MTGNexus

I saw this on twitter and decided to see what you all think

Aether Rift

What does everyone think of this card? Good bad or it depends on the table? It's not a color combo i have ever played. I'm sure it does have it's uses.

Hermes_ wrote: ↑

2 months ago

Aether Rift

It's not necessarily a bad card, though it is rather slow and i'm wondering which commander could utilize it best, since madness, reanimator etc are not usually in Gruul+ colors.
It could be fun in Gyrus, Waker of Corpses or Henzie "Toolbox" Torre, if you're not looking for hyper optimized play.
Plus, there are 5C piles that certainly wouldn't mind it. Sliver Gravemother, Kenrith, the Returned King, Horde of Notions, ... that type of thing.

Extraordinarily, apocalyptically awful. Maybe there's some microscopic niche where it's playable, but I'll believe it when I see it.

The discard being random means that you have to stack the deck extremely densely with creatures to avoid a bad hit - and you're still going to hit lands sometimes. And then even once you've achieved this, your opponents can easily tank the life loss if it's something strong. They have 120 combined life. You're not freecasting an eldrazi.

In the perfect deck maybe it gives you pseudo 2-3 extra mana per turn by discarding smallish creatures that nobody wants to pay the life for, but that requires a steep buildaround, good luck, and you still don't have control over what you're playing when. Just run a mana rock or something.

I agree with Dirk, I can't envision a deck or strategy that actively wants to play Aether Rift and be succesful with it. What did the Twitter post say about this card?

Giving all opponents the chance to stop it is really bad. If you could choose the opponent? If you got to draw a card first? Maybe a bit better. I really just see it as a slow and bad discard outlet.

(I'd instead go with one of the G/GR enchantments that lets you cheat in creatures from the top of your deck instead. And most of those are not very good either.)

Just play Sneak Attack. It does the same thing as AR's ideal outcome 100% of the time. It also costs like 6 bucks these days.

BlackbirdPlaysMTG wrote: ↑

2 months ago

What did the Twitter post say about this card?

Random discard is bad. Punisher effects are bad. Aether Rift looks atrociously bad. I won't say it it impossible for the card to work, but I am certainly dubious. You would need to be playing at an extremely casual table, or be putting enough pressure on your opponents' life totals for the life loss to be relevant.

You could replace lot of lands with land cyclers like Chartooth Cougar and that way reduce the chance of missing with the rift. Play a deck with like 25 real lands.

EDIT:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/IFiG5vxPYE6_znT_p-2beg

This card reads "At the beginning of your upkeep discard a card at random" and then a bunch more text that doesn't matter. If for some reason thats a card your deck wants than this is ok. The rest of the text is basically ignorable, it'll never put a relevant creature into play. Throwing 5 damage is pretty negligible.

This is the type of card that I love. Absolutely terrible card in 99% of all situations but I love engineering the 1% of the time it's great.

I can see wanting to somehow make this work, but...no. The only thing that could maybe make this playable is madness, but with green and no black, that's not happening. There's a reason you haven't seen it played before.

Madness also works against this because a lot of madness cards aren't creatures, which limits the hits, and if you choose to exile madness creatures to be able to cast them then you can't get the opportunity to free fast them. Basically, why not run a discard outlet you can control and which also actually does something?

The niche for this is so incredibly narrow. You need an extremely high concentration of creature cards for it to hit, because otherwise just run one of the many discard outlets that aren't random. You need a way to benefit regardless of the opponents choices, so basically a way to take advantage of the creatures hitting the yard or discarding cards in the first place, but where you aren't relying on the creature hitting the yard (meaning, you're also good with being allowed to freecast it). Honestly, it's a lot of work for what would at best be an ok value piece.