In General: Conspiracy - Withholding the Beef

Welcome to a special edition of In General where we will be discussing the new casual product: Conspiracy. The set is somewhat small already, and contains only a handful of new cards. The set is also designed exclusively to be drafted, meaning that stereotypically under-powered Commons and Uncommons are littered throughout the set. For these reasons I will not be doing a full review of the set. Rather I will talk about a few key cards that I believe are playable in Commander. Next week I will discuss a few logistics issues that arose with the design and release of the set and give you my impressions of the mechanics. But first, a question:

New Cards

Starting at the top, we have a whole string of cards with the new mechanic - Will of the Wisp Council. Naturally, it is almost exclusively for use in multiplayer. However, based on the way some of these cards are worded, the possibility of a tie in the voting makes for interesting results in two-player games. Take this card for example. The result with always be that you choose a card....and you just get that card, regardless of what your opponent wants. That just to happens to make this one of the most efficient and versatile recursion effects available at common. And it is attached to a 3/3 Flier? Deal.


So I can't imagine anyone who is going to give you an extra turn for four mana. In a multiplayer game, if your board is empty as well as your hand you just aren't winning that game and no amount of pleas made to your opponents are going to help. You are almost certainly going to get the cards, but that is cool. It is a more splashable Concentrate. I can work with that.



Same story again here. You can almost always expect a single opponent to pick what is worse for you, but in a multiplayer game the same is going to be true in a different way. If your opponent casts a spell and then you Split Decision it, the other players are incentivized to just vote denial. Then you and the controller of the original spell are down a card, but no one else is. In effect, they profit from you trying to get cheaky. Either way, it is an easier to cast Counterspell OR Twincast. Same deal.

What is going on in this art though? It this guy going to get his hands chopped off? Sometimes creative gets a little carried away




This Demon token is going to be enormous. I am predicting that this will wipe away a few Creatures and then you get a 5/5 or bigger. The piece that this is missing is the word Instant somewhere in the middle of the card. Sorceries are so bad in Commander. They really have to be doing something incredible in order to be worth while.





Legacy playability will definitely help this card. Four point burn spells are pretty much always playable. Fetching Badlands instead of basic Mountains isn't free, figuratively speaking, but it will give access to a whole 'nother set of Flame Rifts. The deck isn't great, but this certainly isn't making it any worse.




The planeswalker, one of the few chase cards in the set at all, is a hit for fans of the lore. For constructed however, it isn't likely to make much of an impact. I can't think of any Commander deck I own that would want this. Perhaps Niv-Mizzet combo? It is cool to see Dack get his own card, but this is a little bit of a dud for me. The abilities just aren't relevant enough to the typical game. Stealing a Sol Ring could be a big game, but if they have had a Sol Ring for three turns and haven't done anything broken with it, they should have mulliganed.


Dack may be a lame card, but members of his posse have definitely got the juice. A Clone that gives Haste? This is something I have been waiting on for a long time and it is going to be crazy. This is the first and only card with Dethrone that I am going to be discussing. The ability is just very simple, very bland, and not powerful enough to change the landscape of a game. The possibility of cloning a Titan, Primordial, or Chancellor will have to be enough for now.



Drawing an extra card every turn is sweet. Getting to draw one on your opponent's turn is an excellent bonus to boot. Triggering Morbid is very easy, as we saw in Innistrad block limited. Commander is just absolutely FULL of removal and stuff to point it at, and Black/Green is the perfect color combination to get the maximum value out of this enchantment. Solid card, if a bit unexciting. Definitely worth slamming into decks like Savra or Glissa.



A Reanimate effect that doesn't restrict the targeting to your graveyard is awesome. A Reanimate effect that doesn't target at all is a card in very good company. This has none of the symmetry problems that plague things like Exhume, and you get the immediate bonus of being able to mill extra cards from both player's libraries before you decide what to return. Insane. Groundbreaking may seem like a strong word to use, but this truly is. Expect to see this card. It will come to define the standard for U/B reanimation effects.



The final new card I will be discussing is, in my opinion, the LEAST interesting of all the Will of the Council cards. I can say with certainty: I AM NEVER voting to return all the nonsense in my opponents' graveyards to the battlefield. No matter what the perceived benefit is, or the expected value, or how quickly you think you can win, I wouldn't do it. I won't even be playing this card. It is straight up worse than Immortal Servitude and Sunblast Angel. I don't even think any deck has room for another copy of either of those cards, particularly when this substitution has such high variance attached. Silly hats? No thank you.

I'll leave you now with a word about the reprints and my final thoughts on the set. There are a number of high profile reprints included in this set. Cards like Mirari's Wake and Pernicious Deed are highly sought after by the Commander community and making reprints of them available is a welcome gesture. However, the majority of these important reprints are at the Uncommon rarity or lower and don't command a particularly high price. Mortify is awesome and oft-played, but it wasn't pricing anyone out of Commander. At the same time Misdirection will drive up the price of Conspiracy packs as players clamor to open Legacy playables.

The decision not to release this product online makes sense. Programming the new multiplayer draft format into Modo would be a logistical challenge, but this product doesn't look like it is going to have enough appeal to the average player to actually make people want to play it on a consistent basis. The gimmicky draft-altering cards are not going to be making widespread appearance in Cubes, and with good reason. They are largely absurd, and as I will discuss next week, if you wanted this kind of thing you already had access to it: in your imagination.

I was disappointed by the Conspiracy product. There was a distinct lack of powerful new cards. The mechanics didn't to anything to stretch the bounds of design space or give me anything that I wanted more of. These, combined with the under-promotion of the product, has left me with a bad taste.

That is all for this week, Zoners. Until next time.

-GG