Fifth Dawn - the good , the bad and the ugly

[dandan]

MTG News has a full spoiler up
http://cards.mtgnews.com/Find/Spoilers/FD/Fifth_Dawn_Printable.html
For those of you not following Fifth Dawn (there has only been limited discussion about FD cards to date here), here are some potentially good cards

3    Crucible of Worlds  Artifact                                (Artifact Rare)
You may play lands from your graveyard as though they were in your hand.
Strong but almost certainly not broken, makes strips even better and fetches even better. Forget about the Zuran Orb combo, it works well enough with cards you should be using anyway.

X    Engineered Explosives Artifact                                (Artifact Rare)
Sunburst [2], Sacrifice Engineered Explosives: Destroy each nonland permanent  with converted mana cost equal to the number of charge counters on Engineered Explosives.
Powder Keg for those who can't wait

3    Staff of Domination Artifact                                (Artifact Rare)
[1]: Untap Staff of Domination. [2],[Tap]: You gain 1 life. [3],[Tap]: Untap
target creature. [4],[Tap]: Tap target creature. [5],[Tap]: Draw a card.
I'm sure it fits in a combo deck somewhere, note that is draws cards as well as Whispers

4    Goblin Cannon       Artifact                            (Artifact Uncommon)
[2]: Goblin Cannon deals 1 damage to target creature or player. Sacrifice
Goblin Cannon.
(Rocket Launcher that you can use immediately, a significant upgrade but is there a use for it anymore?)

1B   Blind Creeper       Creature - Zombie Beast              3/3 (Black Common)
Whenever a player plays a spell, Blind Creeper gets -1/-1 until end of turn.
If only Suicide Black were viable

2BB  Endless Whispers    Enchantment                                (Black Rare)
Each creature has "When this creature is put into a graveyard from play, choose target opponent.  That player puts this creature card from that graveyard into play under his or her control at end of turn."
For the casual players amongst us!!

1B   Night's Whisper     Sorcery                                (Black Uncommon)
You draw two cards and lose two life.
Draw 2 for 2. Not bad at all, 1 mana cheaper than Skeletal Scrying for 2, this might fill the void left by Hymn in Black decks.

1G   Joiner Adept        Creature - Elf Druid                   2/1 (Green Rare)
Lands you control have "[T]: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool."
Superb mana fixing on a reasonably costed body

2G   Rite of Passage     Enchantment                                (Green Rare)
Whenever a creature you control is dealt damage, put a +1/+1 counter on it.(The damage is dealt before the counter is put on.)
Another wonderful casual card. This is also probably the best example of useful reminder text ever

1GG  Eternal Witness     Creature - Human Shaman            2/1 (Green Uncommon)
When Eternal Witness comes into play, return target card from your graveyard to your hand.
Shame it is Green. Better than Elven Cache!!

4GG  Fangren Pathcutter  Creature - Beast                   4/6 (Green Uncommon)
Whenever Fangren Pathcutter attacks, attacking creatures gain trample until end of turn.
How to make a reasonable Green fattie for casual players

XU   Condescend          Instant                                   (Blue Common)
Counter target spell unless that spell's controller pays [X]. Scry 2
At last, the first (semi-) useful counterspell since Counterspell got dropped from 8th

2U   Trinket Mage        Creature - Human Wizard               2/2 (Blue Common)
When Trinket Mage comes into play, you may search your library for an artifact card with converted mana cost 1 or less, reveal that card, and put it into your hand. If you do, shuffle your library.  
Can anyone think of any 0 or 1 cost artifacts you might want?

1W   Leonin Squire       Creature - Cat Soldier               2/2 (White Common)
When Leonin Squire comes into play, return an artifact card with converted mana cost 1 or less from your graveyard to your hand.
I like this card as it isn't obvious what to do with it. Good solid body and potentially good ability.

1WW  Skyhunter Skirmishe Creature - Cat Knight              1/1 (White Uncommon)
Flying, double strike
The best double striker to date in the colour that might just pump it into something sick. Not that 'best double striker to date' is a huge compliment

W    Steelshaper's Gift  Sorcery                                (White Uncommon)
Search your library for an equipment card, reveal that card, and put it into your hand.  Then shuffle your library.
More Skull clamps in Type II

Bad (not necessarily unusable but mainly a waste of a card)

5    Anodet Lurker       Artifact Creature                 3/3 (Artifact Common)
Whenever Anodet Lurker is put into a Graveyard from play, you gain three life.
Hill Giant and Healing Salve combine in one card!

3    Battered Golem      Artifact Creature - Golem         3/2 (Artifact Common)
Battered Golem does not untap during your untap step. When an artifact comes into play, you may untap Battered Golem.
Does a 3/2 for 3 need a drawback?

4GG  Tyrranax            Creature - Beast                     5/4 (Green Common)
[1]: Tyrranax gets -1/+1 until end of turn.
How not to make a Green fattie

2R   Goblin Brawler      Creature - Goblin Warrior              2/2 (Red Common)
First Strike Goblin Brawler can't be equipped.
Why?

3RR  Mana Geyser         Sorcery                                    (Red Common)
Add  to your mana pool for each tapped land your opponents control.
For haters of multiplayer everywhere

5U   Plasma Elemental    Creature - Elemental                4/1 (Blue Uncommon)
Plasma Elemental is unblockable.
5/6 Flier or 4/1 Unblockable? The choice is yours (or pay 1 mana less for Morphling)

Ugly?
I'll wait for the pics to go up. [/url]

[Kowal]

They've managed to print three strictly better cards, eliminating the necessity of three beautiful pieces of Guay art.  And they said they wouldn't do that.

Fuckers.

Overall, the set leaves me...  unimpressed.

[dandan]

The set has a lot of 'wow' cards that are not quite as good as you think they might be. However there are oodles of cards I want to use in casual games and I think Night's Whisper is good enough for Type I (it is basically the same card advantage as Hymn but doesn't put Dragon, Mindslaver and AK in the graveyard for your opponent).

I am very impressed with Mirrodin as a block with Affinity for Artifacts the only major blemish.

[Matt]

Even affinity's not THAT bad; they had the good sense not to print anymore truly free guys besides Enforcer and Frogmite.

Is it me, or does this set feel like it should have been it's own large set? So many of these cards really want to have other helper cards around, it almost feels like it's MR+DS vs 5D.

Cards I will be looking to pick up:

Skyhunter Skirmisher - 1/1 flying doublestrike for {W}{W}
FINALLY, a strong three-drop for WW! Too long has white been plagued with having to spend its third turn casting a second-turn spell (glut at 2-mana mark). This one is strong, too - throw a Bonesplitter on and it's a huge threat.

Eyes of the Watcher - enchantment, pay on a spell to scry 2
This one just looks cool, I can't believe it's not rare. Aggressively priced, it looks like a lot of fun to play with.

Serum Visions
Replaces my ugly WB Sleight of Hands. Also, would like to play Turb-Xerox someday!

Night's Whisper
These ARE going to see play all the way up to 1.x in almost every nonblue black deck. I would try to pick these up at the prerelease very highly, you'll be using them for years unless you only play T1.

Relentless Rats
Pick these up too, but for the opposite reasons.

Magma Jet - instant, shock+scry 2
This one looks fun. They've made a lot of 1R shocks over the years, and I think this is the best of them all.

Eternal Witness
Pretty self-explanatory, I will definitely need a few for my survival decks.

Avarice Totem - , artifact, : switch control of totem and target
This looks like great fun for my friend's LD deck, since the opponent won't be able to switch it back.

Crucible of Worlds
This is a very solid card, with TONS of uses - fetchlands, cycling lands, Waste/Strip, Crop Rotation, Exploration/Fastbond, manlands...I like it a lot.

Energy Chamber - - free +1/+1 or charge counters
By god, if Darksteel Reactor doesn't work now, it never will!

Engineered Explosives
This will be a chase card for block and standard, and is probably beter than Powder Keg for T1 also (Dragon can take out a Planar Void without having to play green, and so on).

Eon Hub - - all players skip their upkeeps
Someday, they will print a card that breaks this. The real challenge is that you can only run four, and the other cards aren't great without the Hub.

Guardian Idol
A nice little Chimeric diamond. A useful card that in a perfect world will be a staple for years to come.

Lantern of Insight
Between this and Baton of Courage, I swear to you that SOMEONE is reading our card creation forum.

Myr Servitor
This guy looks hella fun. I will put him in grave pact decks, contamination decks, survival decks, and my ghoul/horror/spirit decks.

Razormane Masticore
Chase card, and pretty good at that.

Silent Arbiter - for a 1/5 with a Dueling Grounds built in!
Oh man, my Survival deck WANTS this and BADLY so. Tutorable weenie control that isn't incredibly expensive like Masticore!

Vedalken Shackles
No good in T1, this will be great in other circles. I look forward to playing this in 1.5 due to having the dual lands AND a large variety of creatures to steal.

[Magi]

There's a lot of WOW cards, but the 2 cards I will be trying to pick up in multiples @ the prerelease will be Night's Whisper and Guardian Idol. These 2 cards I think will become staple in all formats (I'll admit Guardian Idol is a stretch in T1, but it can happen).

Eternal Witness also, the fact it's an uncommon, and fits into the Survival blueprint like OJ's glove.

I'm not sold on the Engineered Explosives VS Powder Keg debate. I hope that Kegs stay on top though, I have a feeling that Explosives will be one of the ridiculously hard chase rares to get.

Regarding Eon hub, I have a feeling that more hubs are on the way. A hub that makes you skip your draw step, untap step, attack phases, main phases. Pretty soon, everyone skips their entire turn.

cool set. Hopefully the artwork will be kickass as well, and from what I've seen so far it looks really good.

[Matt]

Yes, this is easily the best artwork since Destiny, possibly even further back.

[Dr. Sylvan]

I've been somewhat underwhelmed by this set, and now that I've seen the spoiler I can say that without reservation. Not many of the cards are really my style, and a lot of them just perpetuate problems with the color wheel that are at best annoying and at worst game-damaging. Also, where is the "wow"? I saw several cards that made me say "I guess they finally did that" but nothing that really set off my "wow" sensors in the way that, say, Sundering Titan or Platinum Angel did.

Cards that intrigued me mildly:
Neurok Stealthsuit
Pentad Prism
Suntouched Myr
Eon Hub
Silent Arbiter
Vedalken Shackles
Synod Centurion
Lose Hope (B)
Ouphe Vandals (G)
Tel-Jilad Justice (G)

Cards that intrigued me majorly:
Engineered Explosives
Razormane Masticore
Plunge Into Darkness (B)
Joiner Adept (G)
Magma Jet (R)
Serum Visions (U)

On the art side, too, I find myself in disagreement. Obviously we haven't seen most of it yet, but I've been less than thrilled with what there is.

Matt: Destiny had the best art? Pfft. I have, for scholarly purposes, counted how many cardarts in each set I genuinely liked, and Destiny had seven (4.9%), the precise median and mode of all sets. Darksteel was 5.5% liked-by-Phil, and Mirrodin was 10.1% (the only set higher was Urza's Saga). And that's after I went through each of them again twice crossing out a few pieces that I felt were only there because of my bias towards the sets mechanically. In a less quantitative sense, there are certainly some of my favorites in UD (honestly, check out the avatar and my long history of <3ing Replenish), but I'm just not seein' the "best since '98" argument.

Though of course I can't really prove or disprove anything in this arena, that doesn't mean you're not wrong. :D

[Mith]

I picked up the following today:

1. Serum Visions: EVERYONE wanted four of these...good thing they aren't rare. I managed to get a foily one in trade

2. Night's Whisper: Only a few people mentioned these guys. I had no trouble picking them up.

3. Crucible of Worlds: Regular ones were all over the place...I only saw two foils, and the guys who had them wanted +$25. One guy got mad when I suggested that his girlfriend should throw in a BJ for that price...some people are just too touchy. In retrospect, she was some fugly, so she probably should have offered me money. Oh...and just my two bits: Crucible of Worlds is a HOUSE in 4c Angel Control. I wrecked face all day running one in the spot Fire/Ice used to take. Any deck running 4+ fetches/4 Wastes/Strip can benefit greatly from being able to reuse those lands.

4. Relentless Rats: I traded crap uncommons for these all day...ended up with 20 (1 shiny one to boot). At first I was just going to keep them for novelty (those four Desperate Research in my binder are begging to be used)...but then I got home and saw sets of 4 selling for $9-10 preorder, and promptly put all 20 on Ebay

[Bastian]

One guy got mad when I suggested that his girlfriend should throw in a BJ for that price...

Who wouldn't? If you didn't even know him what lead you to believe that you could have that kind of freedom with him? :S

Code:

Crucible of Worlds is a HOUSE in 4c Angel Control. I wrecked face all day running one in the spot Fire/Ice used to take. Any deck running 4+ fetches/4 Wastes/Strip can benefit greatly from being able to reuse those lands. 

Someone had already suggested that for a 3cc spell that they could be easily fit and played in the place of Blood Moon in control decks. After all this+wasteland/strip is far better than Moon or B2B I think. I wonder if workshop decks will fit one into it, as a way to always have workshops in play?

[Matt]

I didn't say Destiny had the best art. I said that everything between Destiny and Darksteel had worse art than Fifth Dawn. Saga is probably my favorite of all, though pre-Ice Age sets had a lot going for them. I haven't ever really sat down and thought about which are my favorites, but I just remember liking a lot of Saga art and HATING almost everything in the Masques, Odyssey, and Onslaught blocks, and the better part of Invasion art, too.

Favorite art ever: [card]Expunge[/card]. What a beautiful card.

[Bram]

My favorite non-Drew Tucker art is a common from Saga starting with the letters EX, too:
[card]Exhume[/card].
Tell me that's not fucking brilliant. Reminds me of Spin13 and his dead bunnies.

[Kowal]

I must say, I was not impressed with either of those card arts.  I'm a fan of things like [card]Quirion Trailblazer[/card], and the Foglio art on Ice Age [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card].

[Bram]

Yeah, but that's just because you're a pussy

[Matt]

Not JUST. ;D

Expunge is great firstly because it has a wonderful balance between the blacks, blues, and gold/reds in the card. It's very colorful, and the colors complement the black border very well. Secondly, the framing is such that the main angel figure slices the rest of the piece up into what is known as "negative space" expertly - between the angel's body and the blast killing it, the picture is divided up into four spaces. Even the blast itself (coming out of her back) is slightly off-center, which is the most pleasing way of depicting something (incidentally, putting an object exactly in the center of the frame is one of the classic mistakes differentiating an amatuer from a trained artist, and was one of the things that kept Hitler out of art school).

[Magi]

I'll just toss in my 2 cents (CDN) in here

My favorite art is [card]Rancor[/card] (in fact, Rancor is one of my top 5 fav cards)

definition of Rancor:

ran·cor    ( P )  
n.
Bitter, long-lasting resentment; deep-seated ill will.

the definition is dark, and the card art has a sense of "darkness" to it while still keeping the green theme.

The art looks powerful, and he looks angry, fits the card very well. Multani junior on crack with the object of his deep-seated ill will situated in the background (if I can remember the book correctly, he was angry at Urza for what he did on Argoth. Someone correct me)

Not only that, the flavor text is a nod to the recursive mechanic of the card, which in turn is a nod to the long-lasting portion of the definition.

The card is a masterpiece. If we humans were to make first contact with aliens from deep space through Magic cards, we would hand them Rancors first.




Also on my top five is [card]Radiant Archangel[/card] because she looks like a MILF.

Matt: I could have sworn you saying on an earlier thread that your favorite art was from Phyrexian Negator. Or was it your favorite card?

[Matt]

Negator is the card that most perfectly blends art and flavor text and function  and so forth. Every aspect of a Magic card is seamlessly integrated in that card.

I also just happen to just plain LIKE Negator's art but it's not my favorite.

[Magi]

Negator is the card that most perfectly blends art and flavor text and function  and so forth. Every aspect of a Magic card is seamlessly integrated in that card.

I also just happen to just plain LIKE Negator's art but it's not my favorite.

You could say the same thing about Rancor

Negator is a good choice. S-Chinese Negator's look so f$cking deadly...