Edge of Eternities Spoiler Review – Week 2

Hey all. We have reached the end of Edge of Eternities spoiler season, and the set is looking awesome so far, with lots of amazing art, and plenty of constructed worthy cards.

As I mentioned last week, Edge of Eternities is the set that triggers rotation in both Standard and Alchemy, meaning that powerful cards from this set have a higher chance of seeing play than other sets, as everyone tries to find their footing in a post-rotation world.

Today, I’ll be breaking down various cards from the second week of spoiler season that have stuck out to me, either as potential players in Standard or Alchemy, or just cards that I think are sweet and can’t wait to build around.

Let’s dive in!

All-Fates Stalker

All-Fates Stalker might not seem like much, but in the right deck it is a very powerful enabler. The main idea here is to warp this in for two mana, target one of your own creatures, and then at end of turn when this warps out, your creature comes back into play.

This can be great if you had warped in another creature and want to make sure that it sticks around, or maybe you just have a great enters effect on one of your creatures that you want to reuse. Blinking is very powerful and All-Fates Stalker will be right at home in that style of deck.

Then, on a later turn you can cast it for four mana and either take out an opponent’s creature, or protect one of your creatures by keeping it in exile until the All-Fates Stalker dies.

You can also warp it in to take out an opponent’s blocker for a turn if that helps you achieve lethal or take out a planeswalker or something like that.

I’ve been brewing a couple of dedicated warp decks, and All-Fates Stalker is going to be a tool a turn to in those decks, and any blink decks that I brew.

Beyond the Quiet

Beyond the Quiet is our Sunfall replacement. While Sunfall isn’t the powerhouse that it used to be, it seems that Wizards wants there to be a five mana wrath in Standard that exiles, and Beyond the Quiet also exiles spacecraft as a bonus.

This is usually going to worse than Sunfall because it doesn’t give you a token to use as an attacker and blocker, but it will be a tool that players have if there is a need to be exiling creatures instead of destroying them.

Hardlight Containment

Hardlight Containment is a powerful removal spell, but of course you have to be playing a deck with enough artifacts that you are able to cast it early in the game consistently.

This could find a home in a deck using Simulacrum Synthesizer as a stable removal spell to help get to the late game, or it could find a home in a deck built around Brightglass Gearhulk, as the gearhulk can find Hardlight Containment and then have it put on to itself.

I like good removal spells like these that aren’t just generically powerful and go in every deck. You have to be playing some amount of artifacts to use it, and enchantment removal and artifact removal can release the creature from its prison, meaning that there is counterplay as well.

Lumen-Class Frigate

I haven’t been too impressed with spacecraft yet. Most of them are just for limited, which is fine, but the ones that could break into constructed formats are ones with either powerful enters effects or ones that have a cheap station ability to get some value, and Lumen-Class Frigate is the latter.

While anthem effects, or effects that buff all of your creatures calling back to Glorious Anthem, have not been good enough for Standard in some time, I think that Lumen-Class Frigate has a chance for a couple of reasons.

First, it is super easy to turn on. The turn you play it you can tap a creature that might not have been able to attack anyways to station it up to two, and then attack with your other creatures. Second, thanks to the anthem effect your creatures are bigger and will be able to station this up to 12 much faster.

Why that is good is that a lot of the times in aggro decks your opponent’s can eventually outsize you, or stabilize the board with wraths, or just have good blockers. So stationing up Lumen-Class Frigate to the point that it is a flying creature can give you an attacker that the opponent can’t block or as easily deal with.

We’ll have to see if there is even a white aggro deck in Standard or Alchemy, but I like the potential of Lumen-Class Frigate if there is one.

Pinnacle Starcage

Pinnacle Starcage is our replacement for Temporary Lockdown sort of. Temporary Lockdownis leaving Standard with the release of Edge of Eternities, and control players were starting to sweat wondering how they were going to survive against aggro decks.

Pinnacle Starcage is very similar to Temporary Lockdown but while lockdown hit all nonland permanents with mana value two or less, Pinnacle Starcage only hits artifacts and creatures. This won’t matter all that often, but there will be games where it missing enchantments comes back to bite you.

The second difference is that Pinnacle Starcage has a sweet late game ability, where you can dump all of the exiled cards into their owner’s graveyards and get an army of 2/2s to attack and block with.

The last difference is that Pinnacle Starcage is an artifact, not an enchantment, so the removal that interacts with it is completely different. Red decks playing Abrade in the sideboard will now have an answer, where White decks relying on Get Lost will not.

So, if you were sad that Temporary Lockdownwas rotating, get ready to spend four rare wildcards on Pinnacle Starcage.

Seam Rip

Portable Hole returns in the form of Seam Rip. For those who didn’t play when Portable Hole was legal in Standard, it is a very powerful sideboard card for white decks against aggro, and there would always be silly white aggro mirrors where a Portable Hole would come down and take out another Portable Hole.

Seam Rip is essentially the same card but it is an enchantment instead of an artifact. Like we talked about with Pinnacle Starcage above, the difference is the type of the of sideboard removal that can interact with this type of permanent.

Seam Rip is going to be better against red aggro decks that have no way of removing an enchantment, compared to white decks that can have a card like Get Lost.

Seam Rip is another card that Brightglass Gearhulk can search up, so decks built around that card are eating good this set, getting two new removal options to make use of. Otherwise, any white decks can put this in their sideboard as a great, cheap answer to anything aggressive.

Faller’s Faithful

Faller’s Faithful is a very flexible card, and I think that it is going to have a home in sacrifice decks.

There are so many options with this card. You can destroy an opponent’s creature with this if you just need it out of the way for attacking, or you can cast this post combat to take out a creature that blocked one of your smaller creatures to finish it off.

I think the real use of this card is to turn one of your own creatures into two fresh cards. Sacrifice decks are always looking for ways to draw cards, and Faller’s Faithful is going to come down, trigger all of your dies cards like Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER, draw two cards, and give you a 3/1 to attack and block with.

If that was all the card did I would already be excited, but like I said the flexibility of also being able to remove your opponent’s creatures puts this over the top for me, and I’m going to be putting it into any sacrifice deck I build.

Zero Point Ballad

Zero Point Ballad is an interesting sweeper that will be a nice tool for black midrange decks to make use off. The sweet spot for this card will be X=2 or 3.

Imagine a game where on turn three you cast a creature like Preacher of the Schism or Sentinel of the Nameless City, which has four toughness, and then on turn four cast Zero Point Ballad for X=3, decimating your opponent’s board but leaving your threat in play.

I think the other sweet spot is X=2 because on games where you are on the draw, you can cast this on turn three to take out all of your opponent’s early plays, similar to Temporary Lockdown

Sure there are times when this is going to be awkward, like against Sazh's Chocobo which grows its toughness very quickly, or when your opponent has a pump spell, or when you just don’t have the life to pay, but I think it will be a good sideboard tool for midrange decks, where it can easily turn into a one sided sweeper.

Edge Rover

Edge Rover is a nice card for green aggro decks, giving another one drop that can get in some attacks early and generate value when it dies.

Sure your opponent also gets a lander token, but if you are putting on enough pressure they likely won’t have the time to use it, as all of their mana will be spent on trying to answer your board.

I also like this in the various artifact sacrifice decks I talked about last week using cards like Weapons Manufacturing or Biotech Specialist, as this will give you two artifacts over the course of the game.

Sami’s Curiosity

Speaking of those artifact sacrifice decks, Sami’s Curiosity is a simple but strong card for those decks and more.

While two life plus a lander token may not seem to be worth a card, this is the closest we are going to get to Rampant Growth every making a Standard comeback, as this lets us make a lander token on turn one and then crack it on turn two to ramp up.

In those artifact sacrifice decks, this is fine at any point as the two life gives us some wiggle room against aggro, and the lander token will give us fodder to sacrifice.

Like I said, this is a simple card, but I think it can have a home in several different decks.

Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam

Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam can get out of hand very quickly. Even if you cast it for X=0, you will still get two counters on it, giving you a 2/3 for just two mana, and as the game goes on you are able to cast it for bigger and bigger numbers.

While a 2/3 for two may not seem impressive, remember that Cut Down is rotating from Standard, meaning that Dyadrine has a chance to survive for a turn or two and do its stuff.

In a dedicated +1/+1 counter deck, Dyadrine is going to be very powerful, turning counters in to cards and 2/2 tokens. You can easily start drawing cards with this the turn you play it, and the bigger you cast it for the more counters you are going to be able to remove from Dyadrine itself.

The failsafe for this card is you cast a big trampler in the mid to late game, so I have high hopes for Dyadrine as a great engine piece for a counter deck.

Pinnacle Emissary

Speaking of engines, Pinnacle Emissary is a nice artifact build around, that rewards you for casting artifacts by giving you an army of flying tokens.

The cool part of this card is the warp cost, meaning you can take turn three or four to warp this in, cast two or three artifact spells, netting you that many tokens, and then it warps out to be cast on a later turn.

While the tokens it creates can’t block most creatures, since they have flying themselves they are going to be able to starting swinging in and racing toward lethal very quickly.

While this is akin to cards like Young Pyromancer, the tough part is that while instants and sorceries can easily replace themselves, artifacts usually require some amount of mana investment to do so, so if you are down to one spell you can’t as easily chain them off to generate a whole bunch of tokens.

If you do want to build around this card you need to have a deck that can pop off and generate several tokens in one turn. I’m not sure exactly what that looks like, but I look forward to brewing around it!

Space-Time Anomaly

Alright hear me out. In Final Fantasy we got Hope Estheim, a card that mills your opponent at end of turn equal to the amount of life you gained, and now we get Space-Time Anomaly here, asking us to have a high life total to mill our opponent for a big amount.

I think that Wizards is sending us a signal, and that signal is that life gain mill control is a secret deck in the format and we just haven’t figured that out yet.

No longer! I will find this hidden deck and bring it into the light, because while this card will likely be horrible, if I just win with it once then all of that time and effort will be worth it. So check back in a week or two when I post all of my new decklists and some sort of mill deck will be among them.

Seedship Broodtender

Seedship Broodtender is a powerful enabler for graveyard decks. Normally these cards that mill three or four when they enter are on 1/1 bodies and have the option to return a land, such as Town Greeter, and while Seedship Broodtender doesn’t have that potential to find a land, it comes with a much better body as a 2/3.

This is going to make it much better on defense to help you stay alive to the point where you could activate its ability to return something to play.

Any decks looking to fill up their graveyard, or reanimate big creatures are going to have to consider Seedship Broodtender as a great option to both enable that strategy and be a payoff later in the game.

Wrapping Up

Edge of Eternities is looking like a really fun set! There are tons of sweet build arounds, interesting synergies, and new strategies galore.

I’m looking forward to the coming weeks, where we get to build new decks, and evaluate how Standard and Alchemy are going to look like after rotation. So look forward to those articles in the coming weeks!

There were so many other cards that I didn’t have time to talk about today, so I hope you have a chance to look over the set yourself and think about the cards that you are looking forward to playing. With that said, I’ll see you next time and best of luck in all of your matches!