Hey everyone! The shadows out of Mordor have been growing longer and it is time for us to rise up to destroy the evil forces of Sauron. Well, I guess we could also be playing for the other team as well, but either way we’re heading into Middle Earth for a fabulous adventure.
As a long time lover of Lord of the Rings, I am extremely excited to spend a couple months drafting this set. I am slightly less excited about how much my wife is going to spend on boxes of them, but it makes her happy so it’s all good.
Now let’s start checking out how these cards are going to play out in limited.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that they made this cost the same amount to play and equip as the Swords of something & something else cycle. It is similar in that it is an amazing equipment that will quickly snowball everything in your favor.
The tokens having flying is so sick and as I’ve said so many times already in this review, it’s pretty easy to come up with a legendary creature to make them come in attacking. For some twisted reason, I want to equip this to Sauron just to see my opponent concede in total disgust.
While there might be some cards with a little more power, this is the card you want to open because it’s colorless and goes in every deck.
Short Sword can be decent in some settings and removing abilities can be a relevant ability. It just falls into that category of doesn’t quite do enough in a lot of situations.
Do you want to spend four mana at sorcery speed for a +1+1 counter? Neither do I. Even in the situation where your deck is stacked with small creatures, this is too slow to matter.
A Runechanter's Pike that costs more to equip and needs things to line up right to get anything out of the extra ability. Another problem is that you want a lot of spells to make this good, but that it ends up taking up another noncreature spot.
That said, even if you only have a couple spells in the yard it is going to be +2+0 and first strike. That makes most combat very, very difficult for your opponent.
As long as you have plenty of humans, then this can get nuts pretty quickly. If your first activation is making a few tokens, then it is going to snowball the game with a swiftness in your favor.
If you don’t have any other humans, you just shouldn’t play this. It’s definitely a build around because the rate is awful otherwise.
You need to have two creatures attacking for this to do anything, but if you’re hyper aggressive you’d rather have removal, a combat trick, or another creature to win now. If you’re more controlling than you aren’t really attacking with two creatures until you have already turned the corner so it’s just a win more.
It is fairly cheap and you can just wait until the turn you can trigger it to drop it and still usually play the creature you find. There are situations this is amazing in, but also ones that it does nothing.
I’m grading this based off of it being in a deck that is 3-4 colors or at least splashing something that also wants the temptation. Not playable in a two-color deck.
That Elven bread is rumored to be delicious even though these look suspiciously like Girl Scout cookies. Getting the scry and drawing the card up front is nice. It does lots of little things to support a lot of different strategies including draw two, scry, sacrifice, etc.
If you can activate for two, then this is worth it. That’s a pretty large ask and very unlikely to consistently happen. You really don’t want to be spending four or five to draw a card every turn unless it’s really late in the game.
I’ve hated this type of card since the days of Darksteel Plate because it’s expensive for something that mostly serves to be more annoying than good.
It doesn’t even protect against the best common burn spell because Smite the Deathless removes indestructible. You also can’t use the instant speed equip on a non-legendary creature.
This is actually a pretty disappointing card in limited. The fog everything for a turn doesn’t really do much unless you are so far behind that it’s just delaying the inevitable.
When looking at the tap ability, remember that the card draw only happens when you tap it, but the life loss will keep hitting you every single turn without providing anything else. That means you are four mana into drawing one card that will cause you to lose a life every turn. How about four mana to draw three and lose two life EVERY turn.
This is a card that looks bad on the surface, but I think it will end up pretty good. I know that the first response is “but they will just always pick for you not to draw the card”. Well, you just scryed so if they want to take three to five damage every turn, they are more than welcome to do so. I know it’s not great to give your opponent agency over what happens, but they are making their decision in the dark and this can add up fast.
It’s a one time investment of three mana that does something every turn. You might even have some cards that give you a benefit every time you scry like Arwen Undomiel.
This is an excellent midrange card. It’ll be rough in aggro because you don’t want to be playing an early mana rock. Control will be a little leerier of going Hellbent (empty handed for non-boomers). I’m not saying you wouldn’t play it in some of those decks, just that it is optimal in a midrange strategy.
A personal Howling Mine that doesn’t require any additional investment is always a welcome addition to a deck and the mana ramp even helps you dump your hand quicker. The annoying thing is when you draw two lands and don’t get to draw an extra card the next turn.
The life gain isn’t just flavor text either with all the food tokens running around.
There is better mana fixing available, but it does technically do something if you are really desperate. Outside of that, the only thing this really does is block cheap ring bearers.
An expensive Short Sword that gives haste and pseudo-vigilance isn’t a card I would be interested in. I guess it does first strike orcs or goblins, but that doesn’t change the valuation too much.
The thing that I want to do with this is put it on something with an activated ability that requires tapping. That lets you get up to three activations per turn cycle (Precombat on your turn, untaps in combat to use again, and untaps on their combat). That would be insanely annoying on something like Pippin, Guard of the Citadel.
This cycle is great because it’s such a low cost to play them considering that you can either play it tapped turn one or that it will come into play untapped most of the time. That cost is even lower when you consider that there isn’t a cycle of tapped dual lands that could give you too many tap lands. It’s basically getting to play a twenty fourth spell in you deck without having to cut a land.
I do need to add that these are legendary so you don’t want to take a second copy. The opportunity cost sky rockets when you Strip Mine yourself.
While you do need a creature to die to use this, that tends to happen in black decks with all of the sacrifice running around. Making the creature you is kind of pricy, but being a repeatable effect on what is very close to a swamp is huge.
Obviously, this is very deck dependent as you will want four in some decks and none in others. There are tons of random two color busted legendary card that you can cast off of this. You can even play these and Aragorn, the Uniter in a two-color deck. I’m very interested in ending up with a few of these and going full shenanigans.
This was looking a lot better until I saw the word graveyard on that last line. Your ring bearers also aren’t legendary once they hit the graveyard so it is going to be harder to get anything out of that part of the card.
The scry certainly matters, but I am looking at this as a legendary Zhalfirin Void. In other words, I’ll run one in a two color deck as long as my mana is good.
Not on the same level as the rest of the cycle, but if you have ways to use the treasures it can do something. Still fine as being a “card 24” in your deck as long as you pick it up late. I would pick this a little higher if you have some Mirkwood Bats in your deck.
I haven’t been a fan of pain lands in limited and always having to pay a life makes this a lot worse. Bad enough that I wouldn’t run this in most Rakdos decks. If you have multiple legendary artifacts, it suddenly becomes much more appealing because of the potential for the almost game ending last ability.
Needing to have a legendary creature is a very low ask in this set. This ability was good on Castle Vantress and that cost four to use so I will happily be taking a trip to Rivendell when the opportunity arises.
The easiest one of these to get going since all you need is a creature to be able to make an extra game piece every turn. It comes as no surprise that the Shire ends up pumping out food.
An interesting new take on Evolving Wilds with the upside of being able to tap for colorless when you really need it. The downside of needing to pay one and sacrifice it outweighs the potential upside though.
You really need to be playing temptation cards to get this to blow up, but there are plenty of them to go around. As you can imagine giving this (and something else) the combo of first strike and deathtouch is a major problem. You’ll probably be tossing lifelink on soon afterwards as your opponent questions where everything went wrong.
The reason it’s not higher is that it needs ring temptations and another creature out to do anything. In other situations, it is a hard to cast Centaur Courser.
There is enough fixing running around that playing this isn’t too far out of the range of possibility especially with Great Hall of the Citadel. You do get multiple triggers off of this if you play a multicolor card so it can end up doing some crazy things.
It can be very good in the right deck, but it’s not worth having a bad mana base for.
Careful about dropping this early against red as they can play Smite the Deathless to leave you with nothing (Gollum's Bite is something else to look out for if you are tapping out for Arwen).
Outside of that, this is one of those obviously great cards. All you have to do is hold up one mana and this can protect any creature while making both that and herself bigger creatures with lifelink.
There are a ton of ways to scry in these colors giving this huge potential to just go off. Your opponents have to watch out because Grey Havens Navigator or Hithlain Knots are suddenly combat tricks.
While the activated ability is really expensive, it’s just a nice bonus that is there if you need it.
Plays best with treasures since they count for two mana, but there is no easy way at common to make a bunch of them. It’s insane if you play Lobelia Sackville-Baggins on turn three to get a couple treasures then sac them to play the Balrog the next turn. Who would have thought that two of the greatest evils (Sauron is up there, but has he ever stolen a family members spoons? That’s low Lobelia.) on Middle Earth would terrorize a game of limited.
While you don’t really want to play this for full retail cost, it’s not the end of the world if you have to. It’s still a massive haste creature that’s hard to block and kills a creature if they deal with it.
Not as good as Frodo Baggins because it costs three instead of two, but the same concept of a difficult to block ring bearer who gets the party started himself. The treasures are also a nice way to pull ahead quickly.
The Selesnya food decks have an aggressive lean so it’s not great to play a Hill Giant even if it does give you a potential food every turn. You need to have some of the food sacrifice abilities such as Mushroom Watchdogs to really get this to payoff.
Early on, getting another food isn’t worth hampering your board development by spending the two mana to sacrifice the one you have. Just play your cards and worry about the food later.
The body helps to clog up the ground a bit while you durdle around to make more tokens. Since it doesn’t require a nontoken to trigger, you can just sacrifice the new human token every turn for the drain to slowly win a board stall. It also puts a serious clock on them from you being able to sacrifice out four or five creatures to kill them.
This can be awful when you are on defense, but even then, it’s not completely a dead card as long as you can attack with even one creature. You can play this and attack right away, paying you back a portion of the mana you spent.
Sometimes you can miss, but even if there isn’t a creature in the top two, you can put them on the bottom to roll the die on that third card. There is the concern of the creature getting eaten by something bigger, but it’s not like you are actually down a card there. You’re also playing Gruul which has a healthy surplus of large critters.
Wrap Up
It’s always difficult writing a wrap up for the artifacts, lands, and multicolored cards. They are mostly filling in spaces or even defining archetypes, but without a consistent theme to discuss. Most of the multicolored cards seem really good and there is enough fixing that they could end up in a lot of decks.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back tomorrow with Prerelease and Sealed Guide for Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth. Until then, stay classy people!
Fine…I guess I will add that I’ll see you LTR! I’m pretty ashamed of that one, but I have a brand to uphold here.
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
Josh is a member of the elite limited team The Draft Lab as well as the host of The Draft Lab Podcast. He was qualifying for Pro Tours, Nationals, and Worlds literally before some of you were born. After a Magic hiatus to play poker and go to medical school, he has been dominating Arena with over an 80% win percentage in Bo3 as well as making #1 rank in Mythic.
