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A Complete Review of Judgment (black)All Minions get +1/+1. BBB, Remove ~this~ from the game: Each player returns all black and all red creature cards from his or her graveyard to play. He remembers enough of his life to weep for what he has lost. ==> FUN: 4 It's becoming a bit of a habit for Wizards to print good and bad versions of each legend. Annoying, because it breaks the flavor of the legend mechanic. I really shouldn't be able to have two Ertais or Balthor in play at once, it doesn't feel right. Apart from that, though, Balthor looks like a very nice creature. I can't think of any Minions off the top of my head, but there are plenty, considering it has been used as a sort of catch-all creature type for anything that would have been a demon or devil in the old days and for generic black creatures with no obvious type. The limited Living Death ability is strong, especially because it's relatively cheap and against decks that aren't black or red, it's one-sided. -- 62. Cabal Therapy U, B Sorcery Name a nonland card. Target player reveals his or her hand and discards from it all cards with that name. Flashback - Sacrifice a creature. ==> FUN: 3 An interesting card, but Cabal Therapy is very risky. It's not a card that should be played on your first turn, it's better to have it follow a Duress, Addle or Ostracize. With enough good cards in your deck that can show you your opponent's hand, Cabal Therapy can be a good choice. Once in a while you'll get lucky and catch two or even three copies of a spell. The flashback should be seen as a bonus, something you'd really only use in an emergency, but with the right creatures, like Ravenous Rats and Bone Shredders it shouldn't be a huge sacrifice. Cabal Therapy should be a strong sideboard card against counter decks as well, because if your opponent doesn't counter it, he runs the risk of you guessing right and even if you don't, you'll get to see how many counters he has in his hands. From then on, Cabal Therapy will taunt him from the graveyard, threatening to take his counters away at no mana cost. -- 63. Cabal Trainee C, B Creature - Minion 1/1 Sacrifice ~this~: Target creature gets -2/-0 until end of turn. "Ah, a faceshedder. Very rare. Nearly unstoppable. Good luck!" - Cabal instructor ==> FUN: 2 I've never been very impressed with temporary power decreasers like Cabal Trainee. It can help out in combat, but creature combat isn't that common outside of limited tournaments. Even if it was, I'd rather use removal like Vendetta instead of Cabal Trainee. That's a lot more dependable. -- 64. Death Wish R, 1BB Sorcery Choose a card you own from outside the game, reveal that card, and put it into your hand. You lose half your life, rounded up. Remove ~this~ from the game. He wished for power, but not for the longevity to abuse it. ==> FUN: 4 They weren't kidding when they named this card Death Wish! Paying half your life is nothing to sneeze at. Death Wish gives you the most options for what to wish for, it seems, but that's not completely true. Because it costs so much life to use, you're forced to make every Death Wish count. You can't just wish for something funny (like both halves of Big Furry Monster with consecutive wishes) or merely annoying (like Bottomless Pit). You have to wish for something that will win you the game or at least swing it massively in your favor, to compensate for the life lost. -- 65. Earsplitting Rats C, 3B Creature - Rats 2/1 When ~this~ comes into play, each player discards a card from his or her hand. Discard a card from your hand: Regenerate ~this~. Rats come in one amount: too many. ==> FUN: 3 Four mana is a bit much, but Earsplitting Rats makes up for that with two good abilities. Manaless regeneration is obviously good, but the first ability requires a certain type of deck to work. If you can discard a useful madness or flashback card or even an Incarnation, the first ability won't hurt you. You run the risk of your opponent doing something similar, but that can't be helped. Playing discard is currently very very dangerous, unless it's targeted, like Duress. -- 66. Filth U, 3B Creature - Incarnation 2/2 Swampwalk As long as ~this~ is in your graveyard and you control a swamp, all creatures you control gain Swampwalk. "As the portal closed, Filth oozed through. The stench of evil followed it in." -Scroll of Beginnings ==> FUN: 3 I like the Incarnations, but swampwalk? Come on. Filth has a limited use compared to the white and blue Incarnations we've seen so far. You really want to play with a card like Dream Thrush to guarantee the ability to make all your creatures unblockable, but in that case you might as well use the blue one to give your creatures flying instead. -- 67. Grave Consequences U, 1B Instant Each player may remove any number of cards in his or her graveyard from the game. Then each player loses 1 life for each card in his or her graveyard. Draw a card. "You call that a nightmare?" -Braids, dementia summoner ==> FUN: 3 I'm in two minds over Grave Consequences. On one hand it's a cheap cantrip with a potentially very useful effect. On the other hand, it completely destroys any hope of reliably reaching and maintaining threshold and doing fun graveyard stuff. Sure, it's not as reliable as Morningtide or Tormod's Crypt, but this is a cantrip. I see no reason not to play with four of these in any black deck. As a hoser, Grave Consequences is too annoying, I think, but with cards like Gravestorm and others that want your opponent's graveyard empty, it has promise. -- 68. Guiltfeeder R, 3BB Creature - Horror 0/4 ~this~ can't be blocked except by artifact and/or black creatures. Whenever ~this~ attacks and isn't blocked, target player loses 1 life for each card in his or her graveyard. ==> FUN: 3 Guiltfeeder can do serious damage against threshold decks and it's not exactly easy to stop. Green is lucky to have Wild Mongrel, which can block and kill Guiltfeeder for only two cards, otherwise green threshold decks would be as good as dead. -- 69. Masked Gorgon R, 4B Creature - Gorgon 5/5 Green creatures and White creatures have protection from Gorgons. Threshold - ~this~ has protection from White and Green. ==> FUN: 2 Points for originality, but not for anything else. Masked Gorgon is an undercosted, reasonably sized creature with a drawback that makes it next to useless against white and green. When you reach threshold, that drawback disappears and it becomes a serious threat, but by that time it should be too late. There exist much better threshold abilities. -- 70. Morality Shift R, 5BB Sorcery Exchange your graveyard and your library then shuffle your library. The mind sings, though at times it sings a dirge. ==> FUN: 4 Morality Shift is a strange name for this effect, but it looks interesting. An early Morality Shift can give you automatic threshold, access to most of your flashback spells and it will make a spell like Living Death very powerful. It'll help with Ancestral Tribute and Mortal Combat as well. It's a dangerous tactic, though, because of cards like Tormod's Crypt and Guiltfeeder. Still, if it wasn't for the inflated cost of seven mana, I'd give Morality Shift two thumbs up. As it is, it's too expensive for such a vulnerable tactic and it'll take too long before it becomes castable. By that time you can have a pretty full graveyard in other ways. -- 71. Rats' Feast C, XB Sorcery Remove X target cards in a single graveyard from the game. "That does it, I quit!" -Cabal grave robber ==> FUN: 1 The flavor text accurately displays how I feel about this card. It's not just Rats' Feast, but all these anti-graveyard cards that are going to make playing a graveyard based deck in Odyssey block too fragile to bother with. That's too bad, considering so much in Odyssey depends on the graveyard, like threshold, flashback and the incarnations. I think they went a bit overboard trying to hose those strategies in Judgment to make sure the next standalone had a chance of making an impact, instead of playing second fiddle to Odyssey block. That's not a bad idea, but they're overdoing it. Plus, I don't like common hosers. I'll end up with ten of them, which I'm unlikely to use much. -- 72. Stitch Together U, BB Sorcery Return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. Threshold - Instead, return that creature card from your graveyard to play. ==> FUN: 3 Stitch Together starts as a Raise Dead, but becomes an Animate Dead when you have threshold. I'd rather have a more dependable Animate Dead, like Reanimate, but I'll take what I can get. Stitch Together isn't dependable enough for a typical big creature reanimator deck, but if you have plenty of medium sized creatures to Stitch Together, you can still make a nice deck with it. -- 73. Sutured Ghoul R, 4BBB Creature - Zombie */* Trample As ~this~ comes into play, remove any number of creature cards in your graveyard from the game. ~this~ has power equal to the total power of the removed cards and its toughness is equal to their total toughness. ==> FUN: 4 I thought Sutured Ghoul was a bad Lhurgoyff, until I read carefully what it did. I wonder how fast a kill you can put together with Sutured Ghoul. It'll help if red has an Incarnation which gives haste. Let me peek ahead to see if that's the case... yay, it is! Actually, I'm not sure I should be happy about that, considering that shows how predictable some of these cards are. Anyway, consider a game like this: Turn 1: Swamp, Dark Ritual, Buried Alive for Sutured Ghoul, the haste incarnation and any 10+ power creature. Turn 2: Badlands, Entomb for another 10+ power creature and Reanimate Sutured Ghoul, making it a 20/20 with haste and trample. Ok, that's a bit far-fetched, but if you'll settle for turn three, it becomes a lot more stable. -- 74. Toxic Stench C, 1B Instant Target non-black creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn. Threshold - Instead, destroy that creature, it can't be regenerated. ==> FUN: 1 The only thing Toxic Stench has over Terror is that it can destroy artifact creatures. Not a bad card, but there are better ones, which makes Toxic Stench unworthy of constructed play. -- 75. Treacherous Vampire U, 4B Creature - Vampire 4/4 Flying Whenever ~this~ attacks or blocks, sacrifice it unless you remove a card in your graveyard from the game. Threshold - ~this~ gets +2/+2 and has "When ~this~ is put into a graveyard from play, you lose 6 life." ==> FUN: 2 The drawback kills any chance you might have of reaching threshold, which makes Treacherous Vampire no more than a bad version of Sengir Vampire. Not that a 4/4 flying creature for five mana is ever bad, but it's inferior. -- 76. Treacherous Werewolf C, 2B Creature - Minion Wolf 2/2 Threshold - ~this~ gets +2/+2 and has "When ~this~ is put into a graveyard from play, you lose 4 life." ==> FUN: 2 Treacherous Werewolf is reasonably costed, although it's as vanilla as these threshold creatures tend to come. The drawback isn't that big a deal most of the time. Although, sometimes it'll cost you the game. Not my pick for a threshold deck. |
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