The Stack #58- Favored In Fate

Happy Weekend Zoners!

Today, we're talking about our favorites from Fate Reforged. We've had Prereleases, FNMs, Game Day- basically, plenty of time to affirm and destroy any opinions we may or may not have had when did the reviews a few weeks ago.

This week, it's just your core TGZ staff sharing picks, but that's not gonna stop us.

THIS IS THE STACK!

UNCLE LANDDROPS

Uncle Landdrops-  THUMBS UP
What I love about this card is that it is instantly premium removal for us. I was shocked to see something so strong, particularly with such an aggressively costed 1U.

What I don't like about this card is that it feels colorshifted, and definitely not as color intensive. It's just hard for me to see Mastery of the Unseen and feel like this card shouldn't cost WW, GU, or some combination of these colors. It's just so much stronger than Rapid Hybridization and Pongify, which I already play.

Grandpa Growth- THUMBS UP
UL took mine. This card is insane. Even in the most Creature heavy decks, you are overwhelmingly likely to flip a noncreature. Most decks are nearly half lands. You can probably expect there to be ramp spells, artifacts, removal, counters, etc. to be at least 25% of their total deck. 25 Creatures is a lot in a Commander deck. In that case, many of them will be mana dorks. All in all, I estimate (roughly) that this will be excellent 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time, instead of being excellent, it will be interesting.

Tom- THUMBS UP
If you're running heavy Blue, there's no good reason not to run Pongify, Rapid Hybridization and Curse of the Swine. Mono-Blue spot removal is scarce - with good reason - but when it does appear it's always a shoe-in for Island-based EDH decks. Now we can add Reality Shift to the list of must-haves.

As GG says, most of the time the Manifested card is going to be less useful than what's being exiled, and even then running something like Lens of Clarity (probably a good idea now that there are going to be more face-down cards in the format) is going to clue you in as to whether the Manifest dude will be a problem later.

GRANDPA GROWTH

Grandpa Growth- THUMBS UP
I have already gone on two rants about this card and how wildly entertaining it is, so I will spare you, but I am interested in hearing other people's opinions on the card.

Bonus audience participation challenge: In the comments, explain how to consistently turn this into card advantage.

Uncle Landdrops- THUMBS UP
In a bizarre stroke of irony, this is the card I anticipated that GG would want, so I made other picks. Apparently one of those was Reality Shift, which Gramps wanted.

What I like about this card is that I don't actually care about "consistent" card advantage. Most likely, I am going to abuse it once and blow it up. Tormenting Voice is a card I already play in red decks. This is just extra icing on the cake.

Tom- THUMBS UP
Love it. Absolutely love it. It's a very flavourful Red effect. As Uncle Landdrops points out, it's not the usual Blue standard of repeatable tap-and-draw like Arcanis the Omnipotent. It's a one-and-done source of pure draw that fits very nicely with the Red theme of giving up something to get cards. It found an immediate home in most of my decks running Red, and the few times I've drawn it thus far have given me no cause to regret doing so.


UNCLE LANDDROPS

Uncle Landdrops-  THUMBS UP
Really like this card. Working on a super-budget, common/uncommon Uril deck, and this fortifies card draw while also giving me the pumps. I don't have a whole lot of cards that are just pump effects, but if I've gotta have an exception, this is a nice one. Acting as both a Harmonize and a way to go lethal in conjunction with all the cheap little Auras that have static effects, Sage's Reverie will be a nice addition to Uril, and the better Aura-Voltron decks in the format.

Grandpa Growth-  THUMBS UP
This is an easy shoe-in to Bruna decks, of which I have one. I liked flight of fancy in that deck quite a bit because you need a way to draw cards that plays well on theme. Sure you could cast Divination, but the ability to recur it with Bruna and Hanna, Ship's Navigator is important.

In that deck, this draws WAY more cards and has the added bonus of making your Creature into a legitimate threat.

Tom- THUMBS UP
Solid pick for Voltron builds, equally good for Aura-focused Enchantress builds, and, probably not a common opinion, but it's something I've been wanting to try out for a while: pretty damn good in an Heroic deck. Getting Anax & Cymede's pump effect and a few new cards in hand is value. Cheap White card draw with the potential to grab a whole new grip makes this card a serious contender for a few fun builds. The only downside I see is that it can't be run in any of these newfangled Tiny Leaders decks I'm hearing so much about.


TOM

Tom- THUMBS UP

Krenko has a new best friend! As does anyone else running Red aggro/weenies variants. Myself, I like it for a Prossh deck; throw the hungry dragon and his horde of kobolds at someone, play Dragonrage, then sac the Kobolds to Prossh and spend all the mana using his new mana sink to make him a bigger threat than ever.

What really makes this card shine is the flexibility - there's no overly-narrow specification that the mana generated must be spent on pumping your attackers, so you're free to drop this when Krenko's goblin horde is charging at one opponent and then use a supercharged Comet Storm or similar to blast a second unsuspecting foe out of the game. Boom goes the dynamite.

Grandpa Growth- THUMBS DOWN

This card is very interesting, but I haven't seen any truly broken applications for it. This mostly just acts as a Red alternative to Overrun effects. The number one problem is that Creatures don't get Trample, so you really have to assemble an impressive board to make this worth casting. I can't advise using this strategy in a format where there are 50+ legal Wrath effects.

Uncle Landdrops-  THUMBS DOWN
Magic may have invented a nice new compound word, but the card's mechanics are nerfed quite a bit, which feels reminiscent of a bygone Dragon Rage from a bygone Gyarados (For whatever reason, this attack in Pokemon only did 40 damage). Back to our card, I honestly don't see why it couldn't be RR for each creature. That still seems fair, considering that the attacking clause requires your creatures to be in combat, severely limiting time and place that this can be used anyway, and Trumpet Blast is literally 2R, "Creatures you control get +2/+0 until EOT." While not the same thing, short of having another few handy red Instants, I don't see this mana doing much but Firebreathing.

I'd also like to point out that of the 50+ Wrath effects, only a handful can be used or activated on an opponent's step without Quicken or a Vedalken Orrery, but there are many spot removal spells that hose this card. Still, if it does what it's supposed to do, this is an Overrun effect that navigates combat in a more compelling way. By being an Instant-speed trick of its own, the possibility to force trades exists, and that seems cool. My Thumbs still point down, but I'm sure I'll see an opponent beat my face with it, making it a little more optimistic.

That's all we got for this week, but it doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you! Feel free to share with us your favorite Fate Reforged tech for our favorite 40-life format in the comments below!

Pass.

-The TGZ Staff

Fate Reforged Set Review: Answers

Welcome back to The General Zone's Review of Fate Reforged! If you missed the previous installment you can catch up here: Threats.

In today's segment we will be covering all of the answer cards in the set. An answer is something that you use to deal with your opponent's threats. Answers stop or delay your opponent from winning the game. Removal, counterspells, discard effects, graveyard hate, these are all examples of answers, but there are many more out there. This category comprises many different types of cards, but the important information to note when you want to evaluate an answer is what you are meant to use it against. Context is always important, but more so with answers than with threats. Let's take a look at what Fate Reforged has to offer.

This certainly does a lot, but there are many downsides too. We have seen multiple mass Reanimate effects in the last few sets and many of them are just better than this. Immortal Servitude and Return to the Ranks both come to mind as direct competitors to this card.

The problem with rally is that you will never get to attack with the Creatures, so you can't win the game with this. You also lose access to those Creatures when they go to exile. You would rather they stayed in your graveyard at that point. Despite how strong this card looks, I just don't think that it is good enough to edge out its competitors.

Reprisal isn't good enough to play. There are just better removal spells. A Reprisal that allows you to counter opposing removal spells is much more reasonable. I think that this is worth looking into, but will probably fall short. This has flexibility, which I like, but flexibility doesn't always translate directly to power.










Hands down, this is one of the most exciting cards in the set. Blue needs high quality spot removal and this fits the bill. It reminds me of both Chaos Warp and Pongify. 95% of the time it will be better than both of those. It always costs two mana, but gives the opponent a colorless 2/2 instead of a Green 3/3. A 2/2 is probably worse than a random non-Creature permanent in Commander, including lands, so this sounds promising.

In the other 5% of cases, the times where Chaos Warp really hurts you, Reality Shift still hurts you. Potentially more even, but also potentially less. This card will lead to some funny stories, but most of the time it will do its job without burning you.



I have actually seen a few dragon theme decks in my time, which is all the incentive that I would need to play this. If your commander is a dragon, or you have 5+ dragons in your deck, you will probably be favored when you cast this. I think even the potential to Wrath the board and leave you with just one good threat is enough to win most games.

The flavor of this card is pretty awesome. It shows an iconic moment in the games story while tying together the time travel plot with gusto. The name suggests that this moment in time will have far reaching consequences. This is how you make a flavorful card. I do wish that there were a time travel flavored card that actually represented whatever spell or ritual Sarkhan undertook to get to this point though. I want to see what a reverse Time Warp effect would look like in Magic.

Fleshbag Marauder sees occasional play as a cheap and aggressive sacrifice effect. There are plenty of other cards that can fill this role, but I wouldn't be surprised if I saw a handful of these in play over the next year. Beyond that though, there isn't much to see here.










If you must die today...take all your friends with you? It is strange to me that the flavor text on this card is from the human perspective, but the spell being cast makes me think that the dragon is the one who is doing the arcbonding. That is a verb right?

Also, this card is pretty horrible. There are many other Red cards like this, where things have to go very right in order for you to get anything out of it, and it is always worse than Wrath of God. It is also Red, which we know is worse than White in this format.




I have been waiting for this card for a long time. I finally got it, but it is very disappointing. I always thought that this card could exist and be completely reasonable, but I was thinking of it costing 1G or maybe 1GG and you get to choose one or two. Naturalize is a common and it has stayed relevant through the last few years, but it is definitely underpowered nowadays. It only sees play in limited and then only in sideboards. It basically never gets main decked. If you are designing cards for your limited environment, I would want you to design sideboard cards that are good enough to be played in the main deck a certain percentage of the time. Constructed level sideboard cards should look cheaper, more narrow, and more hateful. While the limited cards need to be applicable enough that you don't have to be embarrassed to play them, otherwise they are just garbage that clogs up your packs.

As far as Commander goes, this is basically always going to kill something that is on the board. The problem is that it is a little expensive and it does nothing against a God card. Gods are slightly less popular than they were last year, but it is still a benchmark of the format. Your non-Creature removal has to interact with God cards.




I don't normally like Fog effects in Commander. They just don't do enough to justify using a whole card. Cards are always at a premium and they are by far the most important resource you have in any given game. Now, if you have a card that makes any single attack by your opponent into a complete embarrassment...that card I might consider playing.

If the Ferocious is taken care of, this is as good as any fight card, but it also saves you some damage. That seems pretty cool. Of course, the question must be raised, how reliable are your 4/4's and whether you want to expose yourself to spot removal in response to this. It shouldn't be a problem for many decks, but these requirements will limit the usefulness of the card.

Speaking of fight spells, Grim Contest is a new one. I won't say that it is a good one, or even a bad one, but I can confirm that it is real. If you're still playing Doran, and you are upset that you can't have a fight spell that works for you, now you can stop complaining. Congratulations! I cannot recommend playing this in any other deck.

That is all for today guys. Let us know in the comments what you think about the new set! On Sunday I will be back with my final segment of the review in which I will cover the remaining cards from Fate Reforged!