Pattern Recognition #348 - Foundations Signposts (Part 2)

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berryjon

28 November 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! Time to get back into the grind, so let's start of checking out the rest of the Signpost Uncommons. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, there's a handy link at the bottom of the article taking you back to the previous one, as well as to the next one when it gets posted. So let's dive right in, shall we? I've got four colour pairings to cover today.

We start out in Rakdos with Garna, Bloodfist of Keld. This reprint from Dominaria United isn't really much to look at on the surface, but it does have some interesting aspects to it. The first is that this is our second Uncommon Legendary creature, another example of a limitation to enhance the game. I don't care what MaRo doesn't like about this, Legends give you justification to put more powerful abilities on the board while finding ways to limit how many times it can stack.

The mana cost is also odd as its our first non-symmetrical cost. With a single pip and yet two , Garna introduces the idea that not all multi-coloured cards are not designed equal. I mean, yes, it should be obvious that some cards are better than others and in some contexts, but to be more specific, the casting cost indicates that for this creature, one color is more important than the other. That a deck that runs this card with any serious intent needs to have more sources of one color than the other at the ready, and that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the deck. You see, one of the things I have trouble explaining to people, after "use four copies, not one!" in 60 and 40 card formats is the idea of Color Splashing.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it's a deck that is mostly one colour, but often has a single card (4 of!) that is a different color in the deck that is included because it's utility is so prevalent. The first example that comes to mind was a mostly deck from Tarkir block that splashed just enough to run Atarka's Command but was otherwise a perfectly mono-color deck. If you ever see a deck's colour description include Parenthesis (these) around a colout, often in a lower case, then that colour is intended as a 'splash'. So Garna would be indicated as an R(b) deck. Colours in a deck don't have to be equal, and that is a lesson well learned.

Garna's ability however, is why she has earned her Legendary status. Whenever another creature you control dies, you get a boon from it. This sort of thing is perfectly in 's slice of the pie, but how it is done leans far more to the side of things. brings a couple of aspects to the table that interacts well with Garna, and the first is Global Damage. From Pyroclasm to Inferno, if wants you dead, it's willing to take the heat to do so. So if you wind up dropping a massive damage spell on the board, and you take out your own creatures in the process, Garna's presence means that you cna draw back some resources, including more creatures to refill your board state. And if you happen to be cheating with Tokens, you can get back more than you spent in terms of cards spent and drawn!

On the other side, that's only if your creatures aren't attacking. If they die while attacking, Garna punishes your opponents for having the audacity to block your creatures with direct damage! This ability encourages you to attack often and as much as possible, forcing your opponents into a series of bad choices. Block and lose creatures. Don't block and take damage, or block and still take damage in the process. Aggression is key. Keep attacking, and you will get a benefit one way or the other.

Which leads into the next one. Perforating Artist. It is a relatively aggressively costed creature for its power and toughness, but the presence of Deathtouch is a good addition that doesn't help as much as it implies. Yet it does work when you look at the other ability.

As I talked about two weeks ago, Raid is a Keyworded ability that asks that the player attacks to gain a benefit from it. In this case, this creature rewards you attacking by forcing each opponent to either lose three life, sacrifice a non-land permanent or discard a card. I've covered this subject matter in the past when I talked about the Villainous Choice, and this assures me that this sort of result is now Evergreen in terms of viability.

And more importantly it isn't a Legend, so you can stack this effect multiple times with multiple creatures. It is also important that this effect is not per-creature, and it requires that this creature be on the battlefield at the End Step. Which is where the Deathtouch comes back in. If you wind up attacking with this creature, then the Deathtouch makes blocking it a losing prospect, no matter what. You chump block with a 1/1, and it survives naturally. You block with a large Stone Wall (that's not in Foundations, so.. maybe Crystal Barricade would be the better option) and the blocking creature dies regardless of its toughness. There's a sweet spot where you can deal with this creature attacking and surviving to the End Step and it's very narrow.

These two Signposts work perfectly with the Rares in this set - Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate, and Immersturm Predator, as the former makes it easier to recur creatures that die in combat when you attack, and the latter can safely attack to trigger Raid.

is all about the attacking. They, above all other color pairings, hit the ground running and refuse to relent. They can't, as they generate their majority value by swinging at an opponent. And the Signposts indicate that quite clearly in my view. Good job Wizards!

Ah, Golgari. First up, we have Deadly Brew. This reprint from Strixhaven has had a slight change in the wording to clarify who chooses what is sacrificed - to avoid Tragic Arrogance issues mostly. Anyway, here we get another solid reminder that likes to sacrifice things for value. In this case, the value is in other people sacrificing their own stuff at the same time. But the flip side of it is the circle of life - and no, I have too many standards to link that song - and . If you sacrificed something to this card - because you can't sacrifice what you don't have - you can then return something else from your Graveyard to your hand.

Recursion is a huge part of , and this card helps teach players that can do it as well. One of my favourite cards to do this sort of thing with is with Fungal Rebirth. What this card does is teach players that in these colours, you have other options to get cards back from the graveyard, and that putting things in there to get things out, be it abstractly value, or in this case another creature.

Where the new player reaches understanding is when they deliberately fill their graveyard with powerful creatures, and then use this to remove something useless on their board, like a token, and get Sire of Seven Deaths out from their yard. Until then, they'll more look at this as a catch-up effect, and not a 'get ahead' effect.

On the other side of the equation, we have Wardens of the Cycle. Much like Garna previously, this creature has an asymmetrical mana cost, and much like that example, it indicates which side is more important to the creature and the decks it goes into.

Except not.

With this creature, the casting cost is indicative of the power and toughness more than the ability. But it does come back to there as well. With the Keyword of Morbid, the Wardens have a trigger at the end step if a creature you control died this turn. Pardon me while I glance sideways as Deadly Brew and back to this card, thank you very much. If a Creature died, you have two options. The first is you gain two life, and the second is you lose a life and draw a card.

The latter option is perfectly . Just ask Phyrexian Arena. Or Sign in Blood. Or Read the Bones. is the colour that will trade 1 life for one card, and has BROKEN that ability since the days of Necropotence. And if that was that, a creature with a ability tacked onto it, it wouldn't be spectacular, but it would be serviceable. And probably not good enough to be a Signpost either.

No, this creature reminds people that gets life gain.

:sigh: OK. Look. I get it. I was there when Stream of Life was first printed. But to me, in all my years of Magic, Lifegain has been First. And Second. With getting it as long as it's not pure life gain, but life drain of some stripe or another. getting it like this feels wrong. Yes, I hear that as long as it's attached to a creature, can do whatever it wants, but ... NO! If you wanted to do something that made sense here, and better yet, worked with other colours to remind people about how this all works, you should have had the other option be to put a +1/+1 counter on another creature.

Something died, and now what remains is stronger for it. There. That's the Cycle you're wardening. Not lifegain. Ugh.

Sorry, feeling bad about that. It's a good card, but with a bad outlet.

Moving on.

Ah, Boros, my good friend since the days of Invasion when I actually started to learn how to build decks. My best decks are Boros, and you've never failed me.

Now, tell me sweetie..., WHO HURT YOU?

Because they gave you Boros Charm. Of the ten Charms from Ravnica Block, this is the one that has stood the test of time, and for good reason. I've covered Charms in general in the past, but for those just new to the game, like those people that Foundations is intended for, a card that is a Charm is what is called a modal Spell. That is, unlike most other spells, when you cast a charm, you decide which effect you get when you cast it. And when a Charm is a single color - like Charming Prince, all of the effects are what that color can do regularly. But when the Charm is multicolored, then you get effects that are either/or in nature.

For the Boros Charm, the first effect is pure . The second is (And the less said about Heroic Intervention, the better) and the third option is something that both colors can do.

Choosing Boros Charm here is a good thing in my books, and not just because of the utter game-breaking power that is the second choice. Something that it is easy to splash into your otherwise mono- decks to support. An Uncommon emergency button to save your permanents from an untimely boardwipe or a bad combat trade is well worth its weight in gold. or silver rather, as that's the color of the Uncommon rarity. That or grey. Hard to tell.

Actually, it's been either a solid silver fill or a black-to-grey fill inward on the symbol depending on the artistic value. So that's what I learned today!

But once players understand how Charms work, they will turn their gaze to that last option, and look for other sources of Double Strike to see for themselves. And thankfully there's plenty of it in this set. From Kellan, Planar Trailblazer to Twinblade Blessing and through to Swiftblade Vindicator there is plenty of Double-Strike to go around. And it looks like one of the Jumpstart Packs does exactly that.

It's a good choice of a card, I'll give Wizards that much. I think it might be too much, but for now, I'll work with it. Maybe tweak my RDW deck on Arena into an R(w)DW deck for a bit.

But moving on, our Signpost Uncommon Creature is... Not a creature? What? Heroic Reinforcements is our other card. And it's not a creature, but it makes them. And it does a lot more besides.

Our first introduction to token creatures - so far - sees this Sorcery make two 1/1 Soldiers by default. This isn't something special, but introducing token through a Signpost seems a little excessive, especially as both colours make tokens at Common. Which I suppose sort of makes sense here, but that's just the first part. The other half of the card gives all your creatures +1/+1 until the end of the turn and Haste.

Now the global boost to power and toughness is something we've seen before as a Lord Effect in , so this isn't anything new. That it lasts until the end of the turn is a different take on the effect, but it's the way the card is built. It's a temporary card, so the effect is temporary. And because it's Temporary, you can add Haste to the creatures as well, which is something that brings to the table as well.

but once this all rolls together, in a cohesive series, this card creates two 2/2 white Soldier tokens with Haste until the end of the turn, at which point they revert to being normal 1/1's. And that's just by itself with nothing else to work around with.

This card teaches the importance of temporary effects on permanents on the battlefield. And that they can apply not just to permanents that entered this turn, but to those that were already on the battlefield. The intuitive leap here, one that I think is perhaps the easiest to make, is that this spell's effects become more pronounced and better with the more creatures you have on the battlefield. That you can drop this and cards that you put down this turn are suddenly very effective threats.

That being said, if I had to choose a creature to accurately represent these colours in Foundations, and make it an actual creature...? Well, I checked and there are seventy-nine uncommon Creatures in this color pairing. I looked at them all, and while Sunhome Guildmage does everything mechanical this card does, I think the best option would have been Honored Crop-Captain, a simple card that encourages go-wide effects, as well as attacking. And also stacks when you have multiples in play.

I can understand why Wizards chose what they did, but I do think they could have gone better. Of course, these cards do work wonders with the aformentioned Swiftblade Vindicator, this color-pairing's representative at Rare, and Aurelia, the Warleader, who is at Mythic. Three's a lot of combat going around, and so the Charm's ability to protect your board, or deal the finishing blow cannot be under estimated, while the Heroes are more setup rather than finisher.

And last for this week, Gruul. First we have our third Legendary Creature! Ruby, Daring Tracker is still in Standard, even before Foundations was printed, so she's going to be sticking around for a long time! And as with the other Legends, Ruby has the same restrictions in how many you can have on the table, but she does bring quite a bit to the table.

First is Haste. This, like the previous card talked about with this ability is a good enabler for surprise actions. But what separates her from Heroic Reinforcements is her last ability. Yes, I'm skipping the middle for a moment, bear with me.

Ruby is also what is called a Mana Dork. She is a creature that can tap to add mana to your mana pool. In her case, or . Compare this to Llanowar Elves, which is at Common, and simply adding an additional color in the mana value as well as the ability to make mana of that colour is a legitimate step up in complexity from just the Uncommons in general.

However, when you have Haste, the ability to tap for mana the turn you cast one of your acceleration pieces means that you might not be going higher in terms of mana this turn, but you can go just a little bit wider. Like say, casting Llanowar Elves with that mana?

Of course, her middle ability is where she merges both sides of her colours. When she attacks, if you are also attacking with a large creature, she gets larger as well. And I can tell you this, these colours are not shy or short of other creatures with power 4 or greater.

And again, because of Haste, she can attack the turn she comes down, becoming a surprise 3/4 attacker for a mana value of . Don't underestimate that sort of utility. She's nothing spectacular, but she's an excellent stepping stone to higher and better things all told.

On the other side of things, we have Savage Ventmaw. This is, I think, the most mana-expensive uncommon that I'm going to be looking at. This 4/4 Flyer is perfectly in line with your typical Dragon, but the interesting thing here is the ability it has.

When you attack, the creature generates and you keep this mana for the rest of the turn. Importantly, players learn that they can't 'store' mana in their mana pool over the turn as part of the basic rules, but this changes that. The mana made by the Ventmaw stays around until the end of the turn, and lasts past the combat phase and most importantly - into the Second Main phase. Wait. That's been changed... it's the Post Combat Main Phase now, isn't it? Anyway, this mana sticks around, unlike, say, Radha, Heir to Keld, which is very important.

I keep saying that, but you have to understand that even if you get no additional mana sources after you cast the Ventmaw, and you attack, you now have TWELVE mana to work with after combat. You've doubled your effective mana, and there is very little you can or cannot do with that much available to you. You can hardcast Darksteel Colossus, or Genesis Wave where is equal to . Or activate Heroes' Bane three times. You can do a lot of harm to your opponents with that mana, and the more it counts, the more you can explode into victory.

Looking at the rares though, neither of them jump out as being really synergistic, but that's OK. Not everything has to be.

...

And that's it for this week! Join me next week when I cover the last two colour pairings, and and then provide my summary comments! It's been a week, and tomorrow is Black Friday. It'll be a day. I hope to have the energy to finish this off.

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to discussing my subejct matter in more detail!

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