Top8Magic Fans,

BDM just got back from a week at Wizards and the Columbus Pre-Release and I will be interviewing him on Tuesday afternoon EST. We would love to get some fan questions in there for the podcast. Here are some ground rules:

1) Identifying Yourself - Please give us a name and location to mention on the podcast.

2) Confidentiality - We will try our best to answer your questions to the best of our ability, but some information will be confidential.

Now post your questions!

Best,

Matt

When Mike and sat down to podcast about spoiled Zendikar cards the other night we spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about Lotus Cobra — a card that we both felt is sure to be one of the most coveted rares in the set — which would not get revealed until midnight the next day in Mike’s column. While we recorded our Zendikasts, which would go up shortly after Mike’s preview on the mothership, we teased the card on Twitter and Facebook where I said that the card was the first card to leap this far off of a spoiler list at me since I got an advance peek at Mind’s Desire.

There has been some backlash to the level of hyperbole around the card but everyone seems to agree that the card itself is awesome. Not everyone agrees with Mike’s position that Lotus Cobra is not only comparable to but exceeds other all-star 2-drops such as Meddling Mage or Dark Confidant. Understandable. At this point and time we have no frame of reference for how good this card could be when it has as many miles on it as those previously mentioned all-stars. Having done a small amount of testing with the card in the past few days I can confidently say that playing with this card feels unlike any other card I have played with before. Yes it dies to Doom Blade… and Lightning Bolt…and Path to Exile…and Volcanic Fallout but what happens if it lives.

Here is the updated version of Ob Obv — a deck that attempts to win with Ob Nixilis, the Fallen and Warp World — that I have been playing with that includes Lotus Cobra.

Ob Obv.2
4 Lotus Cobra
4 Rampaging Baloth
4 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Khalni Heart Expedition
3 Oracle of Mul Daya
4 Trace of Abundance
4 Warp World
4  Green-Black fetch land
4  Scalding Tarn
2  Misty Rainforest
7  Forest
7  Mountain
1  Swamp

The deck remains quite raw but is still capable of powering out Warp Worlds with the number of permanents approaching the mid-teens. The combination of ob Nixilis and Warp World is definitely powerful and with Lotus Cobra you just get there that much faster. Whenever you play a fetch land you end up with three mana in your pool — basically a free Dark Ritual for up to three colors of your choice. When you fetch a Trace of Abundance is essentially a free permanent that enchants the land you search up. Even lands that come into play tapped like the ones that you search up with the Heart Expedition are productive members of your mana pool when the Lotus Cobra is hanging around.

Mike and I were talking about the card again today and I posited a scenario where you are playing green black and lead off with a Duress for that pesky Lightning Bolt and, with the coast clear, follow up with Lotus Cobra. Your opponent fails to top deck a removal spell — or, you know, isn’t playing a deck with a lot of spot removal and is planning on Day of Judgement — and you untap to play a fetch land, fetch, Harrow that land away and tap six mana for Mind Shatter for 4. Seems good, right?

“I am not impressed with that,” said Mike, who has been talking about third turn Violent Ultimatums. “Isn’t Identity Crisis still in Standard for another year? That would be impressive.”

Third. Turn. Identity. Crisis.

That doesn’t even seem that far fetched to me. Then again the third turn Ultimatum did not seem that far fetched in the first place. I know I am regularly making Siege-Gang Commanders on turn three with little more than a Lotus Cobra and a fetch land to power it out. By the time Cobra rotates out of Standard I don’t know where it will rank among 2-drops all time but I am pretty confident it is a card that will have had an impact on the format even if that just means everyone plays 4 Lightning Bolt and 4 Doom Blade for the next 2 years.

Forget the buzz around Lotus Cobra and the rest of the Zendikar previews for a moment and read this fact sheet about how the SIXTEEN (!!!!!) Magic Online PTQs for Pro Tour San Diego are going to work. My The Week That Was column this week will include an interview with Digital Games Program Manager Michael Gills and MTGO superstar Brad FFfreaK Nelson. In the meanwhile you can check out all the details here.

After a long layoff Mike @fivewithflores Flores and Brian @top8games David-Marshall talk about all the Zendikar cards that have been spoiled on the mothership. There have been a lot of cards spoiled and a long time between podcasts. Mike and I go on for some time about the new cards. It is something well over 2 hours of ranting and raving about the new cards with very little in the way of comics, basketball, or other distractions.

Zendikast Part 5

After a long layoff Mike @fivewithflores Flores and Brian @top8games David-Marshall talk about all the Zendikar cards that have been spoiled on the mothership. There have been a lot of cards spoiled and a long time between podcasts. Mike and I go on for some time about the new cards. It is something well over 2 hours of ranting and raving about the new cards with very little in the way of comics, basketball, or other distractions.

Zendikast Part 4

After a long layoff Mike @fivewithflores Flores and Brian @top8games David-Marshall talk about all the Zendikar cards that have been spoiled on the mothership. There have been a lot of cards spoiled and a long time between podcasts. Mike and I go on for some time about the new cards. It is something well over 2 hours of ranting and raving about the new cards with very little in the way of comics, basketball, or other distractions.

Zendikast Part 3

After a long layoff Mike @fivewithflores Flores and Brian @top8games David-Marshall talk about all the Zendikar cards that have been spoiled on the mothership. There have been a lot of cards spoiled and a long time between podcasts. Mike and I go on for some time about the new cards. It is something well over 2 hours of ranting and raving about the new cards with very little in the way of comics, basketball, or other distractions.

Part 2

After a long layoff Mike @fivewithflores Flores and Brian @top8games David-Marshall talk about all the Zendikar cards that have been spoiled on the mothership. There have been a lot of cards spoiled and a long time between podcasts. Mike and I go on for some time about the new cards. It is something well over 2 hours of ranting and raving about the new cards with very little in the way of comics, basketball, or other distractions.

Part One

So I have spent a lot of time trumpeting the Baloth Woodcrasher in the face of overwhelming support for the Rampaging Baloth as the six-mana landfall creature of choice.  I still feel that in a straightforward landfall deck I would prefer the Woodcrasher to the Rampaging Baloth but there is another card that I think is waaaay more exciting than either of those two options. Last night, while podcasting with Mike about the spoiled Zendikar cards, I laid eyes on Ob Nixilis, the Fallen for the first time. I guess I was not paying attention earlier in the week or forgot to check someone’s column but I flat out missed this badass when talking about the various landfall creatures.

The demon pretty much kicks both of these cards in their rather  prodigious “toughnesses” with one of the best landfall abilities to date — killing your opponent. One fetch land may cost you one life but with Ob Nixilis on the board it will take your opponent from 20 to 14 and they will be staring down a 9/9 demon that cannot die to Terror-style removal (take that, Doom Blade guy!)

The landfall life loss from Ob Nixilis adds up very quickly and I started looking for ways to abuse it. Obviously Oracle of Mul Daya is going to let you create some pretty sick turns and Khalni Heart Expedition seems pretty saucy as well. What I like about the Expedition is that you can use the first one to fix/ramp out your Ob Nixilis and subsequent ones to abuse the landfall and maximize lifeloss.

I also started looking for other ways to spit out multiple lands. I was joking about phasing all my lands in and out with Taniwa when suddenly it occurred to me…Warp World. You could play the deck much like recent versions but you don’t need such a critical mass of permanents in order to hit four Bogarden Hellkites. Instead you need to Warp up one — maybe two — demon and then abuse all the lands you hit in the process. One Ob Nixilis and seven lands is game over as is two Ob Nixilis and four lands. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was writing my preview of Baloth Woodcrashers I was aware of Oracle of Mul Daya via unofficial spoiler pages but since I try to only talk about cards that are on the official Zendikar Visual Spoiler on the mothership I could only reference it obliquely. Sure enough the Oracle was added to the rapidly expanding official page that next morning so I will talk about it now in what I hope is first of a series of looks at the cards from the impending release. So what does the future hold for the Oracle?

I love this card; absolutely love it. I am not sure if it will prove to be tournament viable or not (insert obligatory comment about it dying to Lightning Bolt and Doom Blade here) but it is the closest green will ever come to having a high velocity enchantment like Future Sight to tear through your library. If you happen to be in Columbus, Ohio for the Saturday Prerelease I will be looking for a copy of this card to put right into my EDH deck – along with a much harder to find Misty Rainforest. But I can easily see this card being played in decks that are 39 cards smaller as well.

If landfall has any Constructed impact – and I think it will – then this card will provide fuel for that linear. I discussed in the Woodcrashers preview that a card like Knight of the Reliquary allows you up to four landfall activations in one turn if you play a fetch land, activate it, and fetch another fetch land with your Knight. So does the Oracle, provided there is some permutation of two fetch lands between your hand and the top two cards of your deck.

(By the way, in case anyone is still sleeping on Knight of the Reliquary, let me remind you that it did win an Extended Grand Prix toward the end of last season.) Read the rest of this entry »