Dom Harvey
Contributor
I've always had a soft spot for mana doublers, being one of the few holdouts to still play Mirari's Wake. Sadly, 5 mana of multiple colours at sorcery speed is a lot to commit for that effect, especially when the tacked-on Anthem is often irrelevant; sure, you almost certainly win if you untap, but you can't reliably expect that these days.
Look at this little bugger though:
The Dictate cycle is a home-run overall IMO, and this is the best of the bunch. Ambushing a hapless opponent with EOT Dictate into an insane mana binge is wonderfully fun and circumvents the traditional downside of Heartbeat effects.
I see a lot of potential in these cards as foundations for combo decks that don't involve bloating your list with otherwise poor/useless enablers (Storm) or encouraging uninteractive games (the 'fast artifact mana' decks, Reanimator done badly).
The most obvious use is with the Urza block untappers:
All of these are somewhat playable in their own right, and even more so when we go back to these:
The Karoos have lost a lot of their appeal recently, but they serve a specific role here: as 'rituals' in conjunction with untappers that happen to be playable in normal decks (mainly in the enemy colour combos which don't have many other appealing lands, and especially in UG/xG where they go very nicely with Explore and the like). They also have cute interactions with landfall, Wildfire/Cataclysm, and many more, and there are incidentally playable untappers like and .
If we have a Heartbeat/Flare in play, we want cards to sink all that mana into:
Any dumb 8-mana animal is good for that purpose too. Ideal sinks are cards like Cyclonic Rift or Mizzium Mortars, which are functional without Heartbeat but become insane with it.
Cards that you can follow up a Flare with to buy a turn are very useful as well; the big appeal of Dictate is that it circumvents the need for those as long as you can survive the early turns.
My inspiration and desire to continue posts like these usually fizzles unceremeniously right about now, so in lieu of any more writing here's a sample deck:
Look at this little bugger though:
The Dictate cycle is a home-run overall IMO, and this is the best of the bunch. Ambushing a hapless opponent with EOT Dictate into an insane mana binge is wonderfully fun and circumvents the traditional downside of Heartbeat effects.
I see a lot of potential in these cards as foundations for combo decks that don't involve bloating your list with otherwise poor/useless enablers (Storm) or encouraging uninteractive games (the 'fast artifact mana' decks, Reanimator done badly).
The most obvious use is with the Urza block untappers:
All of these are somewhat playable in their own right, and even more so when we go back to these:
The Karoos have lost a lot of their appeal recently, but they serve a specific role here: as 'rituals' in conjunction with untappers that happen to be playable in normal decks (mainly in the enemy colour combos which don't have many other appealing lands, and especially in UG/xG where they go very nicely with Explore and the like). They also have cute interactions with landfall, Wildfire/Cataclysm, and many more, and there are incidentally playable untappers like
and .If we have a Heartbeat/Flare in play, we want cards to sink all that mana into:
Any dumb 8-mana animal is good for that purpose too. Ideal sinks are cards like Cyclonic Rift or Mizzium Mortars, which are functional without Heartbeat but become insane with it.
Cards that you can follow up a Flare with to buy a turn are very useful as well; the big appeal of Dictate is that it circumvents the need for those as long as you can survive the early turns.
My inspiration and desire to continue posts like these usually fizzles unceremeniously right about now, so in lieu of any more writing here's a sample deck:
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