Sunday, May 3, 2009

Back drafting - a shards of alara card


Viashino is one of the best cards I have seen for back draft.

That is because: as you might reckon, Viashino skeleton is a card that will mostly never see play, outside of limited. Or not even in limited, really. And back drafting is simply drafting the worst cards for your opponent to make a deck out of.

See, how did they come to this costing? I know that red creatures never are costed 2/2 for 1R, unlike green Grizzly Elves, but they might be 2/1, like Viashino, preferably with a drawback. In addition, Viashino has this regenerate ability, that is usually seen as a positive thing, making the cost 2R or more like 1RR. But with an activation cost that requires you to discard a card, in addition to the mana, it ends up with a CMC of four?
Yes, it is a discard outlet for unearth/flashback creatures in alara-block, but at 4cmc this was intended to be a bad card. In fact, I think the guys at Wizards made this as a joke - its card types is the same as its name!

Even the flavor text backs this up - "creatures long extinct" - the Viashino Skeleton has the power level akin to really old creature cards from way back.

No comments:

Post a Comment