Ok, the moment we've all been waiting for:
Phantasmal Image. When I looked at DesolateMagic's list and saw that
Geist of Saint Traft was the only
spell in the mainboard I thought to myself,
there's got to be some other really spicey cards out there that we aren't utilizing. Image is almost never dead, and that's really not an exaggeration. Let's start with perhaps the most important argument: Modern is absurdly powerful and your opponents will be doing powerful things, often in the form of putting awesome creatures on the board. We need ways of keeping up with this and being able to play our own copies of
Primeval Titan,
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn,
Craterhoof Behemoth,
Wurmcoil Engine,
Tasigur, the Golden Fang or
Siege Rhino certainly qualifies in my book. This is what made me actually consider
Phantasmal Image for the list - whether it synergizes with our board is just gravy because our opponents will almost always be playing something that is worth copying. That being said, Image has a
ton of synergy with our other creatures. We can gain an even more impressive recursion engine by copying
Eternal Witness to get something else back from the grave. Even better, copy a
Flickerwisp and flicker our
Eternal Witness for the same effect but with a 3/1 with flying for more punch.
Voice of Resurgence and
Phantasmal Image are best pals. We can clone our Voice, and when the Image dies it hits the yard as a copy of Voice and thus still triggers the "when dies" clause, giving us an elemental. For even more fun, we can use
Dromoka's Command to suicide the real voice into a creature and
target the copy Voice with the +1/+1 counter mode. This results in us being able to generate a huge board presence at will rather than trying to persuade our opponent to kill one of our Voices. We can clone a
Kitchen Finks, gaining even more life (and making our Burn opponents even more miserable) but the fun doesn't end there. When our clone Finks dies, it's still a Finks as it hits the graveyard, so
Persist does trigger, allowing us to bring back the Image and clone something else. The only caveat is that we need to clone something with at least 2 toughness due to the -1/-1 counter that Image enters with. While it's not exciting, we also have the ability to clone one of our mana dorks and ramp faster into a
Collected Company. Not the line that we want to take, but it will be relevant sometimes. Finllay, we have
Geist of Saint Traft. Now I know what you're thinking,
Geist is legendary, so there's no way that we've got clone synergy here, right? Wrong. One of the more common ways that this deck wins is by amassing an impressive array of flying power. We can attack with Geist, triggering him and putting an angel into play attacking. Then, before the end of combat, we cast
Collected Company and if we hit a
Phantasmal Image we get to clone the 4/4 angel and keep it around to assault our opponent with.
Phantasmal Image really is the swiss army knife of this deck. I'm really tempted to run 3 copies, but I certainly don't want to see hands of multiple Images and no other creatures. I have toyed around with putting a third copy in the sideboard for matchups where I know I'll want to clone my opponent's stuff.
