Fate Reforged Set Review: Utility and Mana

Welcome to the final installment of The General Zone's Review of Fate Reforged. If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find them linked here:

Legends Part 1
Legends Part 2
Threats
Answers

In today's segment we will finish up our review by discussing every thing that is left: Utility cards and mana producers.

A mana card is very simple. It either produces mana, fixes colors, or puts additional lands into play. Easy.

A utility card is harder to pin down. Utility cards add flexibility to your deck. They expand your functionality or your resources. Good examples include Glorious Anthem and Ponder. Obviously this category is diverse. It is a catch-all. Let's see what we are working with in Fate Reforged.

I am only one paragraph into this article and I am already confused. The dragons are attacking the humans. They are besieging the Abzan's sandsteppe citadel. Why then, is the Dragon's ability defensive (preventing potential attacks) and the Khan's ability offensive (boosting the stats of Creatures just before you attack). Yet another flavor fail. The conveyance of concept on this card just isn't satisfactory.

The abilities themselves are not bad, but neither one is really powerful enough to justify play in a good Commander deck. This is a particularly bad time for a cycle of Enchanments. Last year's God cards and Dictates, as well as the recent reprinting of Doubling Season, has pushed the value of Enchantment removal to all time highs.



Mastery of the Unseen has a lot of hidden value. It is ostensibly an expensive source of 2/2 dorks. This is still completely reasonable. Compare to Mobilization and Heliod. The bonus here is the ability to flip up a Manifest(ed) Creature. That turns your 2/2 into an entire extra card. Combine that with the fact that this will gain you 5+ life over the course of most games, and we are talking about one spicy little engine.






I play Merfolk Looter in a couple of decks. No, I am not joking. Looting is actually a tremendous boon to any draw. Commander decks are full of expensive cards, situational removal, finishers, and combo pieces. The ability to smooth out your draw will let you set up more powerful late game plays. Increasing your access to removal and lands will help you reliably survive to cast your fatties. Basically, its everything that a control deck wants and it is slightly more resistant to removal than traditional looters.

As far as I am concerned, this card doesn't have a second mode.

I love taking extra turns; the effect is just so powerful. However, I do not love jumping through hoops. You have to Delve away six cards just to make this the same price as a regular Time Warp. A cost of 6UU would have been pretty insane, but the third Blue sends this card to the doghouse. It is disappointing that the design team couldn't find a middle ground.

I am very disappointed with the flavor of this card. Sarkhan literally goes to the past in this set. Why is he not in the art, DOING JUST THAT?! Secondly, He has traveled backwards, with the intention of changing the past. Delve as a mechanic is the perfect conduit for doing that. You are literally going through the things that have been used previously in the game and GETTING RID OF THEM.

Cards in graveyards have previously been used to represent ancestors, memories, and sometimes literally events in the past within the flavor of the game. The only excuse that I am willing to accept is that the character pictured in this art is somehow accidentally brought forward in time because of Sarkhan's actions. If she doesn't feature prominently in future stories or cards, then this will have been a complete waste.

The name of this card is perfect, no complaints there.


If you are going to choose Khans, you overpaid by a significant margin. Oversold Cemetary is appropriately (not really, but oh well) costed at 1B. If you are choosing Dragons in 1-v-1, you should be playing Sorin Markov instead. Combining these two thoughts, I recommend that you don't play this card.

Weird card alert! As I alluded to in my article last Sunday, this is one of my favorite cards in the set. It is going to create a very interesting dynamic in multiplayer games and is sure to see quite a bit of play. It is unfortunate that this is Red. It is also unfortunate that this isn't great in 1v1 games. Still though, this card is going to be a ton of fun.

I want to briefly dive into the psychology of playing this card. You are going to activate it asap to get your free cards. Done deal. You pick your favorite opponent to give it to and then they are most likely to cash it for some quick cards as well...but then what happens? Do they give it back? That is the big question.

This card rewards cooperation and political alliances, to be sure. The interesting thing to me is, the first person to jump off the gravy train can really screw over the other one. If I give it to you, you give it back, and then I give to to yet another person, I have four cards, but each of my opponent's only have two. In any game with an odd number of people (especially three) this gets very risky. You play it, but then have to give away control to an opponent, who can screw you over and start their own card draw treaty with a third party. This will result in them both getting way ahead of the table and leaving you in the dust. If you are going to play this, make sure you have someway to stop it from getting out of control.


This card ends up being very similar to Chandra Pryomaster, but just worse. You are locked into whatever you choose and you only get to ping stuff AFTER you lose a Creature. I would say that Chandra is already pretty mediocre and a further reduction in her power and flexibility is just not worth playing.

Again, massive flavor fail. What do either of these abilities have to do with what is going on in the art or the mechanics of these groups represented? Am I expected to believe that the dragon's siege strategy is to fly overhead, get killed, and then fall on top of the opposing army thereby injuring some of the soldiers? That doesn't sound like the tactics of an ancient, hyper-intelligent, apex predator of colossal size.


We have finally done it. We got a card that makes some sort of flavor sense, even if it is only on one half of the card. A new dragon shows up to the battle and they get to immediately scrap with somebody else's dude.

Unfortunately, this card sucks. If you choose Khans, you would have way rather had a Garruk Wildspeaker instead. It would allow you much more flexibility in which colors of mana you get and also provide other options with his minus abilities. In point of fact though, this does add mana on BOTH of your main phases, which could potentially be a difference maker, however unlikely.

If you pick Dragons then you are setting yourself up for failure. Green has a relative dearth of quality Flying Creatures and this ability isn't attractive enough to make me want to play under-powered cards.


At Green's higher rarities we see some quality pieces of card advantage and recursion. There are some high points in this card's design: It is an Instant, it doesn't require targeting of specific cards, and it conveniently dodges effects that remove your graveyard by giving you new choices during the resolution of the spell. Someone cracking a Tormod's Crypt in response to your Grim Discovery is an effective counter. Sudden Reclamation is still likely to get SOMETHING even if your graveyard is empty when it starts to resolve. I am not sure that this is worth doubling the cost of the card, but I think that it is still worth looking at, particularly in budget lists.

This land isn't exactly exciting. In Commander, virtually any nonbasic land that you include in your deck is going to tap for any relevant color anyway. Some five color decks, like say: Scion of the Ur-Dragon, might be interested, but I don't foresee this card making much of a splash in the format.


Final note: I left out a great deal of cards in this section of the review because I thought that many of them were just stone unplayable in the current format. If you feel a case could be made for one of those cards, strike up a conversation in the comments.

By all descriptions, this set looks pretty sweet. I am excited to play with the new cards in Limited and Commander. I hope you enjoyed last weekend's prerelease events and as always, leave your feedback on the review articles in the comments below. I will see you again on Sunday!

-GG