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Mercadian Masques - a Complete Review

In this article, I'd like to take a look at what Mercadian Masques will bring us. Will it turn out to be another Homelands? As a sequel to the Tempest block, will it also have the lightning speed of it? Will it have the number of broken cards the Urza block has? For an accurate answer to these questions, you best ask a star player, but if you want to hear my opinion, read on.

At the time when I'm writing this, a completely accurate spoiler isn't available yet, but I'll use the spoiler list from MTGnews.com to look at each individual card. I'll also give each card two ratings, one for tournament play and one for fun play. Take both of these ratings with a grain of salt, because I'm mostly a fun player and as such I don't have much tournament experience. As for the fun rating, well, that's about as subjective as it gets. Ratings go from 1 to 5, with 1 being very bad and 5 very good.

I've split the review into sections to make it easier to read:

I'll leave the copyright notice for the spoiler list in as well:

Conclusion

What can I say about the set as a whole? It's an obvious attempt to slow T2 down a bit and it shows in some of the insanely high casting costs. Creature control is getting stronger, as both white and black get some pretty good, cheap removal. Even green gets its Twister back, but you can hardly call that cheap. On the whole, I'm impressed that they managed to slow the game down without printing Homelands II. On the other hand, I don't think control decks got any sickeningly powerful cards. Perhaps a few blue ones (the enchantment that turns your creatures into Magpies and the enchantment which makes targeted creatures return to hand and the new Propaganda), but that's about par for the course and they're usually not that fast.

This set has ok tournament cards and some good fun cards, but it does have one big problem I think: there are a lot of pretty bland rares. I like rares to be exciting and new, even if they're completely useless if you want to play a serious game. There are a few ok ones, but the cheap medium fat creatures with a drawback don't really get my heart rate up and I'm already dreading getting one of the neo-Mirage diamonds. Bleh.

My thanks to anyone who managed to make it all the way through this.

Good luck, and may your Wumpus never draw out a Verdant Force!

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The Complete Encyclopedia of Magic the Gathering

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Onslaught continues the story of Kamahl, who struggles to cope with what it means to be a druid. At the same time, he has to help his sister, Jeska, who has been transformed into Phage, a being that can kill with a mere touch. At the same time Ixidor, an illusionist with the ability to shape reality is out to kill Phage for killing his one true love. Who will find her first?