Scarred by Awesomeness

I have been home from working at camp for about 5 1/2 days and have been hanging out in magic stores 3 of those days. In those 3 days I was asked by people if they could look at my binder at least a dozen times. Each time I had to say no, but I have a bag of cards I have instead. 11 of those 12 times, they didn't bother. So today I decided to get a binder and a ton of sleeves for my rares and foils. In addition to jazzing up the inside, I printed out some cool arts that have been released as wallpapers on the mothership and put them in the slots on the outside. Here are some pics:

But more important that showing off your rares, theres many things abuzz with the next set, Scars of Mirroden. We are soon closing in on its release and the time tables look a little something like this:

Today's date: August 30th
Release Date: October 1st (32 days away)
Pre-Release Event: September 24th (25 days away)
Previews start on the Mothership: September 6th (7 days away)

So in a week expect a post on september 6th at approximately 1 or 1:30 am as I exclaim in joy like a little girl over its awesomeness. But we don't need to wait 8 days to start squeling, there's already a few cards out with much to talk about!

Before we get to the scant few cards that have been released from Elspeth vs Tezzerett and From the Vault: Relics, I should mention some of the rumors that have been going around. One of the rumors is that there will be 2 factions and there will be separate booster packs for each. The factions are thought to be Phyrexia ("the dark side") and Mirroden ("the light side"). Another rumor that went around was the release of purple mana. White is a major enemy of black, red (fire) is a major enemy of blue (water), and green is left in the lonely position of neutral. No fear, purple mana is here! Purple would be the color of machines so there would be a nature vs machines battle. One train of thought with that is instead of having new basic lands and all for purple mana, it would work like snow mana from ice age block where there were basic snow lands that produced mana of its color, but also made snow mana for when it was relevent.

While I don't know anything more about purple mana, We do know more about the 2 factions theory. First, here is a picture of the booster packs that has been leaked:

There are 5 arts (as normal) but there is also no distinction between dark side and light side, so the separate booster theory is false, however, there is still merit to the theory based on the 3 released cards I mentioned earlier. Take a look at these:

So what's the big deal? We have an uncommon artifact (with an awesome ability I will get to later), A mythic rare equipment everyone has seen by now, and a fairly boring common vanilla flier. Take a look in the text box for the watermark on the back of each card. Contagian Clasp has a watermark that has been in Magic for a very long time, the symbol of Phyrexia. The other 2 cards have a symbol we don't recognize. However it is believed to be the Mirroden Pure symbol. According to MTG Salvation, every single card is supposed to be affiliated with one of these 2 factions.

Something else that has been released is a ton of new arts for SoM. I'm not going to post them all here, so here's the link to view them. Here are the arts to take note of:

Elspeth Tirel: She's back! The epic planeswalker from Shards is rumored to have gone GW (which kinda makes sense. Look at the art for Knight of the Reliquary. Also, Tezzerett is supposed to be in SoM too
 Venser, the Sojouner: Return of the creature/counterspell from Future Sight. He could be a planeswalker, but there is no evidence supporting either way
 Mox Opal: IT'S A MOX!!!!!!! Last time we saw a Mox printed (not in FTV: Relics) was back in Mirroden before it was scarred, and that was the Chrome Mox (which is insanely powerful). I bet this card is both Mythic Rare and completely insanely powerful
 Hoard Smelter-Dragon: This is the foil cover card of the GR starter deck
 Etched Champion: Clearly a reference to Etched Oracle from 5th Dawn and a possible indication of the ruturn of the sunburst mechanic

So anyways, about that new mechanic proliferate... THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NUTS! I can't wait until I get my hands on a bunch of cards with proliferate. That plus the other mechanic announced, Infect (wither + poisonous), is absolutely brutal. Notice how the card says you can also boost the number of counters on a player? Yup, poison counters is looking like a fairly legit way to win all of a sudden. Also, beyond poison counters, or even +1/+1 or -1/-1 counters on creatures, think about quest counters on Zendikar quests, level up counters on levelers, or loyalty counters on planeswalkers! There are almost counters on everything these days, and being able to add to ALL OF THEM at the same time for just 4 mana is insane!

Quest Counters - There are 7 rare quests, and only Quest for Nihil Stone has absolutely no problem gettign juiced alone (Mind Rot/Blightning = job done). Archmage Ascension is easily the best once it's activated, but it requires too many counters to work. Use Howling Mine and proliferate and you have an active quest in 3 turns. For Beastmaster and Bloodchief Ascension, proliferate will help you keep your counters racking up when your opponent has put up too strong defenses. On the contrary, if you're getting bashed, manually putting counters on Luminarch Ascension can soon relieve you of your pain with a legion of angels. One more copied spell from Pyromancer Ascension is nothing to scoff at, and manually putting counters on Quest for Ula's Temple may be necessary when you're drawing all your counterspells and contol magic. The 2 blue rare quests are the only 2 I haven't worked with yet, but thanks to proliferate, expect some sort of blue control dropping boom-booms from the sky deck in the near future

Level up counters - I already talked about the mana advantage provided by Venerated Teacher in a previous post, but this has the same merit. While it costs 1 more to have half the effect, it's still great mana advantage. Remember, you're not required to use it, so if your level up costs for the turn are less than 4 for a single level up across the board, then there's no need to use it. But when you have Zulaport Enforcer + any other leveler, you get some solid mana advantage.

Loyalty counters - Holy cow! I shouldn't have to explain to you why this is awesome. Of the 16 planeswalkers printed, using proliferate once would get them to their ultimate ability a full turn faster on 6 of them (Ajani Goldmane, both Chandra, Nicol Bolas, Sarkhan Vol, Sorin Markov). Also, Tezzeret and Garruk could already use their ultimate on their second turn of existence, except with proliferate, they will survive using it. 5 planeswalkers (Ajani Vengeant, Elspeth, Jace TMS, Liliana, Nissa) have ultimate abilities that put you in a position where it is almost impossible to lose, but they need many counters to reach that point. Proliferate can accelerate them to those insane abilities and help ensure your victory. And for the planeswalkers I didn't mention (Jace Beleran, Gideon, Sarkhan the Mad) more loyalty counters is never a bad thing. For Jace, you can use his -1 ability non stop and ensure you have huge card advantage over your opponent. For Gideon, you can either give him more life to absorb a big attack, or you could help him use his -2 ability more and completely dominate the board. And for Sarkhan, it's finally a way to give him back loyalty counters. If you play Sarkhan and don't proliferate that turn you could use his -2 ability 6 times instead of 3 or 3 times followed by the -4 instead of only once then the -4. If he is almost $20 for having no + ability and only having epic - abilities, how much better is he when you can bring him back up in loyalty?

Basically proliferate is absolutely nuts. I did a getherer search for the keyword "counter" in standard and got 175 results. I quickly skimmed through and took note of things about countering spells, so after removing those, there are 141 cards that deal with counters on permanents of some kind, which shows how simply insane proliferate can really be. And because I know paul is going to mention it, proliferate is completely broken when combined with Doubling Season.

So before I close what I'm pretty sure is my longest post of all time, I want to mention 2 cards that cou can expect to see in a future random deck idea post. The 2 cards are Juniper Order Ranger and Heartmender. In addition to being really cool, they also work great with persist creatures by making them able to persist forever. Consider those combined with Glen Elendra Archmage! I didn't play during the reign of wither and persist, so I never got to mess the abilities, but I won't go down that road right now, it's already 1am... Until next time, stay classy