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A Complete Review of Torment (red)Target creature gains haste until end of turn. Draw a card. ==> FUN: 1 One of the rare cantrips I don't like. Haste is good when it's on a creature, but you have to plan on casting both the creature and Accelerate in the same turn for Accelerate to be useful. Usually you could have just cast the creature during your previous turn and you wouldn't have needed the Accelerate. A haste instant might work if it also gives power, something like: "Hurry C, Sorcery, R Target creature gets +3/+0 and haste until end of turn." That way it's useful to cast it on small creatures early on, instead of having to wait for your bigger creatures, which won't leave enough mana available to cast the Accelerate anyway. -- Balthor the Stout R, Creature - Dwarf Legend, 1RR, 2/2 All Barbarians get +1/+1. R: Target Barbarian gets +1/+0 until end of turn. ==> FUN: 4 A dwarf playing lord over barbarians? I wonder what the story behind that is! I'm not sure there are enough barbarians of varied casting cost and abilities to make a barbarian theme deck worth building yet, but if it is, Balthor goes in it. Apart from the standard +1/+1, the thought of a horde of barbarian firebreathers is nothing short of scary. -- Barbarian Outcast C, Creature - Barbarian Beast, 1R, 2/2 When you control no swamps, sacrifice Barbarian Outcast. ==> FUN: 1 Red has plenty of 2/2s for 2 mana that you don't have to sit on until you draw a Swamp. There have to be better options, even for a barbarian deck. -- Crackling Club C, Enchant Creature , R Enchanted creature gets +1/+0. Sacrifice Crackling Club: Crackling Club deals 1 damage to target creature. ==> FUN: 3 It's a bit on the weak side, but I have to give points for effort. The sacrifice ability gives it some resistance against the built-in card disadvantage inherent to local enchantments. If the enchanted creature is about to get Terminated, you can still break even if your opponent has a one toughness creature in play. -- Crazed Firecat U, Creature - Cat, 5RR, 4/4 When Crazed Firecat comes into play, flip a coin until you lose a flip. Put a +1/+1 counter on Crazed Firecat for each flip you win. ==> FUN: 2 As coinflip cards go, this one is pretty good. Most coinflip cards are too luck dependent to be worth it without a double-headed coin to cheat with. If you lose the flip, you're usually as bad of as your opponent would have been had you won it. And that's not really fair, considering you spent a card and mana on it. Crazed Firecat, though, is always at least a 4/4, no matter how bad your luck is. That doesn't make it a good enough card to use outside of sealed, though. For seven mana, you'd want at least a 6/6, but you have only a 25% chance of that. Anything bigger than that is almost impossible if you're not using Goblin Bookies. -- Devastating Dreams R, Sorcery , RR As an additional cost to play Devastating Dreams, discard X cards at random from your hand. Each player sacrifices X lands. Devastating Dreams deals X damage to each creature. ==> FUN: 4 Compare this to Sickening Dreams. This doesn't just kill creatures, it kills lands as well and it doesn't damage you, so you won't accidentally kill yourself with it. Is Devastating Dreams any good, though? Probably not good enough to see play by itself. It doesn't help that the discard is random, so you really can't count on being able to use your madness cards and keeping a few useful cards in hand. Still, there could be a place for Devastating Dreams in land destruction decks. Once you've emptied your hand of land destruction, you can wipe up your opponent's remaining lands with a Dreams and at the same time kill any weenies he may have cast. -- Enslaved Dwarf C, Creature - Dwarf, R, 1/1 R, Sacrifice Enslaved Dwarf: Target black creature gets +1/+0 and gains first strike until end of turn. ==> FUN: 3 A useful combat trick in the right deck, but it doesn't compare to Mogg Fanatic. -- Fiery Temper C, Instant , 1RR Fiery Temper deals 3 damage to target creature or player. Madness R ==> FUN: 4 In the right deck, Fiery Temper is a Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolts are never useless. -- Flaming Gambit U, Instant , XR Flaming Gambit deals X damage to target player. That player may choose a creature he or she controls and have Flaming Gambit deal that damage to it instead. Flashback XRR ==> FUN: 1 You have to keep in mind that a smart opponent will do exactly what you don't want him to do. If you pump a lot of mana into the X, he's redirect the damage to his 1/1 squirrel token. If you don't put a lot of mana into it, he'll direct it to a creature with enough toughness to survive or a creature with protection from red. And if he doesn't have a high toughness creature, he'll just take the damage himself. This isn't the kind of choice you'll want to give your opponent. The only good thing about it is that, under some extreme circumstances, you can force your opponent to direct the damage to an untargetable creature. Any other time, I'd rather have a Blaze. -- Flash of Defiance C, Sorcery , 1R Players can't block with green and/or white creatures this turn. Flashback-1R, Pay 3 life. ==> FUN: 1 Just like every set needs to have a blue flight enchantment, it also needs a red card to discourage blocking. In this case it only works against two colors. Sure, it's on the cheap side and it has flashback, so it may even be a useful sideboard card, but it's still a boring card. -- Grim Lavamancer R, Creature - Wizard, R, 1/1 R, T, Remove two cards in your graveyard from the game: Grim Lavamancer deals 2 damage to target creature or player. ==> FUN: 4 Grim Lavamancer will probably become one of the chase rares of Torment. Although I'm not completely satisfied that it should be a rare, I have to admit it has the potential to be a very strong card. It does twice as much damage as a Prodigal Sorcerer, yet only costs one mana instead of three. Instead of pinging tiny 1/1 bugs to death, you'll be killing 2/2 bears. That's a big difference. If you really want to get a feel for how good this card is, compare it to black's Cabal Torturer, which is three times as expensive and can only kill bears after reaching threshold and even then it takes a lot of mana to do so. Grim Lavamancer's only downside is that it can't be used too often because your graveyard will run out of cards. Of course there's a silver lining to that cloud as well, because that means it works well in combination with Gorilla Titan. -- Hell-Bent Raider R, Creature - Barbarian, 1RR, 2/2 First strike, haste Discard a card at random from your hand: Hell-Bent Raider gains protection from white until end of turn. ==> FUN: 2 Ok, it's a good creature, but why is it rare? It's pretty similar to Suq'Ata Lancer, with first strike instead of flanking and optional protection from white. Flanking is actually a better offensive ability, because it means even a 3 toughness creature can't safely block it and getting blocked by multiple 1/1s is completely out of the question. First Strike is better as a defensive ability, whereas haste is definitely an offensive one. Hell-Bent Raider is a solid card, but not one I'd like four of. -- Kamahl's Sledge C, Sorcery , 5RR Kamahl's Sledge deals 4 damage to target creature. Threshold - Instead Kamahl's Sledge deals 4 damage to that creature and 4 damage to that creature's controller. ==> FUN: 1 Just when I thought Waste Away was pretty bad, along comes four damage to a creature for a massive 7 mana. The threshold ability doesn't really help change the fact that I can do more damage with a Blaze for the same amount of mana. -- Longhorn Firebeast C, Creature - Beast, 2R, 3/2 When Longhorn Firebeast comes into play, any opponent may have it deal 5 damage to him or her. If a player does, sacrifice Longhorn Firebeast. ==> FUN: 3 This looks like a good card for tournaments. A 3/2 for 3 mana is pretty good for red and taking five damage against a burn deck really doesn't seem like much of an option. It's a bit too boring for casual play, though. -- Overmaster R, Sorcery , R The next instant or sorcery spell you play this turn can't be countered by spells or abilities. Draw a card. ==> FUN: 1 Gee, a hoser. And it's rare. What a surprise. One mana is pretty cheap for a must-counter card, especially as it's a cantrip, so it'll probably see sideboard or even maindeck play. It's a cheap cantrip, so why not if you're expecting a lot of counters? -- Pardic Arsonist U, Creature - Barbarian, 2RR, 3/3 Threshold - When Pardic Arsonist comes into play, it deals 3 damage to target creature or player. ==> FUN: 4 A solid creature before threshold and with threshold it becomes a almost as good as a Flametongue Kavu. That sounds like faint praise, but Flametongue Kavu is really exceptionally good and I'd play with eight of them in a deck if I could without a second thought. -- Pardic Collaborator U, Creature - Barbarian, 3R, 2/2 First strike B: Pardic Collaborator gets +1/+1 until end of turn. ==> FUN: 3 Similar to the blue Collaborator, except that the Pardic one is easier to chump block, because it doesn't have flying. -- Pardic Lancer C, Creature - Barbarian, 4R, 3/2 Discard a card at random from your hand: Pardic Lancer gets +1/+0 and gains first strike until end of turn. ==> FUN: 2 Overcosted. At 1RR, it would have been a good creature. The random discard makes it tricky to use correctly. Do you really want to risk losing a good card to make this bad creature a little bit less bad for a turn? -- Petradon R, Creature - Nightmare Beast, 6RR, 5/6 When Petradon comes into play, remove two target lands from the game. When Petradon leaves play, return the removed cards to play under their owners' control. R: Petradon gets +1/+0 until end of turn. ==> FUN: 4 Petradon isn't in the same league as Hypnox. By the time you have 8 mana available in a red deck, most opponents won't be too inconvenienced by losing two lands. They should have plenty of spare ones by then. Except in a land destruction deck, of course, but in that case it seems like overkill. Wouldn't you rather have a Shivan Dragon for six mana instead? Still, it's a fun big creature, especially because it doesn't seem to have the "if you played it from your hand" restriction, so it could be a good reanimation target. Too bad it doesn't fly, though. -- Petravark C, Creature - Nightmare Beast, 3R, 2/2 When Petravark comes into play, remove target land from the game. When Petravark leaves play, return the removed card to play under its owner's control. ==> FUN: 4 The new Avalanche Riders. Petravark looks good, but, like most of the other nightmares, it's too fragile. A land destruction deck can do very little against "mountain, Shock", which makes Petravark not equal to a land destruction card with a creature attached to it like Avalanche Riders are. On top of that, Petravark can't be reused, like Avalanche Riders can if you repeatedly reanimate them with Recurring Nightmare or the likes. -- Pitchstone Wall U, Creature - Wall, 2R, 2/5 Whenever you discard a card from your hand, you may sacrifice Pitchstone Wall. If you do, return the discarded card from your graveyard to your hand. ==> FUN: 3 I wonder how Pitchstone Wall interacts with madness. It's useful as a wall, but the ability doesn't really make up for the fact that most of red's discarding is random instead of chosen. On chosen discards, I can't see Pitchstone Wall being any use, because you could have just discarded Pitchstone Wall instead of casting it and sacrificing it to get back the other card. The only other use I see is that you may be able to get two uses out of some madness cards with it, but that depends how madness works exactly. -- Possessed Barbarian R, Creature - Barbarian Horror, 2RR, 3/3 First strike Threshold - Possessed Barbarian gets +1/+1, is black, and has "2B, T: Destroy target red creature." ==> FUN: 3 Possessed Barbarian is very similar to the other possessed creatures. It's not really special enough to be a rare. -- Pyromania U, Enchantment , 2R 1R, Discard a card at random from your hand: Pyromania deals 1 damage to target creature or player. 1R, Sacrifice Pyromania: Pyromania deals 1 damage to target creature or player. ==> FUN: 2 Again with the random discard. At least Pyromania has some potential as removal, but it still costs too much to cast and use for too little effect. Compulsion is still the best of the set by far. -- Radiate R, Instant , 3RR Choose target instant or sorcery spell that targets only a single permanent or player. For each other permanent or player that spell could target, put a copy of the spell onto the stack. Each copy targets a different one of those permanents and players. ==> FUN: 4 Radiate sounds incredible, but when you think about it, it doesn't really fit the mould of Fork. Sure, it creates copies of an instant or sorcery, but in most cases that just means a Stone Rain becomes an Armageddon and a Shock becomes a Steam Blast. It's useful, but you really have to search to find a more unique use for it. A good example is using it on a cantrip like Zap to draw a lot of cards or on Dominate to gain control of all creatures or on spells you can only use on your own creatures or only on your opponent's creatures. Maybe you can even find a card that has different effects depending on if you control the target or if an opponent controls it. I can't think of any, though, so they probably don't exist. Yet. -- Skullscorch R, Sorcery , RR Target player discards two cards at random from his or her hand unless that player has Skullscorch deal 4 damage to him or her. ==> FUN: 3 Four damage for two mana is very good. And the alternative is being on the receiving end of a Hymn to Tourach, not something most people enjoy. A bit boring for a rare. -- Sonic Seizure C, Instant , R As an additional cost to play Sonic Seizure, discard a card at random from your hand. Sonic Seizure deals 3 damage to target creature or player. ==> FUN: 2 Sonic Burst, downsized a little. Together with the other solid burn cards in Torment, I wouldn't be surprised if it caused a revival of red burn decks. The random discard will be a problem, though. There really aren't enough good madness cards around yet to give reasonable odds of hitting one when you cast Sonic Seizure. -- Temporary Insanity U, Instant , 3R Untap target creature with power less than the number of cards in your graveyard and gain control of it until end of turn. That creature gains haste until end of turn. ==> FUN: 3 A red version of Ray of Command. It's a bit more limited because of the targeting restriction, but it's still useful. I've had some good fun with Ray of Command, stealing my opponent's creatures, blocking and killing one of their other creatures with it and finally sacrificing it on my Altar of Dementia. Extra Rays of Command are always welcome. -- Violent Eruption U, Instant , 1RRR Violent Eruption deals 4 damage divided as you choose among any number of target creatures and/or players. Madness 1RR ==> FUN: 4 A bigger version of Arc Lightning. It's not as easy to splash, but the madness makes up for that. It doesn't work well with all the random discards in red, but it should do better with blue or green.
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