Explorations #26 - Alara Reborn Sketches

As each set comes out, I like to write an article discussing what jumps into my mind as I think about the way Magic is about to change.  Not only does this give me a chance to get some ideas out there, but it's also the way I prefer to learn about the new cards.  If you want to check out some of the past articles in this style, then here are the ones I wrote for Shards of Alara, and here's the one I wrote for Conflux.  Let's get started with Alara Reborn!

Cascade

Cascade is the biggest new mechanic in Alara Reborn, and represents the biggest opportunity for broken constructed plays.  Here are the cascade cards that we have to work with (get ready for a wall o' cards!):

Anytime that a mechanic provides the potential for 'free spells', Magic players sit up and take notice.  Think about the free cards from Urza's block (Time Spiral, Palinchron), think about the storm mechanic from Scouge (Tendrils of Agony, Dragonstorm).  When Magic players start talking about free spells, they start talking about some serious power.  Is cascade going to fit the bill?

Only time will tell, of course, but it sure seems to have potential.  Taking a closer look, you'll notice two main things right off the bat that the cascade cards in Alara Reborn all have in common.  First off, each one gives you something that you may want for a little more than you'd like to pay for it.  Without cascade, most of these cards simply produce an inferior effect when compared to other available options.

Why would you cast Captured Sunlight when you could cast Dawnglow Infusion, Kitchen Finks, or even Bottle Gnomes?  Why would you cast Bituminous Blast when you could cast Banefire, Beacon of Destruction, or Incinerate?  Well, for the free spell of course!  If the free card doesn't make up the difference, then you're in a situation where you're just slinging inferior spells.  Not exactly a recipe for success.

The second characteristic to notice about this set of cascade spells, is that the cheapest one costs three mana.  The only way to get any sort of cascade effect at one or two mana is with Maelstrom Nexus, which requires a five-color, five-mana investment.  Why is this fact important?  Let's say that Wizards printed very cheap cards with cascade.  Let's say that they printed a spell that cost one and did absolutely nothing other than cascade.  How could this be exploited?

Back in Time Spiral, they brought a cycle of five old favorite back with suspend and no casting cost.  Cards like Ancestral Vision, Living End, and Hypergenesis. 

This cycle offers powerful effects that are only balanced due to their temporal nature.  This is something that we can exploit with the cascade mechanic.  Let's say that you build a deck with Ancestral Vision as the only zero casting cost card in your deck, and the fake one mana cascade spell actually exists.  This would turn each of your cascades into just Ancestral Recall!  Seems pretty good, huh?

It's important to note that this strategy is valid even without the imaginary cascade spell.  If you cast one of the three mana cascade spells, and nothing else in your deck costs two or less, then you can run a set of these powerful suspend cards in order to generate these powerful effects.  It requires some restrictions, but you can construct your deck in a way that guarantees you hit a specific spell off of each cascade.

Last week I saw a deck posted on the forums that abuses this fact and looks like an absolute blast to play:

Cascade Hypergenesis

Extended Legal

Creatures 4 Magister Sphinx 4 Bogardan Hellkite 4 Hellkite Overlord 4 Simian Spirit Guide 2 Akroma, Angel Of Wrath 2 Rorix Bladewing 2 Karrthus, Tyrant Of Jund 22 cards Other Spells 4 Serum Powder 4 Ardent Plea 4 Violent Outburst 3 Hypergenesis 15 cards

Lands 4 City Of Brass 4 Forbidden Orchard 4 Gemstone Mine 3 Reflecting Pool 4 Tendo Ice Bridge 2 Gemstone Caverns 21 cards

The only card in this deck that costs less than three mana is Hypergenesis, and in fact most of the cards cost an arm and a leg.  The idea is to mulligan aggressively with Serum Powder, accelerate into either Ardent Plea or Violent Outburst, cascade into Hypergenesis (the only valid cascade card in the deck), and then bring a few huge, impressive monsters onto the scene.  It plays sort of like a Dramatic Entrance/reverse reanimator strategy.

Apparently this deck is pretty awesome in current day Extended.  I haven't tested it yet, but I'm definitely going to try it out, seems like an absolute blast.  Any deck where you can win with Akroma, Hellkite Overlord, and Karrthus battling side-by-side is a good deck in my book.  I guess what they say is true - even if a card seems like garbage (Hypergenesis, Phyrexian Dreadnought), someday they may just print something that makes it relevant (cascade, Stifle).

So there's an awesome Hypergenesis deck that abuses cascade.  Is there a cool one out there for Restore Balance, Wheel of Fate, or Living End?  The main issue in developing these decks is  that you're forced to give up the first two turns of the game, unless you get tricky with casting costs.  One idea is to use alternate play methods (evoke, cycling) to exploit Living End.  How about something like this? 

Cascade Living End

Extended Legal

Creatures 4 Mulldrifter 4 Shriekmaw 4 Viscera Dragger 4 Mournwhelk 4 Scion of Darkness 4 Twisted Abomination 24 cards Other Spells 3 Living End  4 Ardent Plea 4 Demonic Dread 11 cards

Lands 4 Polluted Delta 4 Bloodstained Mire 2 Watery Grave 2 Godless Shrine 2 Hallowed Fountain 2 Blood Crypt 2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth 4 Swamp 1 Island 1 Mountain 1 Plains 25 cards

The idea here is to use creature that evoke and cycle early, in order to get some pseudo-early drops.  After dumping some of these guys into the graveyard, cast Ardent Plea or Demonic Dread in order to bring all of these huge guys back into play.

Now I understand that this deck is very rough, mostly on the casual side, not good in its current form, and probably just inferior to the Hypergenesis deck - but hopefully it will help to jump start some ideas about how to utilize some other exploitable cards with cascade.  I've got to believe that there's a Restore Balance deck out there somewhere!

Gro Redux

To be honest, I was a little disappointed while browsing through the Alara Reborn spoiler for cards to build some casually competitive decks around.  I've looked through the spoiler four different times and it seems like most of the cards fit into one of three different categories: cards I'm not really interested in, cards that seem to fit well into streamlined tournament decks, and then cards that seem to have fun effects but cost a whole bunch of mana.  I'm personally not a huge fan out of building around a card that sits on top of my curve at six or seven, so that's a little bit of a bummer.  For whatever reason, I'm not finding nearly as many cards to build around as I did in Shards or Conflux...

That being said, here's one that seems like a blast:

I absolutely love cards that grow.  A while back I wrote about a few different decks (check it out here) that used Quirion Dryad to grow to victory, and Lorescale Coatl seems to be a natural addition to this type of strategy.  As soon as this set comes online, I'm going to play around with a Bant Aggro Grow deck something like this:

Bant AgGro

Standard Legal

Creatures 4 Noble Hierarch 4 Quirion Dryad 4 Rhox War Monk 3 Rafiq of the Many 3 Mulldrifter 2 Stoic Angel 4 Lorescale Coatl 4 Qasali Pridemage 28 cards Other Spells 4 Bant Charm 4 Path to Exile 4 Cryptic Command 12 cards

Lands 4 Seaside Citadel 4 Reflecting Pool 2 Flooded Grove 2 Mystic Gate 2 Wooded Bastion 1 Adarkar Wastes 2 Yavimaya Coast 1 Brushland 2 Treetop Village 20 cards

Not only does this deck use the new Lorescale Coatl, but also the new Pauper superstar: Qasali Pridemage.  The Pridemage is a total superstar in my book.  He's a bear+, he strengthens your other attackers, he only costs two, and turns into Disenchant when needed.  Perfect for this list.

I'm pretty sure that there's a Classic version of this deck out there.  Lorescale Coatl paired with Brainstorm and/or Sensei's Divning Top can get real big, real fast.  I've seen a few different versions running around Legacy, so there's a lot of work to be done in order to figure out the optimal strategy here.  I've seen the Coatl combined with Counterbalance/Top, Dark Confidant, Cold-Eyed Selkie, Life from the Loam, etc.

If you want to try out Lorescale Coatl in Classic, here's a starting point: 

Lorescale AggroControl

Classic Legal

Creatures 4 Tarmogoyf 4 Lorescale Coatl 1 Trygon Predator 9 cards Other Spells 4 Ponder 4 Brainstorm 4 Sensei's Divining Top 4 Counterbalance 4 Force of Will 4 Spell Snare 4 Daze 4 Swords to Plowshares 32 cards

Lands 4 Flooded Strand 4 Windswept Heath 4 Tundra 4 Breeding Pool 2 Island 1 Forest 19 cards

This deck adds Lorescale Coatl to the popular combination of Counterbalance/Top and Tarmogoyf for some additional gas.  This is an aggro-control deck that leans heavily on the control side with the spell suite while attempting to counteract that on the aggro side with a full set of the giant Coatl.  I've been messing around with something like this in Legacy while waiting for the online release of Alara Reborn, and the early results have been solid.  The number one thing that I've learned so far is that Lorescale Coatl grows huge in this deck without any real additional effort.  Just play your game optimally and this guy will become a giant monster in no time.

Let's say that you have two available plays:  one strong play, and then one somewhat weaker play that results in your Coatl growing by +1/+1 or so.  From my testing so far, I've learned that you should pretty much always go with the fundamentally stronger play.  It can be very tempting to go out of your way and grow the Lorescale Coatl in an awesome way, but I wouldn't recommend it.  That guy gets plenty huge on his own through the normal course of play - remember that he gets +1/+1 each turn just from your draw!    With the utility of four Ponder, four Brainstorm, and four Sensei's Divining Top...  you will not often be stuck with a small Coatl.  What a relief, huh guys?

He's Baaaaaaaccckkkkkkkkkk (sorta)

For the second time, Chris Pikula's invitational card is headlining the release of the new set - this time with some hot new art.  This new art is somewhat controversial.  Apparently some people consider it a slight to Pikula for his likeness to be removed from his only prize for defeating Jon Finkel and winning the Magic Invitational in 2000.  

I guess I can somewhat understand this point of view.  When Wizards decided to Timeshift Kai Budde's invitational card Voidmage Prodigy, they replaced the terrible original art with some not-as-terrible new art... but kept Mr. Budde as the center of the piece.  I was never a huge fan of the original art of Meddling Mage, so I was excited to see a reboot of this card in the new set.  The new fire lady artwork is pretty sweet, but it would have been nice to keep Pikula in there as some sort of link for the new players to the old guard.  Would have Meddling Mage DUDE in flames not worked as well as Meddling Mage BABE in flames?  I guess not from Wizards point of view.

Also it's worth pointing out that there was also a DCI Promo Meddling Mage somewhere along the line (with some badass artwork, not Mr. Pikula):

So it's not like this is the first time Chris has been separated from the Meddling Mage, but obviously this instance is the most high profile.  This also may be a bit tougher to swallow due to the fact that they turned Pikula's card from a man into a woman.  This just seems like a very odd decision to me.

Alright, enough quibbling about some of Wizards art decisions.  What does the return of Meddling Mage really mean to MTGO?

Lots of people have discussed how the Meddling Mage will impact Standard, so I'd recommend hunting around for other's thought on the matter.  Sean McKeown wrote a solid one on StarCityGames last week.  Personally I'm most interested in how the release of Meddling Mage will affect Classic.  But...  Meddling Mage is already available in Classic right?

Meddling Mage was the chase rare from Planeshift, the third set of the first block released on Magic Online.  At some point this guy fetched close to $100 on the secondary market, and just a month or so ago was holding strong at $35 or $140 for a playset.  Enter Alara Reborn and the price has been halved, down to under $18.  Will the price fall even more once the new set hits?  I sure hope so, and I already own my playset!

Why would I be happy about the value reduction of something that I own?  Because it's one step towards making formats like Classic accessible to others.  Real or not, there's a perceived monetary barrier to entry for competitive Classic play.  Some will argue that the cost of the initial investment more than balances over time when compared to something like Standard, but some will balk at the high cost of Classic staples.

Even though the reprint of Meddling Mage means that I'm suddenly down somewhere around $70 of virtual money, I think that this type of price reduction of a format staple is just better for everyone in the long run.  Not only does it help reduce the perceived cost of the format to Classic outsiders, but it also allows Classic insiders to try out some new decks.

Meddling Mage is one of my favorite cards, and at the center of some of my favorite decks.  Right now the Classic metagame contains a lot of combo, and Meddling Mage is a fantastic tool to fight these strategies.  Back when NecroSpike was first blowing up, I liked to play a UWb Fish deck that utilized Meddling Mage.  Here's the list from back then: 

UWB Fish

Classic Legal

Creatures 4 Dark Confidant 4 Spellstutter Sprite 3 Meddling Mage 4 Jotun Grunt 15 cards Other Spells 4 Brainstorm 3 Spell Snare 4 Stifle 4 Swords to Plowshares 2 Umezawa\'s Jitte 3 Bitterblossom 4 Force of Will 4 Daze 28 cards

Lands 4 Flooded Strand 1 Island 1 Plains 4 Polluted Delta 1 Swamp 3 Tundra 3 Underground Sea 17 cards Sideboard 1 Umezawa's Jitte 3 Hurkyl's Recall 3 Pithing Needle 4 Hydroblast 3 Disenchant 1 Meddling Mage 11 cards

If you want to read a tournament report with this deck, check out this link.

This is one of my favorite decks to play, it's an absolute blast.  It involves a bunch of interaction, lots of my favorite cards, and has game against just about anything.

With maindeck playsets of Force of Will, Daze, and Stifle alongside three copies each of Spell Snare and Meddling Mage - this deck has many tools to fight combo decks in the early game.  NecroSpike is a tough matchup for just about any deck, but this one has lots of different ways to fight back.

If you're interested in playing something like this, then the reprint of Meddling Mage just took $70 off of the price of the deck.  Sure it still uses a bunch of other expensive cards, but many of them are format staples.  In addition, there are some new releases that I think make sense in this deck.

Out:  4x Jotun Grunt
In:  4x Ethersworn Canonist

UWB Fish v2

Classic Legal

Creatures 4 Dark Confidant 4 Spellstutter Sprite 3 Meddling Mage 4 Ethersworn Canonist 15 cards Other Spells 4 Brainstorm 3 Spell Snare 4 Stifle 4 Swords to Plowshares 2 Umezawa\'s Jitte 3 Bitterblossom 4 Force of Will 4 Daze 28 cards

Lands 4 Flooded Strand 1 Island 1 Plains 4 Polluted Delta 1 Swamp 3 Tundra 3 Underground Sea 17 cards

Jotun Grunt is great against something like Threshold, but if you're battling Storm combo then you're going to want the Canonist.  If I was going to play this deck today, I'd make sure to have access to a full playset of Umezawa's Jitte between the maindeck and sideboard.  This card is fantastic in the pseudo-mirror (including the popular Merfolk deck), offsets the lifeloss from Bitterblossom, and turns any threat into a path to victory.

The sideboard also needs a complete revamping to reflect the current Classic metagame.  Maybe I'll take a closer look at this one sometime in the future?

Closing Time

That's it for this week, hopefully this article has helped to give you a little different perspective on Alara Reborn.  Thanks for reading!

Steve Gargolinski
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