Hello everyone!
Dominaria United is right around the corner, and with it, we’re getting a slew of sick cards to look at! I don’t know about you, but to me, these are some of the most exciting spoilers I’ve seen in a long time. Between super cool designs and beloved callbacks, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being one of the best sets of all time.
Today I’m going to be looking at the most evil ship in the multiverse, Weatherlight Compleated!
To start off the analysis, Weatherlight Compleated is a 2 mana Vehicle that’s a staggering 5/5 Flier. However, unlike other Vehicles, this is the first one that doesn’t have a crew cost! In order to animate Weatherlight, you’re going to need four phyresis counters on Weatherlight. To accumulate these phyresis counters, you’re going to need your creatures to die. On the bright side, with each phyresis counter you get, you also get a Scry 1 until you hit seven counters and then you get a card draw with each dead creature!
So initially, I was extremely low on this card. Very specific engine pieces like Weatherlight Compleated, traditionally, have not been playable Standard cards (nor generally playable cards in general). However, that may not be the case for Weatherlight Compleated. First off, we need to analyze if there’s any deck that can have creatures die en masse. Unsurprisingly, Rakdos Anvil fits this to a tee. With the Constructs created off of Oni-Cult Anvil, you’re going to have a lot of creatures dying throughout the course of a game.
The second thing to look at is if this is even a strong enough payoff to justify playing. Although it takes some time, a 5/5 Flier is a reasonably large stat line on top of being able to control your draws with each phyresis counter. While it may seem innocuous, the constant scrying seems very powerful in an Anvil deck and then it can relatively quickly threaten to start drawing cards if the game drags on long enough. Furthermore, the 5/5 Flier is going to be pretty hard to kill for most decks as it outstats most other threats and even a good amount of removal which is a big deal.
The final thing to look at is if this card does anything when it “doesn’t work”. I feel a lot of players are relatively optimistic which makes it easy to see the best case scenario, but what happens when it doesn’t work perfectly. The main issue I have with Weatherlight Compleated is that you really want to play it early for it to do much. Drawing it late in the game isn’t necessarily abysmal as you can start accruing counters relatively quickly, but it’s obviously not amazing. However, unlike a lot of these specific engine pieces, you can still get some utility from this in the late game, even if it’s simply sacrificing Weatherlight to Oni-Cult Anvil.
So where does that leave us?
Artifacts (10)
Lands (23)
60 Cards
$292.86
VERDICT
So this may seem contradictory, but out of the very specific engine pieces I’ve seen printed over the years, this is the one that seems most promising. Personally, I’m pretty low on synergy pieces if they need to be played early as the failure rate just seems so high. However, in a deck like Rakdos Anvil, being able to animate this quickly while also controlling your draws does make me feel this has at least some chance of seeing play rather than the near zero chance I felt when seeing similar designs. To be honest, I still think the odds of this seeing play is pretty low, but I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if playing some amount of this in Anvil ends up being correct.
Thank you for reading! Agree or disagree? Come join our Discord community, discuss the new spoilers, and more.
