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Editor: Yaro Starak. Saturday 15 June 2002.
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 Card Review: Cabal Therapy
Name a nonland card. Target player reveals his or her hand and discards from it all cards with that name.
Expansion: Judgment
Will they ever make a better disrupter than Duress?
Very doubtful but of course they keep churning out one similar thing in
every set of three expansions.
Limited:
You've gotta be pretty desparate to play this in any draft or sealed deck.
I can honestly say the only time it would be half useable in a limited
environment would be when the opponent has some game winning bombs that you
simply cannot deal with short of ripping them from their hand.
Just a few random suggestions to make it better (but still awful): Peek,
Chamber of Manipulation, Ichorid...err
Constructed:
Obviously you really only want to use this thing if you know what is in
their hand a priori. Or if you can somehow abuse the Flashback.
The best ways of looking at their hand are probably Peek and Mesmeric
Fiend. Mesmeric Fiend combines with Cabal Therapy to basically become 2
Duresses, which can certainly be handy in some match ups, especially when
you know they'll just eventually deal with your Fiend with something like a
Violent Eruption. To "abuse" its flashback (I'm thinking T2/OBC here) the
only obvious guys to sacrifice are Shambling Swarm and Ichorid. Note that
if in OBC all you're worried about is a counterspell effect then chances
are all you should name is Circular Logic. Currently in T2 there are too
many good counterspell effects to reliably name a particular card every
time but OBC seems to not be plagued with this problem. I think this is
definitely useable as fair Duress-ish disruption in OBC and just as a few
more Duresses in any environment that lets you play both Duress and Therapy.
In Extended this may well fit right into the modified Wild Zombies.dec
(well, without Ashen Ghoul they are not so wild anymore. More just slightly
perturbed) which will still use Hermit Druid to turn over guys, but now all
they can turn over is Ichorids. So it plays a lot more black creatures to
be able to activate them for the couple of turns needed to kill your
opponent but nevertheless it seems reasonable, especially without Swords to
Plowshares or Phyrexian Furnace around anymore. I guess Nether Spirit is
also reasonably good to use with Cabal Therapy (though clearly not with
Ichorid deck) but whatever...
Value: Wait a while and they should be given out gratis. Foil version? $2
or something...
Jason Street
Well, if you know what's in your opponents hand this card is like Duress on
steroids. If not it's going to cost you a creature to make them discard
anything.
Unfortunately there are not many cards that let you look at someone's hand
that also do something useful besides this. The key here is that they need
to be pretty cheap. First up: Glasses of Urza. Obvious, cheap, and pretty
hopeless for anything else. Of course, if you play against a denial deck the
glasses themselves might come in handy. There's other options, but most of
them are less useful, often giving your opponent the same advantage.
Telepathy is a good choice though, and if you're playing a discard deck with
blue you get to use other cards, like Zuran Enchanter.
Of course you can cast Duress, but I didn't want this review to be too
short.
What about playing it from the graveyard? Well, it's costing you a creature,
so the best bet is to feed it something you don't want anymore. Any creature
that you can no longer pay the upkeep for would be good. Morinfen springs to
mind, and there's countless others. I'd look on this as an excuse to play
Benthic Djinn myself, but that's just me.
Value: $1 or maybe $2 at the most, if you love it - The usefulness is kind
of weighted up by the fact you have to guess or use something to see first.
Still, a nice card.
Jason
Discard has always been one of black strengths but
Cabal Therapy does not live up to it's predecessors.
Limited
This card is next to useless in limited as most decks
do not play more than one copy of the same card. The
only combo I can remotely see this with is Peek, but
even then it is still pretty bad.
Constructed
Extended - Duress and Addle are simply better but if
you absolutely, positively have to play this card it
combines nicely with Squee and other such recyclables
like Ichorid. Even with Extended changing at the end
of the year Cabal Therapy will have little impact.
Type 2 - Duress again is the number 1 hand destruction
card of choice. I can't see it fitting into any of the
major archetypes at the moment but could be used in a
rogueish black weenie deck that uses Ravenous Rats,
Ichorids, Shambling Swarms and other hand destruction
spells. The one redeeming feature about Cabal Therapy
is that if you guess wrong the first time you should
be able to get something with the flashback, but
Duress it isn't.
OBC - This could work in a B/G braids style deck with
Squirrel Nest and it works nicely with Haunting Echoes
as you can potentially wrender their whole deck
useless depending on the cards they have in hand.
Cabal Therapy won't be going for that much - $2.
Dan Turner
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Cabal Therapy (Uncommon)
Danesh Jogia
Dan Turner