Crash Test Magic – Incendiary Ash
Last week’s debut edition of Break This Card was a lot of fun, so we’re going to make it a regular feature. This week, I came up with a variation on serious burn that probably won’t result in any turn one kills (try your best to prove me wrong), but might be horribly broken all the same. We’ve also got a recap of last week, and the search for a better name for this feature.
First order of business: Break This Card was the name of a column run on the Wizards of the Coast website a few years ago. They used real cards instead of the made up ones we’re using (the idea was to find broken combos for crappy rares), but I still don’t want to steal the name. So along with your card breaking in the comments, feel free to offer up some suggestions.
Last week’s card was Waterdeep, a land designed to reward you for a diverse army. It was the shapesift ability of Changelings that broke it, allowing for amazing combos like ggodo’s, which cleverly used Platinum Angel to make the player undefeatable, avoiding mana burn issues. Morose used the infinite mana to make a huge Shifting Wall, which was then sacrificed with Rite of Consumption. This has the effect of not only obliterating your opponent, but also giving you infinite life. I’m not sure which is more awesome, “I beat you and I’m undefeatable,” or, “I beat you infinity to negative infinity.”
My turn one kill using this card requires a pair of Moxes, a Mothdust Changeling, an Astrolabe, all resulting in an infinite Braingeyser targeted at your opponent. “Game over, I just destroyed your brain.”
So, what can we do with Incendiary Ash? There are some obvious choices, but I wonder how broken we can make this. I originally had the mana cost even higher, but, “Make it cost so much no one will ever play it” seems like a dumb way to keep a card from being broken. Your mission, then, is to break this. Second mission – fix it. Make it functional and playable.
May 11th, 2009 1:06 PM
Anything that’s 8+ mana is hard to call broken. By their very nature, 8+ cost cards are pretty hard to deal with (case in point… Empyrial Archangel). But, a great combo with this would be Nevinyrral’s Disk. Wipe the board of all non-land permanents, then kill your opponent(s) a few times over with the Incendiary Ash. Ashnod’s Altar and Manaforge Cinder would probably both be in a deck abusing this as well. Could go off pretty early (turn 5 easily) with that kind of mana production/filtering.
May 11th, 2009 3:44 PM
Not sure about a good break for this, I like the Nevinyrral’s disk idea though. Millstone would be a fun combo with this. Braingeyser would be good too, forcing your opponent to kill themselves with discards… Not sure if those count as “breaks”. There are some fairly obvious tweaks to make it more sane, reduce the damage amount, remove the ripple effect (not sure how often that would come up), make it so that it cannot reduce an opponent below 1… Lots of fairly simple mitigations since it’s a direct damage card.
As for a column name, howabout “R&D”, “The Card Test”, or something along that line?
May 12th, 2009 12:17 AM
Well, 8 mana in the colors that tend to suck at mana is tricky. I’d use Rite of Flame and/or Seething song to hit the colored mana cost quickly then use this obscure bugger: Mana Seism to sacrifice a few lands to get the colorless. Turn four kill with no moxen.
Hand: Mountain, Swamp, Incendiary Ash, Seething Song, Mana Seism, Two lands of any sort that makes mana.
Turn 1-3 land
Turn 4: Tap out for Seething Song and a floating black, use the two gained from Seething Song to play Mana Seism, sacrifice the lands to pay the colorless cost, Incendiary Ash with Storm 4 Ripple 20+ cards, kill your other opponent, repeat until there are four corpses at your table.
Also, this is just in those two colors. Adding green land fetching can move it up to turn three, but would make a deck less consistent.
To fix it I would remove one ability and knock it down in price. With the storm you ripple through too many cards making it almost sure you’ll get another. Heck, with some blue deck magic you could go off turn 2 with Rite of Flame and something to line up a ripple. Either ability on its own is good but not broken at a lower cost. Both at this cost is one hell of a Johnny card that’ll require a combo to even be playable.
Oh, and it’s not infinite mana from Waterdeep, as of conflux it’s 215 mana.
May 12th, 2009 12:24 AM
Oop, I forgot Noggle, there’s 216 types.
May 12th, 2009 9:31 AM
Stress Test?
Mana Burn?
Planescracker?
I still say this should be widened beyond the scope of M:tG…maybe we could have DnD 4e powers? V:tM disciplines? Etc.
May 12th, 2009 11:20 AM
I’m in agreement with Moricai. I wouldn’t mind expanding the range of games, but I do love magic so much.
May 12th, 2009 3:46 PM
I’m not against doing other games, but to some extent it will be limited by the games I’m familiar enough with to do this sort of thing. 4E powers are definitely possible.
Props to ggodo for noticing that Gravestorm triggers Ripple. Did you know there’s only one card in existence with Gravestorm? And it’s not the card called Gravestorm?
Finally, I believe Waterdeep would generate infinite mana because you are not restricted to currently existing creature types (just as you can name “yellow” for cards that say, “name a color”). So you could sit there all day naming new creature types until you had enough mana. Finally, a home for my Wall of Burrito.
Column names – what about “Crash Test Magic” ?
May 12th, 2009 4:23 PM
>>Finally, I believe Waterdeep would generate infinite mana because you are not restricted to currently existing creature types (just as you can name “yellow” for cards that say, “name a color”). So you could sit there all day naming new creature types until you had enough mana. Finally, a home for my Wall of Burrito.
Not to be a pedantic rules lawyer, but according to the complete rules (203.2d, to be precise), you’re only allowed to pick one of the 5 WUBRG colors if asked to name a color. Same goes for existing creature types, which , as ggodo pointed out, there are 216 or so currently in print.
May 12th, 2009 4:23 PM
Hmm. . . you may have a point.
May 12th, 2009 4:24 PM
216!
May 12th, 2009 4:26 PM
Oop, the point was that you couldn’t cast Gleemax. I hit submit instead of preview. I was testing the preview feature.
May 12th, 2009 4:30 PM
CRASH TEST MAGIC GO!
May 12th, 2009 4:34 PM
zizhou, I’d say the point of this whole exercise is to have fun all being pedantic rules lawyers.
They must have changed things at some point in the last few years, I remember a time when you could make up goofy colors and creature types. “Protection from Paisley.” Alas.
Still, 216 colorless mana is probably sufficient for most purposes. Although a large enough deck could defeat my Braingeyser combo.
May 12th, 2009 5:36 PM
Well, you can’t make up types and stuff, but *names* are fair game. So while your Wall of Burrito is just a Wall, it doesn’t mean it’s any less tasty!