Barigord Gaming – 09/18/24 – Magic the Gathering
Almost everyone who’s ever been involved in a Barigord Studios adventure has been passionate for gaming! We love board games, table games, video games, roleplaying games, and game shows! This post is best viewed on barigord.com.
Hey Magic people. Here’s a list of the 10 most playable and awesome Playtest cards from Mystery Booster 2!
At the bottom of this post, you can find links to a card-by-card review of all the Mystery Booster 2 Playtest and Alchemy cards.
Dishonourable Mention – Mox Poison
This is simply too strong. As long as opponents can’t add to your poison count, you can tap this 4 times for mana without downside. Four mana of any colour for free is Black Lotus territory, and spread over 4 turns doesn’t make it any less amazing. That’s 4 Lotus Petals. Playable, but dangerous to consider as a real card.
Other cards which are probably too good and no fun to play against are Kozilek, Compleated, Terry Pin, Turboturtle, and Wrath of Leknif. We’re not talking about Teferi, Druid of Argoth.
For Honourable Mentions, both Naturalize 2 and Penumbra Umbra just missed making the Top 10. They’re cool cards, and very playable, but they’re less innovative than the cards below.
If you want to play with the new Alchemy cards, go for the one you can start with in the Command Zone. Maximum impact, and a very powerful Commander to build around. Getting a dozen copies of Midnight Clock in the same sleeves as your 99 is pretty doable for actual tabletop play. Want to shoot for the moon? Make over a hundred Midnight Clocks, shuffle them back into your deck somehow, and win with Battle of Wits. You know you want to.
The ultimate Changeling! Great for all Changeling decks, and great potential for tricky plays. Bloomburrow’s focus on critter types needs lots of support, like from colourless Changelings. Same for many a Commander and kitchen table deck. Probably not too breakable, but who knows?
8. Night of the Flying Merfolk and Map to Lorthos’s Temple
Two Merfolk-themed cards that would do great together. Both are fun designs, and pretty strong. Why wouldn’t you want to build a Merfolk deck if you could add these cards? The best part here is that these are both designs that could be made real.
Why stop at two blue cards, when you can have three? All three variations on the card are very playable, with ‘There’ as a great basic mode. It would do great in decks that have creatures with Enters abilities. It’s also great to save a Commander from a nasty spell. ‘Their’ is especially fun to have as an alternate mode. It’s all at instant speed, and even a Lesson. Too much good stuff.
A weird build-around that might be sneaky-good with Morph, plus a bunch of other abilities, like reanimation. Since it shuts down the power of any tokens, giving them to opponents could be part of the strategy. While it might not be a big winner, this is both something new and extremely interesting jank, and looks like a lot of fun to try out.
5. Chea, Friend to Maybe Too Many
Bloomburrow’s huge component of compatible familiars make this a no-brainer. This has Rule 0 Commander written all over it. Could be built all number of ways, with focus on familiar types, abilities, or just a fast way to burn opponents out with the tap ability.
The best Commander in the set. Fun just to look at. All five colours, plus colourless, plus a snow mana is tough to pay, but a built-in win-con that requires all sorts of sidequests is a recipe for kitchen table glory. This might actually be best as an Archenemy deck, as it’s likely going to go slow and need some help to get through the early turns with resources intact.
The idea is better here than the actual card. It’s ultimately a 3/3 for 3 that doesn’t do anything right away. Once it gets going, it makes your creatures cost 1G more for a +1/+1 counter and 2 life. Sure they get to spend time in exile, while is probably cool, but yeah, not anything earth-shattering.
But the notion of giving Adventures to other creatures is just so juicy, I had to put it up close to the top of the list. Imagine a set full of quest-givers like this. I think we’ll see this in the Final Fantasy expansion, and I’m excited about the potential.
This might look confusing at first, but the idea is that instead of losing the game, you come back as a Zombie Planeswalker and get some extra shambling time. Even if that never happens, drawing 3 cards and losing 3 life for 5 mana is an okay basic mode. It’s only one more mana than Ambition’s Cost, which is pretty playable.
Being a Zombie Planeswalker is going to play a bit like Form of the Dragon, Form of the Dinosaur or Nine Lives, but instead of having to dive into those forms, it’s a last resort. It’s almost worth losing the game on purpose to see how things would play out. So cool!
1. The Lands!
Almost every land from the set is a banger, and an idea we’ll likely see developed into a real card at some point.
Special mention to Gobland which is totally outrageous. Adding a land to your Goblin Recruiter pile is just the beginning. A free 2/1? That can trigger Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle? I expect this to pop up in future set for sure.
Extra special mention to Wrenn and One, which is totally bonkers, but also quite playable. if it was ever printed, there’d be instant demand. Which is the point, isn’t it? Is this card reasonable? The only way to find out is to get a copy and shuffle it into a deck.
Wrap-Up
The Playtest and Alchemy cards were designed for us to play and test and do alchemy with. Why else release them?
We are meant to take these ideas and try them on our kitchen tables, but also in our content streams. The more momentum these ideas get, the more these cards might be real in the future. Some definitely deserve it.
Thanks for reading!
Full Playtest and Alchemy Reviews:
1 Comment