M15 Set Review: Answers

Hello and welcome back to The General Zone's review of Magic 2015. If you missed any of our ongoing coverage of the set, you can find the previous installments of the review here: Threats pt. 1, Threats pt. 2, Legends.

In today's segment we will be reviewing the answer cards from the set.

What is an answer? An answer is something that you use to stop your opponent from winning the game. Sometimes that means dealing with Creatures, countering spells, discarding cards, and many other things. If your opponent wants to do 'it', you should have an answer for 'it'. Counterspells, removal, land destruction, and graveyard hate, are all easy examples of answers, but they can take on many other forms. An explanation of what you are trying to answer with a given card is just as important as how it is going to accomplish that.

To kick things off, we have a real doozy. How this is not a rare, I don't really understand. This card has way more salt than your average sliver. This is the first time I have ever looked at a gimmicky tribal strategy like slivers and thought, I really want to play this. Constricting Sliver could be the card that gets me to build a tribal deck.

Most of the time you can just kill the important sliver and that will dramatically weaken the sliver player's board. Ex: Muscle Sliver, Winged Sliver, or Root Sliver. You cannot apply that same tactic here. If, by way of this card's ability, some slivers exile your Creatures, you have to get them back one at a time...regardless of whether you deal with the Constricting Sliver! What?! Tell me that isn't annoying. I am absolutely certain that thousands of players will fall into this trap on prerelease weekend. That seems a little over-powered to me. Part of me is hoping that I am just reading it wrong. Slivers are bad...I can keep wearing my tin foil hat forever...


I am extremely excited for this card. Setting aside its incredibly arbitrary flavor and subtype, this combination of abilities is seductively powerful. Modern has been crying for this type of effect since the format's inception. Torpor Orb sees consistent sideboard play against decks like Twin and Pod. Torpor Orb is horrible! It is extremely narrow and has no alternative uses. This is a Flying attacker! It has Flash! This makes Torpor Orb look very under-powered.

Woweeezowee. So here we get to see what a rare version of Aetherize looks like. I am not sure anyone really wanted this to become a reality, but it is quite impressive. This card is right up my alley because it forces your opponent into making difficult decisions that have no right answers. It is most likely that they will bottom less relevant Creatures and leave their best threats on top, but they can't ever truly be sure that they wouldn't have drawn something better. Even if they get to keep their threat safely on top of their library, they still have to waste precious time and draw steps to get it back.

Make no mistake, this card is very powerful and will be difficult to play around. Make sure you know who in your playgroup has copies of this and remember to pick up a few for yourself.




I can't explain to you why the new choice of arbitrarily comical subtype is frog. I can tell you though, that this card is quite strong. It compares easily with Sudden Spoiling, although it is slightly worse. One part Fog, one part Plague Wind, this card is all value. The tricky bit is going to be setting it up to create favorable blocks, but that really shouldn't require too much work. This is where Sudden Spoiling shined though, because it featured Split Second.






Speaking of Plague Wind. I see this as a completely fair update for modern Magic. Planeswalkers are out of control. There are too many of them and they take up too much of the spotlight in top decks. I think that this card would even be safe to print at 5BB.

I get the flavor. Wherever Garruk goes, he wrecks shop. He is climbing in your window, snatching your people up. I have a fundamental problem with this though. He is out to hunt down all the planeswalkers in the multiverse, except you? Wasn't the whole advertising campaign for the set centered around him hunting down the player? But now, you can summon him as an ally and control him. Also you can apparently tell him where to walk. This card doesn't so much represent a spell as it does Garruk  just walking around and messing stuff up...'sorcery'. That's right, you're a wizard, Harry.

Yes!!! Finally we get a truly expanded version of Uktabi Orangutans! I love the elegance of this design. It has become somewhat common to print 2/1s for 1 mana in modern Magic. Which is fine, they are rarely good anyway. The awesome twist for me is that now we have a precedent to combine a 2/1 body and a cmc 2 spell into one card. No drawbacks, no weird casting costs, no silly subtypes! Perfect. I have been wanting this for a long time and I am glad to see that it finally made it to print. This will be a shoe-in to Commander decks and cubes everywhere.



Whenever I play this card, I am going to sing "Notorious", except change the words to Perilous. That only seems fair.

This is a viable alternative to All is Dust for decks that require a colorless board sweeper. Unfortunately, the decks that usually want this effect use Oblivion Stone because they want to recur it with Glissa the Traitor or Academy Ruins. Perilous Vault does not have this same potential, but I still think it will see some isolated play in certain decks.

That's all for today. Remember to like, comment, subscribe, and do all of the socials! We will return on Tuesday for the thrilling conclusion of our Magic 2015 set review!
-GG