This card seems really good. As Bonecrusher Giant has shown, stapling a two mana Shock to an otherwise borderline playable to decent card is a recipe for success. There are so many incidental artifact tokens running around in standard to sacrifice that I don't think you'll have any trouble having fuel for this as long as you put in any work at all.
Dust Animus is a really cool design that I'm a big fan of. Standard control decks could definitely be interested in this card. Taking your second turn off in order to have a free 4/5 flying lifelinker later on after you've stabilized a bit seems pretty good, honestly.
Lilah looks strong, but there are some pretty significant constraints to building around her. A lot of the izzet-colored sorceries and instants are really niche spells, counters, or combat tricks. The last two are really hurt by only being able to play the plotted spells at sorcery speed.
I think this is why Lilah's best friend in EDH will be Painter's Servant, to make her trigger on every instant and sorcery in your deck and not just the Izzet ones.
Absolutely valid point, but I'll still bet that needing a $50 card to make her function well at all will likely keep the number of Lilah-led decks overall pretty minimalized. Probably best in the 99 of another deck.
I kinda wish the ability had been worded not as a trigger on cast, but a replacement effect that checks to see if a spell is multicolored on resolution. What did Chaoslace ever do to you, Wizards
Lilah looks strong, but there are some pretty significant constraints to building around her. A lot of the izzet-colored sorceries and instants are really niche spells, counters, or combat tricks. The last two are really hurt by only being able to play the plotted spells at sorcery speed.
I think this is why Lilah's best friend in EDH will be Painter's Servant, to make her trigger on every instant and sorcery in your deck and not just the Izzet ones.
I can't figure out if the Outcaster is better, worse, or just a different take on Topiary Stomper. Because (and this is why I'm pretty high on this card), at the base level, this and the Stomper are pretty similar. They are both 3 mana plays that do not effect the board at all and allow you to have extra mana starting the following turn. Stomper has the better statline, but the Outcaster has the upside of always being able to attack and block as well as maybe draw you a card or two every so often.
The only thing I don't like about Three Steps Ahead is that, at least in standard, a split Cancel//Catalog card seems like something only the control players would really want. But then, those are also the same decks that, by and large, care almost nothing about the middle mode.
It also plays incredibly well with one of the best black cards in standard, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, either counteracting the life loss when you target yourself or making this BBB: target opponent loses 9 life
I'm going to assume that the sphinx is one of the best non-rare blue cards in the set for limited, because if a 5 mana 3/5 flyer with vigilance and ward 2 that surveils 2 whenever you target your opponents stuff is NOT one of blue's top non-rares then...what the hell are they putting in this set haha
So discounting the ability to just use the Vampiric Tutor mode on its own (as outside of certain niche situations it's always going to be a bad idea), we basically have a split card, where one half is BBB, draw 3, lose 3 (so a mono-black version of Painful Truths), and the other half is 2BBB to cast Demonic Tutor and Divination.
The 5 mana option is...alright, I guess, but it's not a card that I would necessarily want to play in a lot of decks, because as mentioned above, black is INCREDIBLY deep on tutors. The 3 mana option though, has nowhere near the competition.
There are less than 10 cards in all of Magic that will unconditionally draw you three cards (and let you keep all of them) for only three mana, and of them, Necropotence is the only one I would say is hands-down better. Like, I would at least consider playing this in most every commander deck that has the manabase to support the BBB mana cost, even if that was the only mode. The fact that your cheap draw 3 spell then upgrades later on to let you pick one of the cards to be whatever you want is just the cherry on top.
This card seems really good. A four mana 4/4 with ward 2 that has absolutely no color requirements is a pretty reasonable baseline for a creature. Unlike something like Panharmonicon, you don't really need to be going crazy with this card for it to be solid, which I kinda like.
Ok thanks, that's what I thought. I just wanted to double-check because I saw a post on the MTGO forum saying that (apparently) the Dreadknight is bugged right now to where if your opponent steals and sacs it, they CAN cast it from your graveyard, and I wasn't sure if that's actually how it works or just another MTGO bug lol
Just to clarify, if a Mosswood Dreadknight dies under the control of any player other than its owner, its "dies" trigger will be put onto the stack by the player who controlled it when it died. Now, unless there's some random entry in the CR I couldn't find, the trigger will do effectively nothing, because while yes, your opponent resolves the triggered ability that would let them cast the adventure of the knight until their next EoT, the ability granting you permission to cast it from the graveyard specifies "your graveyard," and since the Dreadknight goes to a different graveyard, it is unable to be cast through the resolution of that triggered ability, correct?
If there's a deck in standard that wants a 6-drop threat and is fine with the GGG in the casting cost, this could definitely see some play, especially if the meta is trending towards "destroy" and damage-based removal, because the triplets pretty much laugh that off. I mean, all the first Go for the Throat does to these guys is just make the last two REALLY angry.
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.
I kinda wish the ability had been worded not as a trigger on cast, but a replacement effect that checks to see if a spell is multicolored on resolution. What did Chaoslace ever do to you, Wizards
I think this is why Lilah's best friend in EDH will be Painter's Servant, to make her trigger on every instant and sorcery in your deck and not just the Izzet ones.
The 5 mana option is...alright, I guess, but it's not a card that I would necessarily want to play in a lot of decks, because as mentioned above, black is INCREDIBLY deep on tutors. The 3 mana option though, has nowhere near the competition.
There are less than 10 cards in all of Magic that will unconditionally draw you three cards (and let you keep all of them) for only three mana, and of them, Necropotence is the only one I would say is hands-down better. Like, I would at least consider playing this in most every commander deck that has the manabase to support the BBB mana cost, even if that was the only mode. The fact that your cheap draw 3 spell then upgrades later on to let you pick one of the cards to be whatever you want is just the cherry on top.
Ok thanks, that's what I thought. I just wanted to double-check because I saw a post on the MTGO forum saying that (apparently) the Dreadknight is bugged right now to where if your opponent steals and sacs it, they CAN cast it from your graveyard, and I wasn't sure if that's actually how it works or just another MTGO bug lol
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.