Just stumbled onto this strangeness via Gatherer. Anybody played with it?
I haven't, but let's break this card down real quick.
A 5-mana sorcery is a big ask.
Persecute is a very fun mass hand disruption tool that's typically
too fair in anything but a slower cube, and it's
. So that's a big red mark on this card.
You also need your opponent to have more than 3 cards in their hand for this to do anything. Why? Because 1-mana targeted discard exists, as does 3-mana, discard-2-card tools. If we're looking to disrupt a strategy, making Villain discard 1 of 2 cards is typically fine, and that's a 1-mana investment, as is 2 of 2 cards as a
1,
2, or
3-mana investment.
This is a 5-mana sorcery. Assuming no ramp, that's a T5 play. By T5, to do
anything worthwhile with this card, you need:
- The mana free to cast it (i.e., what is Villain doing T4/5 that you can take this turn off to cast a hand disruption effect?)
- Villain to have at least 3 cards in hand (this can be a big ask, depending on your format speed and card selection tools available)
- A deck built to maximize on this temporary hand-weakness (ideally some really aggressive deck)
Assuming we even care to cast it still at this point, what do we get out of this? Putting, say, 4 cards of Villain's on top of their deck and picking 4 cards out to replace them isn't going to pay off in the vast majority of cases. Assuming you're on the play, Villain is gonna draw a card next turn on their own T5, and is probably also on 3-4 lands themselves by this point. If you replace a hand of 1 land, 2 creatures, 1 planeswalker with a hand of 4 lands, then they are gonna be more likely to draw gas over the next few turns, as you've hugely decreased their odds of drawing lands by giving them so much land. You've also helped make their draws be plays more consistently, by bridging their gap from, say, 3 lands to 7 lands, so anything they draw over the next few turns is probably going to be live (and there's a lot of Magic Math articles out there about how hard it is to get to 6 mana by T6 consistently). You're stuck with the prospect of trying to pick the 4 worst cards for the situation to give to Villain, and you're going to probably only have 1 or 2 turns to really maximize on that. That's gonna be tricky, because a cube is a much stronger environ than, say, retail limited, and this is
already assuming several best-case scenario factors in the caster's favour (1. you can cast this T5 and not lose the game for doing essentially nothing, 2. Villain has 3+ cards in-hand, 2.5 Villain's hand is actually a strong hand, 3. you have an aggressive deck 3.5 that can curve out to 5 in black consistently, 3.8 and can close the game in 1-2 turns upon resolving this spell); we thus end up with a win-more card that makes
massive demands on both players to even begin to be truly "win-more".
So essentially, I'm saying that it looks kinda like garbage. It's a neat exploration of some design space, though I'm guessing we probably won't see anything like it that's playable;
fateseal is an arguably "better" variant of this, and R&D doesn't like fateseal. For a similar feel, you could plant the tools for
Lantern Control, which I ran in one of the very first playable versions of my cube, and found to be really fun, despite being a tad rough to plant in an environment organically.
