Win Target Game

This guy is proper ridiculous. If only he had affinity for islands… I mean, 10 mana is a bit absurd. Considering his abilities, I can see why he’s expensive, but what deck would he work in exactly?

Firstly, I thought Core-Augur having flash was a bit random… I will say that it is a nice trick to suddenly make your opponent have no hand, but who plays a creature with flash for 10 mana? A simple Into the Roil could send it back to your hand with no consequences, or be countered with a Psychic Barrier or likely a Mana Leak, since you’ll most likely tap out anyway.

Drawing lots of cards at the beginning of your end step is also a little odd, considering how much you’ll have to discard. But at least you’ll have tons of options, since your opponent will never have anything to keep in hand! They’ll have to top deck every play after a turn of this being out there. Thing is, the chances of this thing being countered or destroyed quickly is so high that it’s not worth even being in constructed, is it?

There are some nice tricks that this card could pull. The most obvious combo to me is exiling it with Karn Liberated with his nifty +4 ability, and if you’re able to actually start the game over, you can mulligan as much as you want and know you’ll get 7 cards at the end of every draw step. Also, at the end of your opponent’s new “first” turn, they lose everything in hand (so playing first is pointless, really.) Plus, you then have a 5/4 body on the board. That’s the only way I see this really being at its best in Standard right now. But that’s kind of a tricky win condition. I’d love to see someone pull a deck like that off. It’s not viable at all in Limited unless you have the Karn, or can discard it and use Sheoldred to dredge it out.

What do you guys think? Is this just a crazy card that just isn’t really playable? It’s about a three or four dollar card now, and may be a buck soon enough, probably. Still fun to think about how this could play out. It’s just too slow and awkward.

I’ve been thinking about combos for this card since the first time I saw it. The truth is, it’s a bit of an expensive play, 7 mana, so it’s going to be a little slow. Considering you’re probably only going to run a couple copies of this card, that’s not so bad. What makes this especially good to me is that you can have big creatures discarded with Fauna Shaman, for example, to build up your field with smaller creatures, and when the black praetor hits the board, each turn you’ll be getting a big boy back. I’d say you could make killer aggro black/green decks with this card. Plus, opponent’s losing a creature a turn is a nice bonus. Swampwalk is kind of just an extra little bonus.

I think the problem with Sheoldred, and the reason it’s only a 5 dollar card, is as epic as it is with a card, I’m not sure there’s a deck yet in Standard that can make it really stand out and shine. Also, it’s the pre-release card, so there are so many copies floating around, and people aren’t jumping to build decks around a pre-release card very often. I think it’s got a lot of great potential, but alas, it is just a creature that can be banished from the field with all the usual removal (Go for the Throat, especially) But if it survives long enough to just revive a couple big monsters, it’s worth the 7 mana, I think, plus the two sacrifices (even if it’s only a couple of chump blockers, who wants to sacrifice monsters for no gain?)

It’s not really a competitive card with all the crazy powerful stuff flying around. But I like it. Let me know if you could ever see this card working in a non-EDH format. (Mono-black FTW!)