Reviewing 2013 Part 2: The Misses

Welcome on back Zoners! It's me your old Grandpa Growth here again. Once again, this article is a continuation of my end of the year series. In case you missed it, scroll on back through the archives to catch part one wherein I talked about my shining moments of veracity with regards to set review predictions. Today in part two I am going over my biggest misses. The faux pauxs. The fox poxs. The whiffs of most embarrassing size. Let's start with the most recent and roll it on back to the beginning.

In the Commander 2013 set review I declared this to be the far an away home run Legacy plant of the set...since every set seems to have one of those nowadays. I declared that this would go immediately into basically every Legacy deck ever and all would prosper as it handily dominated the format for decades. I didn't quite go that far, but you get my drift. This card is amazing and extremely strong and is absolutely making a showing in Commander, where I basically guaranteed that it would, but it only cracked into Legacy in the form of a one-off sideboard appearance.




I confidently declared that this was the best of the godly weapons and that it did 100% of everything you want a card to do in EDH. This, as it turns out isn't exactly true. In the set review I missed on the chance to make the comparison to Obelisk of Alara; a card which is exceedingly mediocre and only merits inclusion in five color decks based on novelty. Bow of Nylea has some striking similarity, not that the abilities are identical, but that they are all just a bit too small to be effective. You want to shoot down fliers, but 2 damage just isn't enough. You want to grow your threats, but +1 at a time is a costly, long-term investment that is often going to end in removal...and sadness. As for the life gain and 'remember' effects, they really just aren't that useful. These two modes are the least desirable of the four. The life gain, just like the damage to fliers, just comes in to small a package. If I want to gain life, I want to gain life. I'm talking huge chunks. This card is a ton of incremental value, but unfortunately it really isn't up to snuff for Commander.



Boy was I wrong about this one...at least for short stack Magic. In Theros limited this is one of the top commons. In Standard this is one of the scariest Nykthos enablers. The R/G devotion deck is truly degenerate; capable of producing amounts of mana that I can only describe as shenanigans. I thought that this was the kind of stuff that they were trying to take away from Magic. Standard devotion decks remind me a bit of Dredge decks in Legacy. Sometimes you look up from the board and ask yourself: "Are we even playing the same game?" They just spent 30 mana on turn four and you played a tap land. How is this nonsense fair? Anyway, back to talking about this Satyr guy. I was right about one of my comments from the set review: In eternal formats this hasn't made much of a splash. There are a multitude of substitutes that are equal to this in power, so there isn't much reason to play this instead of a different, generic accelerator.



I am going to start putting up flyers at my local store. Missing Kitty. If you find him put him in your decks. I was scared as all get out of this cat...and not just because I am jealous of his luxurious hair. I have been fed up with the absurd power creep within Magic is recent years. It doesn't seem to be slowing down; moreover, it appears to be accelerating at an accelerating rate. Oh wordplay, how fun art thou. Let's be serious for a moment though. In some formats from recent memory this would have been one of the premier cards in the set. Its very existence would have forced people to either play GW beats, or metagame against it. It says something about a format when there are 2/2's for one, 3/3's for two, 4/4's for three, 5/5's for four, 6/6's for five....AND NONE OF THEM HAVE DRAWBACKS. Some of you guys haven't been around long enough to know how strange that is to say. This is a very different game than it used to be.

This is really more of a pseudo miss. The card itself isn't so bad, but it is just part of an incomplete puzzle. R/B Beatz is just a tragically underpowered deck in every format. Two-color aggro decks are rarely as successful or as fast as their mono-colored counterparts, despite the fact that the power level of the cards is significantly higher. There is just a glaring hole in the color pie metagame. Black/Red just doesn't have the right answers. It isn't fast enough to reliably threaten turn 4 or 5 kills in Commander, but it doesn't have answers to the most powerful late game strategies. On the surface you might think that it would have game against tokens, White weenie, or Green ramp decks, but the Black/Red decks are so reliant on creatures to kill that you can't rely on using sweepers to gain an edge. Swarm decks rebuild faster. White can protect their threats (and their threats are better than yours), and Green can do degenerate things with mana or Enchantments (which you have no way to interact with). It is pretty unfortunate, but I just don't think the day is coming where this card will be the shining star...of the underworld.


I think the exact word that I used to describe this was 'unsure'. That actually doesn't sound like as much of a whiff when you say it like that, but I was saying it euphemistically. I though that this was worse than Mana Barbs, and it is, but that isn't the point. It isn't bad. At all. In fact is is almost as good as the Barbs and that is a good place to be. This still does a ton of damage if you cast it early and acts a lot like Armageddon if your opponent has a low life total. This doesn't provide a stone cold lock. It doesn't provide inevitability. It does however do a surprisingly high amount of damage to the table. It is an entire light year ahead of Sizzle in terms of multiplayer burn. I want to say that this is somewhat innocuous, but that is probably just lingering self-doubt. I underestimated this card severely. A mistake I would admonition you against my faithful readers.

I rated this below basically every other iteration of Garruk in the M14 set review. The results from recent Standard tournaments show that was a lie. As it turns out, the +1 ability is very strong. It requires some significant sacrifices in deck building in order to maximize the effectiveness of the ability, but if you can hit reliably it is back breaking. For a plansewalker, upping loyalty and drawing cards at the same time is the nut high in my opinion. This is perfectly at home in Commander. Big green decks. Stompy. Animar. Momir. Some pretty real decks. I shouldn't have been so surprised. This is a pretty real card.



I already used the missing cat poster joke...so I basically have nothing to say except...I am going to my local store and put of missing dog posters. Seriously...this has Hexproof. Which is already snapped, but mono Blue is one of the best decks in both Standard and Commander. Bestow just got printed. Armadillo Cloak just got a spiritual reprint last year. Equipment exists. What is going wrong here. Geist of Saint Traft was a multiformat all-star, but this can't make it out of booster draft. What gives brewers? Don't feel like letting the dogs out? Not down to do it doggy style?

I said this card was bad. I don't always know what I am talking about. This is exceedingly weak to counterspells, since it is functionally a seven drop, but I say this thing all the time about how expensive spells should just win you the game and I missed the fact that this card absolutely does. An unblockable, untargetable, 8 power smash engine is actually enough to make grown men cry. I don't like to travel by sea, probably because I miss the boat so much...


Hah...yea. For contrast, I said this card was really good...that Momir was getting all the fancy new toys. Green/Blue is over-powered...ban everything! The combination of this being very expensive, even for a value-added counterspell, and the fact that is isn't actually a Creature card makes this a very lack luster answer. It is a lot easier to search up a Green Creature than just about anything else in the game save for lands. This is going to be on the sidelines for a while and that is probably for the best.

This card makes me feel all weirdy inside. Extort is crazy powerful. I definitely understated that in the set review. I just wasn't fully aware of how much a two point life swing means. It adds up to a lot over the course of the game. Sure, you end up one turn behind the curve, but you gain so much life and EACH opponent loses some every turn. Blind Obedience is the perfect card to compliment this effect. It buys you back a lot of the tempo you give up by casting your spells one turn later. It nerfs Haste Creatures and Artifact mana so that they are just a bit less powerful. It completely hoses defense-only creatures as well! They are losing life to the Extort so you have a ton of extra reach in your deck PLUS they have to skip a turn of blocking with each new threat they play, making it much more difficult to actually stabilize the board. This card is crazy strong and a real bear to play against.


So, it has been clearly demonstrated that I am not all that great at math, despite having done some time in engineering school. I recall saying that this was just too slow to serve as a kill condition. That is absurd. This gets out of control very quickly and as a five drop is certainly fast enough to present a very aggressive clock.


This is another case of me saying: "it does everything you want" and what actually happened was: it doesn't really do anything. The ability to turn Rolling Thunder into an Instant is awesome, but the ability to turn it into a Silence really does draw much appeal. In practice, this is just a very expensive burn spell and you can find something better if that is all you were looking for.





This hasn't gained much traction, but I am still standing strong. It is an enormous two drop. It is big on power and small on cost. It can be just as large as 'goyf and you won't have to get a mortgage in order to buy a play set. Again, I could be missing the big picture here, but I am sticking to my guns. I think this cad is great and severely underrated.

This is the last card of my naught list. I feel a bit bad for this little guy. The changes to the way Legendary permanents work really hurt the potential of this card for Commander. It is still a powerful value engine, but the ability to take out Commanders on the fly was the only thing that really excited me about this card. Now all that is left is an over-costed copy effect that has mild upside. Not worth working for. Oh well, maybe some day the rules management team will swing back in favor of identity theft.


In the words of one of my favorite philosophers, Forrest Gump: "And that's just about all I have to say about that." I have made plenty of mistakes this year. I hope you enjoyed watching every one of them happen. Hopefully, you can look forward to more of the same! Next week, the final Sunday of the year, I will be looking back at my favorite posts and and least favorite posts from this year on TGZ. The ups and some of the downs.