A little bit of magic. Part 1

So, I finally decided to start a blog to go alongside my youtube channel, you know provide some more content beyond videos for when I don't have time to film or edit. Like now, being stuck at my family home and spending going out with family, leaving me with no time to film.

Now what many people wont know from my youtube channel, though people from my life will know, is that I started playing magic just before Christmas, 2012, and in the last month or so decided I should try and get more involved by looking at spoilers and getting to know standard a lot better. I say standard since it's the only part of magic I have the money, and ability to focus on. Especially when magic is so very large after 20 years.

So it is with this new found focus and want to actually make viable decks that I've turned my eyes to the upcoming Theros set, and devouring rumours as much as I can. And boy am I excited.




After the multicolor play of Ravnica - the set I started with - I wondered as I tried to conceive how Wizards would somehow achieve their stated aims of not only slowing the game down, but also producing a mono-colour focused set. At first I thought it would be through the absence of multi-coloured mana, what with Innistrad and M13 leaving the standard cycle, but Ravnica has given us enough duel lands with gates and shocks to cope. Next I considered if it would be through ridiculous mana costs, such as BBBB or RRRR and so on, on all the really good creatures to force mono decks.

But now, the curtain has been lifted with spoilers starting to slowly filter through, and boy am I pleased.

Because Wizards did something someone like me - a veritable cabin boy - could never have expected. Devotion.

You see, the main theme of Theros is the Ancient Greeks, or more importantly, it's mythology. A mythology which is rampant with what? Yes that's right, Gods. And as such, Theros was always going to feature Gods.

Now many players I spoke to early on after the set was announced were concerned, how could a creature with a type "god" compete in standard without being underpowered. They expected that while the cards would be stupidly powerful, they would be too expensive to play outside limited. Thematically nice cards, but useless in the competitive environment of GP's or PTQ's. I'm happy to say that Wizards didn't do that.

As I say a couple of paragraphs back, the key to this is a mechanic called devotion, which I hear is based off of, or a tweaked version of an old mechanic called Chroma. Never seen that before myself, and probably many of you haven't either. So let me show you what the cards that currently have devotion do.

As you can see from this first card, Abhorrent Overlord, devotion is to do with the amount of a specific colour of mana you have on the field in your permanents. A rather elegant way to encourage mono coloured decks. For example, in the case above, it's a seven converted mana cost 6/6 flyer, two of which is black. Not too intensive overall, and while a bit lackluster easily allows you to go duel or tri coloured with your deck. However, it's enter the battlefield ability is what makes this card stand out, getting a 1/1 black token with flying for each black mana in the permanents you have on the field.

You see, you can go with more than one colour, but unless you go mono, you won't get the best out of these cards.

Next up is the second of the two devotion cards revealed so far.

That's right, Thassa, the blue god. Now granted this card is only a mock up, but you can clearly see what this card is meant to do.

For 2U - easily splash-able - you get a Indestructible enchantment which triggers both "When a creature" or "When an enchantment" enters the battlefield affects, and gives you Scry 1 and the ability for 1U to make a creature unblockable. Not too shabby.

However, if you were to go the whole way and focus on mono coloured, you would then trigger it's ability to become a creature while on the field and you now have a 5/5 indestructible. All for 2U... That's pretty amazing.

If we were to assume this is the basis of the other coloured Gods. We have a cool set. A card worth its CMC that can be easily put in a splashed coloured deck. But really shines in mono coloured.

Wizards definitely achieved something I couldn't have expected. They gave a gentle, encouraging push towards mono-coloured, while making cards that could still be played in the many RTR block based decks.

Now sadly, both of these cards have a hitch. Getting cards out so that you have enough mana of the correct colour to power them. This is increasing difficult since most cards seem to have an x(colour) based cost or a (Colour x)/(Colour y) based cost, meaning that by the time you get enough permanents on the field - in the case of Thassa, 5 blue mana across all of them - that it will be late game. However that seems to be a hitch Wizards are also providing a solution for, if incoming spoilers are correct.

Sadly, that is something I'll have to talk about next time.

In the mean time, I hope you are all as excited for Theros as I am. And I look forward to bringing you more posts as spoilers come out.

Gcsmith