Monday Night Magic #153 – Galapagos Giveaways!

Ethan says:

My favorite card from the new set is Sen Triplets, and it works especially well in multiplayer, especially with a deck designed around it. For instance, my deck uses Exotic Orchard, Glimmervoid, and Ancient Ziggurat to ensure whatever your opponent has that’s not in the three Triplet colors is playable for you. Head Games and Jester’s Mask lets you rearrange their hand on your turn to give you another shot at grabbing something good from their deck, whether it be land, or some of their main threats. It also includes some other artifact enablers like Master Transmuter, Etherium Sculptor and such, and Orim’s Chant for defense or the ability to lock creatures and sorcery-speed threats if you didn’t get a chance to play them on your turn. And while this is all well and good, it starts getting zany if you manage to get out Mirror Gallery and one or more Sen Triplets or a Soul Foundry. Each one lets you choose an opponent and play stuff from their hand, without letting them react on your turn. The first night I played the deck no one knew what I was playing, other than it had artifacts, so I was able to set up fairly easily and get out a pair of Sen Triplets in a four-person game which led me to the ridiculous play of playing another player’s March of the Machines and another player’s Predator Dragon Devouring everything I controlled that wasn’t a Sen Triplet or a Mirror Gallery and swing for fourteen, killing the Devour player who had been continually emptying his hand to keep his good stuff away from me but was unlucky enough to have me Chant the dragon in his hand the turn before, and using the Triplets and the Gallery to swing and kill the March player who had nothing on the board really. The last player killed me with my now nigh-empty board, but it was a fun experience, as the deck really lets you sit down and ala carte your opponent’s decks and play them.

Marc Jenchura says:

My favorite ARB card is, without a doubt, Maelstrom Nexus. One of my favorite multiplayer variants is Chaos Magic [where each cycle of turns, a card is turned over from the Chaos stack and is in play effecting everyone until the next turn cycle; the Chaos card can not be disenchanted/removed/etc]. Maelstrom Nexus in the chaos stack has insured that, when it is the active chaos spell, nobody knows WHAT is going to happen. We have seen everything from surprise blockers to drastically change the face of a blowout attack to absolutely extreme card advantage when combined with a seedborn muse/isochron scepter deck to darksteel colossus cascading into akroma!

By far the nuttiest we’ve seen with Maelstrom Nexus in play was in a Chaos Highlander game with Rorix Bladewing being played; with cascade on the stack, another player played Dark Banishing to take out Rorix. He cascaded into Fork and was able to take out an Akroma as well (because the copy was red). The Rorix player’s cascade then brought up Time Warp, allowing him to take another cascaded turn… or would have if a third player hadn’t played Force of Will via the pitch-cost and cascaded into the obscure but potent Teferi’s Realm, wrecking people’s plans as well as taking out the Abyss that had been in play eating people’s creatures for several turns!

So, kudos to WotC on the Cascade mechanic, and especially for Maelstrom Nexus — the most fun card to be added to the Chaos stack in quite sometime!

wnatog says:

My favorite card is veinfire borderpost. Of all cards why a borderpost?
I like shrapnel blast a great deal but not having artifact can be quite bad and veinfire borderpost is like an artifact land that comes into play tapped that fixes mana too. It doesn’t mean much until you play in a singleton format where you have to make the extra effort to have artifacts in your deck just to play shrapnel blast but RB doesn’t naturally play many artifacts.
So alongside other artifacts like great furnace or mishra’s fac (just to name a few), veinfire borderpost is definitely a very strong card to play. =)

mrme says:

So far my favorite card out of alara reborn is slave of bolas. Not only can the card be a complete and utter blowout in both limited and constructed, but once you’ve shown it to your oppenent their combat math becomes significantly more difficult. My favorite play so far with the sorcery was in testing for standard though, as I put it in the sideboard of a R/G/B blightning cascade deck. I cast slave of bolas targeting my opponents reveillark, beating for 4, and returning 2 jund hackblades(notably only 2/1s when in the bin) at end of turn. After the 3 for 1 the game was relatively easy to take down. I suppose the reason I like slave of bolas so much is because it is not simply just a ridiculous limited card, but rather has constructed applications played correctly. Another testament to the effectiveness of slave of bolas is that it has already found a place in my cube, suggesting that it is in fact a cut above the rest. So far in cube, the hybrid cost of the card have proved to be very important, as it allows it to fit into two very distinct decks. The R/B cost allows slave of bolas to fit into a super-aggressive deck, which uses the card to get threats out of the way to smash face for even more, while the U/B cost puts the card into a much more controlling deck, which uses slave as something closer to spot removal than anything else. In total, during the few weeks that alara reborn has been out, slave of bolas has proven itself to be an exciting multi-dimensional card relevant in formats other than just limited, and for these reasons is my favorite card out of the new set.

Joey D says:

Giant Ambush Beetle yo!

He comes out biting and forces a block, successfully sneaking on adversaries!

I think he has the best name of any card I’ve seen in a while.

Also, he’s a big bug!!!!

WHOA!!!!

So that’s my favorite guy in this set!

seeya!

flyingballs says:

My favorite card in Alara Reborn is Nemesis of Reason. Ever since “The Dark” I’ve been awed by the Timmyness of Leviathans. 10/10 Trample? Kill you in 2 turns? Sign me up. I remember Norrit, the Mogwai (gremlin-Stripe) helping me keep enough precious Islands to be able to finish the deal. I have always been a blue player, and though Blue doesn’t usually win that way, a Leviathan sends confusion and fear into opponents hearts. I’ve always been a fan of Mark Tedin, and his Leviathan drawings since the original in The Dark, and I always look forward and hope he’ll again get the honor. I was thrilled to see his name, and Leviathan come up in the Orb of insight. Memories came flooding back, opponents conceding, my glorious table-top UB Control, and UR counter/burn decks that I didn’t lose with. My favorite memory, was on one such occasion where I was playing two on two (not really THG, we hadn’t heard of it back in 1994) and our two opponents were trying to come up with a way to kill me, while I still had a few cards in my hand. I let the first “test” spell resolve, and proceeded to counter and fork a fireball back at one of their faces. They weren’t nearly upset enough yet, because they were really wanting to play a Shivan Dragon. When I had another counterspell for that, my friend lobbed a deck of well over 200 cards at me (we were total casual kitchen table players) and left. He’d never blown up at me before, and hasn’t since. But it was far too “powerful” of a play to forget.
So, my vote is for Nemesis of Reason, for nostalgia, for Tedin-drawn Leviathans, for flavor (unfortunately I know these pages will shrivel), and for Frodo.

Travis Shelton says:

I would say it has to be meddling mage, i really look forward to seeing what hw fits into after MTG 2010 comes out.