Welcome back to the Modern Flashback Series! Though I don't know if the exclamation point is warranted here, as it's by far my shortest article in the series so far—there's a reason I chose this week to write my
initial 2016 Prize Pack article. That could be bad timing though, as the
MTGO Announcements this week allude to a “special limited time League event” being announced Wednesday. The timing means it should be the traditional “paper-to-MTGO lag time” Cube for Kaladesh, but it could be a way to surprise-release Conspiracy 2 cards and get them on MTGO in time for Eternal Champs, especially now that a Bant Stoneblade deck with
Leovold, Emissary of Trest Top 16-ed a SCG Legacy Classic. The other good news for this series is that Magiccards.info finally updated with everything, up through Conspiracy 2—there are a couple of glitches (the Oath of the Gatewatch Expeditions are still missing, and Standard is still Khans-forward), but presumably those will be fixed in the near-future, and it means the links in my articles shouldn't break anytime soon. Anyway, on to Magic 2011.
After the excitement around Zendikar block, Magic 2011 was an attempt to continue the trend in the resonant core sets people enjoyed in Magic 2010. The main difference is that M11 was the first core set to include a non-evergreen mechanic. However, that's a lot less exciting now, as the mechanic chosen was Scry, which has now become evergreen—heck, Scry only appears on five cards in M11 (most of which are blue), while it appears on ten cards in Magic Origins (spread through all colors but white). There is also an effort to promote the Planeswalkers (which are still the Lorwyn 5 at this point), as they each have a common and uncommon spell aligned with them. Otherwise there isn't much to cover, so much so that I'm going to link to
the M10 Review—seriously, over 40% of the non-rares are direct reprints from M10, and that doesn't count all the reprints from previous core sets (or other sets we've covered in the Modern Flashback Series). That's what sinks these early core sets, despite the potential: most of the “rank-and-file” limited cards are the same from year to year, and while that's an inherent problem with core sets (as you can't just use the new mechanics to vary the basic effects), the later core sets will get better with that (especially as the “guest mechanics” become more meaningful for limited). Anyway, onto the colors!
White:
Unfortunately, white is one of the colors hit most by the repetition—15 of the 29 cards are reruns, and standouts like
Blinding Mage,
Pacifism,
Stormfront Pegasus,
Serra Angel, and
Armored Ascension are among them. One important card is
Infantry Veteran, which promotes aggression in the color (along with
Inspired Charge ). There are also a lot of common fliers, as generic cards like
Assault Griffin and
Cloud Crusader are joined by
Squadron Hawk, which unfortunately doesn't have as many payoffs as when it appeared in Eternal Masters a few months ago. Moving up to uncommon,
Ajani's Pridemate is fine as a bear, but there isn't much support around it (
Child of Night and
Brindle Boar are fine, but the best enabler in white is
Tireless Missionaries, and that isn't saying much—please don't play
Ajani's Mantra).
Roc Egg is also good, but only becomes great once you have sacrifice outlets (more on that later).
Blue:
Black:
Red:
You may remember how I ravaged red in the M10 set review, and unfortunately not much has changed:
Lightning Bolt and
Fireball are still bombs, and while they're joined by
Chandra's Outrage, the rest of the set is warped around those removal spells, especially the creatures (the best common creature might be
Vulshok Berserker). However, the biggest change comes from a card that isn't even new:
Act of Treason was downgraded to common (setting a new trend for temporary stealing effects). While
Act of Treason by itself is still a fine aggressive card, the fact that black has both
Bloodthrone Vampire and
Viscera Seer means that red/black is an actual archetype, as we'll cover in a bit. Up at uncommon, the pair of
Fire Servant and
Earth Servant are both decent creatures,
Chandra's Spitfire is an okay creature (especially for red) worth building around (even if most of the enablers are cards you want already), and
Shiv's Embrace is swingy, but makes your terrible creatures worth something by turning them into dragons.
Green:
While the “lucky charms” are still here (joined by fellow near-worthless lifegain card
Elixir of Immortality), there are actually some decent artifact creatures this time around—sure,
Stone Golem isn't anything special, but
Juggernaut is as strong as always, and
Gargoyle Sentinel is actually good as well. As for non-creatures,
Crystal Ball is slow but very good, and while
Warlord's Axe looks awful, it's not awful in a format of fliers.
Now it would be time for some archetype talk, except that there isn't much to talk about, as most of the archetypes are the same as Magic 2010. The main differences are that green's ramp plan is a lot better (which makes the green/blue deck more-cohesive than M10) and red is a lot better overall (replacing
Seismic Strike with
Chandra's Outrage makes the two-color red decks a lot better). However, the biggest change is that the black/red deck moves from a color combination where all your removal is stolen from you to an actual archetype built around the combo of
Act of Treason and
Bloodthrone Vampire/
Viscera Seer. The combo is clearly strong, especially when combined with the rest of the removal in red and black, but I don't know what the numbers should be, especially of
Viscera Seer, which isn't a great card in isolation.
That's all for Magic 2011—it's boring, but at least it lets me spend more time on the interesting sets. Speaking of which, next week we rejoin a plane in crisis with Scars of Mirrodin.
Vincent
@CheaterHater1 on Twitter