Five Cards I'm Playing From Born of the Gods

Heya Zoners! Weekend Greetings to all!

With yesterday marking the official release of the second Theros block, it's high time we talk about my favorite highlights and question marks of my BotG pre-order.

5. Courser of Kruphix

It might just be me, but it seems like the only god worthy of playable disciples is Kruphix. His prophet is powerful, and so is this guy.

I'm not going to dwell on GG's assessment, because I think this card is one of the better cards in the set for all the game play knowledge Grandpa dropped in the review.

Still, this guy is a Centaur. And a moderately cool-looking one at that. Two things that Magic has been real antsy about making interesting in its illustrious history.

On the flip side, his enchantment typing is bittersweet. I love the border, hate the "this dies to Naturalize" that comes with it.

Kudos to Eric Deschamps, who rarely disappoints and often gets his work on the money cards. May the odds be ever in his favor? 

4. Champion of Stray Souls

Champion of Stray Souls is the best spelling and redux of an already existing card named "Conjurer's Closet."

Welcome to ETB abuse 2.0, which comes in the form of creature, kills things in the name of awesome, and doesn't have to die if you don't want it to. 

This obviously goes without saying, but I think these are all successful ways to define a card that calls itself a Champion.

Like Courser, I'm a fan of this card design top-down. Sweet art, name, affordable cost, ripe for abuse, and ripe for re-abuse, if the price is right.

There are always a few cards in each set that have a solid feel and design to them. They are the kinds of creatures and spells that have flavor, power, and bring exciting elements to the game that push the multiple axes by which we can interact. These are the cards I most enjoy, and I'm hoping this will be one of them. 

3. Unravel the AEther

My first response when this was spoiled was an emphatic fist pump followed by a "Hell Yes!" 

The Theros release party was actually more of a coming out party for Deglamer, as reasonable Commander players everywhere where running on the bank to get ways to deal with the Gods.

So I thank the Gods (Well, let's call them the "R&Dieties") we got a functional reprint of Deglamer. I look forward to beating face on all future Swords, Gods, and other pesky noncreature nonsense.

Get your playset. It's worth the $.40 you spend on it.

2. Archetype of Imagination

So far, I've written pretty glowing reviews about my favorite Top 5 BotG cards.

But none should glow as brightly as this one. The blue archetype is my favorite card in Born of the Gods.

Per the typical blue-leaning we see in R&D, this card is significantly better than its fellow cycle-mates.

Why? Because it makes your creatures unblockable. All of them.

Yeah, I know there's a card that already does this in blue. His name is Sun Quan, and he lords over all the Wu's.

In Animar, he also used to lord over all the "Woo's!" as well. Now, there's another sheriff in town. A prettier, skinnier one that I think is just as useful, and certainly a little more exciting for me. I love this card, and I hope I can find a way to make it playable in a couple other decks too. I can hear the voices of three Aggro-Wizard Tribal players cheering and dancing like Darth Vader just died. 

1. Perplexing Chimera

So people who haven't read my article yet are already coming up to me on the streets which I haven't been out on yet, and they're asking me, "Yo Landdrops- how can Archetype be your favorite if it's not Number 1 on your list?" 

Well, the answer is simple, anonymous mob that doesn't exist anywhere outside the hypothetical situation we now mutually share. It's perplexing. 

Specifically, a most Perplexing Chimera, and the one I'm most interested and excited to play. PC has the most upside to any prospect in the set, and its mystery brings both fun and intrigue to the game. 

I have a feeling he could very well be the life of the party in some games. Back in Ravnica, we had a junk rare named Conjured Currency that was just so close to being fun that it hurt. 

Perplexing Chimera really succeeds in all the facets where Conjured Currency failed. Where Currency had an upkeep trigger and the feeling like everyone was going to get screwed over (the world's most disappointing-yet-accurate flavor), Chimera has that free-market spirit we all know and love. The option to trade your silly 3/3 with something better on the stack is, to quote nefarious Gotham Crime Boss Carmine Falcone, "Power you can't buy." Most game states are going to stay disrupted for a very lengthy period of time if this thing gets passed around, and I predict it will agitate people.

Just be prepared to break a mental sweat. 

Well, that's all I got for today. GG's currently off the grid, so I'll be coming at you live tomorrow where I'll either be berating Duel Commander as a format or giving you a new episode of Command Zone OG's.

Until next time, don't forget to take out your Sylvan Primordials. Cause that shit is banned.

-UL

Born of the Gods Set Review: Answers

Welcome back! This is the second installment TGZ's review of Born of the Gods! If you missed the first segment you can check it out here: Part 1

In today's segment we will be going over the answer cards from the set. Answers deal with your opponent's threats and allow you to survive to set up your own game plan. Things like removal, counter spells, and disruption all fit into this category. This article is going to be much shorter than the first part, just because of how the cards were broken down within the set. This is a very creature heavy set and the removal so far in Theros block has been very disappointing.

The Cards:

First up we have a very narrow removal spell with some even more narrow opportunities for card advantage. Theros block has a strong Enchantment theme and removal like this needs to exist for limited purposes. With regards to constructed though, this has very little to offer even in the context of casual decks. Missing on Artifacts really limits the versatility and playability of this card.



I like 'big wraths' quite a bit, but seven mana is really stretching things. At this price point I would expect it to destroy literal everything or only our opponents' things. There are even better ways to get this effect at instant-speed. This card and cycle and really this whole set are all together unexciting. A very lackluster follow up to Theros, which was one of the most powerful sets in recent memory.



I rarely talk about combat tricks in these reviews. Most often they are too weak to be useful and creature combat is often not the main focus of Commander games. I think this card mainly has implications for Pauper, where Blue is really starting to mount an impressive collection of pseudo-removal combat tricks that let you interact favorably with the board. This signals a slow, but significant change from Magic's early years where Blue was basically stuck trying to answer threats before they got to the board.



This has several disappointing aspects. It has a generally unacceptable targeting restriction, but it also has the restrictive cost that is typical of more flexible counters. It is probably just worse than Swan Song, which basically sees no play because of how weak it is. The fact is that there are plenty of ways to deal with Creatures, even in Blue decks, so a new answer really has to beat the average power of those cards by a significant margin to have an impact on the format.

I am not much of a grammarian, but you definitely don't nullify people.  Nullify would be much more appropriate for a Negate-style effect. This card should be called 'Fork It'. Or 'Fork You'. 'Fork Your Guy', maybe. At least, 'Stick a Fork in it'. Did I mention that the choice by the creative team to use a BIDENT instead of a trident as Thassa's weapon of choice was absurd?



This on the other hand is pretty decent. It is definitely worse than some of the other soft counters like Miscalculation or Condescend, but soft counters are pretty good in Commander despite what people seem to think. The truth is that people never stop tapping out, even in the late game. Also, consider this: Soft counters are usually cheaper and more effective in the early game. Every game has an early game. Not every game has a late game. Tempo decks love cards like this because they plan to win before the late game ever happens, so they don't mind playing cards that are bad in the late-late.

That said, you have to do a decent amount of work to make this as good as Mana Leak and it is never going to be as good as Counterspell, so you can probably find something better.


IT'S THE BLUE WRATH OF GOD! Hide your children, hide you wives, the wave is coming and it is going to wreck your whole neighborhood! I like this card quite a bit. It buys you a ton of time in the early game and is almost just as good as a Wrath if they have to end up discarding some number of things because their hand is overflowing. This card was probably nerfed a little bit by design. If you think of it from a flavor perspective, there isn't a great argument as to why this returns fish, merfolk, and fliers, but that would make the card significantly more powerful if it didn't

Speaking of flavor, I cannot see why this appeals to Thassa. As the god of the sea isn't the largest portion of her constituency fish, merfolk, and plants? What about whales? Save the whales man. If I ever have a Water Elemental in play when this resolves, I am not picking it up.



This has been billed as the premier removal spell from the set and it is a pretty nice one. In Commander it doesn't kill a whole lot of the real threats, but it is perfectly suited to getting rid of utility creatures, mana dorks, and tokens. Token hosers are definitely important to include in any deck list, but I like the next card on our list much more for that task.

This reminds me a lot of Echoing Decay. Let me tell you a story from long ago. Echoing Decay was meant to keep Frogmite from getting out of hand, but instead Affinity became the most degerate Standard deck of the last decade. Bile Blight is obviously aimed directly at Burning-Tree Emissary, which has been tearing up Standard for months. The problem with these answers is that they aren't as good as just having your own Frogmites or BTEs and they usually aren't playable in the mirror because of color requirements. Sometimes you see innovative deck builders like Gerry Thompson tune popular lists to fight the mirror by adding Black or Red to include more efficient answers to the key cards in the matchup. While I love that kind of strategic deckbuilding, a mana cost of BB makes it slightly more difficult to pull that off.


This is a strict upgrade to Infest, a card that sees only minor play in Commander and next to no play in any other format. Adding Scry 1 is a modest, but relevant bonus and has the potential to push this card into the mainstream. As I was just saying token hosers are important in EDH and getting a little bit of extra value out of a card that you already needed anyway feels great.




What a delightfully weird little card! Black rarely gets the ability to generate mana and even then, it is almost never mana of any color. This also produces non-Creature tokens which, while not unique, is very rare.  This presents a reasonably efficient way to answer all of the new god cards that Theros has brought us, although the upside of generating a free Lotus Pedal is not enough to justify this card costing four mana. Cute, but ultimately mediocre at best.



It is not often that I get to talk about burns spells in our set reviews. Often they are too small in scale to be relevant in EDH, but 5 damage isn't completely irrelevant and this is the first card in this cycle that is actually reasonable to cast on your own turn. Burning a potential blocker to get in profitable attacks is very reasonable. Going straight to the dome in the late game is also fine. You reduce your opponent's life total and solidify your next couple plays by stacking your draws. This card isn't incredible by any stretch of the imagination, but is probably playable and is the best of the cycle in my opinion.



I love the diverse and exciting design space that the Fight mechanic created. This is very similar, but obviously better because it doesn't require you to break the symmetry. This will let you leverage any lead on board into targeted removal and likely profitable attacks. Unlike most Red removal though, this can't go to the face and sucks post-wrath. I definitely think that this is playable in the right decks and helps Red as a color, but it isn't going to crack the Commander format wide open.

I dig this art. It makes me think that Purphoros is playing a gigantic game of croquet all across the plane of Theros. Thousands of innocent bystanders are left dead in his wake as the destruction reaches epic proportions.


This is the most important removal card in the set by far. The gods have had a profound, format-warping effect on Commander. The way we build our decks must accommodate permanent solutions that allow us to remove the gods without falling behind on cards. This is a functional reprint of Deglamer, for those who don't remember. Tuck and shuffle effects are generally very good in Commander because of the physical nature of the deck building restrictions. Hiding a single card in a big pile of 99 other cards is a good way to get rid of it. I am certainly glad that we have another card to use in a singleton format, but this is still in the same color, so Black and Red decks still don't have an answer to an active god AT ALL and that isn't likely to change any time soon. I love that this made it to print, but we will need to see more before I feel comfortable at the kitchen table again.

On a side note, unravelling aether sounds like a Blue thing to do. This effect definitely needs to be Green or White, but if you look at all of the cards with aether in their name, about half of them are Blue. The other half are split between Red and colorless. Now I think that Green and Black will have one each. The more you know.

AAAAAND that is all folks. I told you it would be a bit shorter. Next up I'll be back with the final installment where we cover the last few cards in the set. That article will be even shorter still as their are only a couple of cards left that are worth discussing. After the set review finishes up we will be back to our regularly scheduled posts. Make sure to like, comment, and follow us here at The General Zone and I'll see you again soon.
-GG