Hello everyone!
With the March of the Machine debut a few days ago, we saw a huge influx of new cards coming in March of the Machine. While I spoke about Hidetsugu and Kairi, Monastery Mentor, Wrenn and Realmbreaker, and Archangel Elspeth. we have plenty of new cards to look at as well! Today I want to go over what may end up being the best board wipe to be printed in Standard thus far – Sunfall.
Sunfall is a five mana sorcery that exiles all creatures and Incubates X where X is the number of creatures exiled this way. For those who need a reminder, Incubate is one of the new keywords coming from March of the Machine where you get an artifact token with x +1/+1 counters and when you pay two mana, it flips into a 0/0. So this sorcery exiles each board and then gives you a token that can flip into a creature afterwards. How will this compare to board wipes of old?
VERDICT
So there’s a few things we have to keep in mind when looking at this board wipe, but the biggest one is the mana cost. By in large, five mana board wipes are much weaker than four mana board wipes. The reason being is that you need it to come down early enough for you to have not lost too much life and even a one turn delay can spell doom. To that end, we’ve gotten a few four mana board wipes that even have downsides that have ended up seeing a lot of play like Depopulate or Shatter the Sky as having that effect is so powerful. Obviously, this axiom will be working against Sunfall, but in the end, it may not matter.
First off, exiling everything is substantially more powerful than simply destroying everything. If you’ve ever been hit by a Farewell, you know how devastating the exile clause can be if you’re playing cards like death triggers like Siege Veteran or cards that do something from the graveyard like Valiant Veteran or reanimation targets.
If this were simply a five mana board wipe that exiled everything, this would still be well behind Depopulate in Standard as the extra mana is simply that impactful, but that’s still not all! On top of exiling everything, you get the Incubate token which is going to be a decently sized creature 99% of the time. Sure you need to pay two mana to activate it, and while that may seem like a downside, that could be good as well. Since it isn’t yet a creature, you can play more wraths without losing it and you can “flash” it in whenever you want. Obviously you can’t flash in something that’s on board, the opponent will have to respect that you can flip it at any time and may have to hold up removal to compensate or attack differently and so on.
The closest comparison to this is Phyrexian Rebirth which, while powerful, never saw any play as six mana is quite prohibitive for a board wipe. While this is only a mana cheaper, being to exile creatures and bring the token in later as needed is quite powerful.
To sum up – will this be the best wrath ever for Standard? I honestly believe it may be! Wrath effects have never been super exciting for Standard environments with the best likely being Supreme Verdict as it was simply a four mana wrath with upside. Verdict will be hard to beat as it was so good at what it does, but if exiling ends up really mattering, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this eeked it out.
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