You are: Home -> Articles -> Card Review |
Editor: Yaro Starak. Sunday 29 September 2002.
|
 Card Review: Onslaught Words Enchantments
Words of Worship 2W
1: The next time you would draw a card this turn, you
gain 5 life instead.
"The faithful don't succumb to terror, nor are they
ruled by passion. They adhere to order, for order is
life." -Volume I, The Book of Faith
Words of Wind 2U
1: The next time you would draw a card this turn, each
player returns a permanent he or she controls to its
owner's hand instead.
"Be logical in all things. Do not allow instinct or
passion to cloud your mind."
-Volume II, The Book of Insight
Words of Waste 2B
1: The next time you would draw a card this turn, each
opponent discards a card from his or her hand instead.
"Terror corrupts order and paralyzes instinct."
-Volume III, The Book of Decay
Words of War 2R
1: The next time you would draw a card this turn,
Words of War deals 2
damage to target creature or player instead.
"Passions can't be shackled by laws or mastered with
logic. The choice is
freedom or death." - Volume IV, The Book of Fire
Words of Wilding 2G
1: The next time you would draw a card this turn, put
a 2/2 green Bear creature token into play instead.
"Instinct is undaunted by terror, unchained by logic.
It is the path from which all other paths diverge." -
Volume V, The Book of Life
Expansion: Onslaught.
David Chapman
There are five Words, one for each colour, allowing you to replace
a draw with an ability by paying 1. I'm going to leave the obvious
combos like Sylvan Library to the other reviewers, and look instead
at the potential applications of each card in and of itself.
An immediate thing to note is that skipping a draw is not the same
as discarding a card. Even with a random discard, you have some
idea of what you're going to lose and you've advanced through your
deck towards cards that you can use instead. With a skip-draw
effect, the cards you have must be as good as the cards your
opponent continues to draw.
Second note: It may be worth including a Word from time to time
to avoid being decked. It depends how viable a decking strategy
is these days - not very, I suspect.
Words of Worship (W): Gain 5 life.
The object of life gain is to stay alive until you can draw a card
to deal with your problem. Since WoWorship stops you
drawing cards, it's useless by itself. It might have functionality
in a Test of Endurance deck, but such a deck would have to
rely on not taking damage while generating card disadvantage
for itself. The only way to make it function is to draw more
than one card each turn, and if you can draw multiple cards a
turn you're better drawing them than wasting them to play the
stalling game. As such, Words of Worship is virtually worthless,
and should sell for less than the price of the booster it came from.
(Danesh made a small mistake when reviewing this card; he said
you could gain 6 life a turn and keep a card using Sylvan Library.
In fact, you can gain ten if you stack the Library after your main
draw; when choosing the cards to put on your deck, you only
choose from cards drawn that turn. If you haven't drawn any
yet, you don't have to choose.)
Value: £2 or less
Words of Wind (U): Each player returns a permanent they control
to its owners hand.
Now why would you want to give up card advantage to create
a symmetrical effect which will rarely benefit you? Answer: when
returning a permanent to your hand gives you an edge. You won't
replace your main draw with this one, but with instant cantrips it
can be a strong combat trick. You can sometimes get to use
Blistering Firecat twice, which should be good enough for you.
In Extended, it also creates an amusing combo with Intruder
Alarm, Aluren and any mana critter. It works like this:
Play Multani's Acolyte/Wall of Blossoms.
"0: Return all permanents all opponents control to their owner's
hand. Draw a card." I think that's quite strong. Oh, and if you
can generate more than one mana from creatures, you can make
boundless mana as well.
It's a combo card for Extended, so it'll go for £2-£10 depending
on how many GPs and PTQs the deck wins.
Words of Waste (B): Each opponent discards a card.
The best thing about this ability is that it can be played at any
time. This allows you to paralyse your opponents' casting of
anything but instants and madness cards, so long as you can
draw a card during their draw step every turn. Tricky, and I
don't think it can effectively be done. Feel free to try, but I
suspect this card is going to wind up as binder-bait.
Value: £2-£4, depending on the viability of the lock.
Words of War (R): Deal 2 damage to target creature or player.
Now this has potential. It generates card advantage against ZI
decks - assuming you haven't been Upchucked, anyway. It
blows away bears until the cows come home, and eventually
can be used to go to the dome with an uncounterable Shock.
Blue control is *really* going to hate this one.
The big use, however, is with Read the Runes. The Stroke of
Sylvan is bad enough already with the Words, but it becomes
an instant-speed Rolling Thunder with the Words of War. 21
mana is enough to kill your opponent outright, even if you've
not yet scratched him, and if you've had a chance to apply
other burn you'll likely only need 10 or 12. There *has* to be
a Five-Colour Wake deck somewhere, even if it's only in
Extended.
Value: £3-£5
Words of Wilding (G): Put a 2/2 green Bear token into play.
There's an obvious comparison between WoWilding, Bearscape
and Zombie Infestation, so let's make it.
SPEED:
Infestation: Any time, generally an an instant.
Bearscape: Any time, generally as an instant.
WoWilding: Only when you draw a card, generally as a
sorcery.
COST:
Infestation: 0 mana, 2 cards (seen)
It should be fairly obvious to all that Words of Wilding is
inferior to both its counterparts. It's less flexible, and the lost
card is effectively a random discard because you don't know
what you're losing.
A 2/2 creature is not worth slowing yourself up by a turn. It's
rarely going to be enough to stop you losing, and you should
have better cards in your deck. There are times when a bear
will win a game for you, but they will be few and far between.
The times when a sorcery-speed bear will do it are even fewer.
Value: £2
David
Daniel Merrifield
Every card in the cycle has hidden card text saying.
"The controller of the ablilty knows how to abuse this card."
(Only kidding), but they can easily abused in many decks.
Consider the fact that all but the white can become absolute bombs in both
limited and constructed. Now, after pondering that thought for a few minutes,
you may realise how many deck ideas that arise which use this card.
Each 'words of' enchantment allows the user to pay 1 in order to create an
effect in place of drawing a card.
Words of Worship (Gain 5 life instead).
Constructed:
Value: $3
Words of Wind (Each player bounces a permanent instead).
Limited: All - this becomes much more useful if you have cards with come
into/leave play effects!
Constructed: Control decks have a new card entry, and this card is it. Every one
bouncing a permanent obviously includes you, so just find ways of abusing it
with different cards.
Value: $5
Words of Waste (Each opponent discards a card instead).
Value: $4
Words of War (deal 2 damage to target creature or player instead).
This card can also be very painful.
Combine this with Slate of Ancestry, also in Onslaught, (4, Discard your hand:
Draw a card for each creature you control), in creature-heavy and/or
mana-accelaration decks and 'war' is created (that is if you haven't killed the
opponent yet).
Value: $5
Words of Wilding (Create a 2/2 green Bear token instead).
I am sure that there are people out there who have already seen this card and
know how to abuse it.
Making 1+ 2/2's a turn (depending on the deck), can put the opponent under a lot
of pressure in the right situation. As for unlimited bear tokens, well... I'm
sure someone will figure out how to do it eventually.
A very valuable card for green creature decks.
Will fetch upto $6.
Just remember, Words are but connected letters which make sense to the reader!
And these make a lot of sense!
Daniel
Seeing these Words things I see two possibilities; either they will make
for some insane combinations or they'll be utterly junky.
Actually, firstly let me make a few extra qualifiers here: I see mainly the
white Words being the most easily abuseable one but hopefully I'll detail a
few ideas for the others as I go through them
Rather than my typical Limited/Constructed structure I'll just say outright
that they all seem absolutely horrible in Limited. If ever a 2/2 guy/turn
or 2 damage/turn is going to
win the game, I'd hate to be the opponent...how embarrassing.
So on to constructed.
Black Words: I guess maybe in multi-player or something suitably wacky? I
don't really play multi-player constructed-y formats so I'm not qualified
to comment much on this. So I won't.
Green Words: The only way I can see the Bear producing Words to be useful
is with all those generally blue cards that let you draw cards and then
discard as many. Much like as was commented on magicthegathering.com,
getting a bear a turn via a Merfolk Looter for free is an okay deal.
Whether it is a deal worth taking up a slot in your deck is another matter.
Breakthrough and similar can certainly give you a few dual purpose Grizzly
Fates in your deck: Breakthrough for 0 and pay the 4 to get 4 bears. Same
cost as Grizzly Fate and all! Of course you have to discard down to 0, but
hopefully that won't be too tragic. Cephalid Coliseum at a stage when you
are low on card...3 bears at instant speed? Not bad I suppose.
Red Words: I think this is probably the worst one and I choose not to say
anything about it.
Blue Words: All I can think of to do with this one is something annoying
like Tsabo's Web. Play the Web, return the Web etc and you have something
that approximates a Capsize with buyback in function but that is not
targeted, has sorcery speed and costs only 3 colourless mana per
repetition. If there is a cheaper cantrip permanent then that is obviously
much better for this function.
White Words: This card could be fairly nasty in a turbo-fog style deck. Or
with things like Skeletal Scrying. I still have severe doubts that this
kind of plan can do anything against the reliability of Green/Blue and
monoblack but it will be interesting to see what things pop up with the
plan of using this. But with the massive late game Skeletal Scryings that
monoblack control can achieve, it is possible that turning say 5 of the
cards into 25 life will be very helpful indeed. Maybe helpful enough to put
in some Tainted Fields or similar.
General comments: Obscene with Sylvan Library? Could be. Suppose we have
any number of cards in our hand and enter our draw step. Then we can, for
the low cost of 2 mana make it so that we still draw our 1 card and gain
six life (White Words). Or we can make it so that we pay 3 mana and no life
to have the opponent discard three cards (Black Words). And so on for the
others. Is this better than the Library/Abundance combination? I don't know
since I've never played with either and don't really have any intention to
do so...because Pernicious Deed still destroys all these strategies.
I think it is good that Wizards is printing some cards with some decent
combo possibilities beyond Wild Mongrel + cards. In fact the Onslaught set
seems to have been made to appeal to the 'Johnny' type gamers more than any
other demographic and the Words cycle is some evidence of this. I think
quite a few people will have fun trying to break these things and I hope
they succeed at least to the extent of enabling some good, strange
archetypes...maybe ones that even utilise Test of Endurance.
"Word", danesh
Danesh
Jason Street
Hmmm, these cards are interesting, essentially turning the card you drew
(would have drawn/did draw, big deal, there is little difference in this
case) into the card you wanted. The best example is the red one:
"Argh! My opponent played a Hypnotic Specter! I need to draw a Shock, STAT!"
Pay 1, Words of War a creature
"Yay!"
So essentially you need to look at these cards and say "When will I need a
contingency plan?" and "Do these cards give me a contingency plan?". I'm
sure everyone is happily planning on casting big card drawing spells and then
getting a big effect. Myself, I'd rather use them on their own.
Words of War is the best - it's basically a Stormbind. Stormbind rocks. I
want four Words of War. Though not exactly the same it still gives you the
option of going burn when you haven't got burn coming - the randomness is
removed. You know what you want and it's always coming up.
Words of Wilding has potential - I'd like to try one in my Prison deck.
Essentially here you are saying you have no worries about your opponent, you
just need the smackdown. Of course Words of War is more versatile, but this
is faster - if you have board control. As long as you're in control and can
afford to pass a draw you can crank a creature out and go to town.
Words of Worship is kind of cool looking, though in the case of "I'm dying!"
you would rather have something to kill that creature that's beating you
down. Incidentally, this is still better than Fasting, from The Dark, which
lets you skip draws and gain life but gets buried after four turns or when
you draw a card.
Words of Waste is pretty crap. You might get it out on turn three and then
only get to start using it on turn four. If you're playing Type 1 or 1.5 it
might be an effective first turn card to Dark Ritual out against a denial
player, if they can't kill it. The setback in card advantage will be made up
as you go. Of course it's easier to Ritual out a Hypnotic Specter.... But
this is less easy to deal with for red or blue.
Words of Wind is shocking. Even making it a multiplayer card doesn't make it
good. The problem is that you have to return a card as well, so it turns
into an absolute mess for you, unless you want to bounce a Shield Sphere.
Well, okay there's a way to get some use out of it, but the option of
casting a big draw spell and bouncing permenants is not a good one either,
since it affects you. I have to say this is the most unimpressive.
Prices
It's a very interesting idea for cards, though I think they should have
thought up some better effects for the black, blue and white ones.
Jason
All of the words enchantments have "waiting to be abused" written over them and I'm sure it won't take long before they crop up in Extended. In limited the only real contenders are the red and green words (war and wilding respectively) as the others are too defensive or situational in nature. Smaller deck sizes (and higher land counts) in limited make the words more effective as you will be potentially drawing more land and cycling also gives added incentive for some of these cards to make an appearance. I would say Words of War is the better of the two and should be considered as a first pick in draft.
The other reviewers have commented on the combo power of the words in Extended with cards such as Sylvan Library, etc so I wil take a look at Type 2 and how they fit in.
Words of Worship - I played against a Test of Endurance deck (U/W) a few weeks ago and was quite surprised at how quickly the game can lock down and the life totals go up. Ancestral Tribute was one of the "I win" cards with 40 life point gains not uncommon. Now think if this deck replaced the blue with black (counters for removal and Words of Worship, Ancestral Tribute for Phyrexian Arena, Deep Analysis for Skeletal Scryings). Between the card drawing of the scryings and the arenas, there is going to be a lot of life gain going on!
Words of Wind - Like the others have said this card affects both players so cantrip effects and 187 creatures seem the obvious targets. This can backfire especially if your opponent has 187's or Phantom creatures, so is it any good? Could be a combo with Read the Runes if you had enough mana (i.e. Mirrari's Wake) but then again you could cut out the middle man and play Upheaval instead.
Words of Waste - This is definitely the most unconstructed one of the lot. There is better targeted discard around at the moment without the need for this. Words of Waste is further compounded by the small fact that Roar of the Wurm is played in nearly every U/G deck making it pretty bad :(
Words of War - Some people have been comparing this to Stormbind, but this ain't a Stombind. Sure Stormbind costs one more mana to use - but you could use it any time, multiple times until you ran out of cards. This doesn't make Words of War unplayable though as I am sure it will give blue decks fits if they can't counter it. This may also see play in R/G with the new beast that lets you draw a card if unblocked (Hystradon I think), so you could blast out their blockers during your draw phase then attack freely! Other than that this may be relegated to the sideboard for those nasty blue mages.
Words of Wilding - Similar to Bearscape but not as good, Words of Wilding could be useful against pure control decks that play little or no creatures where a 2/2 a turn can get in some serious damage. Although good control players will let you skip a few draws, make a few bears then smash you with Wrath of God, play a thresholded Mystic Enforcer and kill you in 4 turns. This will see some play but there will always be better cards out there.
So what are words worth?
Worship - $7, Wind - $3, Waste - $3, War - $7, Wilding - $5.
Until next time
Dan
|
Danesh Jogia
Dan Turner