[mtgnexus] Random Card of the Day - Argothian Enchantress

[Treamayne]

Cathars' Crusade is great. . .

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in digital formats, like Shandalar and MTGO. . .

[Lifeless]

This is at the top of my list of cards that's completely fine power level wise but drives me insane mechanically. I won't run it and I roll my eyes violently whenever it's cast

[3drinks]

Saturday, December 30th, 2023; Goryo's Vengeance

[kirkusjones]

Saturday, December 30th, 2023; Goryo's Vengeance

I used to love bursting onions with this back in my legacy days with TinFins. What a silly deck that was.

[Dunadain]

A godly rate for people looking to reanimate loop their commander. Exile clause is a drag, but they didn't think to add an exile clause if it leaves the battlefield before then, so as long as you have a sacrifice outlet you can ignore it.

The splice onto arcane I don't think I've ever used, but there's probably some even cooler loops you can do with that.

[Serenade]

Goryo's Vengeance
Desperate Ritual
Cormela, Glamour Thief
Sac outlet

I think that makes infinite {r} + infinite whatever you get from the sac outlet, right?

[Mookie]

Goryo's Vengeance is cool, but this is a format where both Reanimate, Sneak Attack, and Animate Dead are legal, while the two best cheat targets (Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Griselbrand) are not. This means that it suffers from both directions - there aren't enough legends worth cheating into play to justify building a deck around that theme... and if you do want to cheat stuff into play, there are better ways to do so.

There are a few ways to get around the exile clause - self-blinking commanders like Obzedat, Ghost Council / Liliana, Heretical Healer // Liliana, Defiant Necromancer and sac outlets come to mind. I could also see it worth consideration if you're running an expensive but high-impact commander like Atraxa, Grand Unifier and want a cheap way to dodge commander tax / recur it in case it gets killed or countered.

It may also be worth consideration if you're running Ratadrabik of Urborg or another commander with heavy legend synergies. I wouldn't currently run it in my Teysa deck, but there are some strong legend-synergy cards like Primevals' Glorious Rebirth out there, and recurring Ao, the Dawn Sky / Junji, the Midnight Sky / Kokusho, the Evening Star sounds pretty sweet (assuming a sac outlet).

[3drinks]

Sunday, December 31st, 2023; Eureka and functional reprint Hypergenesis

[Dunadain]

Not my cup of tea, but that Niv-Mizzet Reborn cascade deck is neat I guess.

[Lifeless]

Top 10 Anime Betrayals.

That being said it can be fun to wait and see if people overcommit the board off these and then drop a Cataclysm.

[folding_music]

multiplayer chaos flagship card. speaks of how dumb MTG should be <3 Commander is imho a bit too game-plannish and controlly to really welcome effects like this? like it's for an entirely different way of playing the game where you cede a certain amount of control and have fun seeing each other's cards, see if your deck wins or loses by itself etc.

[OneAndOnly]

I find the two cards play fairly differently -- Eureka is more of a "You've been durdling, now let me jam out my biggest creature and stomp you" (and gives a little safeguard against counterspelling, to boot). Hypergenesis is more like "We're in an arms race now, who can draw the most cards so they can dump the most guys onto the board," with a hilarious Storm Seeker / Sudden Impact side dish. It's more of a mini-game, with a few, very different paths to victory.

[tstorm823]

For a bit, I used Jodah, Archmage Eternal to be able to hard cast Hypergenesis without the suspend. My Conflux plan was to grab Hypergenesis, Dualcaster Mage, Grozoth, (and the other two cards were protection for my nonsense, whatever worked best), and then Dual cast Hypergenesis so that the second copy could put all my 9-drops into play at once.

[3drinks]

Monday, January 1st, 2024; Up the Beanstalk

How appropriate to start the new year with undercosted new era busted CA engine cards.

[Dunadain]

It's fine in edh, beanstalk is busted when paired with cards that are technically 5mv+ but aren't actually: Force of Will, Leyline Binding, Murktide Regent, and all the pitch elementals being the primary culprits.

In a traditional format, 4 cards to trigger beanstalk is not enough, 8 is doable, but you really want 10+. That's trivially easy in modern, legacy and vintage because you can run 4 of all the best options.

Translating that into EDH, you'd need 17+ unique "fake 5MV" cards to make it equivalent. That's just not possible. In theory, edh is slower so you can just run actual 5mv cards, but I haven't seen it yet, and it's certainly doesn't concern me a much as The One Ring.

Probably most playable in some blink deck, but it's just not the same beast over here.

[tstorm823]

Honestly, it's the ETB draw a card that gets me. 2 mana cantrips on permanents with much less upside have been staples across formats, things like Wall of Omens, it's kind of wild that they're valuing the cantrip so low these days as to just casually tack it onto a 2 mana uncommon card draw engine.

[Mookie]

Up the Beanstalk seems reasonable. It draws a card on ETB, which gives it a pretty high floor. If you draw even a single additional card off it, it becomes quite good - Night's Whisper and other two mana draw-twos are consistently worth consideration. If you can draw three or more cards off it, it becomes actively amazing. I don't think it's quite as powerful as it is in other formats though. EDH decks tend to carry a low more enchantment removal to get rid of it, and few decks have a bunch of pitch spells to consistently trigger it for cheap.

I could see myself running it in some decks, but I don't think it is a format staple - I would want some sort of synergy to support it, whether that be enchantress or a deck that specifically cares about high MV cards. I'll note that there are plenty of random draw engines available, including Sylvan Library and stuff like Beast Whisperer.

...not sure if it would be good in my Tasigur deck. Looks like I currently have 25 or so spells that trigger it (including Tasigur), but I also have stuff like Bane of Progress and Pernicious Deed that incidentally kills it. Hmmmm.... triggering it off itself gives it a pretty high floor though. Might be worth testing.

[5colorsrainbow]

~When you're way up high
And you look below
At the world you've left
And the things you know
Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are~

In a traditional format, 4 cards to trigger beanstalk is not enough, 8 is doable, but you really want 10+. That's trivially easy in modern, legacy and vintage because you can run 4 of all the best options.

Just to add on you can also run up to 4 of "Up the Beanstalk" meaning the card is more likely to come into play and you can also have multiples triggering together.

[3drinks]

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024; Organic Extinction

[yeti1069]

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024; Organic Extinction

Tried this Osgir for a little while. The commander not being an artifact made this kind of hurt, even when nearly everything else in the deck was, and even with Liquimetal Torque in the deck. There were also a few instances where I just couldn't afford the steep mana cost when I really needed the wipe. Ended up replacing it with Farewell.

[PrimevalCommander]

This looks like a cool wipe, but even when I'm looking at playing many artifacts, I don't play a whole ton or artifact creatures. I would definitely seek out a copy of this if upgrading the Urza precon, which was very playable out of the box and cares specifically about artifact creatures. That one could conceivably play ~30 artifact creatures + tokens and get good value out of this wipe. Many other artifact decks might something generically cheaper that could wipe all creatures or have some additional flexibility.

[Hawk]

Like with Hour of Reckoning this costs too much if you aren't ludicrously far ahead, making it a bit win-more even in decks that can leverage it. Admittedly, it is much easier for this to be "10 mana win the game" than it is for Reckoning to be "7 mana win the game", but even so...I wouldn't eagerly seek to run this almost anywhere.

[Guardman]

I really like this card. It creates one of the main cores of Organic Extinction / Their Name Is Death / Phyrexian Scriptures / Scourglass in my Armix, Filigree Thrasher & Rebbec, Architect of Ascension Artifact Aggro deck. One sided wraths are so strong, especially when you can hit a critical mass, even if they are a little expensive and/or delayed.

[onering]

I think it's wrong to run this and reckoning expecting to get them super cheap or have them win the game when hard cast, I think those should be looked at as corner cases. I haven't ran this, but I have ran hour of reckoning and my judgement for that is simply that if I can get it to cost 4 or 5 it's a really reasonably costed wipe that leaves me with board presence and possibly attackers. I feel like Organic Extinction should play the same way to be worth it, and the question is whether the extra 3 in the mana cost is too much and if you'll really have enough artifact creatures to care. With hour of reckoning, you are putting it in token decks and it's obvious that your plan is to have a lot of tokens and have it be a one sided wipe, but with this not every artifact deck is actually swimming with artifact creatures. I feel like the ability to tap non creature artifacts to help with the cost could be big or meaningless depending on the deck.

You don't actually have to be far ahead, or even ahead at all, for Hour to be good, but organic extinction might be a different story. I wonder how viable it is in decks that just poop out a lot of artifact tokens like treasure, clues, food, etc as a general wipe. Artifact creatures are pretty rare so that clause is rarely going to be a problem if your just using it as a wrath, and something like Sam and Frodo can poop out 8 food tokens pretty easily to make this just a 2 mana wrath.

[Dunadain]

I really like this card. It creates one of the main cores of Organic Extinction / Their Name Is Death / Phyrexian Scriptures / Scourglass in my Armix, Filigree Thrasher & Rebbec, Architect of Ascension Artifact Aggro deck. One sided wraths are so strong, especially when you can hit a critical mass, even if they are a little expensive and/or delayed.

Organic Extinction isn't my kind of card, but this sounds like a fun use-case.