The wrong font, theme and size frames...
Spoiler season for Amonkhet has officially started, which probably brings the speculators, fan-fiction writers and that rookie player who goes to the store every Friday something to look forward to. Spoiler seasons is normally a very busy time for different groups of people, some would pay more particular attention to the spoilers with a varying levels of hype, while others like me are more laidback-not too interested in Standard and slowly sifting through MagicSpoiler.com/MythicSpoiler.com for potential EDH cards.
For today’s article of Amonkhet however, with the whole set not fully spoiled, I’ll like to talk about Amonkhet’s Expeditions..I mean Inventions...no wait...ahh..they’re called Invocations!
In case you haven’t been catching up with the spoilers, these are the “Masterpiece” series of Amonkhet, otherwise known as Invocations!
Now the first thing that might come to mind after seeing these would be:
Or....
Now before the masses mention how bad they look, the horrible font or the fact that the Masterpieces look like Yugioh trading cards. But aside from the visual aesthetics of the cards, these are still Masterpieces of the set. However, they look bad. Art-wise, 10/10, design-wise? Probably a 2.
Straight off the bat, you might’ve thought that today’s article is about flaming Wizards for their poor choice of design in terms of the visual/readability aspect of Invocations. However, I’ll like to highlight another issue I feel needs to be addressed, and that is the choices of cards being placed as an Invocation
Right now, here is the color pie for all Invocations excluding the 5 new Gods:
In this very simple color pie I’ve made up, there already is an obvious problem..
If your answer was “No Green?”. 10 points to a fellow reader like you! I don’t think that either Expeditions nor Inventions had a biased spread of reprinted cards like these, the only actual Invocation with a green symbol on it is Maelstrom Pulse. Aside from having no Green cards as Invocations, I’ll like to highlight almost half of the cards from this collection is Blue, seriously?
I can see why some people are not happy with the Invocations, it lacks diversity, and most of the chase cards are in Blue. Featuring 2 of the best Counterspells ever made as well as a host of other hard to find/staples in various formats.
Invocations grouped by usability of each format:
Modern Staples: 7
Legacy Staples: 9
EDH Staples: 8
To make things fair, some cards do see popular play in more than 1 format, thus I have added them to 2 formats for same cases.
As you can see, most of the Invocations are slightly leaning towards Legacy, a good attempt by Wizards to attract die-hard collectors to pimp their decks. But when you take a closer look at the “chase” Invocations...
The top 5 most expensive Invocations at the time of this writing
To start off, I might be a big fan of Blue, but what the actual hell. Firstly, more blue cards were printed, to the point where there were no remaining slots for Green. Secondly, again, these blue cards, including those not shown(Counterbalance, Divert, Stifle, Consecrated Sphinx). If you compare to the other colors, it seems Invocations were a straight up Pimp-Reprint for Magic’s best counterspells.
It’s rather bittersweet for me, seeing that a lot of strong reprints are in Blue, but much of the value has been diluted. I believe this would make belief that most players would want to open a Blue Invocation, meaning a higher chance to open something more valuable when compared to an Invocation of any other color. Of course, I feel this is a design error by Wizards, they could’ve removed 2 Blue cards which I deem unnecessary and probably place 2 Green cards in their place.
Conclusion
I think the Invocations as a small collection deemed premium to players, has received the proper praise/credit it deserves, aside from the argument where the visual aspects were poor and that Wizards were very biased, causing aggressive reprints in Blue. Overall, I do hope Wizards would give the other colors a chance in Hour of Devastation’s Invocations. Until next time, good luck and enjoy your Amonkhet Spoiler Season!
