Khans of Tarkir Set Review: Utility and Mana

Hello and welcome to the final installment of The General Zone's set review of Khans of Tarkir! If you missed the Legends, Threats, or Answers click the links to catch up. Today we will finish up the review by talking about the utility cards and mana producers.

Mana is pretty self-explanatory: if it puts lands in play, produces any mana, or filters colors it's on here. Utility cards are much more nebulous. In short, they expand the capabilities of what your deck can do. They might give you new options in construction, like engine cards or obvious 'build around me's'. They can expand your options in gameplay too: mainly through card drawing and selection. Enough exposition. Let's jump into the cards!

This set is stretching the boundaries of what uncommons are allowed to do. Granting keyword abilities to every dork in your token army is pretty awesome, even if Vigilance isn't the hottest property to pick up. Blocking multiple Creatures however, is pretty hot. Super chump blocking to the max!

I guess I should talk about how it is going to be used in Commander, but sadly I just can't think of a reason it would be. In my experience, token decks operate on a binary system. You either amass enough tokens to make a timely Overrun effect lethal or you lose. There isn't room in that strategy for something that doesn't directly impact your ability to deal forty damage. It's sad, I kind of want this to be a thing.



This is extremely powerful...and extremely over-costed. Here is a design question for you: what does this effect cost? The most direct comparison is obviously Ancestral Memories. They do the same thing and are both rare. Dig is an Instant, which generally makes things cost about one mana more. Less for good cards, more makes them worse. This costs fewer colored mana, which is better with Delve. One colored mana is generally worth two colorless mana when discussing mana costs. Green and Black mana are easier to come by so double color requirements there aren't as tricky. Historically speaking though,  Red and Blue are tougher to come up with. So an Instant version of Ancestral Memories that only costs two colored mana would then have a converted mana cost of seven. Cost reduction mechanics like Delve or Affinity generally increase the cost of an effect by 1-3 mana, so explained this way, Dig Through Time appears to have an appropriate cost.

Let's look at it another way: Ancestral Memories is terrible. It has never been considered a good card. It was bad the day it was printed and it hasn't aged well over the last decade. Neither one of these cards is as good as Impulse, a COMMON! In fact, pitch the punny, nostalgic name. I would rather have R&D just staple one Impulse to another Impulse and call it a day.



Well after railing Dig Through Time you might think that the forecast wouldn't look too good for this card...and you'd be wrong. This is a common and it much more closely matches my expectations for what a common should do. Even in a normal game situation this is going to turn into a Concentrate pretty quickly (for reference Concentrate is an uncommon). It will get much better with just a little effort to set it up.

This is the closest thing that we have had to Ancestral Recall since...well actually we just had Ancestral in Vintage Masters so that comparison doesn't really mean much. But the point I was going to make is that it is fair...and that is fine! People are going to sleep on this card. They are going to forget it. They are going to chuckle when they lose to it and hate it when they see it in their opening hand, but don't forget: It is a cheap way to draw a good amount of cards. That is inherently powerful.

This card is a little strange. I find it extra strange that they chose to give it a name that has Greek origins, since we just LEFT the Greek mythology world. They should have caught that one in the flavor department, but who knows what those guys are busy doing all day. Here is an alternative name: Hannibal Lecter.

What we have here is a sweet card advantage engine for a sacrifice deck. It also somewhat arbitrarily includes the Morph mechanic, but I guess that is what they mean when they talk about 'theming'. If you wanted to draw even more cards from your Skullclamp shenanigans now you can. Go forth my children and multiply (the cards).



Continuing with the awesome uncommon enchantment sub-theme we have a pretty ridiculous token generator. It might seem pretty lame to pay one for a 1/1 an indeterminate number of times, but if Return to Ravnica block taught me anything, it is that paying a little bit extra for a little bit extra is basically always the right choice.

Somewhere, there is a sweet counter-burn deck waiting to just sit back and Spell Burst all your junk and poke you to death with a handful of hasty gobbos. Tell me that doesn't sound just annoying enough to try.



Many people have boarded the hype train for this card. People seem to be into this kind of junk, but I just can't understand why. Doubling Season was good. It's still good. I won't deny it. It is an express lane to an ass whuppin', but it seems every year R&D vomits up another knock off and each one is worse than the last. First it was only tokens and that was fine, but nobody jumped out of bed at 3 a.m. to go grab one on Black Friday. Then we had a true successor, but they fixed it so that it worked 'properly' with planeswalkers. I used fix there in the same way that you fix a dog by chopping off its wiggly bits.

Seriously, what is the point of playing this card? Why not just have another effect that adds counters? Or GOD FORBID, just a regular threat that doesn't need fifteen +1 counters to make an impact. Are there really that many people left playing Vorel of Hull Clade?


If you have ever played Starcraft you will be familiar with the nickname creation principle of replacing syllables that sound like '-attle' with cattle. Since the following consonant is inevitably going to be a 'C', just drop that and replace it with a 'B'. Now you have a firm understanding of why I am going to call this card CattleBra Mystic.

CattleBra Mystic is a pretty generic mana dork. It costs more than it should and produces fewer colors than it should, but it is a 2/1 so the illusion persists that is will be useful for something other than powering out your Primeval Titan  Pearl Lake Ancients. For added entertainment, it can do this cute trick where it generates an extra mana the turn you un-morph it. Neato!

People have used words like 'explosive' to describe this card. I think that is accurate, in that it is going to explode literally every time you play it. No one has ever once thought; "Hmm, a Morph. Ahh it'll be fine, I'll just ignore it." If they can kill it, they will kill it. At which point you will be stuck unable to cast your fatties, wishing you had just listened to Grandpa Growth instead.

I discussed this card in one of my preview articles, so I won't spend too much time here. In short, it gives you a discount on gigantic fatties. If you can set up the Ferocious trigger you can also generate card advantage. Since that condition isn't too hard to satisfy, you can expect to win with this a decent amount. However, it won't take too long for this to fade out of style. People will remember that there used to be another, better card that they stopped playing. But then they will get distracted by some tasty Cornetto treats.



Wizards has finally seen fit to print enough Morph cards to make an entire Commander theme deck around. Conveniently, they have also simultaneously printed a build around card that rewards you for doing so.

This card isn't really bad at all, but wanting to use it says something about you. You probably got lost in grocery stores a lot when you were little. You have trouble driving on the highway because you crash into oncoming traffic every time you see a billboard.




At some point during the creative process, Doug Beyer probably got back a sketch of this card's art and immediately lost his lunch. I imagine earlier drafts had a lot more BLOOD. You can almost infer that there was a lot of it because the final iteration has NONE. That is interesting because if this happened on a planet with Earth-like physics this guys hand would explode like a guinea pig in a microwave. Everyone standing behind the point of perspective would need a shower and an HIV screening.

This card is strictly superior to previous reflect damage effects in that it requires no targets. An unnecessary complication that has lead to more unintentional losses on Modo than the F6 key.



And this children is why we should always play counterspells. The last thing you want is some hoodlum cat-man rifling through all your stuff until he finds a sufficiently sturdy club to cave in your skull with.

We have all been waiting for something like this to come along. A Genesis Wave that you could point at someone else is going to break just about any game wide open. You can't steal their lands, but you CAN take the Instants and Sorceries. Clever Imposter is the clear runaway favorite of this set, but Villainous Wealth is not far behind. This is the card that I am most excited to play with, being that I already know Imposter is going to rudely trample all over the format. This at least has the courtesy to be three colors so that not every one and their brother can play it.


For the uninitiated, this is known as the Tree pose in yoga. It also happens to be an Izzet Chronarch clone that can also pick up Planeswalkers. This is a little expensive, but the effect is powerful. I don't see why this can't make it into the top decks. It is loaded up with value and big enough to overcome most procedurally generated tokens.









Now we have come to the cycle section of the the review. Starting with the Ascendancy enchantments.

I dig this. It has about the right amount of power for me. Plus, I have never seen a card that screams louder to be played with Ghave. Which, by the way, is still a deck that you should be playing and preparing for. It is better than Doran and better than a heck of a lot of other things too. Ghave is on the short list of maybe ten or so decks that I would consider playing in Commander that don't have Blue in the color identity.



When I saw this card, I was confused. At first I thought this was the box art from Kung Fu Panda, but then I realized I was wrong: this art is much more childish.

Back on topic though, this just might be the most powerful of the cycle, but hardly the most playable. Casting one removal spell, then getting the opportunity to ambush multiple attackers is hot tech. Unfortunately, that is never going to happen. Not only would no one ever attack into this under any cicrumstances, no one even has a deck to put this into. The team America colored commander options are so shallow that you can barely justify the speculation, much less the building, of such a deck.




The first ability is quite a doozy, the second might as well be illegible because people are going to spend a long time reading it, but never use it. Still, getting free tokens for doing something that you probably wanted to do anyway is a pretty sweet way to nab some value. I would expect to see this specifically in Zurgo decks, but not anywhere else. Mardu, like Jeskai, lacks a deep selection of quality commanders.







I am pretty sure that this is the weakest of the cycle. It will be the most played though, I should think. The decks that want this kind of effect are so ubiquitous they might just start edging in on the Pigeons in Manhattan.

People are going to be upset when they open up their fifth copy of this in draft and they are going to have to look for somewhere to apply it. The phrase 'good enough for Commander' might have just quietly slipped from thinly veiled insult to desperate plea for attention.



This already has a convenient home: Animar. The tricky bit is that there are tons of great cards that would shine in Animar decks, but every card that you include that isn't itself a Creature has to be pretty insane in order to justify its spot. I think that this manages to pull that off. With the sheer volume of beaters in that deck, Haste is a choice cut of meat. There are plenty of Creature-based draw engines, but this one happens to be cheaper...and stapled onto a Fires of Yavimaya.





Now we have the charm cycle. On the list of surefire inclusions in the set, this is right up there with the tri-lands and Legendary clan leaders. Shards of Alara basically spelled out all the answers for us. The only question left is whether or not the third set will be similarly all multicolor.

So do you kill a guy or draw two? I am down for whatever. The third mode is secretly good as well. Modal spells are best when the uses for the card don't overlap onto each other. These situations are all related, but distinct: If his dudes are small, you can make your guy bigger than his. If his dudes are already big you can exile one of them. If the board is in balance, you can draw cards to break the symmetry. Quite clever.






Instant speed Time Ebbs have pretty much always been awesome and the cheaper you make them the better they get. Remember Azorius Charm? This is 66% the same card. Except now instead of Cycling you get to singe the dome. Hint: that is not an upgrade.











This is my pick for the worst of the cycle. It might be played in some other format, but it has little effect in Commander. Four toughness is not a significant barrier in a format where things cost one or six. There are better ways to make tokens and Duress, while awesome, shouldn't cost three.

The fact that you don't have a deck to play this in notwithstanding, you...well you shouldn't play it anyway.




If Abzan Charm isn't the best, then Sultai is. You can destroy Artifacts, Enchantments, and most Creatures, which makes this a hot answer card, but you can also Cycle+loot on the rare occasion that the other two modes aren't useful. Basically what that means is that this card will never be bad. I value it somewhere between your opponent's best card and two random cards from your deck. Whatever that means.





This is a much more situational removal spell than either Abzan or Sultai Charm, but if you have fatties it will do the job. The problem with fight mechanics in constructed is that the potential for blowouts is so high. It is just too easy to be two-for-oned.

No one cares about a Falter effect when you can get Triumph of the Hordes for roughly the same price by EDH standards (recall from earlier that Green mana is cheaper than Red mana).

So what are we left with, Mana Leak? No thanks.



So we have combined the Obelisks from Alara and the Cluestones from Ravnica to get Banners. The people in the creative department must all be alchemists. I don't even understand how magnets work. How exactly is a flag meant to produce the same amount of energy as an ancient magical monument or a devoted druid? I don't get it.

Setting aside the glaring flavor problems, we can talk about the glaring playability problems.They won't be played in Standard, Modern, or Commander. They aren't going anywhere in Pauper either, except my Cube.



Besides being obviously insane with certain Artifact combo enablers, Nexus isn't much to look at. When used fairly it...well quite frankly it won't be. When used as a degenerate combo piece it will have a profound impact on the format. There are already some similar ways to achieve an infinite turn lock, but we haven't yet reached the saturation point on such effects. Expect to see a modest amount of this card around the tables. Also, expect to fall asleep from sheer boredom every time that you do.




Well this sure wasn't in Shards block! Why the design team felt it necessary to print strict upgrades to the guild gate cycle just a year after their original run, I have no idea. At first glance, it would appear that these are taking the spots that would have been occupied by the Panorama cycle and Borderpost cycle, but I don't want to jump to that conclusion just yet. I am still hoping that those see print for the sake of Pauper.

On balance, these are a cheap (financially) comes into play tapped land that will easily fill out roster spots in budget lists. Seriously competitive decklists will have no use for them, but it will enable players of average means to build a greater number of decks without having to spread their collection of shocklands too thin. I think that we can all agree, a greater wealth of EDH decks will make us all happier than Scrooge McDuck in a money pool.



Believe it or not, I never really played the original Trilands in Commander much. Partly because I am partial to two-color brews, partly because five color decks are silly, and partly because I always had better options. Similar to the above logic used on Bloodfell Caves, the completion of the Triland cycle will encourage many players to start using them in all manner of decks in which they don't really belong. Tap lands are generally the enemy of an efficient mana curve and there are so many dual lands nowadays that we no longer have to play bad ones. Tapping for a third color has always been a bonus, but I would rather have a fetch land or a filter land.

Additionally: what in the world is a bivouac?

Well that's all she wrote ladies and gents...or more appropriately all he wrote, since I am a Caballero and not a Senorita. Either way we're at the end of the trail for Khans. What did you think of the set? What did you think of the review? Holler at us in the comments.

We will be back to our regular antics next week.  See ya when I see ya Zoners.
-GG