Secrets of Strixhaven’s Best New Cards (In the 99) | 739

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And some new mechanics that I think are a little confusing and need to spend a little bit of time talking about. So we're going to start with some new mechanics, starting with prepared spells. I think this is the big mechanic of the set. Yeah, are you prepared to talk about how it works? Yes, this is a new mechanic. It looks like a lot of cards that have come from the past, like Adventure or Omen, but it is different. The card basically has an additional spell on it. If the card itself is a creature, if it is prepared, then you can cast the spell. A lot of the cards enter prepared. Some of them have stipulations to make them prepared, but it's a state that they can be in. And then the other part of the card becomes active. When the card is removed, you can't cast it anymore. Yeah, there's something that is worth noting. The way that you cast the prepared spell is very strange. And it's because you can't like cast an instant or sorcery from the battlefield. So when a creature becomes prepared, it creates a copy of the spell in exile that you can cast. It doesn't count as casting a card. It is casting a copy. And the spell is technically cast from exile. So you can do weird stuff with it. It doesn't trigger like Prosper, for example, because it says whenever you play a card from exile. Oh, it's play. They're not cards. But Pia says whenever you play a land or cast a spell from exile. So it does count. So that one does count. So keep in mind, like if you have a cast from exile deck to make sure you're reading your commander closely. But. Easy game. Easy game. Easy game. Your card, you can't have like the same spell prepared multiple times. Like even if you can trigger the reprepare ability multiple times, you only ever have one spell available to you. And once you cast that spell, it is now unprepared and you have to reprepare it again. Yeah, it's actually, if you've played arena a lot, it's similar to conjure, which I thought was not an ability that you'd be able to recreate in real life. But you kind of have it here with prepared. It feels like conjure. Like this, let's talk about this first spell. This is Noctamoon Lore Spinner. So this is two in a red for a creature, creature Jackal Wizard. He's a three three. It says at the beginning of your upkeep, if a player has one or fewer cards in hand, this creature becomes prepared. And then it gives you the ability to cast Wheel of Fortune. So it's sort of as if it says at the beginning of your upkeep, if a player has one or fewer cards in your hand, you conjure a copy of Wheel of Fortune to your hand. It's like how this would be written as an arena only card. But of course the rules don't really let that happen in paper. Yeah. And if the Noctamoon Lore Spinner is removed before you get to the point in your turn where you can cast a sorcery, then you are no longer able to cast it. Because the spell is sort of like tied to the creature itself, tied to the card itself. Right. Let's talk about this card because I think this is a very interesting example. We see Wheel of Fortune and think, wow, that's a very powerful spell. But this card doesn't enter prepared and it can only prepare on its next upkeep. And with a stipulation. And with a stipulation that somebody has to have one or fewer cards in hand, which is a pretty difficult stipulation to make. So unless you're the kind of deck that is regularly running out of cards in your own hand, which is not a great strategy, or you are stripping your opponent's hands, this might be a difficult card to prepare. Yeah, it looks really fancy on the surface, but the fact that it does not enter prepared makes it actually kind of bad. You need to be in a discard deck or a deck that's like constantly at one card in hand. And you have to reliably hope that no one's going to remove this thing. I would also say that giving your opponent's fair warning that a Wheel of Fortune is coming up is also not super optimal with this kind of thing. Because if I know that you're trying to cast a Wheel of Fortune on your next turn, because you played an Octomoon Lore Spinner, I'm going to try and get some cards out of my hand. I'm going to dump the cards that I'm worried about losing. I'm going to probably spend less time drawing cards myself because I know this is coming up. It's a lot of extra information to give people when you know exactly when this could happen. Yeah, it's an interesting card. The next one is Igonjo Dynastorian, which is also a very powerful card on its prepared side. It's two in a white for a two, three Fox advisor vigilance. Whenever you tackle two or more creatures, this creature becomes prepared. And then it's replenish on the other side, which is a historically extremely powerful card and expensive one. Return all enchantment cards from your graveyard to the battlefield. This one's interesting because the first thing you think of is like, oh, I'm going to slam this in my Chantris deck. I'm going to put this in my enchantment deck because replenish is a really expensive card. But the stipulation to prepare this is that you have to attack with two creatures. Now you can play this, have two other creatures you can attack with that turn and have it become prepared. But then you also have to spend another four mana on top of the three to do it, that turn, if that's what you're trying to pull off. That's sort of a challenging thing to line up. Having this creature, having two creatures that can attack, having a graveyard that cares about replenish. Yeah, like maybe if you're a more aggro, like aura style deck, like this one was in, then I could see you having the creatures to attack. But if you're like more of an enchantress storm style deck, this might be more difficult for you to actually get prepared. Yeah. And again, you're going into combat. You might have to sacrifice those creatures you're attacking with to be just into someone's board just to cast this on the other side. And if someone removes this creature before you even get to your second main phase when you cast the sorcery, your entire plan is busted. Yeah. This can be very fragile. Sort of challenging cards to prepare. So you have to really think about that as like, okay, sure, this is Wheel of Fortune, but what is the hoop I have to jump through to get to Wheel of Fortune? Let's talk about this next sort of question that you want to ask when you're evaluating prepared cards. And that's, can it be re-prepared? Re-prepared. Yeah. So both the ones that we talked about can be. You can cast replenish, you can attack with two more creatures, prepare it again, and cast it. And Nectamune, as long as it goes to your upkeep and the player has one or more cards in their hand, or one or fewer cards than it was prepared. Yeah. So let's talk about this first one. This is Scheming Silver Tongue, one in a black for a creature vampire warlock. It is a 1-3 with flying and lifelink. And it says at the beginning of your second main phase, if you gained two or more life this turn, this creature becomes prepared. So this one you can cast in the first main phase, gain two life, and then immediately cast the prepared spell, which is Sign in Blood. Black, black sorcery, target player draws two and loses two. This is very interesting to me because on the first turn, like if you're not in a dedicated life game deck, you're probably not going to be able to prepare the Sign in Blood. But this thing has lifelink. So all you need to do is give this one extra power and it prepares itself. Yeah. And in the type of decks that have aristocrats, things going on, or whenever a creature enters you gain a life. This is great and limited and it's obviously much more of a limited focused card. But this is the kind of card that I like better for prepared because it doesn't make every one of your opponents go, oh, I got to get rid of that thing. So you actually have a pretty good chance of just, you know, now you want, let's just say you want a 1-3 flying lifelink vampire in your deck. Great. You got a card that has this nice bonus on top of it. Yeah. I think this card is quite sweet. I mean, I love that you can cast it the turn that you cast the creature side. You can cast the prepared spell the turn. There's a lot of blackpips to do that, obviously. Yeah, yeah, three. But also being able to cast a sign in blood every turn is very, very powerful, especially when it's attached to a little flyer that can do other stuff. And there's a lot of ways to get that extra life gain. Yeah. But it's a fun puzzle to solve, I think, for deck builders. The next one I want to talk about in this section is Lorehold Archivist. One, a red and a white, Freakreature Dorf Artificer. It is a 3-2 with first rake and it says at the beginning of your upkeep. So it's the same as the Noctamoon Lore spinner. It takes a whole turn. If there are three or more artifacts and or creature cards in your graveyard, this creature becomes prepared. The prepared spell is Restored Relic, two red and white for a sorcery. Exhale, target artifact or creature card from your graveyard. Create a token that's a copy of it. Yeah. So this is, again, pretty slow, but in the right decks, it's not that hard to do. Lorehold is all about sort of like digging through your graveyard, so it's got a bit of a, you know, further graveyard up strategy. Yeah. It's almost like this is a creature with threshold and an activated ability that costs you 4 mana. Yeah. And that's pretty good. It is slow, it is expensive and it is pretty telegraphed. So if you have something super terrifying in your graveyard by the time it comes back around to you, they might be incentivized to play this, or to kill this. But I think in the right deck, you can make some copies of some really terrifying things, which you can populate, you can use your graveyard in the way that Lorehold's really dedicated to. Yeah. And you probably don't want to throw the thing that you're going to copy in there until the turn you're ready to do it. So you have some way, like a perpetual timepiece, or whatever, to mill or discard and get that card in there. Yeah. Especially if it's a big, scary thing. Like if you have three, like, Wayfarer's Bobbles or whatever, obviously not in Commander, but if you have three, like, little things in there on your upkeep and they're like, well, we're not really worried about what you can bring back for 4 mana. Discard a portal to Pharaxia. Yeah. Thrill of possibility. Discard a portal to Pharaxia, pay 4 mana, have a token copy of a portal to Pharaxia. It's a very different turn. So it's pretty cool. The final question we want to answer is, is the prepared spell good at the time it can be prepared? So I want to talk about Yabba Maya Bloomsage. So if you're going to Grim for a 2-2 dry-a druid, at the beginning of your end step, put a 1-1 counter on target Grim to control, then if that creature has power 7 or greater, this creature becomes prepared. Oh my. It's Channel, a banned card. Grim, Grim, Sorcery, you can basically pay life to add colorless mana to your mana pool, but it's a Sorcery and this triggers on your end step. So it will, unless you have Flash, or Way to Grant that spell Flash, this will take a very long time to happen and everyone knows it's coming. Yeah, and it's also after you have a 7-7 in play. There's a lot of things that I don't, that they were very safe with this card, which I think is a good thing. You should put a regular channel into Commander, please thank you. But this is a 3 mana creature that you need to have something with 6 power in play, and then the next turn you can cast Channel. And as we've said time and time again, Commander is faster now, paying life is more dangerous now. By the time you're in the game or you have a 7-7 in play, Channel is less good and your opponents know it's coming. Yeah, and it's very disruptible and easy to stop from happening. Yeah, you just kill this thing, you kill the thing with 7 power, which is more likely. There's a lot of ways to disrupt this and there's a lot of ways for the channel to just not be as impactful as you think it is. And once you have a channel, what kind of deck is this that has big creatures and wants a channel? Is it just a Hydra deck? Right. Is it just an Expo deck? I don't really know. Yeah, these are the types of cards I think are very difficult to build around, but they're nicer cards to put into decks that if it so happens that it does do the thing, then awesome. Yeah. So you're not relying on hoping that it's going to happen, it's more of like a, alright, it's turn 6, I'm going to play two things and this you have my Bloom Sage. I like the ability just to give something a 1-1 counter and Gravy on top should it get back to my turn. I'm going to have an awesome next turn. If it doesn't survive or I can't do this next turn, it's fine. I still have a bunch of mana, I'm still in the game, but I'm not fully relying on this thing to happen. Otherwise, my whole plan is bust. Yeah, I would really only look at this card if you like the 3 mana 2-2 that puts counters on stuff. Yeah, exactly. And then you consider the channel Gravy. Kind of crazy Gravy, very good, tasty Gravy. Yeah. I mean, it could be that you have a Hydro Deck or your commander, you know, you're the type of deck that wants to cast your commander a bunch of times because it's always going to get removed, so you can need that mana. But yeah, I think showing everyone that you have channel is just a very dangerous thing to do because no one's going to let you have it if they know what's happening on the other side. Or they just hit you. They're like, fine, I'll hit you for 10. Now you have 10 less mana next turn. You're like, don't! Ow! Please! So those are the things that we're thinking about when we're talking about prepared spells. There's a lot of them that we're going to be talking about today. Those are not even close to all of them that are relevant in Commander. So we just want you to keep that in mind when you're thinking about prepared spells for your decks. 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The next mechanic that we want to talk about is paradigm. All right. So this is pretty powerful. Yeah. It is very similar to old mechanics, one that did not work called epic, which is like after the rest of the game you can't play anymore spells after you cast this crazy spell. But you can cast this crazy spell every turn for the rest of the game. I don't think I've ever seen an epic card played. Nope. And then there's also rebound, which is a card that allows you to cast it again during your next upkeep. Yeah. So this is sort of a mush of those two things. I'm just going to read the rules text on paradigm right now. So you cast a spell with paradigm and then after you cast it, exile it. After you first resolve a spell with this name, you may cast a copy of it from exile without paying its mana cost at the beginning of each of your first main phases. All right. So the way it works is you cast the spell, it exiles itself and it lives in exile. It will cast itself or you have the option to cast it on your first main phase of every turn. Yeah. It's almost like you added a new rule to your game and that every single turn you get to have this thing again. Yeah. And you don't have to pay for it. Yeah. These are all very expensive spells. They're five mana up, I think for most of them. Yeah. They become better the earlier you can cast it because you can have more turns with it. Yeah. It's also worth noting that this gives you like a free cast trigger every turn. So it can be better than like permanence that do this because it's more difficult to disrupt. It's a spell that lives in exile. It gives you instance and sorcery cast triggers. It gives you cast from exile triggers. It gives you just like a big spell like mana value that you've cast every turn, which there are things that care about. The mana value. And in the Strix Haven specifically in Commander. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into the individual spells starting with the black one. This one seems great. Yeah. Decarum Dissertation. So this is sign in blood, but at five mana, but it has paradigm. So three black, black sorcery lesson target player draws two cards and loses two life and then paradigm. So you'll cast this for five mana and then your next turn you get to cast it again. And every time you have a turn, you get to do it over and over and over again. Yeah. And it's just two extra cards every turn and you lose two life. Yeah. It's like two X for Xenorina. You do get the cards immediately too. When you do cast it, it does cost a lot five mana. It's also a lesson for cards that have learn on it and care about lessons. There's some avatar stuff there that does potentially play with this. But yeah, it's like a very slow sign in blood, but it will keep signing in blood. Yeah. A lot of blood that's being signed. I mean, it's sort of like a five-mana enchantment that says when this enters draw two cards on your next step, keep draw two cards. Yeah, keep doing that. And you lose two. There's a lot of life loss here, but there's a lot of upsides here as well. I wanted to compare it to sign in blood because we're looking at the difference in rate. Sign in blood, we expect to be two mana. So you spend three extra mana to keep casting this spell over and over again. So as you can see, the earlier you cast the spell, the better it is. You don't want to cast a five-mana draw two and then never get the chance to cast this thing again. Yeah. Turn six or seven, this is very bad. Yeah. And it's five mana, so it's hard to cast before turn four, right? Yeah. So... I mean, you also have the weird sign in blood clause where you can target somebody else with it and have them lose two life and draw two cards. Yeah. Which I... If you're a spell slinger deck, you're making a lot of mana, you have ways to reduce the cost. This could be really interesting because then even drawing it late in the game, if you're able to cast it for three or whatever, it's not a bad rate. Yeah. If you can power this thing out with a dark ritual or something, it's going to take over the game. It's going to be the best card in your deck. Yeah. So, if you can turn two dark ritual and the decorum dissertation is pretty sweet. Yeah. You would need to return three, but yes. Oh, turn three. Yeah. What was the mana rocks or something like that? Yeah. You can figure it out. But it's... Being able to cast this thing early and draw two cards every turn is going to be really powerful. Yeah. Let's talk about this next one. This is Echo Casting Symposium. It's the blue one for Blue Blue for Resource Tree Lesson. Target player creates a token that's a copy of Target Creature You Control paradigm. Okay. You can also target someone else with this, funny. Really weird. You can give somebody a token copy of one of your cards. Your creatures. Yeah. You probably won't be doing that anytime soon. Probably not unless you got a weird like donate deck. That's a cool way to do this. But this is a plus three rate on like a quasi duplicate, which is what we really expect for this kind of effect. Yeah. We usually pay three mana to copy a creature you control. This is six mana. This one's a lot easier to interact with than stop because if they just get rid of the creature that you're trying to copy before you get to your turn again, you won't be able to keep doing it. Yeah. I would also like to highlight here because it's not something I really clocked is you can't copy anything that isn't in play on your, when you can cast it. When you can cast it. I see. So you cast it on your first main phase. So you can't cast a creature and then copy it in the same turn. Right. You have to play the creature and then copy that creature on your next main phase. Or next turn, first main phase. Right. So it's a lot slower than it looks. You can copy the thing. Obviously you play, you have a creature in play when you cast this the first time and then you could keep copying that thing. But if there's a board wipe in between, then you're going to have to wait another full turn rotation to play a creature that you can copy and copy it. Unless you can flash something in like a fairy mastermind or something. Yeah. Yeah. This card is interesting. Blue does have a lot more ways of reducing mana costs. So this could be closer to a quasi duplicate if you're able to get this reliably down to four mana or whatever. But this is definitely a lot more fragile, but also again, very powerful. And again, if you're doing something wacky with making other people copy some bad creature on the board or whatever, that is fun. Yeah. It's a token. So you can do things with tokens like populate. Yeah. It being a token is often a big deal, especially if you're talking about like a, like a Brutoclad deck or something like that. Yeah. Up next is the green one. Yeah. German nation practicum. Three green green for a sorcery lesson. And it just says put two one one counters on each creature you control. So this is interesting. It's basically a full board buff. And as long as you have a board or even just one creature on your board, you will continue to add counters to it every single turn that it gets back to you. Yeah. I mean, this is a little bit more narrow. Like there's fewer decks that this could go in, but also this is a ton of pressure. If they get this on the battlefield, like the first turn you cast it, if they have 10 one ones, that's a ton of power. And if you don't die that turn, it's very likely you somebody can be taken out on the next turn. Yeah. I actually like this card more than the other one so far just because there are decks that just want to put creatures on the board and then have an overrun effect. Yeah. Also just five mana for like two plus one plus one counters on all your creatures isn't a terrible rate. Even if it happens just one time to get board wiped, you're still going to have a huge impactful turn that turn that you play this. Like I was thinking about this compared to Aura Boroid, which is probably the best version of this effect in Commander right now. First it puts one counter on the next turn it puts two, the next turn it puts three. But the fact that this is just two every turn and it's two right away makes it a lot faster of a clock and pretty similar to the amount of pressure that an Aura Boroid puts on. Yeah. Yeah, I actually like this one the decent amount. I think this one's very powerful. It will be best index that either go wide, have a lot of bodies or care about plus one counters and will have like enhancers and doublers that kind of thing. Yeah. I think if you're tired of running overwhelming stampede or whatever. This is a cool option. It's a really cool option to replace it with. Yeah. Okay. In an imparity situation this thing does take over the game. Oh, it's unbelievable. I don't know how you beat this in limited. Oh, yeah, yeah. Your taste. Even just with one creature on the board just making it a three three than the five five than the set, right? It's just going to be very hard to over tell. Yeah. This is my favorite of the set. This is Improvisation Capstone. Five red, red for a sorcery lesson. Exile cards from the top of your library until you exhale cards with total mana value four or greater. You may cast any number of spells from among them without paying their mana cost paradigm. So you spend seven mana and you get somewhere between like four to six mana worth of spells. Sometimes more than that if you hit really high. Yeah, you could just hit something huge, right? But you're like assuming you just hit four, you're plus three mana on the spells it can give you. But I think if you've seen Dream Harvest cast in Commander, you know that four isn't always the case. It's sometimes five. It's sometimes 10. It depends on what they reveal off the top of their library. Yeah, and you can sometimes get multiple spells as well. Yeah. It could be a one and a five, a two and a three, right? And you know what's in your deck. So you can build in a way that has like a natural high curve that you're getting a lot of value off of a spell like this. But if you're a ritual deck or you can copy or cheat big spells deck, this is incredible. And it's going to put on a ton of pressure on the next few turns where it's like, yeah, I'm going to cast three to five, like three, three to four spells for free every turn, including this. And again, you're in red. This is probably best in some sort of is it build, you're going to find ways to cheat this out or play it for cheaper. I love it in Cast from Exile decks because it casts itself from exile and then like some amount of other spells from exile. Really powerful and pretty fun. That card is sweet. Again, like I really do like when Wizards Prince and you, this is definitely like in the world of like, this is just a good win con. Yeah. And it's randomized. Sometimes you can sort of stack your deck, but like this is like a cool like, oh, seven mana do the big thing. And then should the game continue? Oh boy, you are. You are really going to start ending the game. Yeah. It reminds me a little of like a sun birds invocation, but it happens right away, which I really like. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to the white one. This is restoration seminar. Yeah. Five white white sorcery lesson return target non-land permanent from your graveyard to the battlefield. I think this is the most narrow of all of them. You need to have something like a big permanent that's worth seven mana or like at least five in your graveyard to bring back. And you need it every turn, which means it gets less relevant the more you cast it. Yeah. This one costs a lot as well as seven mana for this effect when you already have a lot of regrow type effects. And in your white deck, you're more generally reanimating creatures, not necessarily permanent. So this would be, it kind of fits that lorehold theme where it's like, okay, you want like a big artifact in there or even the planeswalker or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool in artifact decks, I think, because you can actually power this out a little bit better. Yeah. But that being said, I do play a Mariah Shepard in a lot of my decks, which is just like the seven mana angel that when you play a plains, you bring back an on-land permanent. Yeah. It's really good. So, and it's not necessarily triggering a lot more than this thing does and has a fewer hoops to jump through. So I think this card's playable. I just am not sure like what decks I'm going to try it in right away and it feels like a very me deck card. Yeah. It's definitely a very Rachel card. It is interesting too because people will kill a Mariah Shepard on site. Yeah. And you typically can't do the Mariah Shepard thing or you don't want to until you can play it and then play a land as well. So the restoration seminar kind of comes out a little bit earlier. And then if you're in that mono white deck that's just trying to grind it out, it will just keep on pumping. Right. But I think generally you're putting creatures back out with this, right? Yeah. I mean, the way I think about this card is you want to be in a deck that is slow enough that it can slow the game down where you can cast this multiple times and it's relevant. Right. So you are in like a grindy, highly disruptive graveyard deck, which is like kind of my flavor. Yeah. But you want a deck that extends the game longer because casting a seven mana spell in white that you want to happen multiple times is pretty challenging. Yeah. And these are types of spells that just completely run away with the game. Yeah. If you're in a good enough situation where it's parody or you're just not forced and pressured to the point where you cast this and go like, oh gosh, I'm just getting this back to chump lock or something or whatever it is. Right. Yeah. I think these, all of these cards are going to be very powerful in the right environment. If you place lower games, they're going to be even better. And if you can power it out, obviously they're going to be even better. Yeah. At casual tables, these cards are insane. They're insane. Yeah. I think they're very, very powerful. The fact that you cast them for free and get this free huge burst of value every single turn on top of you playing your whole turn, it means it's a big game changer. Yeah. If you're like very new to the game, this is the kind of card where you go, that's not fair. Yeah. And it's not. It's not. Yeah. Let's move on to this next card. We're just going to talk about this one quickly. It's applied geometry. I was not very good at geometry. I was okay at geometry. Yeah. So I don't like. How are you at applying it? I don't know. Two green and the blue sorcery. Create a token that's a copy of target non or a permanent you control except it's a zero zero fractal in addition to its other types. Put six one one counters on it. All right. So it's not copying auras. Yeah. Which is a little interesting. You can't have an aura that's not attached to anything. Oh, I see. That's right. That makes sense. So it is just a four man of clone, but it's a guaranteed six six. Yeah. It's a six that can copy a land. It can copy an artifact. It can copy a battle. Yeah. Like you can copy a planeswalker with this that is a creature so it can't be attacked. Can you copy a battle with this? Oh, yeah. All right. And you control it and it's a non aura. They can't they can't attack it and you can't flip it. So I don't know how good it is, but it can. Yeah. Yeah. This is a very flexible clone spell that turns your non creature permanence into creatures, which means you can do really weird stuff with it. Oh, right. You can like mutate onto planeswalkers. Now you can like mutate onto lands. Now you can like do some yeah, bizarro populate non token or non creature tokens, which is not usually a thing you can do. Right. Turn artifacts into creatures, which a lot of decks want to do. This is a great way to do it as well. You can turn vehicles into creatures so they don't have to be crude to get their effects. There's like a lot of weird things that you can do with this and it's not really a clone that we've seen before. Of course, it's a creature. So it's a little bit squishier. Yeah. It means that you can really like mess around with how certain things interact. Landfall decks that want to make land creatures. Yeah. This is pretty sweet card. I do love a good four mana. This actually feels like it could have been five mana and just as fine. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. But four mana is on rate for a clone and it gives you a huge body. Six, six is enormous. Yeah. Any permanent except for aura is pretty sweet. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Borrowed knowledge. So this is our first uncommon we're talking about. Mm-hmm. Two red in the white for a sorcery. You can choose one, either discard your hand and draw cards equal to the number of cards in target opponent's hand named Joshly Kwae or discard your hand and draw cards equal to the number of cards discarded this way. So it's a very flexible windfall in a way. It's sort of a Borrow's windfall. I mean, you discard, it's just for you, which is nice and it's a good way to catch up on card draw. It's one more expensive than windfall. But if you think about this as like, I only have two cards in my hand and I cast this discard two and draw six. That's a huge burst and it fills up your graveyard, which is not super easy to do in Borrow's. And they keep making these sort of like Lorholdi Borrow's C graveyard decks that have a lot of trouble filling up their graveyard. Yeah. I think this card is just awesome. Yeah. It's very cool to see something that gives the flexibility, right? We've seen a lot more modality added to cards recently and this is a way that again, they're just pushing cards in ways that don't necessarily break things, but make them more just powerful for their phase value. So, I do like Borrow's knowledge quite a bit and it's going to definitely see play, I think especially in the Borrow's decks that are being inspired by the Lorhold sort of thing. Yeah. If you're a graveyard graveyard Borrow's deck, you definitely look at this card. Yeah. Up next is Cauldron of Essence. This is one black green for an artifact. Whenever a creature you control dies, each opponent loses one life and you gain one life. Great. One black and a green tap, sacrifice a creature, return target, creature from your graveyard to the battlefield, activate only as a sorcery. Yeah. So, this one's fun because it's slightly more expensive than a typical risk-scrad effect for the top part. Yeah. And it's pretty on rate for the middle part, which is Sac something brings something back and then the card itself costs three. So, it's like six total to do something where you immediately get something back. But if you're just playing this in the deck that just wants to drain people out, this seems really good and really great again in a slower grindier game. Yeah. I mean, if you squint, this is a once per turn recurring nightmare. Yeah. It looks nothing like it, but it is. But once it's in play, it's three mana to sacrifice a creature and bring another creature back. It works really well with other sac outlets where you can, you know, if you have Gary on the battlefield, sac him to another sac outlet, bring Gary back to the battlefield with this. You can put together these sort of turns where you're like, yeah, I'm going to keep playing the same spell of return and it's going to be very difficult for you to deal with. The first thing I thought of though was combining this with just like other creatures that bring tokens onto the battlefield like chittering witch or overlord, just stuff that like when it hits, it brings fodder, which you can sacrifice with it to another sac outlet and then bring it back with this next turn. So it's a recurring token. Recurring cauldron. The nice thing about this is that you can just do it the turn that comes down at a sorcery speed if you have six mana. So a lot, you know, oftentimes people will play a four mana reanimate effect, but this is something that sticks around the board. So if you care about creatures dying or you're in the rest of the deck, this is just it's just super good value. Yeah, I think this card is a little slow, but it's going to feel great when you have it on the battlefield. Just opens up your options a whole lot. I would especially look at it if you're in aristocrats, but if you're in kind of a grindy creaturey graveyard deck, this might be good enough for you as well. Yeah. Cauldrons, which is cauldron cauldrons are just pretty, pretty good. Cauldrons are having a moment. What's your brewing? So trendy. All right, we have a whole nother major cycle that we're going to talk about in the next episode. And honestly, we haven't even gotten to the most powerful card in the set. We're ramping up. So stick around. We've got a lot more cards for you. We'll be back in a few minutes. This episode is sponsored by Boot.dev. So really it should be more like 39 lands, but nobody, oh wow, we're the first ones here. Who? Josh, what are you doing in the dark? Coding. I've been learning on Boot.dev. It's a platform designed to teach you programming and software development. Were you here all night? That depends. Is it morning? It is. Then yes, pretty addictive. Check it out. Because you're a level 11 apprentice? Yep. I've been working my way through the beginner Python course and they structure all of the coding exercises like you're playing a fantasy RPG. So I'm basically learning to make games by playing a game. There's achievements, item shops, quests, even boss fights. That actually sounds pretty fun. It is. And it fits really well into my MTG brain. Did you know there's a data structure called a stack? Does it work like VStack? Yeah, first and last out. Really, so much of coding is just creative logic, which we use playing magic all the time. Plus, if you want to grind some XP and get better at a specific concept, they just launched the training grounds where you can do unlimited practice challenges. I've always wanted to make games. Oh, then you've definitely got to try Boot.dev. You can even get a 25% discount by using code COMMANDZONE. I'm in. After work, though. I'm your boss. You can do it now. Yeah, but I got to work on the sponsor spot for Boot.dev. Oh, yeah, you should get on that. Go to Boot.dev and use our code COMMANDZONE to get 25% off your entire first year on the annual plan. Oh, hey, Rachel. What's with all the papers? Do you know how there are daily calendars? Uh-huh. And monthly calendars? Sure. What about weekly calendars? What about them? Do those exist? They do now with my brand new product, Rachel's Weeks. I know that this is a billion-dollar idea, but between design and inventory and still hosting the podcast, my to-do list is through the roof. Oh, yeah, that is a lot. But you know you don't have to do this alone, right? Really? You'll help me? Oh, no, not me. But I will tell you about Shopify. When the COMMANDZONE was just getting started, Shopify was a huge help launching our merch store, and we're still using it today. They streamline everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns, which frees us up to focus on making more magic content. And for new brands, they've got great marketing tools to get the word out with social media and email campaigns, plus built-in templates to save time building your website. Between all of that and 24-7 support, they just make the day-to-day super easy. Or in my case, the week-to-week, because I'm Rachel Weeks. Yeah, we got it. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify. And start hearing... Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash TCC. Go to Shopify.com slash TCC. That's Shopify.com slash TCC. Hey, everybody, we wanted to tell you about something we're pretty excited about around here. It's from a close personal friend of ours, iconic magic artists, and avid commander player, Johannes Voss. You don't know the name. You definitely know his work, Phorexian Metamorph maybe, or Blood Artist. Restoration Angel, one of my personal favorites. Yeah, Johannes has made some of the best magic artists of all time. And now he's launching a limited-time Kickstarter called the Johannes Voss Token Collection, featuring over 50 tokens, all in his own style. Yeah, he's great at magic type fantasy, but his range goes way beyond that. From the super cute cat and bird tokens to the more anime-style dragon, you've really just got to see these tokens for yourself. I think my favorite is the construct token with the robot in the field. It feels straight out of Studio Ghibli. Yeah, that same robot shows up on Power Stone. Yeah, he's on a few different tokens, right? Yeah, it's a cute little story. And there's actually a few things like that hidden on the collection, but they're all in order right out of the box so you can't miss them. Oh man, the attention to detail here is wild. Even down to which tokens he included. You can tell he put a ton of care into picking ones commander players actually use. I know, it feels like every deck these days makes 10 plus different tokens, and looking through these, there are 50 of them. It's going to cover a lot of commander decks. And you know, this is the first time these designs are being printed in cardboard. Johannes told us it is super important to him that these were black bordered, exact magic card size, and just ready to sleeve up and play. This guy is so passionate about the game, works so hard on everything he does, and this Kickstarter is a great way to support him. So make sure to get your pledge in at tinyurl.com slash jvtokens. Each box comes with 52 tokens, plus there are some really cool backer rewards from sparkly plastic tokens to real magic card artist proofs. So go to tinyurl.com slash jvtokens or scan the QR code on screen to get your pledge in before it's too late. Man, I cannot wait to get mine. Oh, he sent us some, you can have that one. Thank you. Oh, one's for me? These are spoken for. Oh. You know what my favorite thing is about Architect? How easy it is to build decks. When I'm brewing for game nights, my first draft comes together super fast because I can drag and drop cards straight from EDH Rec or Skyfall. And Architect even sorts them into categories like ramp or card draw automatically, but I can always add new ones or move things around based on my strategy. It's quick, intuitive, and it just makes deckbuilding fun. Architect is the best place to browse, brew, and play test Commander decks. Just go to architect.com slash command zone to get started. That's archidekt.com slash command zone. Welcome back, everybody. We are talking about the magic cards from Secrets of Strixhaven. And we're going to get into the Mythic Cycle. I think it's the second Mythic Cycle. Yeah, after the... Yeah, yeah, the paradigms definitely are. It's time for the Emeritus. Emeritus. Emeritus? Emeritus? Emeritus. You, we, emeritus. Emeritus of abundance, two in green for a three, four, elf, druid, vigilance. This creature enters prepared, very important. Winner of the creature attacks. If you control eight or more lands, this creature becomes prepared. So you cannot double prepare. But you get regrowth, one in green sorcery, return card card from the graveyard to your hand. So if you think about this, it's sort of like... This card's sweet. I think this card's really cool. It's sort of like a five-minute eternal witness that you can use multiple times. So I think the best comparison is honestly something like evolution witness, which is the one that whenever a counter gets put on it, you can return a permanent. So having a repeatable regrowth effect is very, very powerful. It'd be, you can go infinite if you get extra turn spells, is the first thing I thought of. But other than that, it's just like you can keep getting board wipes back. You can keep getting removal spells back. You can keep getting threats back. Whatever you need at the time, the emeritus has your back. Yeah, it's a really good rate. A 3-4 with vigilance too. You're pretty safe to have this be an attacker to have you re-prepare on your next turn. I also, of all the emeritus that we're going to talk about, this is the one I'm most comfortable just running out on three and thinking, my opponents probably aren't going to kill this thing. Totally. It's a 3-4. I'm going to cast it to get back my fetch land, replay the fetch land, attack and have another regrowth. And that's a pretty sweet little play pattern in the early game. In the late game, it will be a little bit more challenging to find a safe place to attack with your 3-4. But you can play some nice politics to be like, look, I'm going to get back a removal spell and I'm going to be able to answer this thing. Can you just take 3 for me or block in a way that bounces? Yeah, but then when you cast Time Warp and the one goes away, make a deal with you, you just bought back Time Warp to your hand. Yeah. Yes, I did. Yeah. Are you prepared? Because I am. Yeah, so you can go infinite if you have that extra turn spell. So this card's pretty sweet. It again, like eight lands on the battlefields is the big blocker here. So I guess you can't really re-prepare it in the early game, like I said before. But if you're a big manatec, you certainly can. And just having a creature that threatens to be a regrowth in the late game is nice. Yeah, it's a good one. I like this card quite a lot. It's cool. All right, let's move on to the red one. Emeritus of Conflict. One in red. It has lighting bolt. It's a 2-2 first strike whenever you cast your third spell each turn. This creature becomes prepared and it has lighting bolt. So it's red mana, instant, deal three damage to any target. Yeah. And hypothetically, the lightning bolt can feed the next turn. So it's another one of those spells that you can cast and prepare the turn it comes down, but it doesn't enter prepared. So you would like cast the Emeritus of Conflict, cast a Gitaxian probe, cast something else, a signet. And now you can cast lightning bolt on your next turn. Or whenever, but you can use it to re-prepare the next turn. And repeatable lightning bolt is really sweet. It's great in a storm deck. It's great just to pick off little value creatures or mana creatures. I think it's pretty tidy. Yeah, I like this guy. It's just cute little 2-2 first striker. It reminds me a little bit of Iron Crag pyromancer. This is the three mana zero for us. Whenever you draw your second card each turn, it deals three damage to any target. Just like gives you a lightning bolt every turn with a little bit of synergy. And we don't play a ton of Iron Crag pyromancer, so because drawing 2 in red is, I guess, a little challenging. But the three spells of turn thing is big for red and big for commander, should be relatively easy to keep prepared and re-preparing in the late game. And being able to threaten three damage to anybody's face at any time is like, not nothing. Turns out lightning bolt is still the best card in Magic Gathering. Still good. Oh, the other thing it's good with is like, you know, gutter snipe effects and that kind of thing. You're in the type of deck that wants to cast three spells of turn. You're going to be able to enhance the power of this lightning bolt. Okay, the blue one, this is sort of their poster child of the set. Yeah, this is one that everyone's talking about. It's Emeritus of Ideation, because who doesn't love Ancestral Rickol, baby? Three blue blue for a 5-5 flying ward 2. It's the creature and she's prepared. And whenever the creature attacks, you may exile eight cards from your graveyard. If you do, it becomes prepared and you can cast Ancestral Rickol. Yeah. So if you have six mana, you can place for five and then just straight up recall. Yep. Right there and then there. Yeah, the comps for this one are really interesting because it's sort of, I know it's not. Yeah. It's sort of a big fancy mold rifter. Yeah, it's like a really fancy mold rifter. It's like a mold rifter that can beat the daylight side of you. Like a 5-5 flying ward 2 is already a problem. And it enters and draws you three cards if you leave that last bit of blue mana up. It kind of reminds me of like, I don't know, Sphinx of Enlightenment is like a six mana ETB draw three. Yeah. And it's a 5-5. We don't play a ton of that, but the fact that you get the cards whenever you want, you don't have to give an opponent a card and you can re-prepare this is pretty sweet. Yeah. And you have like an Octavia deck that should be really sweet, obviously. Oh yeah, Octavia can definitely re-prepare this. Yeah. It's an enormous creature too. It's just a 5-5 flyer with ward 2. So on its face, this is like, I think this is a very powerful card. It's a pretty sweet card. I want to ask you a question. Yeah. If they play this on 5, they tap out for 5, do you try and kill it? It's got ward 2. Ward 2 is, yeah, it's basically hex proof. It's kind of hex proof and you're stopping them from drawing three cards next turn. Yeah. But that's a huge cost. That's a big tempo blow to kill this thing. Yeah. I kind of think I don't, which is crazy. I kind of think I don't as well. It is kind of crazy, but it is a very powerful card. So I think like playing this on turn 5 is a little bit safer than it looks. Or playing this on turn 4, you're probably ramping it out a turn earlier. And you know, you want to cast it into where you can definitely get that ancestral recall because we don't really play 5 mana 5, 5 flyers. Yeah. But the fact that it has that ward protection makes it a lot more flexible than it looks, I think. Yeah, you can blink this thing. This is a very interesting way to bring ancestral recall back to. I missed you ancestral recall. Where have you been? Thank you. Coming back with Emeritus of the Vadiation. Yeah, this is a really sweet card. The ward 2 really does, I think, add that extra juice on top that makes this. Just to make it really good. Really good, yeah. I mean, it stabilizes the board and like, it stabilizes the flyers where everybody because anybody have a flyer, you're like, yeah, I have a 5-5. Yeah. Oh, what? And you're like, you have, I think you can only realistically expect that you're going to be able to re-prepare this thing one time unless you're in a blink deck that can re-prepare it, you know, when you blink it. Yeah. It's quite sweet though. The other thing that goes really, really hard with this card is Displacer Kitten. Oh my goodness. You play the Emeritus of ideation, you follow up on the next turn, you cast the Kitten, you cast an ancestral recall that blinks the Emeritus and you have a re-prepared ancestral recall that can protect both your Kitten and your Emeritus. Yeah, it's quite sweet. You can put together some really, really gross turns if you can blink this thing multiple times, or of course, if you have the ever broken Kitten on the board. Indeed, indeed. Yeah, that's so far my favorite card of the set. I think it's pretty freaking powerful and it's also cool. The white one, this is Emeritus of truce, not truth. Truce. Truce. It is one white, white for a 3-3 cat cleric. When this creature enters, target player gets a one, one, white and black inkling creature token. Then if an opponent controls more creatures than you, this creature becomes prepared. And the prepared spell is Swads to Plowshers. This is sweet. This card's nasty. This card's awesome, man. People have been talking smack about this card. Really? Yep. How are you talking about this card? Like, why can't you re-prepare? And it was like, so they can't have a million Swords to Plowshers? Oh, every turn, yeah. So they can't have a Swords to Plowshers every turn? Yeah, this card's awesome. That's crazy. There's a lot of things that I really like about this. First of all, it's just a 3-3 that comes in with a 1-1. It gives you a decent blocker. If you're a low board presence type of deck, then it also prepares, which is sweet. It's great in like a sort of a slower deck. It gives you a little political things where you're like, I will give you an inkling, don't send the inkling at me, and I'll send the Swords somewhere else. So you can do that. But more than that, this is a solitude that you can bring back with Sun Titan effects. Oh, it's three mana. Oh my gosh, I need to use that. It's three mana. So if you can get this thing into the graveyard, if you can blink it, if you can bring it back with a Savins Reclamation, you have access to way more Swords to Plowshers than any person should have. Yeah, it's a very powerful card. And I don't want people to underestimate the power of a Swords to Plowshers as a rattlesnake. I got a snake in my boot. Well, you've heard of the rattlesnake description where it's like, you have it on the board, it's prepared, everyone knows you have it prepared. Are you going to send your big 6-6 at the person that has those Swords to Plowshers sitting there in the wings? Yeah. Probably not. A big thing with all the prepared spells is that usually like everyone sees it coming, but because this is an instant, it makes it much more like dangerous, basically just to have the Emeritus of Truths out. Yeah, I mean, if you play it on turn four, you play this, you get it prepared somehow. It is worth noting that you have to prepare it the moment it enters. Yeah. So you have to figure out a way to have fewer creatures than another player, or it's not prepared and it won't be. So that is, and I don't think you want to play this without it being prepared unless like the flyer is super important to you. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think Blink decks, I think Recursion decks, I think any deck that wants like sort of a political tool where you're like, I can give stuff away, but also I have a sword supply shares. Like this thing is gross in Feldergriff. I like the idea of having a public sword supply shares. Like, hello everyone, sword supply shares is here. Like, okay, well now I have this thing. You all know I have this thing. What can we do with it? And give me gifts. Yeah, so one on the cheek please. If you like this card, Pleasant Kenobi did a whole video on it. It's really funny. So go check that one out. It's pretty, it's pretty fun. But I think Emeritus of Truce is underrated and is going to be very good in commander. Yeah, it's a powerful card. All right, let's move on to the final Emeritus of Woe. Three and a Black Vampire Warlock, five, four. This creature enters prepared at the beginning of your end step. If two or more creatures died this turn, this creature becomes prepared. And it's demonic Twitter. Yeah. Emeritus of Woe. Whoa. Yeah, so this is a creature that enters prepared and can cast demonic Twitter right away. It's, it smells like a variegoth, Blood Sky. Like that's the other thing. Variegoth is the one that has to attack and then you can boast to demonic Twitter. But this is pretty sweet. Yeah, I enjoy Twitter effects. I have a, I have a weird relationship with Twitter effects in commander now where I'm like, do I play too many tutors? Do I play any tutors at all? Emeritus of Woe is cool though, because I think like generally when you want to slam down a rune's guard demon, it's seven mana, but this allows you to sort of set up your board state in a way that gets you into cards going and then you can choose to do it in an earlier state. Yeah, I, this one's also interesting. I, this one I might in more, I might be more likely to remove if somebody just tapped out for this, played a four mana, five, four that can cast demonic Twitter next turn. Unless I'm on that person's team and I want them to cast a, we're like, we need a board wipe right now. So demonic, like tutors can be an interesting thing. They can get you out of a sticky situation or they can be a combo piece. So it, depending on like what I know about that person and their deck is how I will treat this card, it is worth noting this is a repeatable demonic Twitter effect. It can be re-prepared as long as you can, you know, sacrifice your own creatures or you can kill your opponents to get it re-prepared for the next turn. You would be able to cast it again. So it can like give you multiple demonic tutors over the course of a couple turns, if your opponents let you have it that long. It's not a very fun play better than though to just cast demonic Twitter over and over again. But I think a lot of the prepared and a lot of the cards we've talked about so far are very much like more grindier games, favorite of these sorts of cards. Yeah, I, at any high power table, they're just playing demonic tutor. And they're not playing any sort of demonic Twitter that costs four and then an additional two, unless you're reanimating it. And even then runes card demon is better because it tutors when it enters the battlefield or various other tutor demons that enter and search your library for stuff. So I think this card is maybe the worst of the cycle. It's fine. You're just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like of all of them, the green one is like a little slow and is fine. I think the blue one and the white one are my favorites in commander, but the black one is like, yeah, just sort of like a slow tutor engine, which I just don't know how functional that is. Commander has been speeding up so much that these prepare cards make it feel like you're slowing down a little bit. Sure. Yeah, it does like sort of say next turn. Hey everyone, let's play the game. Yeah. If you're the kind of player that's like, I'm the game master and I'm going to explain the rules of the board game to you. These cards feel much sweeter in that sort of that vibe of environment. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, so very, very powerful card, obviously when you can tutor anything to your hand. All right. Let's talk about the next one because this is a humdinger. It's erode. Yeah. This is really cool. I do like this card, Rachel. Let's tell the people about it first. All right. Erode is one white manna for an instant destroyer, target creature or planes walker. It's controlled main structure lever for a basic land card put on the battlefield, tap, then shuffle. Okay. We added another staple. One mana, kill spell? It's a staple? Yeah. I mean. Is it will be a forever staple? It's, so you put an extra path to exile and destroy is worse than exile. So path to exile is winning there, but erode does hit planes walkers where path to exile does not. And that, like those are fairly even, I would say like a planes walker being on the battlefield and being a problem happens about as much as like somebody brings a problem permanent back from the graveyard where it's just like sometimes that happens. In this, yeah, yeah. But I will say that exile I think is much better in commander because of the amount of indestructible effects because of the amount of like. Just a regrowth or whatever. Yeah. You just want things gone forever. Yeah. Commander typically. You don't want your removal spell blanked by a selfless spirit and erode does get blanked for that reason. That being said, you can hit your own indestructible things and turn this into a ramp spell. Does actually feel a lot more likely than if you have a path to exile. Like if I have an indestructible creature I can hit with this, I will. One mana get a landed instant speed. That's like, that's pretty decent in a white deck if you can set up like if the land gets you to the next step where you can do something cool. So it's interesting. I think the big question is not, is this card good? This card is good. It is. This card is good. Do you play path, swords and erode? In every single deck that can play a white man. I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, we always talk about commander being less single to any. Yeah. And this is one of those cards that kind of goes, well, you just got another one that redundant effects again. So. Yeah. I think there's only so much room for spells that only kill creatures. The only thing this spell does is kill creatures. It can't kill planes, parkers. I understand. It's going to kill creatures most of the time. And so I don't want like my removal suite to only have answers to creatures in it. So I want a little bit more diversity, but the efficiency is so good. And creatures, as we've seen in this set that is about spells, there's still a lot of creatures you have to be able to kill. Otherwise, you know, they're repeatedly demonic tutor or whatever. So creatures are the problem permanent. I could see decks that put all of these in, but I would say those are like more control style decks or more focused on like their aggro decks where they just need the cheap disruption that are trying to be as fast as possible. It's another piece of the pie and the pie is getting very big. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that don't run path and swords in all their white decks. It's kind of like, are you cutting soul ring? Time to cut that path eggs out too. Yeah, it's very interesting. I don't know. I'm curious to see what happens with a road. Honestly, I think the price will have a lot to do with it. It is in the rare slot. If this card is $10, we're not going to see that much of it. Yeah, it's a good point. It's really, really, really good point. All right, let's move on to the next one. This is pretty sweet. Fix what's broken. Two white and a black for a sorcery as an additional cost to cast this spell pay X life, return each artifact and creature card with mana value X from your graveyard to the battlefield. This is sweet. So you can pay four mana and four life and bring back two to three four drops? Like that's incredible. Yeah, that's a lot of value here. The cool thing about this is I think I look at this card and if you bring back one thing, this card is over-costed. If you bring back two things, you're perfectly happy with it. If you bring back three things, this card feels busted. Four mana to reanimate three things. Yeah. Crazy. That's awesome. And artifacts and creatures too, right? So there's a lot of stuff they can get out of the graveyard for this. Yeah, I think if you have this in your deck, you might even look at like sort of the important pieces in your deck and try and build around a mana cost. Yeah. Like I was thinking about this in my angels deck and I looked at the threats that I have that I would bring back and they're sort of split between six and seven. But I think if I put this in the deck, I would shift a few of those six drops to be seven drops so that I have a better chance of casting fix what's broken with like two or three seven drops in there. So you can just drop some huge stuff out. Because that would be awesome in the right reanimate deck. It seems really cool. Yeah, just four mana as well. And really the big pain is just life. So seven life, no big deal. You can really get some crazy stuff out with this card. Yeah. I am, if you're in a reanimate deck, I think you can look at it. I mean, this is like sort of a living death at home kind of thing. If you're trying to bring back little things, I would look more at raise the past, raise the past as return all creature cards with mana value two or less from your graveyard to the battlefield. There's another one that does that that scales a little bit more with the mana value. So if you're bringing back little things, there are better options for you. But I think if your deck is built around like four drops or five drops or you're more of an artifact deck, then fix what's broken sort of surges into the front and becomes a really interesting, interesting option. This might be one of the best reanimate spells of all time. I mean, I it's up there. Four mana is a like if you're only getting one thing back, then four mana doesn't feel good. If it's double animate dead and you get back like two, six drops, that's awesome. This is great. Yeah, it's really awesome. So I think this card's really cool. I think we'll see a fair amount of it. It's sort of a command the Dread Horde, but four mana, which is a big difference. It's a huge difference. But this let's move on to this next card because I think this is sort of the card of the set. Yeah, this is like magic of the gathering, baby. Flashback. Red for an instant target, instant resource for the card in your graveyard gains a flashback until end of turn. The flashback cost is equal to its mana cost. Yes. Just give some flashback. This card's sweet. It's just so yeah. A lot of people online too is this is magic. I mean, it's snapcaster for one mana without the body in red. Yeah. And like those things. That's fine. It's great. It's here. The fact that it's an instant, it can hit an instant or a sorcery card in your graveyard. And the fact that it, yeah, you can do it at instant speed. Rebuy whatever. A board wipe, a removal spell, a counterspell. Like if you're in a counterspell war and you were like, I cast one song and they're like, all right, I counter your swan song. You can be like, okay, flashback swan song. Like you're back. I'm back in this. It's so sweet. So the thing that I really like about this is it's red. Yeah. I was surprised when I saw this. I was like, holy crap, red got this. Because like red hasn't gotten any cool cards that I'm like, oh, this goes in a ton of decks. This goes in a ton. You look at past inflames and you're like, past inflames, who? Yeah, I just need flashback. Four mana to give all of your stuff in your graveyard flashback when you're only really going to cast like two of those things. And flashback gives you, you're like, okay, so much flexibility to get exactly what you need. And it's in red, which is the color of rummaging. Yeah. So many of my red decks have a full graveyard just because I have so many effects that are like, you get faithless lootings and throw possibilities and you throw things. Things will be in the graveyard. You throw things away in the early game that your aren't good in the early game. And then in the late game, you're like, they're in my graveyard and I can't really get them back unless I pay four or five mana for it. And flashback says, nope, you can. Yeah, this is just a, this is going to be one of the all timer type cards, I think. I agree. I'm actually surprised that this card didn't exist. I agree. It's one of those cards is like, how did this not, how did we not have this thing before this thing had finally happened? Yeah. And now I'm like stoked. It's so good in storm decks that give you two more casts with it and it's only a red mana. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with flashback. Flashback, the possibilities are kind of endless. I did want to mention there is a card called recoup that I did not know existed. Oh yeah. And this card's like kind of sick. Not being able to hit instances, obviously a big deal. Like flashback helping you in a counter war makes a big difference. But if you're playing like a red spells deck, recoup is kind of a cool one that I didn't know about. Yeah. Yeah. Flashback finally red is just like emerging from the green. Like, I'm alive. I have resist. This is a move. A relevant red card that is a new effect. This might be the best red card since Jessica's will. Yeah. I don't really. In casual commander, I think so. A lot of people would say hexing squelcher, but. Squelcher is whatever. But not in casual really. Yeah. I think that's. Reg's never had just this. Right. Yeah. This card. At this rate. This card is sick. I'm super stoked about it and we'll see a ton of it. Yeah. Let's move on to the next one. This is grave researcher. Two in the black for a 3-3 troll warlock. At the beginning of your upkeep, surveil one. Then if there are three or more creature cards in your graveyard, this creature comes prepared. And you can reanimate. Gross. Gross. Yeah. So just two in the black for a 3-3 surveil one. The beginning upkeep is a okay card. Yeah. It's a fine card. Reanimate one of the best spells in commander. Straight up. Yeah. This card is incredible. There's so many decks that this is great in. If you're a self-mildeck that just has a graveyard full of stuff, and you can cast a reanimate every turn, that's the most powerful that you can be doing. Like. It's not a really hard thing to qualify for. Three or more creatures. It's not delirium. It's really easy to get that. Creatures are in, especially in a deck that has wants reanimate. You also have a lot of ways to get creatures into your graveyard. This card's awesome. I think this card's really good. This is definitely one that you have to answer. You might be able to let them cast one reanimate. You cannot let them cast two. Multiple, yeah. The game just sort of that amount of value is really difficult to surmount. It is a lot of life loss. It's like the only thing you have to be careful about. But like if you cast two reanimates, you're good. Yeah, you're good. Also, a lot of times reanimates are reanimating like a two mana creature that is just the most busted thing ever, right? Yeah. So many, it's reanimate used to be like, oh wait, I'm going to get this nine drop out, this 10 drop. But reanimate in modern commander more feels often like, oh, I just have a very, it's extremely powerful card at the three mana, four mana slot. Yeah. I'll just bring back professional facebreaker. I'll bring back selfless spirit. I'll bring back like Steve. Yeah. Like one mana get another land and is fine. Especially if you can keep doing it over and over again. As soon as you, if you have reanimate prepared, you need to be casting it because you're not guaranteed another day for every searcher. But this card's really sweet. I mean, I think we'll see plenty of it. Yeah, it's a nice solid creature. And for all you warlock decks out there, it's a perfect addition to your warlock meta. You can also like reanimate this, like you can bring it back from your graveyard with another reanimate effect and then you have a reanimate engine going. That's pretty sweet. Yeah. It's a pretty sweet. Sweet. All right. Next up, we got a moral bargain. One black green for a sorcery as an additional cost to cast this sacrifice X creature, destroy X target, nonland permanence. Cool. This card's awesome. Yeah. It's like putrefy everyone. Yeah. It's the assassin's trophy, the world. The world. Yeah. Yeah. It's bone shards. A lot. Yeah. I mean, this card's great. Black green has always kind of, they've got a bunch of great sweepers and stuff, but this is just another one of those like build a board and then kill everything. But the thing that's so efficient, like it being one black green to do this is the biggest deal for me because a lot of the time the like black greens answer to stuff is like pay X and you destroy X things. Right. Right. But this is three mana, Sacure four fodder creatures, kill four things for three mana. That's nonland permanence. Really good. This card's great. Sorcery's speed is sort of the biggest issue with it. Instant speed would be way too powerful. It would be way too powerful. Don't give me any ideas. But I think this card is, if you have, if you're the kind of deck that makes a lot of things that you're happy to sac, you should be playing Immoral Bargain. Yeah. We were all, I was screaming about Coaling Ritual back in the day and this is like, I mean, we're in Strixhaven. Play both of them. Play both of them. They're both great. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think hopefully we'll see plenty of Immoral Bargain. Oh, this next one's gross. Mind into matter. Finally, Quadrix gets their time to shine. X, Green, Blue for a sorcery, draw X cards. Then you may put a permanent card with mana value X or less from your hand onto the battlefield tapped. Yeah, that's sick. So nasty. You could do this for just Green, Blue. And just put a land into play. You just could. You could. You just totally could. You could. But the way that this scales is disgusting in Canada. It's so gross. This is Rich Kerr's expertise that you can cast for four mana. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like if you cast this thing for three and you draw a card and put a mana creature into play, like that's fine. That's fine. If you cast this thing for six and you draw four cards and put a four drop into play, that's nasty. That's nasty. Yeah. That is nasty. Yeah, they really pumped the power on a lot of the cards in this set and mind into matter. And the last one we talked about is it's a great example of this, I think. This is a really powerful card in Green, Blue, because you are going to always just the fact that you draw the cards first. Yes. Is nasty. Like, yeah, if you're in a Simic deck and you flooded out and you draw mind into matter, you're like, yeah. Good game. Yeah. I will like you just tap out. You're like, all right, I'll cast mind into matter for eight, draw six cards. And the thing goes into play tapped. So you can't like defend yourself really with this. But the fact that you can progress your board and develop your hand on one card is like dumb. Yeah. The reason I don't play Simic on game nights anymore is because of cards like this. Because it's just like, oh, sorry, you thought you were out of the game. No, one single card can completely turn the tide and mind into matter is a very powerful card. Yeah. It's almost like flashback level for me, right? It's just one of those cards where it's just like, how does this not exist? But it does exist. It's just, it's a magic card. It's a rich cards expertise for sure is like the, I think the cleanest comparison. Obviously the rate for like cards is a little different. But the fact that you don't need a board state to do this, this is the best thing to cast after a board wipe. Oh yeah. Like if there's a board wipe and you cast this X's four and put a forwarder up into play, you're winning that game. Yeah. Yeah. Because ETBs are just way better than they've ever been. And you just have all the man in the world in green, blue to begin with. Yeah. You can usually. There's no threats to your life total at that point. Yeah. You've got, you've progressed your board and your hand is full after the board wipe. Yeah. We're talking about modular things on cards. What about modular about just the fact that it's an X spell? Well, it just does. Well, yeah. Let's just do two this time. Let's do maybe next time we'll do it for five, three this time or whatever. Like you just have so many options to flex the block. Green and blue draw two, put a land into play. That's gross. Yeah. It's gross. That's like the, we play that card, that card exists. It's an instant, but that card exists. And the fact that this scales for the late game is pretty. We should read the flavor text. What the mind conceives began Dean Adryx magic can achieve assured Dean Neve magic. Indeed. This is a magic card. Yeah. We have strict saving is really truly where you get a lot of magic cards, right? It's there's so many magic cards. It kind of, yeah. There's so many that are just feel like they slot right into decks. And this next one is, um, Oh, this one's disgusting too. This is moment of reckoning three white, white, black, black for a sorcery. It says choose up to four. You may choose the same mode more than once. Once. The two modes are destroy target nonland permanent and return target nonland permanent from your graveyard to the battlefield. This is sort of the combination of like the last couple of cards. We were to the white, black one that reanimates and the black, green one that blows up all this stuff. Slap them together. No way to reckoning. If you cast this and you reanimate three or four things, you're winning the game. Yep. Like you've cast a living death and then you blow up some stuff on top of that. Yeah. Nasty. I don't think you want to be casting this to kill four things. No. You can. You're probably reanimating side is better. And then you're usually going, what's the best stuff to reanimate? And what is the most problematic one or two things I need to get rid of? Right. I think the modality is really nice here. The big thing to highlight is this is seven mana. This is a monster of a spell to cast. This feels like a ruinous ultimatum or like an aerial to made a miss is a good way to describe it. Where when you're casting it, you are going to win the game. And you shouldn't put it in a deck where reanimating three or four things isn't going to put you in a winning position. If this card is just a removal spell in your deck, it is not the right deck for it. You should be self milling. You should have big stuff that you're bringing back to the battlefield. Like when you, when you bring stuff back, you should be doubling the amount of value you're getting. Yeah. It's interesting because the strict saving cards so far have been like, all right, I'm going to prepare this thing and you're going to see it coming from a while away. And then it's going to take a whole turn cycle. And then now we're in the cards that are just like, when you play this, the entire dynamic of the game will shift. I think a lot of people are comparing this to casualties of war, because they have a similar looking mana cost. But the big difference between moment of reckoning and casualties of war is moment of reckoning gives you a board. It puts you in the game. Casualties of war is like stemming the bleeding, which is not necessarily what you want out of a six mana sorcery. You don't want to be like, I'm dying less. Let me get rid of some stuff. I'm still dying. Yeah. Moment of reckoning says, no, no, I'm the problem now. And I get to choose very specifically if I'm going to remove more stuff or bring more stuff back. Yeah. The flexibility here is one of the best seven mana spells I think ever printed just because it can reanimate so much stuff. Yeah, it's cool. It wouldn't go. Yeah, I love this card. Uh, yeah, yeah. Can you imagine? This is a very Jimmy card, by the way. Like, what if you bring back just a creature, a bolus, a citadel and kill two things? Gross. Gross. Gross, guys. Even just seven mana kill four things is pretty good. It's pretty good. It's not my favorite way to cast this. But if you can reanimate one thing and kill three things, I'm like, I feel much better about that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. The only thing that puts the sort of like the brakes on this is that it's white, white, black, black and it's casting. It is. You have to be able to cast this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Again, in the in the slower games of Commander, this is going to be as haymaker-y as it gets. Yeah. All right. Let's put storms back, by the way. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about ominous harvest. This is two in the black for a sorcery with gravestorm. Yeah. Reagravestorm. You cast this spell, copy it for each permanent put into a graveyard from the battlefield this turn. Oh, yeah. Try to pull out or draw as a card and loses one life. Hey. Okay. So this is a cool board by follow-up for sure. Yeah. I mean, if you can cast a board with like a toxic deluge into this thing, it's from. From the battlefield. Into a graveyard. Yeah. From the battlefield. So it counts all of this stuff that your opponents lose as well. The thing I was thinking of is it was like crack 10 treasure tokens. Cast this storm for nine. Like that's disgusting. Yeah. That's disgusting. That's so gross. Because those are permanents going to your graveyard. So if you're a deck that can sacrifice creatures, that can kill a lot of creatures efficiently, that have like any sort of junk lying around, clues, treasures, tokens, like spawns that just sacrifice themselves for free. If you have an infinite sacrifice loop, for example, if you have like a grave crawler or an ephorexian altar and a zombie on the board, you can cast and sacrifice grave crawler infinite times. Then you cast ominous harvest. You can draw. They'll someone out. Well, you can draw your entire deck. So you draw until like until you die from the life loss. And then you have your opponents draw their entire decks and they'll either die to life loss or card draw. You do have to be careful though, because they're drawing one card at a time. Each time. So they find a lightning bolt in there or something like that. It is a little bit dodgy as a wind condition. Sure. But it's a wind condition. It's a way that you can draw so, so much. So many cards. Yeah. Even in decks that aren't trying to build around ominous harvest, this card will just still do work. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's card that will just randomly just be like, oh sweet, I draw six off of this. Like if you play a plague crafter and just have everybody sacrifice a creature, including yourself, and then cast this, this is a three man to draw for. And that's sick. Yeah. No, no, this is three man to draw five. Yeah. Because it copies that many times. Yeah. Yuck. Why are they putting storm on cards still? I don't know. It's grave storm. It's different. It's different. It's different. So this reminds me of like a plum, the forbidden or a reprocess. Like it's going to go in decks that can sacrifice a lot of things that have a lot of things that they want off the battlefield, or they're just highly controlling where they could kill a lot of creatures efficiently. I don't know why they said target player on this instead of you do it. Yeah. It should have a little bit of breaks. The fact that this is also a wind condition if you have a combo is pretty wild. Yeah. Great card though. But this card is really cool and I think we'll see a lot of it. Yeah. The next one is Pensive Professor. One blue blue human wizard for a zero two with a new ability called increment. Yeah. We haven't gotten to one of those yet. So whenever you cast spell if the amount of mana you spent to cast that is greater than this creature's power or toughness, you put a one one counter on this creature and it's a zero two. So pretty much anything will increment at least one. Yeah. Whenever one or more one one counters are put on this creature, draw a card. Oh yeah. It's a fathomage in blue for three mana that is easier like increment is easier to trigger than evolve. Yes. Evolve requires you to have a creature and a bigger creature at that increment just says whatever you're doing. That's fine with me. Yeah. The you do have to the next time you cast spell has to be bigger than the one three than the two four. Right. So it does go upwards but this is a very powerful card. Yeah. I mean just any any creature with a line of text whenever one or more plus encounters are put on this creature draw a card. Yeah. Remember if you put four counters on this, you still only draw one but if you have those little effects that are like put one plus one counter on a thing at the beginning of combat or at the end of turn like the channel thing. This is just going to be a thing that you can put that counter and turn them into card draw which we know is really powerful. I mean you've played against Terra Zambiosis by now that card's messed up. This is less explosive than that but it's much more reliable in terms of your your card draw. Like you can you can get it even though if you're just putting one on it. Really good in spell slayer decks and good in one one counter decks so it has a little flexibility to go and sort of both slots. Yeah. Good professor. He's good. This will probably see I think a decent amount of play I think. I think so. I mean in in plus one counter decks or in yeah if you're in like expel decks. It's also in that sweet spawn commander where you play and no one wants to kill it but it's going to draw them seven cards so you should have killed it but it's too late to kill it now. Yeah. And now it's also randomly like a five seven. You're like why is it so big? You know what that's been happening slowly. Oh this card's awesome. My profession is jacked. I want to talk about this one. This is another uncommon. This is practiced scroll smith. This one is hybrid mana in it so it's red and a boros hybrid and a white. So it's three mana all together. You could say cast red red white or red white white. It is a three two dwarf cleric with first strike and when this creature enters exile target non-creature non-land card from your graveyard until the end of your next turn you may cast that card. This is an archao mancer that can get back artifacts that can get back. Enchantments that can get back like instant sorcery artifact enchantment battle shore. Plains walker. Yeah walkers. Yeah. There's no limit on the mana cost that you can bring back and you have until your next turn to cast it which is so much time. This is like a three mana eternal witness. Yeah. Yeah. For boros. Yeah. We've never seen a card quite like this before. It doesn't bring back creatures obviously but the fact that it brings back literally anything else. Yeah. Not lands. Not lands. Literally anything else other than those. Literally anything else but creatures on lands. Yeah. No this is actually really really cool. I think this card's cracked. Yeah this is a great way that I this is when I enjoy game design is when it can use right like the mana restriction of being boros hybrid and having this like he have to red red white red white white whatever is great because this is a really powerful card and in colors that typically aren't really great accessing the graveyard in such efficient ways. The other thing that's easy to miss is this doesn't exile the card forever. If it's an instant or sorcery. Yeah that's right. You can cast it. It goes back to your graveyard. If you blink this thing you can cast that same one again. Yeah. It's great in blink decks. It's great in copy decks and you're in the two colors for that. It is three mana so it can be brought back by Siven's Reclamation Sun Tide and all of those kinds of effects. It just does all of the things you want it to do. Yeah Arcaneo Mansers sucks compared to this thing. I mean Arcaneo Mansers awesome like Arcaneo Mansers cracked but the fact that this is in boros is such a big deal. Yeah. Borhold really coming up big. I agree. I think this is a huge set for red and it makes me really happy. Yeah it's been a while by the way. It's been a while. The Paradigm spell for red is great. I think the Emeritus is fine. It's not the best. This is great flashbacks great. There's a lot of really cool red spells in this deck except excuse me. Sweet card and uncommon. I love to see good uncommon. All right up next is another creature with a prepared spell. It's Stensian Sanguinist. Super cute one black two two vampire cleric. Whenever you attack Tard creature gains death touch until end of turn. Whenever that creature deals combat damage to a player this combat this creature becomes prepared. The prepared spell is? Exanguinate. Gross. Pretty gross. Yeah again a creature that you see it and you're like I can't kill that thing. I don't want to waste the removal spell on that and then they cast Exanguinate on you. And you're like well we might be dead. There's a few things to talk about here. It's just so easy to disrupt. Yeah it's a tootoo. Just there's a million ways to disrupt this thing. Killing it is the first reason. Killing the thing that you gave death touch to that's attacking. Blocking the thing that you gave death touch that's attacking. All of those countering Exanguinate. There's a million ways to stop this from happening. So this really can't be in your deck as like my reliable second Exanguinate. I actually kind of want to play this as my only Exanguinate. I like that. It's got a little bit of a hoot to jump for. Yeah if you're like a vampire deck that has flyers so it's easy again for that combat damage then it's like sweet cool. I'm down with it. I think you do have to want this death touch ability. Like I could see putting this in like my Nashi deck which is my I have a three two commander that's trying to deal combat damage so that you can give Nashi death touch and be like okay well now it's harder to block my commander and if you give me an Exanguinate sick. Yeah I also love just Exanguinate for X is equal to three. Because the card is so powerful by itself a lot of people see it and I typically don't play Exanguinate because it's like that's kind of a boring wincon. But when it's stapled onto a creature like this it then becomes like oh my life gain deck or the deck that just wants to stay in the game a little longer. It's totally okay to cast this for way smaller mana levels. Yeah I mean this was in I put Exanguinate in Mr. Negative because I was like that's cool I can like boost my life total and swap with somebody and draw a bunch of cards or vice versa and but when you put just put them in the deck then you draw them in the late game and go well well now there's a win condition. So I think this is has some very cool guardrails to it. It is not more powerful than Exanguinate certainly not. Yeah it's a nice sweet spot for commander players for sure. Oh I like this next one too. Suspend aggression. One red white for an instant. Exile target non-land permanent and the top card of your library. For each of those cards its owner may play it until the end of their next turn. Whoa this is so flexible. This is so cool. Exile their thing to just get out of the way to blink it or exile your own thing and your impulse drawing on top of it. Pretty sweet. This is a cantrapping removal spell for three mana that exiles and hits anything but a land. Yeah like I the the so what happens it's a little confusing. If you exhale one of their things they can recast it until the end of their next turn. So likely because it's instant speed they will have one turn to recast it which is tough. If you hit like a setup piece like a mana doubler or something like that or a or like a damage doubler then it sets them back an entire turn they were handled because their last turn it's like a time walk. Or if they don't cast it that thing's just gone and you've impulse drawn a card. At the same time yeah. I'm obsessed with this card I think like if you're in boros you should cut your generous gift you should cut your chaos warp and you can put this thing in. Yeah it's a really sweet card. It's awesome and the fact that you can just occasionally target your own thing as well if you just need to replay it yeah especially if you're like a really low to the ground deck with really low mana values. Yeah like I don't want to recast my commander for eight or whatever I'm going to exile my commander and I'm going to impulse draw the top card in my library. Yeah in response to someone even trying to take out your commander totally. Exactly yeah yeah yeah. So you're like okay I can recast my commander for its mana cost and I get a free card off the top. Yeah it's like a it's like a slightly slower flicker in that case. Yeah for some cards too yeah it's it's sweet boros is cooking. Yeah right I think this card is really cool yeah and I know everybody's screaming at the tv and saying that this doesn't hit lands but play wasteland play ghost quarter play dumb militian field man those answer lands how many people in the comments right now have you ever cast generous gift to kill a land the amount of people that was let me know they will scream at you jimmy and say they do all the time but it's like the amount of people that are like what if you're playing against glacial chasm it was just like glacial you're playing generous gift against glacial chasm you've lost yeah you've lost man I don't even think I've ever cast generous gift to kill a land before I play strip mine okay I truly don't think that is as as relevant as everybody thinks it is okay let's move on to this next one vicious rivalry Rachel versus everyone casting generous gift it's not good too black and the green this is your chromatic this is my chromatic lantern it absolutely is what's my chromatic lantern off the thing about you know there's situations that I will play it as like they printed one with a picture of a horse on it so now I have to play it yeah but that was a gift to you that was the generous gift yeah like the next best removal spell in that deck is guild so sure sure yeah yeah uh stroke of midnight we would stroke of midnight enjoyers out there okay right vicious rivalry too black and the green for a sorcery as an additional cost to cast this spell pay x life very cool destroy all artifacts and creatures with mana value x or left this is a sick board why yeah this is toxic they lose that also hits artifacts also hits artifacts and you can pay sometimes you would just cast this for two yeah and it would just destroy the board like kill all of your mana creatures everybody's tower already had calling ritual why do we need to give them vicious rivalry too right this card's awesome yeah it's really sweet I think like it's a harder board wipe to make uh to break parody on yeah I think if you have an expensive commander or if you're like your goal is to ramp out a bunch of lands and play big things then you look at vicious rivalry as a crazy turn three play what if you're just enchantment or a lands deck to ramp out right you're just wall growth dot deck I mean that's it just revelry instead yeah it's yeah you pay five life and blow up the entire board like this card's great the only restriction is it has to be in green and black but it's really good you're gonna like yeah there's no card that's like this that blows up all artifacts it like and creatures yeah for this efficient it's modular I was looking at I was like is it pernicious deed is it like compared to pernicious deed and it's it's different than pernicious deed and pernicious deed is less efficient four mana is so cheap to be able to also hit the artifacts I said yeah and you can just choose for zero two if you only discover the tokens right there's a lot of different ways that vicious rivalry just like looks so sweet in your hand yeah and it's I like board wipes that when you look at it you go I like some borrowers are like I have to cast this next turn vicious rivalry is a card where you look at you go I can just wait to cast this at a really opportune time yeah and have other options for board wipes or however I want to deal with the board state yeah this card's sweet I'm excited about it yeah and of course life gain is still just more important than ever everybody like if the first strict saving was like the beginning of the trend of like hey maybe gaining life is actually good second strict savings like it life gain is very relevant these days all right let's talk about wild growth archaic this is a very cool card uh it is sorry it has two bread mana so you have a two of any color or a green for both of its pets so it's it's like mana val it's like converted mana cost its mana value is four yeah but you can cast it for as little as green green you can also cast it for a green blue red or like whatever it's very flexible it's into or just straight up four colors yeah and this is a uh creature avatar with trample and reach it's a zero zero and it has converged this creature enters with a plus one plus one counter on it for each color of mana spent to cast it cool and then whenever you cast a creature spell that creature enters with x additional plus one plus one counters on it where x is the number of colors of mana spent to cast it yeah gross so four color five color decks you are eating with wild growth archaic I think three colored x yeah three colored x yeah like if you can cast your commander with like the three different pips and has three counters on it because a two drop you cast did that yeah like you cast this thing for two it's a one one but the rate is really good here it's so efficient because you don't care about the wild growth archaic itself being a big creature not worried about you just go green green maybe in like if you have more mana you can do green with some other colors making a little bit bigger yeah but it's really kind of an enchantment creature in that way it's an enchantment effect is that cool I just have this extra mana oh randomly like yeah I'm gonna cast this card that's like five in the blue but I'm just gonna add some other colors into it yeah and boom it just becomes huge yeah my commander like your commander cares about its own power or something like that you put this in and suddenly you you've done given your commander a three color like a three plus one counter boost I think this card's awesome I think it goes in a lot of different kinds of decks plus one counter decks obviously but even if you just play this as green green and it's like a metallic mimic and all your creatures come in with one extra counter on it that's not a bad effect we we haven't seen that this efficient for for just two mana that usually is like a three or a four mana effect yeah so you put railway brawler here which I thought was a really good comp because when I first saw this card I was like oh this card is busted I'm gonna see this a lot in commander and I've seen it never it's fine mana while growth archaic is like a way more efficient version of this card that is super more flexible with commander decks too yeah it reminds me of a warden of the grove where which is the one that puts counters on its end step and when your creatures enter they enter with like that many plus one counters on it so it doesn't scale quite as big as warden of the grove but it's much faster in terms of like you get the effect right away as long as you have the colors to uh to make it bigger so yeah I think three colors in up probably is where you're looking at this arcade but you're fine with it in the mall color that's really but I kind of am fine with it in the green yeah it's just metallic mimic in the mall green deck right yeah super sick all right we've got a bunch of other cards that we wanted to talk about but we didn't have a infinite time in this episode despite how long it is already so we've got a bunch of things that we just want to mention quickly and let you know that they exist because I know a lot of people are watching this episode and they just want to know what cards are relevant so we didn't want to skip ones that weren't necessarily like a conversation quick mentions all right let's start off with choreographed sparks red red for an instant this spell can't be copied you choose one or both copy target instant sorcery spell you control you can choose new targets for the copy and or copy target creature spell you control the copy gains haste and at the beginning of the next and sacrifice this token this is just like the best it's cross great doubler yeah just copy one of your own spells and one of your creatures why not yeah gross yeah uh there's not a lot to say about it other than yeah uh yeah we'll play that hey did fork need an upgrade apparently uh it can't copy like your opponent's spells sure that's it um okay the next one is defiling demigoth this is three black black for a creature demon it's a five four with menace whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a player you may gain one oh you gain one life you have to you have to sorry at the beginning of your end step each opponent loses x life where x is the amount of life you've gained this turn each each opponent uh these effects have been targeted in the past veto enduring tenacity we've seen these kind of things before but it's when you gain life that person loses it this says if you wait until end step i'll hit everybody yeah good one new tutor time dina's guide into one black green instant search your library for a creature card reveal it put into your hand or graveyard then shuffle and it's an instant yeah this is sweet this is just a great card you're gonna see this a lot i think yeah this is cool this is really flexible it's great obviously you would want to have cards in your graveyard yeah like that's the you would want to maybe choose the graveyard option to cast this and then this solves like so many problems and decks that like oh i need a card that is the engine to help me discard the cards in my graveyard but i don't want to bury the live it because it's in my graveyard and then for me i'm in to do things like nope dina's guidance she's got you it's fine uh this next one is flow state that's so good one in blue for a sorcery look at the top three cards of your library put one of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order in any order and put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order if there is an instant and a sorcery card in your graveyard instead put two of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order this is two mana draw two in spell stacks yeah you're very easy to hit this two and i love flow state as just like the name of it like you're in the flow bro i can't instant sorcery here we can't flow in two cards out of three very good cards great it's expressive iteration but you don't have to exile the card um they go into your hand you obviously only play this if you can meet that stipulation yep next up we got mana drain for wizards it's mana sculpt one blue blue instant counter target spell if you control a wizard you add an amount of uh colorless mana equal to the amount of mana spent to cast that spell at the beginning of your next main phase do you things to notice here uh you have to control a wizard is a wizard to commander yep do you have a wizard in the command zone now you can look at mana sculpt but i did want to notice call out another uh nerf on this is it adds the amount of colorless mana equal to the amount of mana spent to cast it so if you counter like a force of will with this you get no mana because they spent no mana on it whereas mana drain would mana drain would give you five mana equal to the mana value right right right so it's a little bit different this is somewhere between a mana drain and a cancel i think it smells more like a cancel but if you have a wizard in the command zone there's a lot of upside to this you're just a wizard deck a lot of decks just have incidental wizards all over the place yeah especially if you have like you're an x spell deck you're a big big spell like you can use that all that colorless mana maybe an artifact deck would might use it too yeah sorry i was just thinking about incidental wizard and how this is a kind of cool band name i'm incidentally a wizard do incidental wizard oh i was like it's sweet and thoracios he's a he's a wizard he's a wizard he's a freaking wizard anyway because you can put all the mana into the raseos anyway you got you guys get it pest rescuer is the next one two and a green for a creature dry adrew it it's a tutu at the beginning of each upkeep if you don't control a pest create a pest a one one one creature this is old pest not new pest so when it dies you gain one life and if you would gain one life you gain that much life plus one instead hey it's ophio mancer in green the snake doesn't have death touch right which i think makes it considerably worse um yeah the death touch on the ophio mancer snake is huge the pest this is just like if you're in a deck that cares about triggering life gain yeah have life gain triggers and sacrifice a creature reliably this will give you a new one and it gives you like two life gain a turn yeah so basically you have to care about life gain or you have to care about a creature that you're actually going to sacrifice on four turns because the death touch really uh you're going to feel the difference notably ophio mancer is in the set though it is in one of the commander decks yeah great card uh next up is prismari pianist one red red for a two one gin bard whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell create a one one blue and red element of creature token if that spells mana values five or greater you create three of those tokens instead three that's a bunch yeah this is like young pyro mancer but uh slightly more mana for one red red instead one red and then if you start doing big stuff you're making a ton of tokens i don't know how much you're going to be doing big stuff um yeah like five mana is a huge amount to cast into an instant or sorcery and the kind of decks that really do like these effects are the ones that cast like a lot of one mana spells yeah if you're casting five mana spells like this payoff doesn't really feel like like your five mana spells should be the thing that's winning you the game so i'm not sure how much we're going to see prismari pianist but i did want to mention it because like said more which sees play and that's roughly what this is yeah up next is resonating loot uh this is two a blue and a red for an artifact it says lands you control have tap add two mana of any one color spend this mana only to cast instance and sorcery spells yay then tap draw a card activate only if you have seven or more cards in your hand yeah that's kind of fun card draw yeah it's four mana so it's a bit expensive and it's an artifact so you don't have as many cost reducers in the decks that will play this kind of card there's a mana doubler for your instance and sorceries though yeah but every land having two mana when this comes down means you're probably going to get that rebate really fast and you're going to make this feel like it costs nothing yeah i i think the tap to draw a card thing is gravy if you can tap it great um if your deck is like you really have to dedicate a lot of your deck to drawing cards to be able to activate that every turn um but especially if you have a mana doubler on the board like if you have a mana doubler you don't play your cards pretty fast yeah yeah um so i think you consider that part gravy and the mana doubler the the land doubler the the meat of this card yeah the man doubling is very powerful there uh thunder drum soloist is up next it's one in a red for a dwarf board bard sport one board dwarf board dwarf board it's got reach uh and has the ability whenever you cast an instance sorcery this creature deals one damage we should opponent if five or more man that was spent to cast that spell the creature deals three damage we should put it instead this is just a great pinger uh that has just gravy on top it's just a one three with reach which is actually really relevant yeah reach is a big part of this card and should not be overlooked the fact that he has reach is weird i don't know why flavorfully this dwarf drummer has reached it's like he's flying in the arts but he does so that's important um soloing so hard he's lifted off the ground this has kind of the same problem as the prismari pianist most of the time if you're playing these effects you're casting a lot of cheap spells yeah but it's nice that it gives you a little bit more punch if you do have some more expensive spells in there so i think thunder drum soloist just like replaces your aerobor flamesmiths and we all move on yep hooray up next is one of my favorite cards in the in the set it is traumatic critique x blue red for an instant traumatic critique deals x damage to any target draw two cards then discard a card i'm traumatized man this is instant speed chart of course that can kill a thing for more mana i had a lot of traumatic critiques throwing that mean me too growing up i had a professor that used to uh use like a bamboo stick and he would smack your art with it and point out problems use this tiny tiny filipino man oh my gosh like this cane that he is whap your fist that tracks yeah agents we like to toss sandals and and flap things yeah yeah yeah yeah i got beat by a backscratcher once you know that sounds painful yeah it was kind of like bend to it yeah it was it had a whip to it as well yeah not nice it was a traumatic critique yeah sweet sweet card it's awesome i think you can cast this for x is zero plenty of times and if you have like a little thing to kill you spend more yeah great cards at scale with the game and our modular in terms of how you want to pay the man into it x spells turns out they're really great yeah i mean this this card's awesome i'm and i have to put it in my prism i call it prismarie deck because it's got prismarie on it pretty cool and you can remember about the bamboo professor that's true uh with a balloon charm black and agree that by the way all the charms are uh there's a charm for every one of the schools in this set they're all pretty fun with a balloon charm is black and a green for an instant choose one make sacrifice a permanent if you do draw two cards or you can gain five life or destroy target knowledge permanent with man of value two or less card's great yeah it's pretty good uh sacra token draw two cards is probably your main mode you can sac like treasure tokens to this yeah that's awesome um but if there's a soul ring or a fairy mastermind or some like a ledger shredder this thing it becomes really good yeah so yeah i think those are the two modes that you're thinking about the most when you put wither bloom charm in your deck yep finally keep withering curse one black black for a sorcery all creatures get minus two minus two until end of turn infusion oh boy if you gain life this turn destroy all creatures instead this is a three man a wrath of god if you can reliably gain one for black yeah i just got two this year now right yeah and plus all the other board wipes we talked about yeah green and black this time yeah one black black if you can gain left reliably kill every creature on the board that's a great right i also like we've seen in game nights a couple of times the power of just firing off an early like early board wipe yeah and minus two minus two is a little less than we would what we would expect i would love if it got to three um because that cleans up a little bit more of your threats in the early game but i think that would push this card a little bit oh yeah uh minus three is very different than minus two but i could see you just like casting this without gaining life to kill a bunch of scoots farms or something and call it good yeah so if you can reliably gain life look at withering curse so many board wipes oh my gosh there are so many cool cards in this set we've gotten through all of the ones that we're going to talk about here today if you want to pick up any of the cards that we talked about uh or any of the cards we're going to talk about jimmy and i are going to talk about our favorite and uh the one that we think is the most powerful in the set in just a moment but you can go shopping at card kingdom dot com slash command and support episodes like this one or all of our set review for secrets of strict saving we love the set we hope it shows and card kingdom is a great place to get all the cards that you want from the set in one place whether you're a sealed product girly or you're into the pre cons or you like buying singles card kingdom has everything that you need all under one roof they have a ton of stock of new sets so it's great when you're like okay well i'm gonna need like three flashbacks and two of this and oh well i i definitely want a researcher for this deck uh you can get them all in one place you can add them into your cart at one time and you get out of there you don't have to pay for shipping multiple times you don't have to spend all day comparing a bunch of stuff you just buy it from a place that has it all in one spot and they ship it to you safely and soundly and you're supporting the show use your affiliate link at card kingdom dot com slash command and then go to ultra pro dot com slash command and get your deck protected with ultra pro sleeves play mats deck boxes binders you name it they've got it we use their keyword dice all the time we love ultra pro for all of their products and they're always coming with new stuff they're innovating all the time so if you go to ultra pro dot com slash command you can see their amazing inventory of stuff and they also have great sales going on for older stuff that's coming out uh that's sort of like they need to clear the warehouse and so you can get some great deals on some product as well so make sure you check it out ultra pro dot com slash command support our show at the same time all right let's talk about our favorite cards in the 99 from strict savings specifically from the ones that we talked about today i know there's a bunch i will begin by saying my favorite is ominous harvest this is the gravestorm one this is cool yeah gravestorm yeah i do love to cast an early toxic deluge i'm the kind of person that loves to just draw a bunch of cards as well if i can lose some life to do so ominous harvest feels like it fits into a lot i've become more and more of a mono black player these days you've been playing a lot of black yeah i don't know what's happening in my heart but yeah i mean i was grixis originally kind of so black's always been a big part of it so i really like ominous harvest i think i'm gonna find a way to slot this is a lot of my decks yeah this card's really cool i think will make for some very like cool big moments yeah the one that i really like from this set i think it's i think it's traumatic critique i that's such a boring pick but the but the flexibility i love a chart of course i love like a two-man a little like draw two discard one and the fact that you can kill something um on the way out is really awesome like if if you spend three mana you take out somebody's lana where elves or birds of paradise and draw two and discard with us you're gonna feel incredible that's it's just it scales really well it could also go face right it can it can totally go face that's sweet you're like okay i'm gonna spend 10 mana on this i'm gonna dome you for eight and i'm gonna and then draw two and just go yeah it's cool it's it's very flexible it's the kind of card that i feel like when you cast it it's gonna make you feel really smart and interesting uh the other one that i did want to mention is mind into matter yeah that card is uh is really gross and it makes the like green blue draw x cards yeah better because you feel like you haven't just dipped your whole turn to draw much cards yeah very powerful let's talk about the most powerful card in the 99 for this set i do think that um i'm in agreement with you here yeah i mean erodes really good but i think the number one for me has to be flashback yeah a card that feels like it was almost it should have existed but didn't it's it's been here it's my favorite kind of card it's been here for a long time it's every incident sorcery in your deck yeah it's great instant two if this was a sorcery different story different story it's an instant yeah it's so good being able yeah just just being able to make that decision this is the kind of card that you put in your deck to like give a little present to the the person playing the deck yeah because when you have flashback in your hand you're like oh my gosh what can i do what can i do it that's i'm gonna cast this i can cast that i'm so happy to cast this now because i can get like later i'm happy to discard this because i was looting it anyway etc yeah something that we didn't mention that we probably should for those who haven't played with snapcaster mage is it doesn't give sorceries flash yeah uh you have to be able to cast it still is built around timing restrictions so if you're flashing something back on an opponent's turn it has to be instant and sorceries you have to do on your turn that doesn't matter as long as they can do an instant for an instant is pretty darn good so in red so sick another deflecting's what you have to pay three mana for it but still sure whatever yeah obsessed with this card really excited to put it into decks i've got a lot of spots where i would be happy to have a flashback yeah it's just it's just an easy card to put into so many decks doesn't even nearly be spell slinger flashback to be amazing uh in case you can't tell this that's awesome got some really cool commanders it's got some really cool cards a lot of cards that were just like that card didn't exist yet no i guess it didn't uh which is awesome and it means makes for a very like natural feeling a very traditional feeling magic set so we hope you're having fun out there and enjoying strictshaven yep thanks for watching this episode we're gonna say thank you to our amazing team here with the command zone thank you to karina cruz josh Diaz john schneider grob glottie jamey block jordan pridgen jake boss beccy bell eric lemm it's along josh murphy evan lemberger sam waldo and of course josh they cry bye bye everybody