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.