gamergirl

I’ve been very pleased with Magic: the Gathering’s new set, Shards of Alara. The past few sets have seemed to make a choice between having strong flavor and allowing the player a lot of options for creative deck construction, and I think the case could be made that Shards of Alara succeeds in having strong set and shard identity while not locking you in to making specific decks.

What I mean by that is that if you think back to Ravnica, you made a “Boros Deck” or an “Izzet Deck” and while your deck might be a few cards different from someone else’s Boros or Izzet deck, your overall direction was going to vary between one or two related choices and the deck you built would likely be very predictable. The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor Blocks had similar issues. The decks you made would be Tribal. You had one or two choices for how to build a deck for a specific tribe. And that was that. (Yes, I’m leaving Time Spiral out of it… that set allowed more freedom, but it also rubbed a lot of players the wrong way by having the cohesive theme of “incohesion.”)

Shards of Alara, on the other hand, has struck me as very interesting so far. There are five distinctly flavored shards, but a lot of ally shards arguably work very well together, and few cards are shard-limited. Yes, there are several tri-color cards per shard, but there are also a multitude of cards like Branching Bolt which is equally good in two different shards, or Thunder-Thrash Elder which seems built to fit well into three different shard’s strengths. He’s a Jund card, with the Jund devour mechanic, and a lot of Jund critters will grow slightly bigger as the Elder eats their buddies, but he’s not ONLY a Jund Card. For example, you can make him big enough to trigger Jaya’s “If you have a creature with 5 or greater” abilities. And, his cost is arguably lower in a Grixis deck, where you can Unearth the creatures you fed him, or Unearth creatures in order TO feed him. You could make a very fun deck by mixing him with Sedris, the Traitor King and some creatures with fun comes-into-play abilities like Blister Beetle.

That’s just one example, but it seems to me that many, if not most, of the cards in the set are not locked down to one specific kind of deck. I’m very pleased, and I hope they can keep it up when Conflux (the next set) comes out.

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