Appears to be a brief respite on Sunday, with only a few spoilers dropping. That said, it could just be that the mythicspoiler.com admins are enjoying the long weekend. We can catch up on some skipped ones too.

rating system

• Game-Changers (aka bombs, As)
• Power (aka Bs)
• Draft-Changers (aka Build-arounds)
• Signals (top commons)
• Variable Playables (playable cards that have a home)
• Filler (borderline playables that don’t have a home)
• Avoid (Fs & D-. Or just too narrow to plausibly make work)

Ghoulcaller’s harvest

It looks like Golgari is doing what Golgari does, and is planning to dump cards into the graveyard to use as a resource later. Which brings to the forefront: what is the value of a Decayed creature? Decayed creatures can’t block and are sacrificed at the end of combat. It’s theoretically possible to set up a giant alpha strike with a lot of 2/2s, especially if this has a very reasonably flashback cost. But I think there’s a more intriguing alternative:

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Okay, so I don’t speak German either. But these commons have an activated ability “Tap three untapped creatures: ________”. The black one deals one damage to oppo and the blue one allows you to self-mill. I think fueling this is the highest use of decayed creatures, as you can take your horde and get repeated value. Note that these can be activated multiple times a turn as they don’t require the creature itself to be tapped for activation.

With all of that said, I think this will qualify as a “Draft-Changer” (aka build-around). If the payoffs for having a horde of Decayed are reliably at common, then a card that can turbo out 2-4 zombies fills in a key role in that deck. Great art too.

draft-changers

Liesa, Forgotten Archangel

A five-mana 4/5 flying & lifelink creature is extremely powerful just on the French Vanilla test. It is an excellent blocker that can easily attack and turn the tide in a racing situation. Add to that a phenomenal source of repeated value: your dead creatures go back to your hand. Trade-off with reckless abandon, bring back ETBs, yikes. Seeing how this card can both stabilize all but the worst board states *and* provide resources to grind out an advantage, it’s a clear bomb.

game-changer

flame channeler // Embodiment of flame

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I find this card really interesting. First, it has a classic “high floor”: a 2/2 for 2-mana with upside is going to be a solid playable at worst. And this gets significantly better than that as it can transform. Any damage spell turns it into a 3/3 (almost a mini combat trick in itself, if you have an instant like Shock available). If you have the good fortune to draw a second direct damage spell, it then offers some card advantage in that classic, “We’re red, so we can’t draw cards but I’ll let you exile a card and play that instead.” Assuming that a deck with mountains has 2-4 copies of direct damage, I think this makes it all the way to Power as it’s efficient and a 2-for-1, or more. If direct damage is harder to come by, it’ll slip down to a Variable Playable.

power