Thursday, January 26, 2012

Blight


Upset because your Sinkholes are too good? Have I got the card for you!

More seriously, this card's terrible. It's a nightmare from a design perspective because it's 2-mana land destruction, meaning it has serious potential to just lock people out of the game; it's just straight-up terrible next to Sinkhole in an either-or choice; and it has a multiplier effect WITH Sinkhole, making it far more likely that you'll be able to blow opponents out with multiple, cheap attacks on their mana base.

From a player perspective, this card isn't exciting, but it can be brutal. While it can be used responsibly to keep Maze of Ith and the like under control, what it typically ends up doing is working to lock people out of the game. However, it only does that job well in conjunction with other, more-powerful effects -- it's a redundant Sinkhole, for all intents and purposes -- but it allows the opponent to choose the most-opportune time to miss a land drop. In other words, this card was probably intended to replace Sinkhole, but it's only good when it's paired up with Sinkhole!

There's a dozen "fair" land destruction spells that would come later to replace this guy -- Rain of Tears and Icequake being the most obvious spiritual descendants -- but I'm just not that big a fan of land destruction. It has a place in the game -- after all, utility lands need an answer -- but point destruction at anything less than three mana tends to lock up the game rather than keep Mazes and Tabernacles under control.

For my money, I think something like one of these would be fairer:


This knocks out utility lands and punishes nonbasics. It's not particularly good -- you're never going to see real card advantage from this, it's usually not going to even be a virtual 1-for-1, and its tempo cost probably outstrips the tempo you'd gain -- but it would be a decent budget answer to greedy manabases and annoying lands. The major advantage of this card over the original Blight is that its effect is always laid out on your terms. With the original, your opponent can sandbag the Blighted land until it's important; that's not the case with this one.

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