Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight
- Thread starter Dom Harvey
- Start date
So, I've been playing the latest iteration of the Planar Cube on Arena for a few drafts and a card that I really like (and probably has not been talked about much since it's an alchemy card ist this one:
It's a bit on the expensive side at 5 mana and two colors to boot but the turn you play it you make 5 artifacts, it crews itself the next turn, it has some wrath protection and the attack trigger is sweet but not oppressive. The spellbook is here: https://scryfall.com/search?q=spellbook:"Support+Skyforge"&unique=cards and consists of 8 medium to very good flying vehicles that enter as creatures.
If anyone is doing spellbooks in paper (I'm not... yet), this is a cool card.
It's a bit on the expensive side at 5 mana and two colors to boot but the turn you play it you make 5 artifacts, it crews itself the next turn, it has some wrath protection and the attack trigger is sweet but not oppressive. The spellbook is here: https://scryfall.com/search?q=spellbook:"Support+Skyforge"&unique=cards and consists of 8 medium to very good flying vehicles that enter as creatures.
If anyone is doing spellbooks in paper (I'm not... yet), this is a cool card.
One of the many Alchemy cards that plays extremely well online but would be rough to do in paper. Drafting from a spellbook in paper in particular is annoying, I wish you just got one wholly at random so that it would be easier to skip reminder text / yet another component/decision to understand for people who haven't played Alchemy. Still, would love it if they just printed them all in paper.
On the note of cards that demand you have a separate token/peripheral section just for it:
I've been really enjoying Fire Nation Occupation. It reminds me of the excitement Drake Haven brings about, but not only do you not have to pay, but you get the first hit for free, which makes all the difference. I love cards that ask you to build/draft/play differently than your typical Black deck would ask you to, and this one is potent enough to justify the effort. Do I like having a unique token that has an ability that's essentially useless in most decks with it? No, but the card is cool enough to overcome it, and hasn't gotten the attention I think it deserves. And, of course, it kicks ass in tempo decks like these.
Some of its best friends (besides Mana Drain and Doom Blades are also fairly recent cards. Katara, Waterbending Master is a Kitsa/Baby Jace variant that gets the trigger from attacking, and can be a real card advantage engine later in the game. Its experience counters are gained in the same way as Fire Nation Occupation, so it's an obvious pairing.
Transpose is maybe less obvious, since its second trigger happens during your turn, it's a card I've really found myself enjoying across a bunch of different archetypes, and the Black Mage token is pretty stoked for the kinds of decks you want Occupation in, which is also why the understated Black Mage's Rod is also a good consideration for these black spells-matter decks, even if, again, it doesn't itself trigger the Occupation. The much more popular Astrologian's Planisphere is not so different from the Black Mage's Rod in the typical game I've been playing with the two cards (despite being much better on paper), so if you're on the Planisphere, I'd recommend also looking at the Rod more closely.
I also generally like flash creatures, and they've been getting a bit more attention lately. One in three of my blue creatures has flash now, and so you can easily play a deck where half or more of the creatures can be trigger your Fire Nation Occupation, like this one from a month ago.
Draw/Go may be a mostly dead archetype in Cubes that have been keeping up with the pace of new creatures, but Fire Nation Occupation helps scratch part of that itch, and I encourage more people to check it out.
Is this the mana rock I've always wanted to make Wildfire happen? One-card archetypes are just so much to play with and where else can you ever play Wildfire or Burning of Xinye nowadays. Even if it's showing it's age in 202,6 I'm just too big a fan of when the stars align to ever remove it from my list. I have fond memories of my Vivi Wildfires deck I drafted in the last year that was a blast to pilot as I did the thing with Vivi razing everything to the ground once it grew big enough to supercharge it out.
Anyone get to try it out yet?
Is this the mana rock I've always wanted to make Wildfire happen? One-card archetypes are just so much to play with and where else can you ever play Wildfire or Burning of Xinye nowadays. Even if it's showing it's age in 202,6 I'm just too big a fan of when the stars align to ever remove it from my list. I have fond memories of my Vivi Wildfires deck I drafted in the last year that was a blast to pilot as I did the thing with Vivi razing everything to the ground once it grew big enough to supercharge it out.
Anyone get to try it out yet?
I put it in my list for this exact purpose, and swapped in Jeskai Revelation for my Jeskai slot for maximum Tablet-ing. It lasted a few weeks, but I took it out before it got an in-person test because I kept seeing Cursed Mirror in packs and realizing most decks wanted that one more, and it felt like overkill to have two red mana rocks, especially when I don't run that many X-spells or big mana instants and sorceries. I still like it, but I'd need to shift my Cube -- particularly my red section -- to be much more red-focused if I wanted to play it again.
Yeah, between Cursed Mirror and Loki's Scepter it has become a choose your own adventure deal with what you want to push. I'll likely be swapping between the 3 over time as I figure out what makes the most sense for that slot. It's definitely more a Constructed darling right now with how much redundancy you get with multiple copies of cards and maxing out efficiency with castable spells from the ETB mill. Might be one to just test out for now and relegate to the sidelines unless they print other big mana spells or cards with kicker that can maximize the jump.
Cursed Mirror is for Ux and Wx combo decks. I assume Miles is talking about having a red section that rewards red-focused archetypes, or other colours reward "red"-based decks, rather than a red section that rewards other colours.
Edit for clarity: Cursed Mirror also works just fine in Rx decks that are doubling up on a threat but it rewards non-red shenanigans in a way that Tablet doesn't, where Tablet works better with Rx shenanigans like casting from other zones or big impactful sorceries with a heavy Red commitment in the pips.
Last edited:
you assume me to be far too smart, though I do agree
I meant my red section is not spell-focused enough for this, it has too big of themes for discard, tokens, and artifacts to properly focus on spells-matter and big spells