In general, I model my articles loosely as essays, and try to stick to some central thesis. This week, I simply want go over my impressions of M11 based on what we know so far.
At first, I was not too excited. I realized that this set wouldn’t really be able to follow M10, which I feel had amazing design, but what impressed me so much about M10 was the return to heavy top-down, flavor driven cards. All M11 could hope to do was match that, and it looked at first like that wasn’t really happening and some of the focus on that aspect had been lost. I feared the designers had drifted from their new understanding of what a core set needs to be, and had just gotten to the work of designing another set, rather than one where generic fantasy flavor (in the best possible way) really stands out.
Then I saw the titan cycle.
I love this cycle.
First, in terms of flavor, it’s an excellent way to create a cycle of mythic creatures. Titan is the perfect kind of creature to template that on. Powerful, human-like beings that can easily fit into any color. Moreover, it was really an underused fantasy trope in Magic. An excellent introduction.
Moreover, it represents a continuation from Rise of the Eldrazi and recent design in general to push the power level at the top of the curve. I feel like the designers looked at tournaments in the past and saw that competitive Magic has generally been dominated by cheaper spells, but realized that most players like to play with powerful effects, and they asked themselves what would have to happen to make people play more expensive cards. The simple answer is that expensive cards just weren’t good enough. These days, Magic is working harder to figure out what you should get for 5, 6, or even 10 mana to make it worth going through the effort of trying to get to that point, and I think that’s a healthy direction for the game to go. I think Primeval Titan is among the best things you can do with 6 mana, and I’m excited to play with it.
The fear, with all these powerful expensive cards, is that there’s no good answer – your opponent plays a Titan and you play a removal spell, but your opponent is already pretty far ahead. You have to have a powerful threat to match it, as answers just don’t match up with the kind of immediate card advantage these threats can provide. I’d like to see some good high-end answers that can net similar value, I think, but until then, I feel like Magic needs a healthy system of checks and balances on these powerful monsters.
Enter Mana Leak.
Mana Leak is the perfect counterspell for keeping people honest when they try to play things like that. Traditionally, Mana Leak gets bad later in the game, but you’ll almost always be able to counter a six-drop with Mana Leak (unless your opponent has already resolved a Primeval Titan). Moreover, when you trade two mana for six mana, you’re pretty far ahead. These days we have cards like Bloodbraid Elf and Kozilek, Butcher of Truth that Mana Leak is not an ideal weapon against, as well as cards like Lightning Bolt, which are still good late in the game after Mana Leak has no hope of countering them. This means that Mana Leak isn’t too powerful. It’s not oppressive, it just helps make sure the bombs don’t get out of hand. I’m happy to see it back. I strongly believe that playable countermagic is actively good for any format, even if a deck that doesn’t do anything else isn’t always the most fun to play against. We need them to keep people honest.
While I really believe that Mana Leak itself isn’t oppressive, it’s possible that it’s the last missing piece in the puzzle to make Blue as a color relatively oppressive at the moment. As I think we all know at this point, Jace is pretty absurd, and I feel a bit like the doomsday clock that ticks down to Jace’s absolute dominance once Shard of Alara rotates out of Standard somehow managed to speed up a bit, without the schedule actually changing.
It can be seen as bold to claim that Jace will be better post rotation – well, not even bold, rather, it could seem naive. It could seem like I’m saying that with the tools available now, without Shards, Jace would be the best, just because it has less competition, and I’m ignoring that fact that we’ll get other new cards when we lose Shards. The issue is that it isn’t the size of the card pool that I think is keeping Jace in check (I played 3 copies of Jace in Legacy this weekend), it’s specifically Bloodbraid Elf and Blightning that I think keep Jace in check. While I’m optimistic that Wizards has seen this problem coming and done something about it with Scars of Mirrodin, I’m only optimistic, not confident.
So how did the clock speed up? Well, I think Blightning may have rotated out of Standard a little before the rest of Shards of Alara thanks to Obstinate Baloth. Yes, you’re still allowed to play Blightning, but do you really want to? Maybe you can still maindeck it and side it out against Green, or maybe you’ll have to sideboard it so that you can bring it in against UW, but either way, it’s pretty awkward.
Aside from his impact on Jace’s position in the format, I like Obstinate Baloth. It’s cute how perfectly he matches up against Jund while being slightly more subtle about it than last year’s Great Sable Stag. It’s also cute that Green gets one rare slot dedicated to hating out the best deck 3 months before rotation each year. I hope that trend continues, just for comic value. Much like with Great Sable Stag, of course, this card doesn’t represent the end of Jund. It just gives people a tool to help beat Jund if they want to, which is good, because I think it was a little too hard to specifically hate Jund out when that was your goal. I think it’s safe to say a deck is a problem if you can’t design a remotely viable deck that can win 70% of the time against that deck.
On the subject of hate cards, this sets real Great Sable Stag award for most obvious specific purpose goes to Combust (1R: Destroy target Baneslayer Angel). It’s funny that such dedicated hate was needed, but I feel like it’s best if the color hosers in the base set are all at least good enough that you at least strongly consider them when you’re trying to beat that color, so I’m glad to see this over Ignite Disorder (I hope that’s the name of it, I’m only about 90% confident, which says a lot about how unplayable the card is… I’m not looking it up on principle).
I really hope Green walks away with a respectable Mold Adder replacement.
Tribes have shifted slightly in ways I’m pretty happy with. White gets a knight lord, which is good, because knights have always been much cooler than soldiers and there’s no real reason someone shouldn’t be able to lead them. Indestructible is a pretty sweet keyword, so I’m glad to see the Knight tribe get pushed pretty hard with its first real lord (I understand that there are others, but not in the same league).
Similarly, Black continues to stay trendy and shifts its focus even more toward Vampires over Zombies, as made most clear by Barony Vampire. Captivating Vampire is an awesomely flavorful lord, so I’m not about to complain (and to be honest, I like Vampires more than Zombies anyway).
Sphinx continues to develop into a real tribe, and we’re finally starting to see some tribal synergy with a minor “I care about the top card of my library” theme. I’m not that big on sphinxes in terms of flavor, as they kind of fall flat for me. I think I preferred djinns, but Conundrum Sphinx is certainly a powerful card.
Borderland Ranger finds its way back to the Elf tribe, but now in slim two-mana form, which is pretty cool, and Rampant Growth trades up to the three-mana slot with Cultivate, one of the cards I’m most excited to play in the set.
Another card that shifted slightly on the curve while maintaining a similar function and power level is Howling Mine, now Temple Bell. Temple Bell is a cool card. It’s like a Jace Beleren in any color that never starts going down, but it can’t be attacked. Maybe Howling Mine is an easier card to compare it to. In exchange for one more mana, you and your opponent get the card at the same time, which means you’re down a card to get the effect into play, but if they spend a card to get rid of it, they are not ahead. Moreover, they don’t get to use the card before you; they don’t even get to use it substantially before you untap, as you can wait until their end step the turn you play it to make both of you draw. Then, if you don’t know what you want to do on your turn, you can tap it again. I like that it’s a bit more skill intensive, since it adds the decision about when to use it, and even whether you want to stop using it at all, which will often happen once you’re far enough ahead and you just want to be sure they can’t catch up. Another great benefit of this card, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the real reason it was printed, is that you don’t have to worry about players forgetting to draw 2. At some point you’ll have to remember to activate it, and both of you will draw together. No missed triggers. That should generally lead to better play experiences.
One of the most exciting things about Temple Bell is this brief period where we get to play with it AND Howling Mine (AND Font of Mythos, AND Time Warp). Turbo Fog/Time Sieve decks just got a lot of redundancy.
It’s hard to say without seeing the full set, of course, how this will impact Standard, but my initial impression is that it will be pretty huge. I think it could shake things up more than Rise of the Eldrazi. There are a ton of tools to work with even in the few cards we’ve already seen. Some of them have obvious homes, while there is an obvious demand for others as an answer to something. Others are just impressive enough on power level that they’ll probably create homes for themselves.
Mana Leak has an obvious home in Blue/White, but it could also easily create a new home for itself, driven by a desire to play with more instants, causing an awkward alliance with powerful, sorcery speed White cards that have driven Blue/White to its primarily tap out nature. Condemn is another extremely powerful card for these kinds of archetypes.
Squadron Hawk has an obvious home in Next Level Bant, where synergies with Vengevine and Jace seem extremely potent, but it might also have uses in some new, more aggressive deck that can make better use of a bunch of evasive 1/1 attackers.
Primeval Titan seems like a huge instrument in bringing the block Mono Green or Green/x Eldrazi decks into Standard, or just finding Raging Ravines in Jund, where it competes with Broodmate Dragon and Grave Titan.
Obstinate Baloth doesn’t exactly have a single deck it wants to go in (although every Green deck that is currently weak against Red will at least want to sideboard him), but the need for the card is clear.
Time Reversal, Conundrum Sphinx, and Cultivate are all good enough to try to find homes for.
I’ve been using the visual spoiler on Wizards website to write this, and I have to add that the artwork for this set is very impressive. The new Shiv’s Embrace is an excellent example of really evocative art, which, while fairly generic in terms of color scheme (see Bogardan Firefiend or Fiery Hellhound for cards that I think look very similar from a distance) is really just a cool depiction of what’s going on.
This article is by no means exhaustive, and there are several cards that make me happy this time around the same way Master of the Wild Hunt and Sleep did in M10 (Hoarding Dragon, Fire Servant), but it’s safe to say Wizards has continued to push captivating flavor and interesting card design as a draw to new players exposed to the core set, and I’m very pleased to see that.
Next time around, I should have enough information to start to look in more detail at how this set will play, what the best cards might be, and what the Limited format will look like, but for now, I’m just happy about how things are going.
Thanks for reading…
Sam