(Opened May 28, 2015)
Manifest Manifesto (Part 1)
I love manifest. I love to think of it as a precursor to morph (and later on, megamorph). I love what it does to my library and how it churns out extra (featureless) dudes to fight for me. I love how it's so backwards-compatible with every creature in existence (especially with odd-ball freaks like Phyrexian Dreadnought). But most of all, I love the mystery it introduces into the game to help keep it a bit less chess-like: bringing a face-down creature into the battlefield would make my opponent(s) guessing, and since I'll be doing so by manifesting it, I'd be in on the guessing game too!
In fact, it's that randomness that made me fall in love with manifest so much, it encouraged me to buy an entire booster box of Fate Reforged (that, and I needed a Temur legendary to help complete my Commander deck collection). I do see, however, that it's exactly that randomness that probably has turned off a lot of people as well: manifest cards have yet to see some love in both tournament and casual deck lists as of this writing.
I think what makes manifest a little hard to use is that you can only turn the face-down card face-up if it's a creature card. The only way to make a good value out of manifest is to fill your deck with nothing but creature spells, but then you'd still be prone to manifesting a dud if it hits a land.
(To be continued)