[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - North Star

[Sinis]

Saturday, January 29th, 2022; Volcanic Offering



Five mana value but the price is right for a four for one in one colour, no?

I actually find that this rarely does enough. People often double up on targets because people don't want to destroy inoffensive lands, etc., and then a single application of 7 damage doesn't actually destroy some threats (like Hullbreaker Horror, etc.), so it really isn't a 4-for-1...

Between the ineffectiveness and poor targeting, it.. it never seems worth 5 mana. I'd rather pay 1-2 mana and play the most efficient removal from Magic's history from the better colours.

[RowanKeltizar]

Volcanic Offering I think the only deck I would consider this in would be a mono red creature deck where I don't want to hit my own creatures with things like Blasphemous Act or Chain Reaction even then, there are probably better things to slot in. I think the niche case where this is better is if you can reliably copy it.

This suffers from limited target selection for its mana cost. It's 5cmc so you are definitely approaching or exceeding what I would expect to pay for a full blown board wipe. I think in most cases I would prefer that or a cheaper spot removal. Red already has a ton of ways to wipe the field more efficiently. It also has some premium non-basic land hate.

For creature spot removal:
Chaos Warp
Lightning Bolt
Firestorm
Chandra's Ignition - hits your own stuff but keeps your biggest thing alive
Abrade
Fall of the Hammer

for non-basic removal:
Ruination
Blood Moon
Cleansing Wildfire
Scorched Earth
Avalanche Riders
Pillage
Raze

[hyalopterouslemur]

Has a lot of potential. You usually want to make a player who isn't just about to win choose.

@TheAmericanSpirit Yeah, but Wildfire generally only hits basic lands or maybe duals. Never anything that absolutely needs taken out. (An issue with forced sacrifice cards in general if you can't force them to sacrifice enough.)

[wildfire393]

It's a card with a high ceiling and a decent floor, but ultimately at five mana it's generally not as impactful as you'd hope. Value goes up if you're playing at a table where several people are packing Cradle, Nykthos, Coffers, etc, but even in those cases it's often too slow to keep them from going nuts off the acceleration.

[Mookie]

Volcanic Offering is a card I keep meaning to try, but haven't gotten around to actually putting in a deck. A four-for-one is extremely tempting, even if it is somewhat conditional. I would definitely consider it for a deck that cared about blowing up Maze of Ith or other nonbasic lands, but if your opponents aren't willing to play around, it goes down in value significantly. Unfortunately, both my spellslinging red decks (Mizzix and Kess) tend to be a bit archnemesis-ish, so having opponents be willing to negotiate seems... somewhat difficult. Hmmm...

...it also suffers a bit from that fact that the floor is a five mana piece of spot removal, which is pretty overpriced.

[DirkGently]

I've played it a fair bit and I think it's pretty solid. 7 damage kills almost anything and killing 2 problematic lands is pretty rad. It's definitely a lot weaker if you're the threat, though, or if the table is close enough (and the chosen player is enough of a spineless coward) to choose the same targets as you. But then, if the table is even, you probably don't need to use your removal anyway. 5 is an awkward amount to hold open, though, so ideally this goes into a deck with stuff to do eot if the environment isn't right to fire this off.

[benjameenbear]

I love this card in Kalamax, the Stormsire. With its doubling trigger, it basically becomes a one-sided board-wipe that also includes a couple of Time Walks as well on your opponents. Highly, HIGHLY recommend for anyone playing Kalamax.

Otherwise, it's a pretty fair rate for a nice 4-for-1 at a minimum.

[3drinks]

Sunday, January 30th, 2022; Kethis, the Hidden Hand

[Serenade]

My buddy plays this guy a lot. Many gods and PWs. Thicc stats. The cost reduction is excellent. I'm tired of eating Urza's Ruinous Blast on loop. Sometimes he has trouble closing out games, but overall it is a strong, resilient deck….with the continual promise of growth as we get 20+ legends every set now.

[hyalopterouslemur]

Hell, this guy is made for Urza's Ruinous Blast.

The use of cost reduction with a sort of "one-turn flashback" (Yeah, I know, it's not quite the same.) for all legends is nice.

[Mookie]

Kethis, the Hidden Hand offers a very different play pattern for legendary tribal compared to Sisay, Weatherlight Captain. The cost reduction incentivizes you to cast your legends (instead of just tutoring something out), and the pseudo-flashback ability gives you a lot of longevity in the long game, plus a way to get a bunch of legends to cast. That said, Kethis doesn't quite excite me - the play pattern of 'jam as many of a card type as possible in the deck' seems a bit too linear. I suppose he also suffers from the introduction of Tayam, Luminous Enigma and Nethroi, Apex of Death, two other recursion engine commanders in the same colors, both of whom offer a bit more flexibility. Hmmm...

Still, as others have noted, looping Urza's Ruinous Blast is a very powerful thing to do, even if it will make your playgroup hate you.

[duducrash]

I have a Kethis deck! Its a creature control deck. I noted that many many taxing cards are legends so I picked Kethis up. Its a fun deck, sometimes it runs out of gas and struggles to close games but I really like the deck

[TheGildedGoose]

Like most Abzan commanders he really suffers from a lack of fair win conditions. Kethis offers an an interesting take on your standard Junk deck, trading a little versatility for efficiency and consistency, but the problem is that Abzan is a fundamentally fair color combination, and EDH is a fundamentally unfair format. Plinking away with hatebears only to lose to something like Cyclonic Rift followed by a combo is miserable. It's a shame.

[3drinks]

Monday, January 31st, 2022; Marshland Bloodcaster

It's rare to see a card I've never seen before. What a strong cheat cast mechanism.

"Can we get Bolas's Citadel?"
"No, we have Bolas's Citadel at home."
The Bolas's Citadel at home.

[materpillar]

Monday, January 31st, 2022; Marshland Bloodcaster

It's rare to see a card I've never seen before. What a strong cheat cast mechanism.

"Can we get Bolas's Citadel?"
"No, we have Bolas's Citadel at home."
The Bolas's Citadel at home.

I've never seen this card hit the battlefield. I'd imagine it would be a kill on sight card. I can't imagine it'd be used for anything particularly fair. Chunking yourself for 6-7 life for a discount doesn't sound great as it only bets you 4-5 mana. Chunking yourself for a 9-10 drop seems more like what people would be doing with this. Hence murdering it immediately is required.

[Serenade]

Elite pun FT

[PrimevalCommander]

I have never seen this card before. Looks pretty cool. Though I don't know where I would put it. Only cheating one spell per turn due to tapping is quite fair, which makes it more interesting, but still chews through life quite quickly. You need to cast something 6+ CMC just to get any mana advantage out of this 5 drop. How does this work with commanders, do you still pay the commander tax? Either way, sounds cool for some high MV commanders for cheating on the cost. The Ur-Dragon casual deck, that doesn't mind a small selection of non-dragons, would like to get it's commander in play for .

[Jemolk]

When I saw the card name in the thread title, I was wondering why I had never heard of it before. C21 explains it. More frequent that I go dredging through ancient cards for obscure, fun nonsense than that I look at some of the more recent precons once I've decided I'm not interested in their theme. Maybe I should rethink that... though not for this card.

As to the card itself, it's... okay? If you're using it in a relatively fair manner, the cost in life will really add up fast, while the mana savings really won't add up anywhere near as fast. And if it's even suspected you won't be, it's probably going to die before you get to use it the first time. It'd need to be in a pretty heavy lifegain deck to justify its use, and even then, I'm not so sure it'd be good, though it would be thematic, which I value highly with my EDH decks.

That flavor text is 10/10 though. Love it.

[Hawk]

You know we've hit peak card saturation and peak "pandemic killed my ability to play Magic" when I, who my friends call the Walking Wiki, has totally not seen this card and had no idea it existed. I imagine that'll just keep happening.

For the card itself it seems meh. I personally despise cards like Elvish Piper and Omnispell Adept - they're total removal bait and seem very win more to me most of the time. If you can cast them, protect them, and get more than a turn's value out of them, you were probably going to win with any nonsense. This card is better than its counterparts in that a 3/5 Flying Body is an actual real useful body for the mana value. But this doesn't give you anything "for free", which makes it even more removal bait and even more "I use this to cast Omniscience or I guess I die?". I can't fathom running it anywhere - as 3Drinks pointed out, if you really wanna play the most dangerous game of "spin the wheel", Bolas's Citadel exists and does it better. Also, it misses a key thing that makes Piper and Adept remotely playable - part of those cards' strengths is to lay down cards at instant speed with no risk of countermagic. This forces you to play the cards whenever you normally would. Seems awful overall.

[onering]

I vaguely recall seeing this when it came out, never seen it played though. It seems like it sucks. You're putting 7 mana down and waiting a turn before you get the luxury of paying life to cast a spell. Slow, expensive, and with a steep cost of life loss, you could theoretically get value out of it by using it to cast Ulamog turn 6, or earlier off rocks, but there are better ways to do that which are more reliable and less painful. Obviously, dramatically worse than Citadel because it costs mana to use, is limited to once per turn, and isn't CA, though Citadel is busted so its not a fair comparison. The fair comparison is the one Hawk made, to Elvish Piper, and its dramatically worse than that. It has the advantage of being able to cast non creatures, but again between the mana you pay to make it happen and how damn slow it is just damn. I'm thinking, you want to cast a 12 drop off of it, which is near the top in terms of single cost spells excluding X spells, you're better off running one of the many mana doublers available or Coffers. Crypt Ghast can get you there turn 6 off of swamps as well, without the life payment.

This seems good for exactly one thing: telegraphing that you plan on sinking 35 life into a Torment of Hailfire so the blue player can hold up a counter spell for it.

[wildfire393]

This seems good for exactly one thing: telegraphing that you plan on sinking 35 life into a Torment of Hailfire so the blue player can hold up a counter spell for it.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't even work, when you're paying an alternate cost instead of the mana cost of an X spell, the X is always zero.

I'm sure there's some deck that packs both this and Omnispell Adept and uses them both to cheat out Enter the Infinite for an "easy" win. Maybe with stuff like Sneak Attack and Shallow Grave that can let you get them out more quickly with haste. Overall though, it seems clunky and ineffective. It's enticing to think about getting a spell for free, but at 5 mana and requiring another 1B, T to get the activation, it's just not going to cut it.

[BeneTleilax]

I wish we got a WB or WBr life payment matters general to give some of these cards a home. It's not terrible, it just doesn't really have a deck right now, and isn't generically valuable enough to stand on its own.

[3drinks]

I have never seen this card before. Looks pretty cool. Though I don't know where I would put it. Only cheating one spell per turn due to tapping is quite fair, which makes it more interesting, but still chews through life quite quickly. You need to cast something 6+ CMC just to get any mana advantage out of this 5 drop. How does this work with commanders, do you still pay the commander tax? Either way, sounds cool for some high MV commanders for cheating on the cost. The Ur-Dragon casual deck, that doesn't mind a small selection of non-dragons, would like to get it's commander in play for .

If you're cheating commanders, then you want Geode Golem or Hellkite Courser.

[Mookie]

As others have noted, Marshland Bloodcaster looks pretty questionable. Cheating out something big could be powerful, but it's also extremely telegraphed... and you already need to have sunk seven mana into it. I'd probably go with Crypt Ghast or Magus of the Coffers instead - black has plenty of ways to generate lots of mana. I suppose it could make sense in decks like Vilis, Broker of Blood that specifically care about losing life.

[PrimevalCommander]

I have never seen this card before. Looks pretty cool. Though I don't know where I would put it. Only cheating one spell per turn due to tapping is quite fair, which makes it more interesting, but still chews through life quite quickly. You need to cast something 6+ CMC just to get any mana advantage out of this 5 drop. How does this work with commanders, do you still pay the commander tax? Either way, sounds cool for some high MV commanders for cheating on the cost. The Ur-Dragon casual deck, that doesn't mind a small selection of non-dragons, would like to get it's commander in play for .

If you're cheating commanders, then you want Geode Golem or Hellkite Courser.

Redundancy is good in commander I'm told. But yes, those cards are better. Though Geode Golem has many of the same troubles, and required combat damage to trigger.