Pattern Recognition #18 - A Purchased Rare

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

23 February 2017

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Hello, and welcome back everyone! I'm berryjon, TappedOut's resident Old Fogey and deliverer of fine articles for your reading enjoyment.

Today's subject is something I've chosen for myself. I've wanted to do this one since I started, but other things (and suggestions from you guys) kept pushing it back. But no longer! No, this isn't because you guys haven't given me any ideas about what to write, but rather because I actually want to get back to talking about cards.

And this particular card is something near and dear to me. You see, it was the first rare I actually purchased as a single and as such, it - and its successors - have been mainstays in my decks since then. When they're in colour And I don't have more important things to put there. And I remember to.

Don't think I don't see you guys going through my decks here on TappedOut, trying to figure out which one I'm talking about ahead of time. You'll fail!

Because I'm going to tell you right now. It's Crusade.

Crusade is one of the hallmarks of White's core colour philosophy, something that has stayed with them from the very start of the game through the current sets. That is, is embraces the whole rather than the individual. And this is reflected in how they handle their creatures. I've mentioned before how White is the one most likely to have the "All Creatures get..." spells, and this is where it started.

Crusade (and that's my favourite picture for the card, by the way) is the first, but not the last or the least entry in this style of card.

Now, I want to talk about why this card is the way it is, but for that I want to wait until I've talked a bit more about the other examples in this line of cards.

As the game developed out of its nascent and formative years, it was decided that the game had evolved enough that Crusade simply couldn't cut it any more. Multi-coloured decks were becoming the norm, and as Sixth Edition was getting ready to be rotated out in favour of 7th Edition, the designers also knew that the Invasion block was coming. Therefore, the colour limitation on Crusade was going to be more of a hindrance than an acceptable part of the card's design at that point,

Thus, 7th Edition gave us the net iteration in this series of cards - Glorious Anthem. (I've always read that flavour text to the tune of 'Ode to Joy'.) It has even been brought to my attention that this entire series of cards are called 'Anthems' after this one.

It was only an incremental improvement, but still an improvement none the less. For the additional cost of , the effect of the card was not only expanded, but made asymmetric. Whereas Crusade affected all creatures, Glorious Anthem only affected creatures you control. This is important as a global symmetrical effect could easily blow up in your face.

Just ask Sliver players about Plague Sliver.

The raised cost on Glorious Anthem also served a more subtle purpose. By delaying the casting of the card to turn 3, it freed up the vital 2-drop in white decks for other cards. You see, White has a lot of very good turn 2 creatures, from Samite Healer to Knight of the White Orchid. Moving Glorious Anthem up did nothing to slow down or otherwise hinder the deck.

But for some reason, this didn't jive well with how Wizards was planning things. In a curious turn, Glorious Anthem was last printed in a regular set in Tenth Edition, and replaced with Honor of the Pure in Magic 2010. This new version combines Crusade's colour limitation with Glorious Anthem's asymmetry.

So, why was this change made?

I couldn't rightly tell you. I do feel that Glorious Anthem hit the sweet spot of cost and viability, but the existence of Honor of the Pure confounds me. I could see it as a step between Crusade and Glorious Anthem, but to come after? In addition, Wizards has been trying to get away from proactive colour hate like this, so why the limitation?

Maybe having Glorious Anthem affecting all colours was considered too powerful?

I don't think so, as there are other cards that go across colours. Though I suppose they come with limitations of their own. Muraganda Petroglyphs only affects Vanilla creatures, Raiders' Spoils is a tribal card. And in looking at what options there are, I am beginning to think that Wizards isn't accepting of the idea of such a global boon without some form of drawback.

Of course, that's not to say that Wizards hasn't backed away from the idea. They've circled around the idea with other benefits, such as Knighthood or Asceticism. I think part of the resistance to these sorts of cards is the idea that creature enchantments in general have a huge target on them because it makes it (relatively) easy to remove two cards for the price of one.

And then I went to a Khans prerelease, and put Battle Mastery and Glaring Aegis onto my Graceblade Artisan and punched well above my weight class because no one thought to include enchantment removal because no one played creature enchantments.

But this comes from the other side. Instead of taking out the underlying creature to chain remove enchantments, you can remove something like Crusade or Honor of the Pure to affect all the creatures under that player's control.

It's a matter of precision removal, or being a detriment to everything really.

However, things don't end there. I want to also talk about Marshal's Anthem and Dictate of Heliod.

Marshal's Anthem is a curious card to my mind. It's a Glorious Anthem with an increase in cost by . I can't help but wonder if this was an attempt to back-door re-balance the Anthem. However, before I can make any real conclusions about that, I have to point out that that this card does come with a Kicker ability.

Now, how many of you know about the idea of "Strictly Better"? Yes? No? Well, it's a concept in Magic that sometimes one card will be better in an objective sense than a different card. Compare Lightning Bolt, which is strictly better than Shock as the latter only does two damage rather than three.

To bring this point home, if it were simply a choice between Glorious Anthem and Marshal's Anthem, it would be the former every time. However Marshal's Anthem also allows you to recover creatures from your graveyard, at an additional cost which Glorious Anthem doesn't do. Thus, the increase in base cost of the card isn't simply in response to an attempt to balance the card, but also to avoid having one or the other be "Strictly Better" before accounting for the Multi-kicker.

Dictate of Heliod though, represents a different approach. For an additional cost of , you get +2/+2 rather than +1/+1 for all your creatures, and you can play it at instant speed. This card is definitely more powerful, but I can't say that it is any better as the cost has increased immensely, and casting it with Flash is usually a one-time surprise.

And White doesn't end there. There's Always Watching, Angelic Voices, Day of Destiny, Gerrard's Battle Cry for a pumpable version, Spear of Heliod and others.

Moving on from that though, I would like to inform everyone that it is now time for the Time Spiral drink! Or at least a couple shots worth. I would first like to introduce you all to Bad Moon. This card was printed concurrently with Crusade starting in Alpha, but was silently dropped for being out-of-colour before getting the inevitable Time Spiral reprint. What I find interesting about this is that it is not a pure counterpart to Crusade, but rather it's cost is reduced a half step - compared to .

In retrospect, this didn't seem like such a big deal at the time. But I was young and foolish and completely incapable of recognizing what that meant. Part of the reason for Crusade's bigger cost is that it is more powerful. White has more creatures and they benefit more from the bonus, while Black is less worried about that sort of thing. They have fewer creatures, and have moved away from token generation except for Zombies who have better options for making things stick around - like Engineered Plague.

The other Time Spiral reference I want to introduce to you is a colour shifted card. Gaea's Anthem is the version of Glorious Anthem, and is a surprisingly underrated piece. This card is more than just one of the many colour-shifted cards in that set, it represents a difference in how the two colours treat their creatures.

Here's the point I passed down from earlier. White is the colour of creatures, and shares this distinction with Red and Green. However, unlike those two, White's creatures trend towards the smaller numbers. You'll get far more 2/2's than you will 4/4's, unlike Green or even Red.

Yes, I know that Blue and Black get creatures too. It's just that as I pointed out when talking about Vanilla Creatures, it is that Red, White and Green get the best creatures in terms of sheer Power and Toughness when compared to their relative casting costs.

It's even gotten to the point where there is an entire archetype to it - the White Weenie deck!

More so than any other deck, White 'fixes' the 'problem' of having small creatures by using global boosts to make everything better without singling out any specific creature as a 'champion'. Well, they do have those - Serra Angel was the first, and most certainly not the last.

Going back to Crusade itself, there's another reason why I think it's been dropped, rather than given a functional reprint as time goes by. And that is the religious connotations. It is a major sore spot for Wizards, that in their early days, the game drew quite heavily from real-world sources to get cards from. Ali Baba for example. And from Arabian Knights comes the one version of Crusade that I am completely understanding of that Wizards has quietly buried.

Jihad.

Yeah. I'm not going to touch the connotations of that card for all the Black Lotus' in the world. Let's just say it exists, and leave it be.

So, what next? Well, it's hard to say. Dictate of Heliod was pretty much the most recent version of this card, and as it's from Theros, it's rotated out of Standard. I suspect that there will be a replacement in Amonkhet, or the set after. But what it will look like, be it a reprint or something new entirely, I couldn't say.

But it will come. White won't be for long without something to make all their creatures better. It's too much a part of them.

Join me next week when I talk about something introduced in 5th Edition, and why it made the game actually playable. See you then!

And I'm selling out! Or is that tapping out?