MTG Salvation

Quote from Crispen_Smith »

How on earth was Utopia Sprawl a $5 card? Pauper? I would have thought even there that supply outstrips demand by a wide margin?

There's more demand than just Pauper. Any enchantress deck in Legacy, Modern, or EDH (assuming you're playing green) is going to be playing it. Plus, in Modern it is the hardest turn 1 mana accelerant to interact with, especially if you put it on a basic forest, as Prismatic Ending and Portable Hole are really about the only commonly played ways to answer it on curve, so it's a very reliable accelerant as long as you are playing mostly forests. It also benefits from the fact that there's not really a substitute for it, as in 30 years of Magic sets, it and Wild Growth are the only 2 one-drop enchantment ramp cards, which means that if you want to build a deck in any format Sprawl is legal that wants ramp and cares about enchantments, it's about as close to an auto-include as you can get.

Unfortunately not. Now if the damage boost had been written as two separate abilities, one of which pumps red sources and the other pumping artifact sources, the Goldhound *would* indeed deal 3 damage, so that is something to keep in mind for the future.

I really like that fact that this puts counters on ANY creature. Similar to Luminarch Aspirant this can place your opponent into the spot of "I only have one removal spell, do I use it on the creature giving out the counters or the beefy one currently wearing the counters," which is better than I would've expected from an uncommon one drop.

So do multiples of these in play exponentially grow token production in a similar manner to a Doubling Season style effect? In other words, if you have just one copy in play, and you go to create a food token, it will replace that event with creating a food, clue, and treasure instead. Now if you have two, my understanding is that you have to pick one of the replacement effects to apply to the event first as stated above, but now the second replacement effects is applying to an event that is creating one of each kind of token, and thus will replace the food with one of each, the clue with one of each, and the treasure with one of each, so you end up with 3 total of each kind.

So in general (assuming I'm mathing correctly), the resulting number of each kind you end up with is M*3^(N-1), where M is the number of tokens the original effect had you create, and N is the number of Academy Manufacturers you control...bonus points if you decide to throw in Doubling Season effects in there as well.

I think the exiling clause is a bit of a trap in terms of evaluating the card, as most of the time you probably won't want to/need to use it. It actually reminds me somewhat of Tarmogoyf in that it's a reasonable on-curve body on turn 2/3, and it, without really expending much effort is going to naturally grow over the course of the game. A 3-mana 3/3 that grows everytime you kill one of your opponents creatures/cards or they crack a fetch/Fabled Passage is already a somewhat reasonable card without needing to account for the other ability.

This guy seems really tricky to evaluate in the context of a deck like modern burn. On the one hand, you basically never want to cast this on turn 1, which is bad. But, in a deck that never wants to draw more than 3 lands, and so has a correspondingly low land count, the fact that this guy returns lands to your hand could also be a massive benefit. If you have only drawn two lands, this guy lets you cast 3 mana worth of spells off of those two lands every turn cycle, which is probably enough to shave a turn or so off of how long it takes you to kill your opponent.

Seems really good in limited to help enable the "eight or more cards in opponents graveyard" mechanic in blue/black.

Is this Ashiok only the second regular (i.e. not WAR weirdness) planeswalker we've had where they can only use one of their loyalty abilities the turn they enter (the other of course being Mu Yanling, Sky Dancer)?

So as long as you can turn this into a creature (hi Nissa, Who Shakes the World), it does go infinite with either Training Grounds or Biomancer's Familiar and an Umbral Mantle to both pump it infinitely and generate infinite green mana. The restriction on how to spend the mana isn't even much of an issue, because as long as you have a random mana dork (Birds of Paradise), you can simply move the mantle over to the BoP to filter the restricted green mana into unrestricted mana of whatever color you want. Don't know how useful that is, but hey, who doesn't love janky infinite combos?

So am I the only one who isn't bothered that you lose a mountain when he leaves play? It just makes him a Mana dork that is actually decent in the red zone and ramps you even as it attacks. Not saying this card is amazeballs or anything, but some of these comments make it sound like he stone rains you when he dies, which isn't exactly true.