I could say something clever here. Or I could tell you what I learned about the cards I played with, and against, this weekend. So rather than bore you, I’ll just say that I went 4-1 (losing my sole round thanks to me not following my own damn advice from last week’s article), won nine packs*, and had a lot of fun.

Here’s the fruit of my first touch of Planar Chaos, baby. Impressions, tourney results, and actual Sealed Card pools will arrive next week.

Crovax, Ascendant Hero
I gotta say: for six mana, he’s a little pricey, but considering that he pretty much decimates a Black and Green board — bye bye, you little Saprolings and you x/1 regenerators! — I consider him to be a kind of modified board sweeper spell. Kind of like an expensive Engineered Plague that leaves a wall behind.

Because you know, you are not attacking with him. Not if you have any significant White guys on board at all. He has no evasion, and though he can protect himself, the whole point of the Crovax is that he beefs your other guys. A Crovax launching himself back to your hand in mid-combat, with damage on the stack, can leave all of your other White dudes eating dust.

The old Crovax flew. I liked that. This Crovax? Pretty darned cool. Very potent at stabilizing leaking boards, where you’re almost good enough to block but not quite. But a force of damage? No.

Dust Elemental, Stonecloaker, Whitemane Lion
I had all three in my deck, and the rare occasions I lost were pretty much caused by me having too many bouncy-bouncy critters stuck in my hand while I had a single non-bouncy guy to work with.

That sucked, but that’s the sort of thing that’s really only going to happen at a Prerelease event with its attendant three packs of Planar Chaos, so let’s talk about them individually.

Stonecloaker is the awesome one out of the three. It’s fairly priced, it can yank a guy out of combat to save it or remove it in response to a Strangling Soot, and it removes cards in the graveyard. The only issue — and this is something I’m a little leery on — is whether you must target a card in a graveyard when it comes into play. I’m pretty sure, given the wording on the card, that you cannot cast it unless there’s a card to target, but two judges at the Prerelease told me otherwise. If they’re right, this card is an awesome house, because you can go to it any time you darned well please. If not, then this card becomes a lot more awkward.

Unfortunately, since there’s no pre-tourney Judge FAQ for me to consult, I can’t say. More on this next week, when I know more.

The Whitemane Lion, however, was purely a defensive spell. Generally by the time I was ready and able to use him, the tempo loss of exchanging a valid critter to put a vanilla 2/2 on the board was crippling. Thus, he got used as a cheap yoink! spell to save my guys whenever my opponents got mean, with the consolation prize of a fresh 2/2 attacker ready to go the next turn.

The Dust Elemental? Returning three guys is a lot to ask, but the price is right and the 6/6 damage to the face is quite nice. I did it once at EOT against an R/G/w player, who was really helpless against it, but a Black or Blue player might have made me pay significantly for putting all my eggs in one basket. It’s a great card in some circumstances (and it gets better with Saprolings, making it great in W/G Sealed builds), but more testing is definitely needed to see how often this guy sticks the field.

Still. A fun card to cast in response to Damnation. “Oh, I’ll just put my best cards back in my hand...”

Mycologist
I had two of ‘em. I’m not sure if they’re playable, because the last time I saw this card in its original form was before the whole idea of “Limited Play” was even a glimmer in the mind of some greedy Wizards sales exec.

That said, it’s a cheap way of producing Saprolings and a reasonably decent usage for them once you’ve sent them into combat. I like lifegain a lot, especially if said lifegain comes when I’m saving myself a turn of damage via chump-blocking (or, more ideally, when I’m sallying forth with my Salad Army).

But is it worth a card? Especially in the two-slot? This format’s reasonably slow, but an 0/2 wall that takes three turns to get going? I don’t know. I guess it depends how many Thallids you have.

Voidstone Gargoyle
This, however, was totally awesome. It could get killed, of course — what couldn’t? — but given that its coming into play usually neutralized my opponent’s worst threat, that was a risk I was willing to take. That Magus of the Arena? Now it’s just a 5/5. That Pyrohemia? Now it’s useless. That Mire Boa that’s hitting you in the face? Well, now you can kill it, because it can’t regenerate.

That’d all be nice, but Voidstone Gargoyle comes with the lovely bonus of “being in a color that’s now dedicated to flashing things in and out,” so with Momentary Blink you can immediately reset your Gargoyle at will, or — more slowly — trump some larger and more recent threat by yoinking it back into your hand with a Whitemane Lion. Nice.

Chronozoa
I was not impressed when I saw the card. This is because I misread it casually and thought that it merely put 3/3 tokens into play. Putting 3/3 copies of itself into play, however, is completely over-the-top — it replicates, splitting and dividing into new and ever-growing armies every damn time, which for four mana is pretty damned awesome.

This wins for “Most Flavorful Card In The Set.”

That said, the nice thing is that almost every color can do something about it except for, as usual, Green and White. Blue can bounce it, Red can kill it, and Black can destroy it. But if you have some way to protect it, it’s a beautiful, mana-free victory condition that’s a very strong card.

I mean, I’d pay money for a generic 3/3 flier for 4. One that will replicate? Sign me the heck up.

Erratic Mutation
Considering that most Sealed games involve a mana curve that starts at two and winds upwards, barring the odd Misery Charm or Chromatic Star, this is pretty much guaranteed to kill at least an x/2. Not bad for three mana, and it’s in a color that needs it.

Jodah’s Avenger
This is, as they say, expensive but stupid good. I wish I had something clever to say about it, but the two times I had it played on me it just dominated the table. Of course, I was playing Red against it, which makes me a little more hateful of it, but for six mana you could do worse.

It’s no Dragon auto-win. But it’s solid enough that it’ll make it into my deck every time.

Reality Acid
If I were a really good player, I guess I’d have a firm opinion on this. I don’t think it’s particularly good, being both slow and expensive, but sometimes Blue needs an answer to something and this will kill it in a few turns. It was a real hassle when I had it played upon me, slowing me down.

Thus, the question of “Is this good?” may depend upon your deck. If you think you have the kind of slow deck that gets into ground stalls — in other words, a deck that’s pretty much not Blue — then you may want this if Blue’s your splash color. But if you have a quick deck that really wants to blitz on tempo, this is gonna be a handicap. Yet it is a slow out.

All right, what do you think?

Cradle to Grave
Speaking of “What you think,” here is what I suspect will be one of the most closely-analyzed cards in the set (for Limited play, anyway), because it’s just such a weird card.

Assassinate was widely criticized for being too slow. You had to take the hit, and it was three mana, and then it was a sorcery. Now we have a two-mana instant that can hit any non-black creature, but you have a one-turn window to use it before it’s completely useless.

Is it any good?

The answer is that right now, I like it. In the course of five rounds, I played it maindeck just to see (and because, hey, removal), and I had two spots where the card shone:

1) After a slow draw, when I was waiting until turn 4 to start churning out my real offensive, an early third-turn Cradle to Grave often robbed my opponent of tempo and let me recover long enough to start turning the tide my way.
2) The late game, when I was holding on to a tenuous lead, and my opponent cast something that would have stopped me dead (or close to it), but whoops! Cradle to Grave!

That said, there were three places where the card sucked:

1) When my opponent was playing heavy Black. And this is Sealed, where you usually don’t get a choice of the removal you open, so you tend to see Black a little more heavily than you do in Draft.

2) When my opponent was in the lead, and I had this useless spell in my hand and I could do nothing to stop him because his guy came into play two turns ago when I had tapped out.

3) In the mid-game, when I was using up all of my mana to cast my three- to five-mana spells so I could build up a board presence, and my opponent’s three- to five-mana spells were clearly superior to mine.

It’s hard to say whether the card is flat-out capital-“G” good, because a card that almost by definition is going to get stranded in your hand a lot of the time isn’t a card you want to run all the time. And it’s also not a card you want to save mana for — because unless you know that your opponent is going to dominate you the next turn with something huge and splashy, you generally want to cast your best card, not hold back your mana in an attempt to neutralize a power play that may never come.

So is it good? It’s not bad. But I think in the end we’ll come to accept it as a late-game card that may not save you when it needs to. It’s insurance. And some decks want that, and others do not.

Mirri the Cursed
OH MY GOD, I LOVE THIS CARD.

For the record: Despite a lot of games for fun, I ran into an astounding no dragons at the Prerelease. And I also ran an amazingly-abnormal B/W deck, meaning that I had D’Avenant Healer to pretty much trump every Errant Ephemeron that got in my way.

But in the deck I had? Well, nobody ever expected to see Mirri on turn 4, so she was like a mini-Lightning Bolt. And then, given that I had some nice White bouncy-cards (see earlier), I often had the turn 5 play of “Attack with Mirri again, end of your turn play Stonecloaker to bounce her, recast her, attack for six damage in the air on turn 6.”

GG, guys, GG.

I only triggered her vampire ability once, and that was when I was in the lead and my opponent was chump-blocking. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a lot of massively inflated Mirrae in the air any time soon. But for what she is, she’s a house.

Rathi Trapper
Every bit as annoying as you’d think. The “Pay B to tap” is a bit of a pain in a color that wants you to use a lot of Swamps for everything you play, but hey. I like it.

And, may I note, it’s a Rebel. Search ‘em if you got ‘em, fellas.

Akroma, Angel of Fury
I would just like to register my complaint that a Red creature that is supposedly an Angel of Fury does not have haste. She’s apparently very angry, but not enough to get to work on the turn you pay eight damn mana for her. This, to me, makes her significantly worse than her white brethen.

In other news, at the Prerelease there was a girl who had angel wings tattooed on her back, glistening with the fresh sheen of a new tat, with the word “Akroma” hanging between them. Now that’s hardcore.

Magus of the Arena
This card caused more headaches than any other card that I saw, and again the judges seemed a little more uncertain than they should have been. The two questions that continually arose were these:

Can you tap the Magus of the Arena to put it into the battlefield against the creature of your opponent’s choice? After all, a 5/5 is likely the beefiest thing you have on the board....
My answer: Yes. The wording on Magus says, “3, Tap: Tap target creature you control...” Because the “Tap target creature you control” part is after the colon, not before it, it is not a cost but an effect. You can tap an already-tapped creature, if you want, so sure. Send it in.

This confused a lot of people, though, so perhaps reminder text might have been an order. And again, if I’m wrong, I’ll clarify next week.

Can you respond to the damage done by Magus of the Arena?
My answer: No. Like Contested Cliffs — a card that won the award for “Most commonly-asked Judge question” back when it was legal — the damage does not stack.

The issue is that the damage done isn’t part of a spell; it’s part of the resolution of a spell. The whole “Choose a target, the creatures do damage to each other” all happens as part of one seamless package, where you do not get priority in the middle to intercede to save your guy; the target’s chosen, the damage is done, and state-based effects will whisk your guy off to the graveyard before you have so much as a by-your-leave. By the time you have the input to cast, say, a Healing Leaves, you guy has taken fatal damage and is already off the table.

In other words, if you say, “I choose this guy” as the Magus of the Arena’s effect, they’re already in the battlefield. You have to make sure any healing effects/regeneration shields/pump effects resolve before you choose your target guy.

The same applies for bounce spells. If you say, “I choose my Crovax and then bounce him,” you don’t get the chance to bounce him “in response” to the damage. He’s dead. You can bounce Crovax before you choose targets, but since Crovax won’t be in play you’ll have to choose another creature in play to face the Magus.

Now, I could be wrong. I don’t think I am, but again — that whole “lack of a Prerelease FAQ” issue is troublesome, so I must rely on my past (non-Judgely) knowledge to guess. If you’re curious, I’m sure a judge will back or correct me in the forums, and if I am wrong expect a correction next week.

Simian Spirit Guide
This dude has the best flavor text ever. But unfortunately, I won’t have it in the system until later today (I have to manually input the cards from Wizards information once the set is officially released), so you’ll have to look at the card for your reading pleasure.

Stingscourger
Dammit, people, this guy is not a turn 2 play. He is a turn 4 or 5 play, when you’re clearing the way for last turn’s beef to strike your opponent straight to the face.

He is very very nice. But I’m still not sure when I should pay the echo.

Kavu Predator
This was a very, very funny card to cast on my turn 2 in response to my opponent’s turn 1 Essence Warden. Followed by a Healing Leaves to my opponent’s face.

Truthfully, I would not recommend this strategy to all people, but I had a sucktacular draft deck. And it was hysterical to see them being pounded by their own lifegain.

Necrotic Sliver
Combine with Pulmonic Sliver for an endless string of Vindicates.

Home on the Strange
Yes, my webcomic! If you haven’t been reading, the storyline is such: Izzy, the troubled-but-conflicted semi-girlfriend of too-nice-guy Tanner, has been invited to Seth’s house. Seth is a sleazy GM who only invited her there to seduce her... And he offered to introduce her around to the local art critics in exchange for being by his side. Hmm.

Izzy refused. But Seth showed her the deep, dark secret — literally — in the basement of his house. And this week, she has to wonder what sort of man Seth really is....

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy

* - Yes, I can play. I checked with Scott Johns, and because I saw only the same preview cards that you did, I wasn’t disqualified from prerelease play. I could have seen the whole set, probably, if I’d asked, but I really hate that so I didn’t.