Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Ahh! Opposable Digits!

Yesterday, two gentlemen in the U.K. powered to the tops of their national qualifier using rogue decks running the unfiltered energy of 1 crucial card: Polymorph.

You can check out the twin reports of Andrew Morrisson and and Grant Hislop over at Starkington Post, and see how this oldie but a goodie owned the Standard format all over again by putting Iona, Shield of Emeria directly onto the battlefield.


As you can see, Polymorph began it's rise to power near the beginning of Magic history. When the Mirage set arrived, Polymorph was probably first used offensively to destroy their opponent's creatures. Then, one day, someone eventually had the thought: "I'm changing his big creatures into small creatures, but sometimes I'm changing his big creatures into EVEN BIGGER creatures!"

The obvious synergy that proceeded soon after this revelation was turning your own piddly little creatures into Spirit of the Night.

Why sacrifice Breathstealer, Feral Shadow and Urborg Panther to get your giant monster of evil, when you can blow up a token or a man-land?

In today's standard, Morrisson and Hislop used Khalni Garden to generate the token (plus a lot of planeswalkers). The nicest thing about this is of course…it's land and thus cannot be accidently tutored up by the Polymorph in progress.

Khalni Garden is a great example of the maximized token producer…it does the job for no cost while also functioning as an excellent source of green mana.

In casual circles (the ones I travel in), Polymorph has begged for something like the Garden. Combined with Spout, Sprout Swarm, Scatter the Seeds and other token producers, the budding (ha!) green/blue mage can dump just about any foul beast onto the opponent's door step as early as turn 3!

And as the U.K. team has showed us…the creature-creeping folks at Wizards have provided some pretty kick-butt beasts to choose from.


So while you dream of combos tonight, may they be tinged with the image of a simple bunny rabbit, confused at the use of new appendages.

"Ahh! Opposable Digits!"

No comments:

Post a Comment