I love them, they are simple, elegant value creatures that give black (creature) decks some card draw. Yet you'd have to be really REALLY low powered before they'd be too good.
Of course they don't really hang with super pushed eight+ lines of text monsters from the past ten years or so.
I think it kind of depends on what you're doing. Phyrexian Rager is still at a good rate and has proven itself to be an awesome card in its recent outings in retail limited. I would suspect you'd want something akin to the Regular Cube in order for it to be truly great, but it wouldn't be bad in a more powerful environment. I think you might be able to get away with playing it in something like my Cube!
Phyrexian Gargantua is a little worse (by virtue of costing six mana), but I still think it would be a solid playable in all of the places where Phyrexian Rager is a great card.
I could definitely see Phyrexian Rager in the Cube linked in your bio!
Dear lord, I didn't even realize Banishing Light is in Foundations. You can now play 8 copies in your Standard deck! (Once upon a time this would have been an exciting prospect. This is not that time.)
Before previews for Tarkir: Dragonstorm officially begin, I thought it would be fun to do another of my Duelist-style teasers where I give tiny hints of things to come. Note that I’m only giving you partial information.
First up, here are some things you can expect:
• A cycle of Dragonstorm enchantments
• Two planeswalkers
• Some counters in the set: decayed, lifelink, and time
• A card that can tutor for one of two other cards
• A legendary enchantment
• A Hydra that uses a clan keyword
• A common archetype theme gets an ability word
• An instant the generates five effects
• Dragons get a new typal enchantment based on a popular Zombie one
• A new instant and sorcery subtype
Next, here are some rules text that will be showing up on cards:
• “Whenever you cast a Turtle spell, untap this creature.”
• “As long as there are three or more different kinds of counters among creatures you control,”
• “You may cast it without paying its mana cost if that spell’s mana value is 8 or less.”
• “If you put +1/+1 counters on five Dragons this way, you win the game.”
• “Whenever a creature you control enters, if you cast it, destroy that creature”
• “At the beginning of combat on your turn, if you’ve case both a creature spell and a noncreature spell this turn,”
• “Then if creatures you control have total toughness 20 or greater,”
• “During your end step, Warrior tokens you control have ‘This token can’t be sacrificed.’”
• “Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, you may search your library for a card named <CARDNAME>, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle.”
• “Spells you cast have delve.”
Here are some creature type lines from the set:
• Creature – Dog Monk
• Creature – Elephant Druid
• Creature – Yeti
• Creature – Djinn Cleric
• Creature – Zombie Advisor
• Creature – Kirin
• Creature – Snake Shapeshifter
• Artifact Creature – Chimera
• Artifact Creature – Ape Snake
• Legendary Creature – Zombie Snake Warlock
Finally, here are some names in the set:
• All-Out Assault
• Cruel Truths
• Desperate Measures
• Dragonologist
• Hundred-Battle Veteran
• Lightfoot Technique
• Rescue Leopard
• Seize Opportunity
• Stillness in Motion
• War Effort
Tune into the Tarkir: Dragonstorm Debut stream on March 18th! Watch it on twitch.tv/magic at 10am PDT (Don’t forget, this weekend is Daylight saving time! So the US will shift their clocks forward 1 hour and the start time may be different than you expect as a result.)
These are Elspeth and Ugin. Elspeth was confirmed today via an Art preview and Ugin was confirmed back when the "Tarkir: Dragonstorm" name was announced.
MaRo said:
Some counters in the set: decayed, lifelink, and time
Since Delve is in the set on at least one card, I think this may be a Sultai-themed Snake Hydra like Hooded Hydra that uses the Delve mechanic. It is possible Delve is a cameo mechanic, but I hope it's just the actual Sultai keyword again. We only have two Delve cards in Green right now, and that's a crime in my opinion.
I don't have a strong opinion on what this mechanic will be, but I think it might have something to do with creatures dying/leaving the battlefield. Alternatively, I could see this being the ability word version of Prowess, like we see on Dragon's Rage Channeler, Cathar's Companion, and so on. Finally, I think keyboarding "whenever one or more counters are put on this creature, EFFECT," might be a good potential option for Abzan.
I am probably off the mark on these, but I'm excited to see what they do!
Honestly I don't have a lot left to say about this particular teaser. There's a lot of cool things coming down the pike, but since he didn't hint too heavily at reprints and many of the hints seem to point to entirely new design space, there's not a lot I can really gleam from this. That said, it's a Tarkir set, and I'm excited for it due to that alone!
Honestly a huge missed opportunity back in the day. Would have loved this. Holy spells, elemental spells (fire, ice, earth, and so on), charms (so you can do shit like: you can choose an additional option when casting charm spells), etc
