MTG Salvation

About cycling from wizards:

"The Modern format impacted these cards more than most, especially in taking care not to give Living End decks anything too egregious.

Cycling and its reward cards are focused in blue and black."

Im loosing my hopes a little bit

Quote from Odross »

About cycling from wizards:

"The Modern format impacted these cards more than most, especially in taking care not to give Living End decks anything too egregious.

Cycling and its reward cards are focused in blue and black."

Im loosing my hopes a little bit

What the hell...they make this big stink about not testing for modern but put a big asterisk next to it that says: "We are not testing for modern.* *-Unless you like Living End, cause that deck is something we have to watch out for meanwhile have some Eldrazi and Sol Lands what could go wrong"

They're testing for modern now and it's because of Eldrazi winter. They don't want that to happen again.

They can say that all they want, but we already have at least 1 new card that will be added to the deck and change the landscape a bit. I would much rather get a power bump than a bannable happening like the Eldrazi were.

Besides, there are still non cycling things that could happen, really in any set, that could always boost the deck. I mean who would have thought that Beast within would be better than vindicate for the deck prior to its printing.

OK.

This is a new Living End enabler. I don't know if it's better/worse than what we already have (Violent Outburst/Demonic Dread/Kari Zev's Expertise), but it's something all right. Late in the game, it might even get you some other free spells if there are enough counters on it.

It's definitely just as good at enabling a stranded Living End as Kari Zev's Expertise. Being off-color doesn't help it, but the repeatability is nice. With our curve, we're not likely to use it repeatedly unless the game goes super long or we end up with multiple Livings Ends in hand, and it doesn't have the sometimes-relevant "Just steal a guy" mode.

Certainly worth considering!

The expertise needs a target (creature) to be cast. This doesn't, and lets you cast anything. On the other side, Expertise cast your LE right now, and As Foretold takes 1 turn.

I wouldn't play either, though.

Quote from CosmoKramer »

The expertise needs a target (creature) to be cast. This doesn't, and lets you cast anything. On the other side, Expertise cast your LE right now, and As Foretold takes 1 turn.

I wouldn't play either, though.

I wouldn't either, but As Foretold doesn't actually take a turn. It's worded weirdly but you can use it immediately for a 0 CMC spell.

It lets you cast LE from hand, which is great, but it's off color and there is not any real discount for it to be played, which is crappy. I believe this will be a one of at most, and will take the place of expertise if it had a place at all, and then only in decks with rainbow-ish mana.

Cascade is still the way to go since it basically tutors for you and is 4 out of 7 times instant speed, but I could imagine a different deck where you use these to string together all sorts of odd cards like LE and Ancestral visions and restore balance and stuff.

As it stands though it's reusablity will scarcely come into play most games, and it takes 3 turns minimum to give you the ability to cast anything else in your deck that isn't LE.

Is there any Armageddon-like card legal in Modern? Can imagine get as foretold in play, cycle bunch of guys, then hose all lands and use As foretold to play living end unopposed

Restore Balance and Boom//Bust are the two stand byes. But with the CMC rule change //Bust is just that a bust.

Quote from protoaddict »

As it stands though it's reusablity will scarcely come into play most games, and it takes 3 turns minimum to give you the ability to cast anything else in your deck that isn't LE.

On the other hand, during those three turns, you're not investing anything into the card. I'm certainly not saying this card is any kind of auto-include, please understand, just that if you get into a grindy game and the board has stalled a bit, it will give you a free Beast Within or Jund Charm or something. I don't think I'll be adding blue to my deck just to run this card, but it's not like I haven't considered it in the past already, if only to hard cast Architects of Will.

I think I, personally, like having 4x Violent Outburst, 3x Demonic Dread, and 1x Kari Zev's Expertise (it's not that often that I need to cast Living End from my hand), but if I pull one of these in a draft or something, I might give it a shot at an FNM just for fun.

Now this is the game changer.

That seems pretty good!

The only real issue is what we take out and how do we solve the mana base given the color restrictive cost.

I'm inclined to 1 for 1 swap on monstrous carabid seeing as this is just a strict upgrade over that in the context of our deck but that would definitively put us in blue and we need ways to accommodate it, fetches and landcyclers become even more valuable now.

Is it worth the blue splash?

I'm thinking yes.

Blue splash is not very demanding : 1 Watery Grave should do the job. Heck, you can even use it to hardcast Architects of Will.

love some new players to Living end!

Quote from ottosmagic13 »

Is it worth the blue splash?

I'm thinking yes.

Yeah, I'm thinking a blue splash is absolutely worth it. A 1-CMC cycler with a big evasive body is great on its own, and having our cyclers do double duty on digging is great when we're in topdeck wars.

Also it's just big enough not to get eaten by Deadshot Minotaur.

They're pre-selling at a decent price on eBay; can be had for about $2.50 a pop right now. I grabbed a set just in case cycling ends up being super pushed in this set and Standard demand drives up the price.

Here's the preview article, with bonus Living End deck list, as an example.

Preview

What do we think?