Hello again, everyone!  This is the first article I have written s, ince the release of Zendikar (and the Prerelease, for that matter), and boy, is there a lot to talk about!  I hope the majority of you reading this were able to make it to a prerelease of some kind; I went to a local one at a little place called Underhill’s Games in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and it was fantastic.  Okay, I only won 1 out of 3 matches (I dropped after that, since they didn’t award prizes to anyone who had lost 2 or more), but given that it was my first prerelease in about ever, I would say I did pretty well.  Of course, my little brother had to show me up and win 4 extra packs, but hey, it was still a good time!

Anyhow, as I said, Zendikar has offered a wealth of topics to discuss, and I’d like to kick things off with a piece about what is possibly my favorite element of the game: card cycles.  I love the idea of each color having a card that is similar mechanically to each other one, but at the same time tooled to fit its color in flavor and ability.  It’s always exciting to see a couple of cards get previewed that look very similar, realize they’re part of a cycle, and then anxiously await the unveiling of the rest of the group.  Inevitably, some of the cards in the cycle will turn out to be better than others; the best cycles, of course, are ones that, while there may be one or two standouts, have a solid card in each color.

One of the awesome things about Zendikar is that it contains a wealth of different card cycles, each with their own theme.  Of these cycles, there are three different rare cycles which I believe are the absolute coolest and the best representations of what the set is trying to do.  We’re going to go through each of these cycles one at a time, taking a look at the good, the not-so-good, the bad (gasp! Yes, there are a couple) and the freakin’ sweet.  Yeah, that’s not the order in which those four categories should logically be presented, but hell, we’re in Zendikar!  There’s floating rocks in the sky, for heaven’s sake.  What’s logical about that?  Seriously, though, I think most of these cards should fall in the Good or Not-So-Good areas of the spectrum, with only a few landing in the other two.  Want to find out which ones those will be?  Then take my hand!  …Or not; that’s a little creepy.  Just follow me to the Ascensions.

The Ascensions

THE GOOD:  Pyromancer Ascension

THE NOT-SO-GOOD: Archmage Ascension

THE BAD: N/A

THE FREAKIN’ SWEET: Luminarch Ascension; Beastmaster Ascension; Bloodchief Ascension

Pyromancer Ascension is just dying to be slipped into a combo deck of some sort.  The best thing about the card is that you can play it pretty much whenever you draw it and still get use out of it.  Its ability requires you to be slinging spells pretty much every turn, so you’d want to use this in a more agressive sort of deck.  Playing out your hand wouldn’t be too bad if you were using cards with the Hellbent ability along with the Ascension, so that’s one way to go; Madness cards would also be an option coupled with some sort of discard aimed at yourself.  The best card for this, of course, would be Chandra Ablaze, who is just amazing in combination with the Ascension, giving you doubles of every red instant and sorcery in your graveyard with her ultimate.

Archmage Ascension falls into the Not-So-Good category because of the fact that it’s hard to get quest counters on it in the first place, and you need six of them to kick off its ability.  However, the ability itself is good enough to keep it out of the Bad category.  A converted mana cost of 3 (with no double-color requirements) means that you can get it out early enough to start getting quest counters on it before its ability becomes worthless (the later it is in the game, the less likely you’ll actually need to be searching your library for too many cards, as you’ll probably have drawn most of them already).  You’ll want to have a LOT of draw in a deck with this card, because going a couple turns in between putting counters on the Ascension is pretty much a pure waste.  It seems that this card would be best in a deck with some of the Lorwyn/Morningtide/Shadowmoor/Eventide Merfolk, like Fallowsage, Sage of Fables, or Sygg, River Cutthroat.  I would love to see how this works with Sea Gate Loremaster, as well; not only would this card help get counters on the Ascension, but once the Ascension ability goes off, you’ll be able to use the Loremaster to search your library for a card for each Ally you control.  Sweet!

Luminarch Ascension is just amazing; there’s so many ways in white to keep yourself from losing life that you’d be sure to be pumping Angels out in no time; plus, in multiplayer, you have a ton more opportunities to get counters on this card right out of the gate.  Its converted mana cost is amazing, its screw-you-Sarkhan Vol ability is, in my opinion, the best of the Ascensions, and to top it off, the art is kick-ass!  One thing that you must remember about this card is that life gain does not cancel out life loss in the same turn, so don’t expect to load up on counters simply because you have a Soul Warden out.  If you’re packing lots of Holy Days, you should be fine; other cards that would work would be ones that work to prevent attacks turn after turn, such as Ghostly Prison.  You might also consider the Clerics from the Odyssey and Onslaught blocks that can go nuts with damage prevention.  Another route would be to run an entirely creatureless deck that uses Luminarch Ascension and Sigil of the Empty Throne alongside Pacifism and other slow-the-game-down enchantments in order to quickly flood the board with Angels.  I would splash blue into this type of deck for some countermagic to prevent your opponents from wrecking your enchantments or board-wiping your Angels.

The first thing I thought when I saw Beastmaster Ascension was, “Wow!  That artist must be a serious Cincinnatti Bengals fan!”  Okay, no, actually, I found it to be the third-best of this enchantment cycle (second being Luminarch Ascension; we’ll get to #1 in a moment).  The only reason for this is the fact that you’ll need to be attacking pretty much every turn in order to really maximize this card’s early-game potential.  With an aggressive deck, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem; the only other real issue I have with this card is the fact that it costs one more mana to play than its Luminarch and Bloodchief cousins, so it’ll take a tad longer to really get going with it.  Drakdrium13 (who also writes for this site) mentioned to me the other day that he would rather just play it the turn he was going to attack with 7 creatures at once, and have them all get +5/+5 immediately.  That sounds like a fine plan to me!  I feel that the deck archetype that could benefit the most from this would be Elves (cheap, quick, aggressive creatures with mana accelleration), but you shouldn’t have any problem using this card in all sorts of fast mono-green or part-green decks.  Awesome combo alert: Beastmaster Ascension (with enough counters) + Mycoloth + Pandemonium!  20+ damage worth of creatures per turn?  Whoopah!  (If any of you are Friends fans, you’ll get that).

That leaves the best Ascension for last, namely, Bloodchief Ascension.  The converted mana cost of 1 pretty much seals the deal for me; the fact that, like Luminarch Ascension, it actually becomes far better in multiplayer is just the icing on the cake.  In certain types of decks, you should have no problem getting your opponents to lose 2 life here and there, and the great thing about this card is that it can let you sit back and watch your opponents smack each other around and still get quest counters (that is, if your opponents are just that stupid).  Plus, it only needs three quest counters before its ability goes off!  This card is dying to be used in a bleed deck; a deck that could do that and mill cards at the same time might very well wind up being virtually unbeatable.  And I don’t think I have to tell you to use Sanguine Bond alongside this card.  Bloodchief Ascension is going to piss a lot of people off, so make sure to get your hands on some, because there’s nothing more fun in Magic than pissing off multiple people just by laying one card on the table!  Just make sure that you have lots of removal up your sleeves–this card is going to make you a target, and fast.

The Kicker Spells

THE GOOD: N/A

THE NOT-SO-GOOD: Conqueror’s Pledge

THE BAD: Gigantiform

THE FREAKIN’ SWEET: Rite of Replication, Elemental Appeal, Sadistic Sacrament

Conqueror’s Pledge is not in the Not-So-Good category because of its mana cost; as you will have noticed, every one of these spells is heavily mana-intensive with an expensive kicker.  No, Conqueror’s Pledge missed the Good category simply because of what it does.  Although 12 1/1’s for 11 mana seems like a good investment, there are a lot of cards out these days that can handle that sort of threat rather easily.  Pyroclasm just got reprinted in M10, for example, and that only scratches the surface of the different types of mass removal that are around these days.  A white weenie deck would certainly benefit from this card, but just make sure that if you’re planning on using it you know that you don’t have anything in your deck in which it would be more worth investing 11 mana in one turn.  A good situation would be to have a Glorious Anthem or two on the table when you play this card.  A final note: Just recently, Jacob van Lunen wrote an article for magicthegathering.com about a white weenie deck that he built involving the Pledge alongside lots of cheap soldiers, including Veterans Armorsmith and Swordsmith, among others.  As I recall, he did relatively well with the deck, winning about half of his matches, but one thing he seemed to gloss over was the fact that he barely played Conqueror’s Pledge at all, and the one or two times he did, it didn’t help him in the slightest.  Every match he won, he did so without so much as considering playing a Pledge.  With that information, I wouldn’t consider building a deck around this card; rather, think about throwing it in as a two-of so that you can have another finisher in a deck that needs one.

Curiously enough, Gigantiform is the only spell out of this cycle that isn’t a Sorcery.  Specifically, it’s an Aura, which only serves to bury it deeper in the Bad category.  For 9 mana, I would want to do a hell of a lot more than turning two of my creatures into 8/8 tramples, not to mention the fact that, since it’s an Aura, your opponent could easily two-for-one your creature and your Gigantiform and you would be back to square one.  There are so many other ways to beef up your creatures in green (or just play beefy creatures in the first place) that the idea of running one of these, much less more than one, seems bad from the start.  Maybe it would be better if it gave your creature a power boost instead of just changing its power and toughness to new base numbers.  As it stands, though, I can think of a myriad of other cards that would be more worth using in a green deck than Gigantiform (Epic Proportions, for one; if you really want to use Auras, at least use good ones).  Don’t feel bad, though, green… you got Lotus Cobra.  Lucky bastard.

Elemental Appeal is heavily red-intensive, so I probably wouldn’t bother using it anywhere other than a mono-red deck (or a two-color deck with a crapload of mana-fixing).  However, 9 mana for a 14/1 trample haste is just gorgeous!  This card will win you games, it will win you games, it will WIN YOU GAMES.  It really shines in one-on-one, because it will basically swing the game in your favor (or, if it was already in your favor, put it out of reach).  Your opponent is probably not going to want to take 14 damage, so they’re going to have to lose some creatures to take out your crazy-big token.  Even if you can’t kick the spell, you’re still getting a 7/1 with the same abilities for four mana (albeit all red mana), so it’s still a great play.  Yeah, the token is just as killable as the Kor tokens I mentioned when discussing Conqueror’s Pledge, but the fact is that this card is so much more dangerous than the aforementioned white sorcery because it forces your opponent to act as soon as you play it, as opposed to giving them a turn to figure out what they’re going to do.  Unless they happen to be holding a timely kill spell or direct damage, they’re basically going to have to gang-block or die.  This card would be fantastic with Chandra Ablaze and/or Pyromancer Ascension (see above).

Sadistic Sacrament is hands-down the best card in the cycle.  For three black mana, you get to look through your opponent’s library and rip out three cards.  Kicked, this spell basically hamstrings an opponent’s deck.  Losing fifteen cards is bad enough, but losing what will essentially be your fifteen best is hard if not impossible to recuperate from.  The fact that this card only takes 10 mana to perform at full capacity is almost too good to be true.  It’s basically a Denying Wind on crack, and essentially puts the old Prophecy powerhouse to shame.  You can’t find anything nearly as good from recent sets except for Future Sight’s Bitter Ordeal, and that requires a lot of cards going to the graveyard to really be powerful, whereas with Sadistic Sacrament, what you see is what you get, and what you get is a whole lot of AWESOME.  I would love to see a mono-black mill deck utilizing this card, with a good creature base, plenty of removal, Memory Sluice (and other mill cards), and hell, if you can wrangle it, the aforementioned Bitter Ordeal.  It seems like it would be a blast to play, especially since black gives you cards like Bubbling Muck and Dark Ritual to help you play the Sacrament as soon as you can.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Sadistic Sacrament is so unbelieveably good, Rite of Replication would be my pick for best card in the cycle.  Granted, I only rated it Freakin’ Sweet because of what it does when it’s kicked; just playing it normally is essentially playing a Cloneat rip-off pricing.  Still, getting a copy of any creature on the battlefield for four mana isn’t much of anything to sneeze at, not to mention the fact that you can use this card to kill off other players’ Legendary creatures.  However, by paying an extra five mana, you are essentially grabbing control of the board right then and there.  By the time you are able to play this card, there should be a few different creatures out there that you wouldn’t mind having five of; this ability gets astronomically better in multiplayer games.  Depending on what creature you wind up copying, this card could potentially win you the game.  It is a lovely play alongside any number of different comes-into-play effects, such as In the Web of War or Pandemonium (and hey, having both out at the same time couldn’t hurt!).

The Rare Lands (no, not the fetchlands)

THE GOOD: Emeria, the Sky Ruin; Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

THE NOT-SO-GOOD: Magosi, the Waterveil

THE BAD: Crypt of Agadeem

THE FREAKIN’ SWEET: Oran-Rief, the Vastwood

You’ll notice that I took the time to mention that I’m not speaking about the Fetchlands.  Yeah, they’re amazing cards, and they’re technically a cycle, but there’s not much else I can say about them since they’re not very unique individually or as a group (there’s been an allied-color cycle of those already).  Therefore, I can’t really count that cycle as one of the best in Zendikar.

We’ll get the bad one out of the way first, so I can end the article on a good note.  Crypt of Agadeem is pretty terrible.  Sure, it’s the best black mana battery in Standard, but that’s only because all the good ones have been phased out.  For casual players, there is a wealth of other cards that are far better than this piece of crap.  Try the infamous Dark Ritual or Cabal Coffers on for size, and if you’re using the Coffers, you might want to check out their Magus, as well.  That’s not to mention the gabillion other cards out there that provide lots of black mana at a time.  If you really do want to use this card, you’d better have a hell of a good reason for putting enough creatures in your graveyard (and keeping them there) to make it worthwile.  Perhaps Umbra Stalkeror something of the like would be cool, but again, there are plenty of ways to play that guy that don’t involve a card that comes into play tapped, requires 2 mana to activate, and probably only gives you 4 or 5 black mana in return on average (for a net result, mind you, of 2 or 3).  My best advice to you would be to use this card as a coaster.

Magosi, the Waterveil would be good if design had forgotten to add the “return to your hand” clause into the cost of its second non-mana-producing ability.  If that had happened, there would be a ton of ways to get lots and lots of extra turns out of this card at no cost to you.  Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened, and so all you have left is something that probably will hurt you just as much as it could help.  I’ve never liked cards that made you skip turns (I have no idea why Chronatog is such an iconic card), and this one is no exception.  It’s not necessarily a bad card–it gives you an extra turn, after all, but that’s only after a lot of screwing around.  I don’t think I would want to put the effort into using it more than once (after all, it essentially gives your opponent(s) an extra turn as well) unless I had some sort of ridiculously awesome plan up my sleeve that wouldn’t be harmed by one or more opponents who decide that they want to kick my ass during their extra turn.  There is one card that combos rather nicely with this one, though:  Rings of Brighthearth and enough mana should allow you to take a few turns in a row all by yourself, which, with the right deck, should be enough to win the game.  Unfortunately, that’s the only way I know that this card will work better than it does on its own, and it’s not in Standard.  Lucky for us casual types, Rings is a rather cheap card money-wise, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some decks spring up here and there using this combo.  For the rest of you, be happy that Magosi’s ability at least lets you utilize Landfall to a greater extent.

Emeria, the Sky Ruin is a land saddled with Reya Dawnbringer’s ability, which would normally make it amazing, except for the little catch that you need to have seven Plains under your control before it starts working.  That’s not as bad as it sounds; this land is still a mana-producer, so it’s good to have in your opening hand, but it’s not a dead draw late in the game, either; as a matter of fact, it might turn out to be a game-winner in certain situations.  Getting your choice of creature back from your graveyard every turn is certainly nothing to sneeze at!  This card can work well in either mono-white or multicolor decks; in a multicolor deck I would strongly suggest including Endless Horizons.  This card will thin your deck out, allowing you to draw more of what you need when you need it, and at the same time will pretty much guarantee a timely activation of Emeria’s ability.  You could do this with a mono-white deck as well; that way, you’ll be guaranteed a land per turn while at the same time having immediate access to the entire non-land portion of your deck on every draw step.  Other recent cards to consider would be Harrow (sac a Forest for two Plains, for instance) and Kor Cartographer.  As for what to grab out of your graveyard… well, get creative!  (I shouldn’t have to mention Pandemonium again, but I will anyway; I’m obsessed with that damn card).

Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle is very similar to Emeria in that it requires you to have multiples of the same basic land type in play before it starts working to its full potential.  The problem with mono-red is that it basically has no land fetch, so you’ll probably have to run this land in a red-green deck to ensure that you’ll get enough Mountains into play early enough for this card to work to its full potential.  A Lightning Bolt for every Mountain you play is better than awesome, so make sure you get this baby working as soon as you can.  I would play this card in a red-green deck for access to cards like Harrow and Exploding Borders, which can build up your Mountain count rather quickly.  Imagine this (as a late-game play): Valakut and five other Mountains and a Forest under your control.  Play Harrow, sacrifice the Forest, get two Mountains onto the battlefield, and play another from your hand.  That activates Valakut three times at once!  Nice.  And since you’re using all the land fetch, you might as well utilize some of the Landfall effects found in Zendikar while you’re at it.

Oran-Rief, the Vastwood is certainly the best card out of this cycle.  I’m sure some people would argue with me over this, but the fact that this card doesn’t have any prerequisites for using its ability makes it fantastic in my eyes.  In an aggro green or green-red deck, this card is just spectacular.  Utilizing cards like Bloodbraid Elf in conjunction with this card sounds like a fine idea to me!  Any sort of mono-green Elf deck would also benefit greatly from this card; it’s a land, so it wouldn’t be taking up the space that, say, an Imperious Perfect could be filling (and it would work great with the Perfect, too!).  Warrior decks would get a kick out of Oran-Rief + Bramblewood Paragon.  It would be kick-ass in team games too, since it pumps up every green creature that enters the battlefield, including your teammate’s!  This card seems to be underrated in my play group as of right now, but I feel that it is highly useable and will start to see a lot of play all over the place.  Actually, I might go so far as to say it’s one of the best non-basic lands that has come around in a while.  Count it!

The End

Well, that about wraps it up for this article!  Feel free to comment about any combos or deck ideas you can think of that use any of these cards.  I would love to see your ideas, and I’m sure other readers would, too!  Until next time!