? Why is it an anything? I am of a mind to think that all Artifact Creatures should be Constructs. Since it was built by something else (confirmed by flavor text),  it is a Construct...or a Golem, which is just a magical construct. If it wasn't built by some other type of creature then it really shouldn't be an Artifact seeing as it isn't artificial.

It seems like every block nowadays has a cheap knock off of Lightning Greaves. Some colors don't have as much support for Flying as others so I can see it being necessary to have some effects like this every once in a while, but those colors: Green, Red, and Black, have Haste creatures. Not to mention other types of evasion. Ergo, this card is either redundant (in the bad way this time) or unnecessary.

A good threat will have one of these abilities or some kind of protection from removal already. Greaves is so sick because Flying is way easier to come by than Haste or Shroud so it tends to work out in the general case AND Shroud and Haste don't typically occur in the same color so there is very little overlap. In fact, only Green and White have ever really scored this Haste, Evasion, protection trifecta and even then it only happens at the highest rarity.

Well. This isn't the kind of thing I typically go in for. It places you at a raw disadvantage on cards. An investment which you can only recoup by blind-flipping more relevant permanent cards than your opponent. This requires a big commitment in deck building to have both: more relevant hits than the sum of your opponents and better ways to manipulate the top card of your library. The problems with this are manifold:

-You don't want to fill up your deck with instants so you will be short on counters and removal, which is hardly ideal.

-You will inevitably have a number of 'soft hits' things like extraneous lands and ramp, Sensei's Divining Tops and associated Trinket Mages, etc.

There is almost no way that this can contribute to a victory in multiplayer. It will create interesting game states and the sort of over the top plays that Commander is famed for. However, not every one appreciates it. The randomness of this card and the general trend that it will help out your opponents some, even if it helps you more, lends itself to a political style of game play that can be both appreciated and hated.

I personally do not play and do not recommend that other people play group hug or group slug decks. If you want to play a deck with dedicated themes, that is fine, but if you are only building your deck with the intent to skew multiplayer games you are neglecting the most basic strategic concern within any game: you are supposed to try and win.

Compared to previously printed cards that fall into a similar vein (Knowledge Pool, Eye of the Storm, Cast Through Time, etc.) this has a unique advantage: It's is cheap to get into play. If you are playing something like this you are obviously trying to abuse it, so savvy opponents will know to try and disrupt your plan, but at one mana this is virtually never going to get countered on turn one. I just can't see myself using a Force or a Spell Pierce to fight this. To be honest, I can't imagine fighting over this on any turn, it just isn't good enough to be worried about.

Phew, I have gone on some long-winded asides today. Let's see if we can tighten up for the home stretch here.

Nykthos is a powerful card. Anything that produces multiple mana can potentially be abused to great effect in Commander. Devotion is a new thing. It is going to take a while to really get your head around keeping track of Devotion in multiple colors for multiple players. I can virtually garuantee that the God cards will be popular, so in the near future Commander players will be building their decks with this concept in mind.

After that learning curve has taken its course we will be seeing a lot of this card and it will be doing a lot of work. Start picking up copies now, you will need them for the days to come.

I really like this new set of dual lands. Always coming into play tapped is kind of a bummer and really hurts decks that really on tempo at critical spots on the curve.

Scry is powerful though and it will let you keep a larger variety of hands knowing that you will be able to influence your draws, even if it is only by a single card. New Benalia is deceptively strong and it is whole leagues behind this cycle. It doesn't produce multiple colors and the color it does produce isn't Blue, Black, or Green.

Even if this theoretical cycle of 10 isn't completed these five lands will still see significant play. They are excellent tap lands for people who are into that sort of thing and the control they give you over your draws is useful both early and late.

Last and most certainly least we have a Shimmering Grotto knock off. The original iterations of this card didn't even make it into my Pauper decks so it's unknown whether or not I will ever actually start this in Commander.

Well that is it. Theros in three easy payments. I am very excited for this set and am looking forward to many great stories for the prerelease, which at the time of this being written, has not yet occurred. Get out there and slay some monsters my friends and remember to leave your feedback in the comments below!

-GG