Daily Archives: March 1, 2018

MTG: Chainer

[mtg_card]Chainer’s Edict[/mtg_card] defined a standard environment.

It was the tool of a bloated mono-black control deck, a simple removal spell you could use as early game disruption and ate a creature early, then ate another one later when the game was drawn out. Moreso than most other spells of its type, it funnelled the game towards its flashback costs – a two mana indiscriminate removal spell that provoked players to overextend as a countermeasure, in the same space as [mtg_card]Mutilate[/mtg_card], Chainers’ was the elbow-drop that you structured the rest of your removal around. Two mana was just right, and tricks like [mtg_card]Goblin Sledder[/mtg_card] didn’t help against it – you were going to lose a creature, no matter how you cut it. Even the Savage Bastard [mtg_card]Wild Mongrel[/mtg_card] wasn’t going to get around that removal spell, unless you got the hopeful [mtg_card]Basking Rootwalla[/mtg_card] draw.

Chainer’s Edict was power.

Despite living through that period of Magic: The Gathering and watching as every non-[mtg_card]Astral Slide[/mtg_card] deck I played in the period crumpling like paper in the face of a good Chainers’ draw, it never occurred to me to really check back and examine Chainer himself, the man whose orders so bent the world.

Let’s look at Chainer.Continue Reading →

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