EMN Limited Set Review Part I: Gory Numbers and Differences from SOI

The set is fully spoiled, and I've been chugging some math - the numbers are in! In this first part of the set review, I'm going to go through the major themes and mechanics, and see how much support they have now that EMN is around. Importantly, because this is the second set of the block, I am going to use heavy comparisons between this format and the previous one. Because EMN is a small set, and because it's 2/3 of packs now, things can potentially have changed a lot. On the other hand, for many of the themes, the fine folks in WotC R&D have re-supported what was there before, at least to some extent.


A quick note before we begin, just like in SOI, I have done a tiny bit of guesswork on the numbers. I'm assuming every pack has one common/uncommon DFC (in place of a common), and 1/8 packs also have a Rare/Mythic DFC (in place of another common). I haven't seen this confirmed, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't correct. Also, there was a little bit of guesswork on how the print sheets worked to get the ratios right (particularly for DFC). However, it's worked out such that for Uncommons, Rares, and Mythics, the number you expect to open doesn't care if the card is DFC or not, and for Commons, you are getting about 1% more of the non-DFCs - not enough for the vast majority of people to notice over the course of the format, particularly given that card-to-card variation is going to swamp that for at least several hundred packs.

And just like in BFZ/OGW, you want to realize that the old cards are much rarer now: in fact, you're slightly more likely to open a particular card of one rarity higher from EMN than you are from one a single rarity lower in SOI. To give an example there, I'm slightly more likely to open Hamlet Captain than Byway Courier in any given draft, slightly more likely to open Bedlam Reveler than Rise From the Tides, and slightly more likely to open Tamiyo than her Journal. You don't want to know what your chances of opening Avacyn are now (but I'm going to tell you anyway: one out of 120 drafts; on the plus side someone at the table will open one only one out of 15 drafts now, so you get wrecked less often).

Without further ado, onto the analysis!

Returning Mechanics

Madness
Madness is significantly down in this format. Madness cards themselves are down 26.5%, and discard outlets are down 15.5%. Note that this is also a significant shift in the ratio of Enablers to Payoffs - before, we had about 1.3 enablers for every madness card, now that ratio is up to 1.45. What that means is that the simple ability to have a discard outlet should be somewhat less valuable (both because there are fewer payoffs overall, and also because it is proportionally more likely to be redundant). But the actual effect of Madness itself might be better - if you really want to use those activations, you are going to want to be getting value, and there's just fewer options for that now. It's unclear how that will trade off against slightly fewer enablers existing.

Delirium
Delirium is also less prevalent (maybe Emrakul doesn't have people crazy so mcuh now as completely gone, crazy Eldrazi?), down about 10% from last format. More importantly, though, it's going to be harder to turn on. We have a 9% drop in, for example, enchantments that go to the graveyard through play, but that's including Crop Sigil, which only goes if you already have delirium, Spontaneous Mutation, which likely only gets there if you use it as a trick to win a combat you would otherwise have been trading, and Choking Restraints, which you need to activate for potentially little value to get there. If we take those out, we'd be down over 60%. Of course, that's not entirely fair, because there were more unplayable Vessels than questionable Lunar Forces we have now, and sometimes you will get those things to happen, but the point stands that it's significantly harder. Enchantment was a fairly easy type before, if you wanted it; now your only really good bet is Boon of Emrakul (which should make that effect a bit better).

In terms of other types, there's about 5% more instants now, while sorceries remain within 1% of where they were before. These aren't huge issues, since those cards were already disproportionately being cut in order to keep creature counts high. Milling was very important though, since it tends to be your best bet at lands (and even more so now with fewer Forks in the Road and Warped Landscapes). That, too, is down about 5% from where it was previously.

So it's not a massive change, but it's a little less important than before, and a bit harder to get turned on.

Skulk
Skulk is down 39%. It wasn't all that important before (a little more than the flavor text it was oft joked to be, but not tons), and I don't expect it to be now - there are a couple rares which try to use it to effect, but well, ok, that's rares for you.

Investigate
Investigate is not present in Eldritch Moon, so naturally it's exactly 1/3 as present in this format as it was in the previous. The implications of this are that cards which care about investigating or having lots of clues (Graf Mole, Erdwal Illuminator) will get significantly worse. On the other hand, the actual act of investigating will probably get better, since you're less likely to get to the point where you have too many clues and not enough time to crack them all.

Tribes

All the same tribes are back, though maybe not all at the same level of importance.

Humans
There are about 4% fewer humans than before, along with about 5.3% fewer cards that care about them. About 35% are now in white, and 31% in green, with the rest spread over the other colors, which is within a couple percent of where they were before. Of note, the green cards that care about the type are a bit more aggressive than the white ones.
 
Spirits
The number of spirits is down about 6%; the number of cards for which the type matters is down from the already paltry 4.7 per draft by an additional 43%, all the way to 2.7 per draft. This tribe continues to not be an important factor in terms of typeline in limited, being more impactful here in terms of flying.

Zombies
The number of zombies is steady from last format to this, but the number of payoffs or cards that care about them is up by over 14%... but still only at about 5 and 1/6 per draft. That's enough to do something with in certain cases, but not something you should expect to see on a draft-by-draft basis.

Vampires
The count of vampires are up about 3%, but the number of payoffs is down 18%. Again, this wasn't a huge number before, but the only non-rare card (out of 2 total) that does something in this set is a cantripping lava spike that cares about the number of vampires (which is probably unplayable unless you get very all-in somehow).

Wolves and Werewolves
More of these now care explicitly about Werewolves, whereas before it was almost always either or. Furthermore, the total number of these is down about 11% now, and the payoffs are down by 26%. This is one of the tribes that had some cohesiveness before, with cards like Howlpack Resurgence, Moonlight Hunt, Howlpack Wolf all seeing pretty serious play, but now there's far less reason, which in turn probably makes all of those cards worse. Also, they used to have mechanical cohesion with their flip triggers playing well together, but that's more or less out the window now - all but a mythic from the new set are based on pouring mana in (more on that later), which really function pretty independently.

New Mechanics and Themes

Emerge
The fist thing I want to note about emerge is that all of the Emerge costs total 1 less than the creature's normal CMC - so even if you're sacrificing a token, you are getting a discount. Next, strictly speaking, they're colorless, but they're expensive enough that I imagine that you aren't gong to be playing them in very many decks at all where you can't at least pay that color of mana to Emerge them out some of the time. (Note that sacrificing even an on-color creature can never reduce the colored mana portion of the emerge cost). Some of the cheaper ones might be good to keep in mind as sideboard options even when out-of-color in the durdliest of matchups, though. That they are, by themselves, very expensive, can potentially make them more susceptible to bounce (though once you have the mana to hardcast them, that flips around). It's also worth noting, though, that you are going in on one big creature, which makes you a bit more susceptible, at least potentially, to go-wide strategies, and potentially removal.

There aren't all that many Emerge cards in the set, to be perfectly honest, coming in at just under 9 opened per draft. That they are centered in one three color wedge (Sultai) will help you see more if you're in those colors, to be totally fair. And almost all of them seem at least reasonable to think about playing, so that helps, too. It's a bit hard to tell how much worse this mechanic will make enchantment-based removal, like Sleep Paralysis and Choking Restraints, but my best basis of comparison is the similar Exploit mechanic from Dragons of Tarkir - in both cases, you tend to be getting a spell-like effect worth roughly the cost of a card, then when you exploited and now just when you cast.

This comparison to exploit leads me to needing fodder to sacrifice, which more generally gets me to:

Sacrifice more broadly
We still have 6 and 3/4 other sac outlets besides emerge cards in the format (depending slightly on how you define a sac outlet), for a total that's 79% higher than we had in triple SOI. On top of that, we go from 11.8 cards per draft with death or sacrifice triggers all the way up to 18.9 (again, there's some slightly different ways you can define this, but the underlying point remains the same), getting us a massive 61% increase. Worth noting is that msot of these trigger on their own deaths, but a few care about other things dying.

On top of this, for more fodder, we are up to 40.3 Enter the Battlefield triggers per draft from 39.1 before. This is only about a 3% increase, but in my estimation, a bit higher percentage of the triggers now give you the value of a card (a la Enlightened Maniac), as opposed to being a nice tack-on bonus (see Gibbering Fiend).

This last point on ETB effects makes bounce spells on their creatures potentially a little worse, but bounce on your own creatures much better, and obviously blink and flicker effects quite a bit better. With the addition of EMN, the format comes up to 8.3 of these per draft from 7, an increase of 19%.


Mana Sinks
The way most werewolves transform is now a pretty simple mana activation. This has some things in common with Morph from KTK and especially, as several others have pointed out, Monstrosity from Theros block. There are more of these cards with low CMCs than there were with morph or especially monstrous, which is a bit different, but on the whole, I expect similar play patterns - they reward you and help you hold mana up at instant speed, as well as providing early plays which let you continue to use mana and have good plays later on in the game. Thraben Gargoyle is the one example of this kind of card in the last set - it was pretty good, and I expect basically all of these cards to be pretty good as well.

Beyond that, we also have Escalate, which is another mechanic that gives a lot of flexibility, and can also serve as a mana sink of sorts. These cards also seems to generally be good to me. And then we have just traditional mana sinks as well. When you combine all three of these effects, the number of mana sinks in the format jumps a blistering 125% (not to 25% more than it was, but 125% MORE, or 225% of the original SOI number). We do lose out on a lot of clues, which helped to be mana before, but even accounting for that, we remain at a 72% increase.

Because of all that, I expect EMN EMN SOI to be a format where you will usually be wanting to play with 18 land.
 
Flash
There are going to be about 3 more flash spells per draft now than there were before, a 55% increase over the previous format. This works well with the hold-mana-up-for-sinks plans, as well as other instants in general. So it makes a card like Silverstrike better, but on top of this, it's just something to be aware of in order for you to be able to play around it effectively.


Graveyards
I mentioned Mill before, but something important to add is that the number of cards with activated abilities in graveyards is sharply down, by about 53%. We're mostly left with a couple new zombies with similar return-to-play abilities as some we've seen before, plus all the old stuff.

 

Fixing

I mentioned I think it's going to largely be an 18 land format already, but it's worth noting that there's also very little fixing in this set. You have Terrarion, a green 2 mana 0/3 common that needs to die to Rampant Growth you, and a very strange 3 mana rock. Then there's the smattering of duals and fixing you had from last pack (Fork in the Road, duals, Wild-Field Scarecrow), but that is much diminished now. Even if you assume you can always kill Primal Druid to get the effect, fixing is down 35%, to less than 10 pieces opened per draft now. In fact, you're more likely than not to see more fixing in the last pack than in the first two combined. Worse still, a lot of that is tied up in uncommon duals from SOI, which will be very unreliable to be your colors. Almost all the rest is green. So 3 colors is a very strong no-go, and you really don't want to splash unless you have a massive incentive - I'm talking Tamiyo here.

As a side note, there are way fewer lands in this set as well, such that the number is down nearly 60%, and almost all of those are in pack 3. That does mean that you'll see more spells, which in turn means that you'll likely be taking from a slightly higher quality cut of cards, in terms of what you actually play - though this effect will be minor.

Removal

As a note here, I am not including combat tricks or bounce spells as removal; there are some other cards which I had to choose one way or the other, as they aren't hard removal per se, but but often incapacitate a creature; I tend to include these as removal, but it's a bit of a judgment call - certainly all the numbers here are within a margin that, depending on what's good or bad in the format, it could 'go either way'.

More about specific kinds of removal when I get to creature size in a moment. For now, I'm going to say that there's about 7% more removal overall now compared to before. At instant speed, though, it's about 6.7% less; when you look at interactive spells at instant speed (including bounce and flicker), we're about the same, and when you add in the flash creatures, the current format is again in that same 7% range lower than we were before.

Creature Size

Overall, creatures are slightly more expensive than they were in triple SOI - an increase of about 1 CMC, which is about 3.4%. However, this doesn't take into account things like Emerge, and in any case this is well within the margin of "but how good are the cards" changing the conclusions there.

The average toughness of a creature now is 2.70, compared to 2.74 previously, and the average power is down to 2.39 from 2.57. Again, there are playability issues here, but there is something significant in terms of the shift to a lower Power:Toughness ratio. That means the format will likely be a little slower, with more groundstalls. More groundstalls make evasion better, but the rate of flying is also down by about 13%, so those cards probably go up in value ever so slightly.

I would be remiss to not note that these figures don't take into account the 2/2 zombies and 1/1 flying spirits which still litter the plane, nor do they account for the now fairly common 3/2 Eldrazi Horrors.

When you look at actual distributions, 2 is the most common power for a creature, followed closely by 3, and a bit further behind by 1. Only 9 or so creatures per draft have power greater than 3, at least without looking at the back half of DFC. On toughness, 3 edges out 2, with 1 still being ahead of 4.

More concretely, when you're looking at creature combat, defensively, a 2/4 is where you start to get a very stable body. It stops the tokens, eats most of the 2s and 3s, and bounces off of most things until a few 4 drops and a decent number of 5s can rumble through. Moving up to 3/4 allows you to eat almost all 2s and 3s, and most of the 4s, and 4/4s are bigger than just about everything below 5 mana, and not smaller than much even then. The 5th point of toughness lets you live to block to the vast, vast majority of attackers.

Offensively, the 2nd point of power is as important as ever, to provide a threat and be at least able to trade with basically any playable creature. The 3rd point gets you to where you at least trade with cards up to 4 and 5 drops (and even with some of those). The 4th point of power means very little is going to straight-up eat your creature, and very little will bounce with it as well. There are a few X/5s in the format, but for the most part, 4 power will be able to attack more or less freely. The third toughness is important, as usual, to be able to get through 2/Xs, but the 4th is pretty important, here, too, with a healthy number of 3/2s, 3/3s, and even some 3/4s, plus all the Eldrazi Horror 3/2 tokens.

In short, the creature sizes vary pretty typically for a modern limited format. It's not the world were Bears rule the roost and Pikers are fine to hold off the bears, as Origins was, nor is it the one with lots of giant monsters all around, as BFZ was - though it's a lot closer to the latter than the former.




In terms of how the creature sizing interacts with toughness-based removal:
1 or less toughness = 19.5% of creatures
2 or less toughness = 48.6% of creatures
3 or less toughness = 79.6% of creatures
4 or less toughness = 92.7% of creatures
5 or less toughness = 97.6% of creatures
6 or less toughness = 99.0% of creatures
7 or less toughness = 99.96% of creatures
13 or less toughness = 100% of creatures (base stats)

Again, these numbers don't take into account tokens, which typically have 2 or sometimes 1 toughness.

EMN Spoiler Spotlight 1: Chaining Ancestrals

Welcome to the first installment of EMN Spoiler Spotlight here on the WanderingWinder games blog. My limited review will come later (need the full set to get the numbers right, also hopefully my own predictions are a little better than last time), but for now, we're doing some Constructed thoughts. These aren't meant to be comprehensive (there's too many cards) or very predictive of what you should play (too early to try to figure out the metagame).

Instead, I am going to point out some ideas to keep in mind which excite me - something powerful and at least situationally very good, something fun, something to keep your eye on. Like most ideas, I suspect most of these are not going to be good enough for serious competitive play, but some of them might, particularly under the right circumstances, and and hopefully some of the rest will be on the mythical level of "good enough to take to FNM", which I must admit I've never really understood. Or tl;dr My hope is these are fun and potentially powerful.


We start today with:

Influence of Emrakul
2GG
Enchantment
Whenever you cast an Eldrazi creature spell with Converted mana cost 7 or greater, draw 2 cards.

This card makes me think of that unplayable janky rare that can do wacky, potentially powerful things, but ultimately is unplayable in every format (except maybe EDH). Then I notice it's an uncommon... so maybe there's something in draft/sealed? I doubt it. But then there is this thought that built in my mind, and it's based around the first non'mrakul Eldrazi revealed in the set:

You'll notice that we have a CMC of 7, but that in practice, it costs less. This is something you're going to see on all of the Emerge cards (probably). Something I also expect to see on all the Emerge cards is a relevant cast trigger - in this case, the favorite words of most Magic players I read or listen to, Draw a Card.

With Influence of Emrakul in play, Wretched Gryff casting this guy draws you THREE cards. With a creature that has a CMC of at least 5 in play, you replace that creature with a 3/4 flier to draw 3 cards. Since the emerge creatures themselves all have CMCs that are very high (probably more than you are casting them for), you get to pay only the colored mana to do this kind of thing. So with one Wretched Gryff, you can cast a second for only U, you replace a creature with the same creature (ok, summoning sickness, but whatever), and draw three cards. You've just paid U to draw three cards. Ancestral Recall anyone? And then, if you have another one, you can do it again. "How likely am I to have another one?" Well, you've just drawn three cards, so ok still not too likely, but it helps a lot.


Obviously, Wretched Gryff is not enough, by itself, to make this engine run. Fortunately, we've already seen some other friends (wait, Eldrazi are our friends now?):

Okay, even having all three of these isn't enough. But I suspect that there are going to be at least some other creatures in the set that will fit the bill, and potentially you can even throw e.g. some World Breakers in. But assuming that we get some more reasonable cards in these colors, it could happen.


Other than Influence of Emrakul, and the Emerge creatures, what does this deck need? Well, it needs fodder to sacrifice to get your chain started, it needs to be able to survive, and it needs to be able to either find Influence of Emrakul and/or win without it.

As for the first couple of these, you probably want to have them work together. Matter Reshaper seems like the nutter butters. You also have lots of other creatures with ETB or dies abilities - Eyeless Watcher, Scion Summoner, Eldrazi Skyspawner, possibly Hangarback Walker, Youthful Scholar, Palace Familiar, Byway Courier, Elvish Visionary, Greenwarden of Murasa, Separatist Voidmage, Stitched Mangler, Tower Geist, Whirler Rogue, Pilgrim's Eye, Nissa, Vastwood Seer, Bounding Krasis... there are others, I am sure. I'm also sure that you're going to want to just play "Good cards" like Sylvan Advocate. I don't know if this is really going to be enough to survive against hard-core aggro decks, but building the right mix of cheap creatures to be able to survive, set up your sacrifices, and get the right bonuses, is going to be one of the big challenges of getting the deck to work.


The other problem seems bigger. There isn't really a great way of finding that enchantment right now. Worse, Dromoka's Command is everywhere to make you sacrifice it. This seems to be a pretty intractable problem right now, so I don't think this deck can possibly by viable, at least until rotation. Even then, I'm not sure whether you can spend so much time to play a 4 mana do-nothing enchantment. But at least part of me sure hopes you can.



A couple final notes: It's worth noting that there is also another sacrifice-based mechanic in Standard right now, and you might want to build a deck with some of those Exploit synergies together with your Emerge cards. Can I interest anyone in a Necromaster Dragon? And if you really want to throw playability out the window and live the dream, can I interest you in adding two superfluous colors (or getting very lucky off of Oath of Nissa) to play Sorin in your deck full of 7 and 8 drops?

2015 June 9th Magic: Origins Spoilers

Yesterday, a whole bunch of cards were spoiled on the MtG Mothership Monday. Let's see how the catch my fancy.

I'm taking the cards in the order they're listed here, but of course that page will change, so if you want the originals, they're from here and here.

Avaricious Dragon
It's a mythic, so we're mostly looking at it from a Constructed point of view. First though, we'll take a quick look at the limited implications.
The card looks bomby, and a 4/4 flier for 4 is, well, a Dragon, and quite good. The rider, though, makes things a bit tricky. The main thing is that you probably don't really want to curve into this (assuming there's any reasonable amount of removal in the format), because if they can kill it after you discard your hand, you just got X-for-1d, where X is your whole hand. It's an excellent top-deck of course, and when it is the last play in your hand, you also have the potential to reap some good Card Advantage out of this as well. I think the card has to be good, and probably pretty good, but it's probably not a total bomb.

Okay, constructed implications. My first thought was that this is a playable Dragon, so those archetypes could want this. After a little thought, though that doesn't seem very realistic - you really want this to be your last play, and all the other Dragons are more expensive than this. Maybe you can still pull something off with some of the 5 CMC ones, but it just seems pretty risky. The exception, of course, is Thunderbreak Regent, and these two could definitely be buddies. Ultimately, the biggest home I see for this guy is as a potential curve-topper in a slightly bigger Red Aggro deck. I think Raph Levy was playing something along those lines, and with the possible exception of Thunderbreak, this card just seems better than the alternatives which are available. I expect it to see some play, but I wouldn't be surprised if it only hangs around the fringes and doesn't catch on. It's just pretty bad against removal a la Master of the Feast.

Akroan Jailer
This, like basically all the rest of the spoilers, is pretty clearly a card purely for limited, and I will treat it as such. The card looks bad. Probably not quite totally unplayable, but three mana is just so much in order to do what it does, so you will be pretty unhappy if you ever have to run this.

Grasp of the Hieromancer
This card might be playable - a lot will depend on how good the removal in the set is. If you can get this creature to survive, then the ability is worth it if you are attacking, as you can get a good chunk of damage through. The problem is, you get blown out per normal if this is killed, and this is really not worth it when used defensively.

Valor in Akros
This is the one other card which has me thinking constructed applications. I am thinking of this in a tokens deck, either RW tokens or Jeskai Tokens, where you can be getting some serious buffs to your team. Of course, the problem is, you need tokens in play as well as tokens coming in. Between Rabblemaster, Monastery Mentor, Brimaz, Hordeling Outburst, Raise the Alarm, Dragon Fodder, and Secure the Wastes, there might be enough, but... it's just quite a bit worse than Jeskai Ascendancy. If this cost 3, we could talk. As it is, this is probably a bit too restrictive, needing lots of tokens and costing a bit too much to be worth it. In limited, too, I'm a bit skeptical. You need to play this, and then play a creature every turn for it to be a Glorious Anthem, and even then it only works when attacking. If you can get flicker effects or tokens it could be quite good, but I doubt those would be supported themes given that they were white's theme in M15 and the interaction with morph, respectively. I suppose flickering might be ok.

Heavy Infantry
Color me unimpressed. The going rate would be a 3/5 here, and I am not really excited by a Siege Mastodon (though, hey, they're fine of course). 3/4 seems a decent bit worse than that, and for it you get to tap a guy. The problem is, this body is not efficiently costed, and the ability is purely a way to get damage in right now, and that's just not a big enough impact for me.

Sentinel of The Eternal Watch
This card is a bomb. The ability is the bad half (or more accurately, the not-completely-broken-but-still-good half) of Citadel Siege, and basically that is a removal spell on their best combat creature. On top of this, you get a 4/6 Vigilance, which is respectable on a 6-drop anyway. Both on the same card seems quite nice, and I assume the body will be hard enough to kill that you usually get your effect. This is basically good in every situation, and it seems this will be an A unless somehow the format is very fast such that 6 mana isn't realistic even for a board-stabilizing card.

Veteran's Sidearm
Leonin Scimitar wasn't exciting, and this should be even less so. Probably fringe playable, but you won't want to play it.

Separatist Voidmage
The new and worse Man-o-War. The card will surely be playable, and as much as Marsh Hulk will love it, I am anticipating that it will 'only' be a solid inclusion, and not a high pick. If tempo is a huge deal, it could be quite good though.

Hydrolash
This card has me pretty excited. The last time we saw this effect was on Blinding Spray, which was not exciting but saw some play. This card only nerfs power half as much, but costing only 3 is a big game. Of course it can only be used defensively, which is a real drawback. I don't think huge blowouts on this card are going to happen very often, but getting a 2-for-1 seems doable, and worst case it cycles for 3, which isn't good, but isn't that bad. Card will be a lot better if there are other blue instants to hold up (particularly a draw spell of some sort).

Ringwarden Owl
Card looks solid, and probably one of the better blue commons, but not busted. 5 for a 3/3 flier is playable. 5 for a 4/4 flier is very good. And while I expect it will be closer to the former than the latter in practice, the threat is worth something too.

Malakir Cullblade
I don't expect this card to do a lot. If you can get into a grindy game where there are lots of trades happening, it can be good (but it only triggers off your opponent's critters, so it's no Scavenger Drake), but I imagine it will be a bit tough to make that happen. The big issue is, you need this down early, and then it's not impressive early. Later on you might bet it to be a 3/3 or a 4/4, but that's not so busted on later turns anyway. I suspect this will have its homes, but that those won't be every black deck.

Deadbridge Shaman
This card, on the other hand, seems quite good. A 3/1 for 3 is only slightly below rate, and such a way that you are probably getting a trade out of this body very often. That means you are going to get that discard trigger, which is a nice 2-for-1. I expect this to be one of the best black commons in the set.

Eyeblight Assassin
I'm not terribly impressed with this one. If there's lots of 1-toughness creatures floating around, it will obviously get a lot better. But if you have to try to use it to finish off a creature post-combat, what you've done is a lot of work to trade a slightly worse creature for a slightly better one, and gotten a sub-par creature out of it yourself. I am probably going to look to avoid playing this (again, unless 1-toughness creatures are common).

Rabid Bloodsucker
I guess this is playable? The drain is obviously only good in aggressive decks, which I guess is where you might play a 3/2 flier for 5 anyway, but that's just not very good stats baseline, in general.

Reave Soul
Defeat did not impress me much, but this card does. The jump from 2 to 3 power gets a LOT more creatures, and that means this should be a quite good removal spell - up there with Deadbridge Shaman in terms of good black commons.

Shambling Ghoul
The card is solid. Doubt I'm cutting often, but unless the format is particularly filled with Bears, probably not very excited about it either.

Infernal Scarring
Whether or not this card is good probably largely depends on the removal available. If it's Pacifism/Claustrophobia types, or if there's a lot of bounce, the card is likely pretty bad. But if it's more like Flesh to Dust and random-burn-spell, especially if that's sorcery speed, then this is probably... okay, not great, but fine. Overall probably mediocre.

Enthralling Victor
I have a feeling this card will be overrated. It's a 4 mana 3/2, which is decidedly below-curve. And the rider... well, if they held one guy back you might get several damage in, which is pretty nice, but being so restrictive is a knock, and if this isn't particularly well-timed (say, you're on a board stall), it's more or less doing 2 to their face - which isn't horrible, but not good enough to make this a good card. Still should be fine, but probably not a high pick.

Seismic Elemental
This card, on the other hand, looks quite good. Falter on a near-curve body is something I will definitely take. Great to end the game when the board is stalled out, or to push the last points of damage through, and the downside of Falter when you're behind is way mitigated by the 4/4 for 5. Just a very nice card.

Volcanic Rambler
The body is sized well enough that you can play this without being embarrassed, but you're going to prefer not to. You want your 6-drops to do more. The activated ability is nice in board stalls, but not great.

Subterranean Scout
This wants to be paired with Scroll Thief, or a Prowess guy (see below), but in general it looks pretty comparable to Goblin Shortcutter (probably this is a little worse), and that is a serviceable dude.

Hitchclaw Recluse
Filler. Horned-Turtle with upside hasn't been exciting for a while, so unless X/1 fliers are everywhere, I would expect this to be a 25th card that you may board in a good bit.

Conclave Naturalists
The body isn't good enough unless the ability is going to be one a fair bit. It's not completely terrible though, so you can probably run this with a reasonable amount of targets in the format. And when it does hit, the upside is very good.

Mantle of Webs
The problem with this card is that if you're buffing a guy defensively, things are probably still not looking good for you - and it gives them time to 2-for-1 you. Obviously the offensive applications of +1/+3 and reach are mediocre at best.

Joraga Invocation
Um, sticking Lure on an Overrun probably doesn't help it much over not having that clause? Still, Overrun effects can be powerful. Pretty hard for me to evaluate this at the moment, honestly.

Boggart Brute
Menace is interesting. In general, it's got to be worse than standard evasion like flying. But there are scenarios where it's better - can't be brickwalled by one thing, and possibly better in multiples, as you can swarm. Definitely wants to be in an aggressive deck. And this card seems quite good. 3/2 for 3 is just fine as is, and adding in the evasion seems really goood actually. They have to hold two things back, and even if one is big enough to eat this, you can still trade with the other. I expect this to be a high pick.

Jhessian Thief
Scroll Thief with Prowess? Sign me up. Scroll Thief was already a fine card. You probably really need both abilities to make this good though - Jeskai Student was pretty much filler, and Scroll Thief had its ups and downs but was rarely great. This card will be a lot better if you can make it evasive, but the Prowess helps it out a lot. The threat of activation is a big deal - probably they really need to block with a 2/2 on a bluff attack, but given that that is true, you should be able to 2-for-1 them with instants a lot of times. Still, it's a 1/3, so it's not going to be amazing (unless you can give it evasion).

Lightning Javelin
4 Mana for 3 damage at sorcery speed is pretty yawn. You will play it, but it's not exciting. The scry doesn't do much to change that.