Pattern Recognition #324 - Annihilate!

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

23 May 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And welcome back everyone! Today I'm going to pretend ot be relevant and hip and with the cool kids and holy URZA is that GRANDEUR? It is! It is! But that's not what I'm going to be talking about today. Yes, I'm going to instead talk about the Typal mechanic associated with the Eldrazi type. No, not Devoid. Let's talk about one of the unloved mechanics in the game. Almost as unloved as Infect. A mechanic that ended games hard and fast - as designed - and was pretty much used once and almost never touched again.

Until Modern Horizons 3, that is. Which brought it back because this set skips Standard and goes straight to Modern/Eternal legal. And I don't even remember this from its original printing.

Let's talk Annihilator.

Now, I could have sworn that I talked a bit about this before, but it's not showing up on my master list of articles and their subjects. So I think I must have done a side-note about this mechanic when I talked about the Eldrazi, so I'll go forward with that in mind.

As existences of Cosmic Horror, the Eldrazi have an effect ton what we would consider to be conventional reality. That effect would best be described as bad things. And while things like All is Dust existed to to help show their larger effects, several creatures and one enchantment were created to give a more ... personal touch to their endless destruction that they caused to Zendikar. And that was the Annihilator mechanic.

Annihilator is a Keyword ability that acts as an attack trigger. Whenever a creature with this keyword attacks, the ability triggers with the attached numerical value. The defending player must sacrifice that number of permanents.

It's really that simple. You're forcing sacrifices when you attack.

This mechanic was designed not just for the flavor but also as a stalemate breaker. During playtesting of the block, Wizards determined that it was possible for the game to stall out as no player could effectively attack the other without opening themselves to larger retaliations. Thus, players would draw things out and the game would effectively grind to a halt as people went into "Draw-Go" mode for long periods of time. Much like how the Infect mechanic was supposed to work. Which should give you an idea about how well it went over.

Anyways, Annihilator sough to clear the boardstate by forcing the removal of permanents and slowly degrading a player's ability to have a boardstate until something breaks and someone wins. I can sort of understand how it all works in theory, but in practice it's another beast entirely.

First of all, Annihilator is expensive. The cheapest creature with the ability (before Modern Horizons 3 reaches store shelves in a couple of weeks) is the mana value Ulamog's Crusher, followed by the MV Hand of Emrakul and Artisan of Kozilek. These were not cheap creatures to cast by any means, thouch as you can see on the hand, there were options to get them out faster. And this was a nice synergy between the creatures and their unifying mechanic. The Eldrazi were supposed to be expensive, so it would take time to get to the point where you could summon one of them, and yet by the time you did, you and your opponent would both have boardstates ready to become the victims of Annihilator. It would feed on the time spent reaching this point, and would work from there.

In theory, two players with Annihilator would start swinging at each other, each trying to maximize the amount of damage they do the opponent, trying to keep as many permanents in play to absorb the hits until either they or their opponent gave up the ghost.

Of the cheap ones, the only one I really remember playing was the Artisan. This creature had a ridiculously large body, and was colourless recursion, pulling a creature straight to the battlefield when you cast it. Not when the Artisan entered, but as a Cast trigger. And in colours that didn't recur all that well, like , this could be a surprise end-game recovery of a resource that your opponent can't really respond to now because you have both the Eldrazi and the creature itself.

It That Betrays was Tergrid, God of Fright  ^Flip long before Tergrid was a thing. But this one included a built-in sacrifice ability and would quickly turn the game around. I had the ... interesting time of watching two players with ITB in play exchange control over a permanent until the regular blockers ran out. It was boring honestly.

Eldrazi Conscription is an Aura that effectively turns a creature into an Eldrazi (without actually doing so), and was considered a capstone of certain Voltron strategies because even if the opponent could make it through the Annihilator triggers, the sheer size of the creature would deliver a knockout blow as well. Not that I've ever done that in Light-Paws. What do you think I am?

Don't answer that.

Then there are the Titans, the Legendary creatures. But eh, they're not interesting for the subject of this article.

Now, there are ways to counter the Annihilator trigger. First is to ensure that it never happens in the first place. As of the time of this article, only Emrakul, the Aeons Torn has any form of self-protection. This is "Protection from one or more Colours". Which is to say if you have something with , , , or in the casting cost, then it's safe. Please just ignore the Unstable Obelisk in the corner. Of course, if your opponent has resolved this card, then you have bigger problems than the Annihilator 6 attached to it.

What I am saying here is that removal is always an option. You should never be fighting the mana costs by the time these creatures enter the battlefield, so you won't have to worry about having cheap removal spells in hand. Well, you might have to worry about having cards in hand in the first place, but that's a different kettle of fish.

Following that, various forms of control in place to prevent attacking are good. From the classic Pacifism to the hilarious image of Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre putting on a fedora and a trench-coat because they are now in Witness Protection and are just a totally Legitimate Businessperson. Honest!

But if you've failed to prevent them from entering the battlefield, and in preventing the Eldrazi in question from attacking, what can you do? Well, have stuff that you don't mind losing and can replace relatively easily. Tokens.

Harder to come-by in the old days of yore, but not impossible. Not like today where token strategies are so common there are now cards dedicated to preying on them. Tokens can be a cheap and effective way to pad your vital non-token permanents from hitting the graveyard (unless that's what you want, you player, you) and this can be your first line of defense. If that gets breached, then you had better know your deck inside and out and commit to some serious triage to try and hold out long enough to come back and win.

So yes, there are ways of dealing with Annihilator, but they all tend to be very limited. Which is by design.

And this would be the end of things, except that we have gotten new cards! Nazgul Battle-Mace was a one-off card from one of the Lord of the Rings supplemental sets with this ability, and a punisher that works off of it.

And then Modern Horizons 3. Annihilator is back, and to avoid spoilers, it's also appearing on cards with Devoid, and there are some more cards that grant it.

Yet, the costs are still very high and unless this set includes some decent ramp package (there are suggestions there are already, but we're still very early into spoilers), then this mechanic is again being relegated to mid-to-late game cleanup and ending.

It's interesting, but I'm not sure what's going on with it. It was ill-received as a 'feel bad' mechanic when it first came out, and has resisted any sort of proper re-imagining or reprinting outside of Commander since then. I suppose I may have jumped the gun with this article, but I do want to rehash what the mechanic is and what it does given that you may be seeing more of it at your table in the near future.

But we'll see how the rest of this set shakes out. I don't think we'll see any cheap cards with this mechanic as Wizards should hopefully want to avoid another Glistener Elf scenario, but where they draw the line will be interesting for me to see.

And there are other things in the set as well. We'll see what comes over the next couple of weeks.

Thank you all for reading. I'll see you next week with something else. What? I'm not sure yet. But I'm always willing to lend an ear to suggestions and requests.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!