I’ve been playing the newest set of Magic: The Gathering for about a week now and I’ve gotta say I couldn’t be more happy with it. Initially when I’d read early descriptions or seen spoilers on the official site, I was curious as to how all of these new mechanics would work. I mean, look at Emrakul down there. How on earth could it be fair to play a creature like this in a standard game? Well, it certainly helps that the development team openly admitted that Rise of the Eldrazi was designed to be played within its set, but even so ,what’s to stop one person from dominating the entirety of the game in a race to accumulating a 10 to 15 mana pool?
He also makes a delicious sorbet!
Thankfully, the kind of balance that has always kept Magic fun in the first place has been well preserved in this latest game changer. For starters, it’s difficult to get these types of bad boys out, but it isn’t impossible. Thanks to multiple 0/1 Edlrazi Spawn Creature generation cards, there are plenty of ways to accelerate your mana to get one of the heavy hitters out. Of course, not all of them have protection from colored spells so as scary as they look, a well played pacifism or guard duty could greatly assist in defending yourself.
Another nice feature of the new set is the level up creatures that I’d talked about in a previous post. Initially I didn’t have much of a taste for them as I thought it would be too much of a waste of resources to concentrate on leveling them. However, in a pinch or on a bad draw these have saved me a few times as having no other options but to beef up a single lone warrior certainly keeps the game from becoming too one-sided.
Totem armor can also be great fun, especially if you stack multiples on a single fatty. Even if your opponent does manage to keep knocking layers or your armor away, you can continually put them to a decision of whether to take a beating or sacrifice a creature just to peel it away.
The only real complaint I have about the new set so far is that I’m not sure if it accomplishes what the developers set out to do, which is slow games down a bit. In fact, I could almost argue that games go even faster than before as most of the people I’ve played employ merciless mana acceleration to get their Eldrazi out early on. Either way though, it’s still a lot of fun to play and there’ s a lot of great new cards.
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