If my cursory view of the rest of the list was correct, this is the second highest ranked "make a creature bigger" enchantment there is. And there's a good reason for that. Empyrial Armor wins games. Attaching it to a small flyer early on puts an impressive clock on your opponent. Crusade might make all of your creatures a bit bigger, but Empyrial Armor makes the one creature that matters most a lot bigger. It's a deadly weapon for aggro decks and even allows some control decks to behave as though they were aggro decks. Throw in white cards that can keep your hand full (often as a side effect of doing other valuable things) and the boost from Empyrial Armor is even more dramatic. They remade it as an equipment, which lets it stay out to equip something else if the creature dies and gets rid of the color requirement, but in this case, the tempo advantage of 1WW over two investments of 2 each (2 to play and 2 to equip) is enough to make the enchantment version arguably superior.#112: Kudzu
Kudzu gets this spot because it's so very much fun. Well, it's fun for you. It's sure to annoy your opponent—a lot. There are plenty of tricks with Kudzu. But to be honest, I've never bothered with any of them. I just use it and let the lands crumble away. Using it in Ernhamgeddon was always fun and the opponent sending Kudzu back over to my lands would let me kill my own forests in order to negate Ernham Djinn's drawback. Mainly it compounded the effects of other land destruction spells. At some point the opponent is doomed either way, but the fun part will be when he's doomed and doesn't yet know it. He has the choice of using the land Kudzu is enchanting and losing it, while letting you send Kudzu to another one of his lands, or holding that land back and slowing himself down while you destroy his other lands with sorceries anyway. If this sounds cruel and you don't want to do it, that's because unlike me, you have a conscience.#111: Fires of Yavimaya
Veteran players may remember that after Stronghold, Wizards of the Coast stopped printing multicolored cards. Exodus, Urza's Saga, Urza's Legacy, etc. No multicolored cards. And then we got Invasion, with an explosion of multicolored goodness. A lot of the multicolored cards were pretty bad though. Most of the really good ones were cheap cards with two colors that were already being used together in decks. Fires of Yavimaya not only fit this description, it was the perfect card for red/green beatdown decks. We already featured Concordant Crossroads, a card that shows how giving all your creatures haste is such a powerful effect. Fires only gives your creatures haste, making it the equivalent of Fervor, which costs the same. And it has a minor Seal of Strength effect, letting you sacrifice it to boost a creature at any time. Especially nasty with the even more amazing Saproling Burst, a card which won't be showing up on this list quite yet.
#110: Pursuit of Knowledge
A personal favorite of mine. I could go on and on about Pursuit of Knowledge. I already have, actually. At the Casual Players Alliance, as an idea to motivate people on the message boards to write articles for the site (because we're all so lazy), someone started this "theme week" thing. It never really took off and I don't remember if there was ever even more than one theme week before the concept died due to lack of interest. But the article I wrote was about Pursuit of Knowledge. It can be found here. For those too lazy to click the link, the interactions I point out as being most worthwhile are with Brainstorm and with Sylvan Library. I'm not sure what kind of deck I'd build with this card right now. Someday, I hope to break it, but for now, having to skip card draws and just being a white enchantment seem enough to keep this one in check.
The ultimate enchantment for a cycling deck. Actually, I'm not sure this is really that much better than Lightning Rift, but it's certainly more interesting. In any case, they're typically used together. And if you hadn't already guessed, Astral Slide is very good with those wonderful "comes into play" ability creatures. You can use pretty much whichever ones you want. Eternal Witness is probably the best one though. When it comes back into play, you can grab the card you cycled and cycle it again. Combine that with Wall of Blossoms and you'll be drawing multiple cards from cycling just one card. Yes, it's broken. If anything, I'd argue that it's even more broken than it first sounds. Multiple copies of Astral Slide will let you do even more, and Slide decks get the fantastic Eternal Dragon as both a repeatable cycler and a formidable attacker.
Veteran players may remember that after Stronghold, Wizards of the Coast stopped printing multicolored cards. Exodus, Urza's Saga, Urza's Legacy, etc. No multicolored cards. And then we got Invasion, with an explosion of multicolored goodness. A lot of the multicolored cards were pretty bad though. Most of the really good ones were cheap cards with two colors that were already being used together in decks. Fires of Yavimaya not only fit this description, it was the perfect card for red/green beatdown decks. We already featured Concordant Crossroads, a card that shows how giving all your creatures haste is such a powerful effect. Fires only gives your creatures haste, making it the equivalent of Fervor, which costs the same. And it has a minor Seal of Strength effect, letting you sacrifice it to boost a creature at any time. Especially nasty with the even more amazing Saproling Burst, a card which won't be showing up on this list quite yet.#110: Pursuit of Knowledge
A personal favorite of mine. I could go on and on about Pursuit of Knowledge. I already have, actually. At the Casual Players Alliance, as an idea to motivate people on the message boards to write articles for the site (because we're all so lazy), someone started this "theme week" thing. It never really took off and I don't remember if there was ever even more than one theme week before the concept died due to lack of interest. But the article I wrote was about Pursuit of Knowledge. It can be found here. For those too lazy to click the link, the interactions I point out as being most worthwhile are with Brainstorm and with Sylvan Library. I'm not sure what kind of deck I'd build with this card right now. Someday, I hope to break it, but for now, having to skip card draws and just being a white enchantment seem enough to keep this one in check.#109: Astral Slide
The ultimate enchantment for a cycling deck. Actually, I'm not sure this is really that much better than Lightning Rift, but it's certainly more interesting. In any case, they're typically used together. And if you hadn't already guessed, Astral Slide is very good with those wonderful "comes into play" ability creatures. You can use pretty much whichever ones you want. Eternal Witness is probably the best one though. When it comes back into play, you can grab the card you cycled and cycle it again. Combine that with Wall of Blossoms and you'll be drawing multiple cards from cycling just one card. Yes, it's broken. If anything, I'd argue that it's even more broken than it first sounds. Multiple copies of Astral Slide will let you do even more, and Slide decks get the fantastic Eternal Dragon as both a repeatable cycler and a formidable attacker.
No comments:
Post a Comment