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Gladiator Big Talk: Pioneer Masters, Multicolored

So on the gladiator discord, (Gladiator is a competitive singleton format using the Timeless card pool on arena and you should check us out, it's great) I do a series of long, hastily written thoughts on every single new-to-arena card and call them Big Talks, and now they live here! Some notes:

This is comprehensively talking about every single new-to-arena card in Pioneer Masters. If I don't bring up a card, it's probably because it's already in the format.

I'm sorting this by collector number, which, for this set is baffling, so Ctrl+F is your friend if you want to find a specific thought.

Each card is also a link to it on scryfall, so you can follow along without having the full set open.

Without further ado, let's start off with Anax and Cymede:

Anax and Cymede: I’m pretty confident that the RW blitz deck is going to be real, and this couple is both a decent body on their own, but also has the benefit of making pumps on them give power and trample to your whole team, which makes this have significant reason to be slotted in and played. If the RW blitz deck is played in the next year, this card should be in it.

Ashen Rider: Say hello to one of your best persist targets, that gets you significant value even when killed, and is good on a regular board and scary when you’re already ahead and can afford to hit a land.

Assemble the Legion: I think this card just takes a bit too long to really get going, even if, once it does, it just takes over the game. You need your cards to have some decent amount of immediate impact, and that’s the primary and singular true flaw of this card. If it triggered on entry and upkeep, I think it’d stand a chance in today’s economy, but that’s a different card, and this card is almost certainly not playable.

Azorius Charm: This card is one of the best charms we have, because it does 2 modes at a decent rate and it has 2 modes that you’d actually like to cast. Those modes don’t fully overlap, but the removal mode hits a sweet spot of being good and cheap, and the other two are legitimately good fallbacks for if you either need to gain more life than removing an attacker does or if you don’t have pressure on you and just want to cycle it.

Blood Baron of Vizkopa: Protection from white and from black with 4 toughness is largely hexproof against all but a small collection of removal spells, but being a 5 mana 4/4 is a bit awkward while it doesn’t have any other evasion. Against Jeskai decks where it’s going to be hard to muster 4 power of nonwhite creatures against it, it could be decent, but it’s hard to justify if decks are going deeper into red than just bonecrusher, a few great removal spells, and fury.

Boros Reckoner: For the holidays this year, we get another stuffy doll, and one that’s not embarrassing otherwise! I think it’s still not enough to find a home outside of the stuffy doll deck, but it’s totally defensible in a few decks and obviously great in a niche meme deck.

Bring to Light: I don’t think the 5color pile is going to be that great, but I do think it will be able to often hold its own, especially now that Bring to Light can act as a lot of a silver bullet, able to easily be a second copy of your wraths, single-target removal, and haymakers at the same time. Plus, it works scarily well with cards like snapcaster mage, so a deck not too dissimilar from Pioneer’s Niv to Light deck seems definitely doable for us, especially with really good 2c haymakers and enablers.

Cartel Aristocrat: This card’s very good for the crats deck, though its one weakness is sweepers as opposed to yahenni’s vulnerability to a lot more Single Target Removal. It’s just a really good card to consistently get in, block about as perfectly as you want, or just be a sac outlet that is very hard to kill.

Catacomb Sifter: This card is scarily good at smoothing out your draws as the entire purpose of its being–it generates a mana to ensure you get to 4 mana or above 4 and that also triggers itself, but it also just causes jund or abzan crats decks to keep checking what they’ll draw until they find something good enough, which can be an achilles’ heel of the deck occasionally.

Chromanticore: I was feeling pretty good about this card, but the more I think about it the worse it looks, getting to the point where it kind of just looks like a harder to cast Lyra, and I’m just not excited about that anymore in the current or next year.

Counterflux: Wowie Invert Polarity did a goddamn NUMBER on this card oofa doofa

Destructive Revelry: I think naturalizes have a pretty high bar at this point, and Revelry does a lot to help clear that bar, but I think I’d still rather have broader removal or removal that does more in its slot, like Cindervines or First Pig

Dragonlord Atarka: I can see this as a good sneak target or one of your highest end in a Big Gruul deck, where it acts as a second copy of fury that deals a bit more damage in both respects, which, for a sneak attack deck, gets a lot of mileage.

Dragonlord Dromoka: I was pretty decently high on this card, but now I’m coming to terms with the fact that it just is an idiot without a real way to protect itself until it becomes relevant.

Dragonlord Kolaghan: This dragon just being a big hasty idiot that gives haste to your other idiots is largely enough to get some people on board, but for Ellesandra specifically it’s a way to make a spell and dragonstorm into a win without more mana or board presence, and that might be enough for me to get excited for the deck.

Dragonlord Ojutai: I think Ojutai has ultimately become outclassed by Dream Trawler, but it’s still not a laughable card, especially because you get to go a turn before it can be targeted, at which point you can be holding up your mana drain or the like again.

Dragonlord Silumgar: Silumgar’s steal being contingent on him sticking around just makes him all around awkward, and it means you have to put a lot of work into keeping him around just in order to have a steal effect.

Dreadbore: You’re totally at liberty to play this, and it’s fine, but we have so many options for removal these days that dreadbore just gets a little less interesting and appealing each time.

Dreg Mangler: YOOOOO IT’S THE JUICE BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE yeah, hell yeah, fuck yeah play this card, it’s the fucking juice, baybee, play this card, hell yeah

Epic Experiment: I’m gonna be real I stopped reading this card halfway through back in 2014 I’m sure as hell not reading it now.

Fleecemane Lion: This is, in fact, a watchwolf with upside, but that upside is pretty meek these days. That said, if you can make it work, it goes hard, and an unkillable threat is a pretty neat thing.

Garruk, Apex Predator: I love Garruk so much, and this is one of my favorite planeswalkers around, but it is definitely 7 mana and doesn’t put in a ton of effort to live up to that mana cost. Making deathtouch creatures on a plus is nice, outright destroying Teferis and Vronos is cute and all, but it’s just so much mana in a format where 7 mana can say “singlehandedly turn the game around” and it’s still dubious if we’ll play it.

Ghor-Clan Rampager: This card’s awfully close to playable, but really only if you consider it to be a pump spell and not a 4/4 trampler for 4. However, our room for pump spells is super low, so you have to be getting your mileage out of both sides, and more than another pump spell or protection spell would give you.

Kiora’s Follower: This is a super versatile mana dork, and I could see it popping up in UG ramp shells as a mana dork that has added utility as a way to muck Wandering Emperors (and, in some part, Wandering Rescuers) without significantly sacrificing on its ramp potential, and it works really well with the myriad ways we have to get more mana from our lands. Oh yeah, and this singlehandedly gives me the joy needed to maybe try building paradorks again now that we have a small pile of new ways to combo off or increase our reach.

Lotleth Troll: This guy’s kind of like psychic frog, except much, much worse. Psychic Frog is one of the strongest creatures in our format, so much, much worse than that is probably still playable or at least close to it.

Loxodon Smiter: I’m dubious of how good this card is, but if BR midrange ever gets to the dominance that jeskai is enjoying right now, it’s pretty safe for a GW deck to sleeve up the now 3 ways to cheat out big idiots by opponents playing kroxa and Lili’s

Lyev Skynight: I might play this card in skies, but it’s a 3 drop that is only pretty good in a format where the bar is often higher than that.

Martial Glory: I like this card; I even think that it is playable in a RW blitz deck, but I can’t bring myself to believe that a 2 mana giant growth has the juice to make it in this format, so even if I try out RW blitz, I doubt I’ll be sleeving up this card in it until convinced otherwise.

Medomai the Ageless: This card’s goofy as hell, and there’s a few ways we have of turning him into infinite turns, but also. This card SUCKS.

Nivix Cyclops: Yeah someone is going to kill me with this card in an izzet blitz deck and I’m going to say “yeah, someone was going to kill me with this card in an izzet blitz list eventually.”

Possessed Skaab: Card’s cool and all, but it is the combination of the worst gravediggers we’ve ever seen and the worst archeomancers we’ve seen, and that’s not a combination that turns into a playable card.

Progenitor Mimic: This card is very sweet, and has a lot of goofy applications, but it also is a 6 mana clone, so it really can only be awful in our format, and that’s coming from someone who tried to make Canlander clones into a deck that won a match and failed.

Ruric Thar, the Unbowed: The good news is that I do consider Ruric Thar to, by and large, have Ward - Pay 6 life, and he is a funny card to have that text. The bad news is that I also think he’s still not worthwhile, even in a ramp shell that can get him out on turn 4ish.

Selesnya Charm: Unlike Azorius Charm, this charm suffers from “no on-rate mode syndrome,” a condition where the card is too hard to cast to be a worthwhile 2/2 for 2 with flash (compared to Virtue of Loyalty), super restrictive for removal, and quite inefficient for a pump spell. That said, I could still see it being played, I just think it needs to be for the versatility in specific, and if your deck too often picks the same mode, it might be an option to switch to a better card for that mode.

Sin Collector: The fact that this doesn’t temporarily exile the card is quite nice, and essentially the only fact keeping it off an easy dismissal. That said, it’s still not that good, just not an inherently bad choice.

Sire of Insanity: This card is actually a pretty good litmus card, which is to say, a card that tells you if you’re winning or not. If your opponent doesn’t answer the card before it triggers, you’re winning, and if they answer it, you’re losing, probably because they removed your 6 drop for either 1 or 2 mana. A mark of a good magic player is being able to tell that they’re losing or winning without playing a really bad 6 drop.

Skyrider Elf: This is, ironically, a creature that gets worse the more mana you put into it on a per mana basis. For example, a 2 mana 2/2 flier is pretty good, and the stats are reasonable. A 3 mana 3/3 flier is also pretty good, but, with no text, it’s a bit less exciting. At 4 mana, a 4/4 flier needs some pretty decent text to become worthwhile, and at 5 mana, a 5/5 flier is actually quite a mediocre to even bad statline, especially when you consider that its real casting cost at that point is WUBRG.

Steam Augury: There is, in fact, a reason that the phrase is EoTFoFYL and not EoTSAYL, and it’s further than just FoF getting printed first. Giving your opponent agency over which exact card you get is pretty awkward, and for steam augury’s particular case, it makes the prospect of this 4 mana probably-draw-two-or-draw-a-less-powerful-three a bit unexciting.

Stormchaser Mage: I mean, you’ll play this card in Izzet Blitz, but I’m doubtful it’ll make the grade elsewhere, and even in blitz it’s really just a swiftspear sidegrade at best.

Swift Warkite: This card is bad but it looks interesting sometimes. If we get a legitimate archaeomancer at 3, this card becomes a lot more interesting, but as is, getting a couple etbs off a 3 drop isn’t quite enough for me to be on board.

Thunderclap Wyvern: This whole set has been pinging my 2014-2017 nostalgia alarms, but this one hits especially hard. It’s also not good, arguably even in skies.

Urban Evolution: This card is just deeply unexciting for our format imo. It sorta gets the job done in the right deck, but even then, we just have treasure cruise and dig for the time being, y’know?

Zendikar Incarnate: Wow, this card’s bad. 4 toughness on a 4 drop who’s only saving grace is that it can have a huge front end is really awkward, especially when like… they totally could’ve just made this an X/X and not an X/4.

Athreos, God of Passage: Athreos might be the best of the Theros 15 (I actually think they’re third, but go off king) sheerly due to their ability to strongarm the opponent so easily. With a sac outlet, all removal on your creatures become either bounce effects or are lava spikes while they’re at it, and either way, you’re feeling happy. 3 mana for 3 blood artists is a great rate, and that’s the baseline for Athreos, because the alternative is just that you get an immense lever of control to get back your doomed travelers, sac outlets, high impact enters effects, and more with pretty minimal effort. Plus it can sometimes be a 5/4 with indestructible, but you frankly couldn’t care much less about that part.

Bounding Krasis: Before THB this had value in pod lines, but now it’s redundancy for them which is ok i guess, but it’s a tutor line, you don’t need redundancy (a little redundancy is a little appreciated though).

Ephara, God of the Polis: Ooooooh fun a way to draw a card a turn or with a good chunk of work checks notes two cards a turn I’m so enthuuuuused.

Frostburn Weird: Why the hell did I agree to making these comprehensive, I want a nap.

Gift of Orzhova: This card’s pretty interesting for the GW auras or bogles decks that I’m expecting to start making their way into the gladiator ecosystem–flying is the cream of the crop, but lifelink gives you pretty insane amounts of time to enact your gameplan before you have to start worrying about pressure, or lets you trivialize the race with their preexisting board, which is a great thing for the bogles decks to do.

Growing Ranks: I think this has to give you a 3/3 ever turn for you to actually be satisfied with it, but that’s not the hardest ask. The issue is really that it makes the token on your upkeep, meaning you have to keep your board up longer before any payoff and your opponent always has the ability to react to the board state you have in order to minimize your gameplan. It’s a bit of a red flag when your opponent playing the game is counter to a card’s performance.

Iroas, God of Victory: I’m pretty confident that this is the best of the OG Theros 15, even though I don’t think it’s the most likely to have a home in gladiator (Godpilled Xenagos already has a home and a very comfortable seat in that home). However, if you’re a RW aggro deck and playing 4 drops, this one is hard to remove and makes it so your creatures just always win combat, between making blocks twice as difficult for opponents and making sure they just don’t die in combat. On top of that, when it’s a creature it effects itself, so it has 7 power, can’t take damage on attacks, and has menace. I’m testing this one in naya bard class, and I’d make a good recommendation that RW decks that focus on turning things sideways start sleeving up this card too.

Karametra, God of Harvests: You don’t need lands after you hit 5 mana, you already (should) have enough to cast all your spells, or maybe all but one of your spells. There is I’m pretty sure no amount of lands you could tutor with this to make me say that it feels worthwhile in any deck in the format.

Keranos, God of Storms: God, I hate that this card was legitimately quite good generically at one point, but we have well outgrown this guy’s mana cost, enough that we can replicate a lot of his function for less or fewer hoops. That said, he's really not embarrassing to play in shells that can consistently draw some extra cards.

Kruphix, God of Horizons: It is legitimately pretty funny that all of the lines on this card are just the most unnecessary words you could imagine. 5 mana for no hand size (something I doubt we would pay 0 mana for) and Horizon Stone (a card you also shouldn’t play, even if you could) is just pretty laughable. Even in a ramp shell where you might store and use excess mana, it’s really hard to imagine that it would be worth a card to make that possible.

Mogis, God of Slaughter: 2 damage is so little these days, especially for it being the only thing that Mogis does. These days, we can do more damage by sneezing and playing like a 2 drop, we don’t need a 4 whose only job is sometimes dealing 2 damage unless it’s more convenient for them to sac a creature they don’t care about.

Nightveil Specter: We’ve come a long way in the decade since this got printed, and now I think if you wanted this card you got your answer 6 months ago with Thieving Aven, or even 5 years ago with Thief of sanity. That said, this card’s very iconic, and isn’t embarrassing to play, even still.

Pharika, God of Affliction: god, this god’s sad. Making a supply of deathtouchy snakes is neat, but being unable to hit your opponent’s yard without giving them the snake is wack, especially when you consider that Deathrite Shaman and Scavenging Ooze both give you the same effect regardless of if you’re using your graveyard or eating your opponent’s.

Phenax, God of Deception: Mill isn’t viable in gladiator unless it’s going infinite, and even then this card is 5 mana to start enabling mill, which is frankly highway robbery in any format but limited.

Rubblebelt Raiders: This era of magic design had a strange love for vanilla or french vanilla creature designs, and this isn’t any exception, and to be clear, I don’t mind that, it just means that a bunch of creatures just read to have keywords beeeg, and that doesn’t quite cut it alone, because you also need the secret keywords kinda-cheap and quickly-kills-your-opponent. These raiders don’t quite have that.

Ajani, Mentor of Heroes: Ajani is kind of underwhelming for being a 5 drop, but he does a lot of things I like in planeswalker design, which are 1) kills your opponent while upticking, 2) giving you card advantage while upticking, and 3) giving you consistent versatility in what you want to do regardless of roughly where his loyalty’s at. All that in mind, Ajani is a great card to distract the opponent while you keep attacking with the enormous creatures you have drawn and pumped up thanks to him, acting as both the source of your opponent’s problems and also a red herring with the actual problem being that you have creatures in your hand, deck, and battlefield. That said, Ajani really needs a preexisting board or a notable lack of pressure, and that with a 5 mana payment is a tough sell.

Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver: Ashiok fails some of those tests that Ajani succeeds at, but they are cheap and scary quickly, with their +2 buying a lot of time on a cheap planeswalker while also demanding the opponent keep their loyalty low so you can’t get all the fun things you stole. I don’t love how low-impact ashiok is for the first few turns of existence, though, so I’m not exactly the most excited to be sleeving this card up.

Domri Rade: Domri is a weird card, in the sense that he kind of just runs away with the game when played on turn 2, and gets worse and worse as the game goes on. I’m very hesitant that I’ll play him in decks like Bard class, but in a more traditional stompy gameplan I think he works quite well.

Kiora, the Crashing Wave: Kiora is a Kraken machine, but it runs into the problem where she takes a lot of work to make that happen, and otherwise, she’s arguably just an explore that leaves behind a small speed bump. It could be that I’m looking at her with too much of an aggro-slanted midrange lens, but her +1 is pretty middling to just be paying off with more explores.

Narset Transcendent: Narset doesn’t fit the mold exactly of the era’s planeswalker design, but she makes up for it with the fact that both her first abilities are pretty close to reading draw a card, and that she comes in with SIX FUCKIGN LOYALTY. So, she’s pretty low impact, and she doesn’t do anything herself to really protect herself, but she also has enough loyalty that your opponent has to commit a lot to killing her.

Sarkhan Unbroken: This is one of the better planeswalker designs to see, and enables you to have a lot of versatility both the turn you use him and thereafter. The + is simple and doesn’t leave room for feelbads, like a lot of the others in this set, and also does a good impression of 5feri. Similarly, making a giant dragon on the - is something I’m very much here for, allowing you to help close out a game or gain a blocker that doesn’t get bolted. Oh, and also, that ultimate just says “win the game” if you include Dragonlord Kolaghan and Terror of Mount Velus in your deck.

Xenagos, the Reveler: This is a card that reads a lot like Burning tree Emissary on a 4 mana planeswalker, where it either reduces its cost by refunding some mana, or starts contributing to the board without downticking. I’m probably going to try this out in Sneak Attack decks, but might also include it in bard class lists for a little bit, as playing this when it upticks for 3+ mana feels really free.

Alive // Well: Neither side of this card is something you want to cast.

Armed // Dangerous: I really wish this were an instant, but there are plenty of threats in blitz decks where Armed is totally acceptable as a sorcery as well.

Aurelia’s Fury: I’m not impressed by the idea of casting this card, but I would love to be proven wrong, especially where this has the versatility between being removal, silence, and/or clearing the way for an alpha strike. I’m just really put off by the fact that RW in addition to the X does a lot to limit what it can remove, who it can tap, and if you have an extra point of damage to throw at the opponent to stop them from casting spells.

Down // Dirty: Neither side of this card is really something you want to cast, though I could reluctantly be convinced of Dirty’s viability (it is, however, worse than your top 3 regrowths, and thus hard to justify).

Far // Away: Both sides of this card are 1 mana more than you’re really willing to spend on them.

Give // Take: Give is unexciting, but on rate. Take is wacky, and I’ll even dare to say, bad.

Jarad’s Orders: Is entomb plus Eldamri’s Call worth a 4 mana sorcery? I don’t think so, in part due to the fact that true costs rise exponentially with mana costs: I’d pay 2 mana for either part of this, but 4 mana is more than double 2 mana, and so what I expect out of my 4 drop is more than just Entomb + Eldamri’s call, and this card is even worse than both of those combined.

Profit // Loss: Both of these cards are within a half mana of being on rate (well, Profit is close), but I don’t think I’m interested in either part of it as a magic card, and the awkward part of fuse, despite it really all being upside, is that the fused card is ultimately just a bit worse than the sum of its parts, and its parts are all individually uninspiring.

Protect // Serve: Neither of these effects are actually interesting to me, especially at their costs. Once again, I think both halves are 1 mana more than they should be, and the fused spell is a bit worse than the sum of both halves.

Rakdos’s Return: Mind Twist gets a lot worse when it isn’t random and scales 1 mana worse. That said, it also punches your opponent in the face, so it gets a solid mark up in my books. Its colors are not the best for an X spell that you want big early, but it can do a lot of harm if your opponent isn’t emptying out their hand by turn 5.

Render Silent: I really don’t think that added silence is enough to add to your cancel to play it over, say, Saruman’s Trickery, and I don’t think our combo players are here to play cancel in the current year.

Toil // Trouble: This is another one that I really wish was an instant (though it would be very cracked at instant speed). As is, neither side is super enticing to me, but I would be lying if I said that hitting an opponent for 4 + their hand size didn’t make my eyebrow raise a hair or two.

Turn // Burn: Even if you’re just consistently playing one side at a time, this card’s surprisingly effective, and this is one of the few cards that actually plays particularly well with the design space of Fuse–it allows UR to have a card it normally wouldn’t see on its own at the cost of a bit less efficiency on the individual components. In this case it’s murder, but also it’s not a huge drop of efficiency, when turn is a spell that you wouldn’t sleeve up, but are happy to cast when it lets you win combat or stop a combo turn, and Burn is a card we are willing to play when it’s connected to other cards as well.

Unexpected Results: Holy shit this card is so bad, I cannot stress this enough, this card sucks ASS. Don’t play it, and then don’t play it 3 more times that you would’ve hit land off it before casting your 3 drop.

Wear // Tear: This card is a Pioneer and Modern staple and it’s not super hard to see why, where the versatility between hitting 2 things or 1 on either side is really tantalizing, and, unlike other cards in this cycle, the combined spell is actually a little bit above the rate you would typically get for destroying 2 noncreature permanents.

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