Congratulations to our winners this week! @col-seaker-of-the-memiest-legion wins best card for its college with Crescendo of Inspitation, @loreholdlesbian withe Re-Perform wins best card for its deck, and @hiygamer wins best overall card with Pastsealer’s Quill!
I’ve looked at this card for a while, ever since it showed up in the Discord, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. I like how powerful of an effect it is, offering both things that storm decks want, card draw and mana, and the cost is both high and low. Exiling cards from graveyards essentially risks nothing, and can be pretty easy to fuel, though exiling enough to make this mana positive may be a little hard unless you have some good mill. I especially like how it balances that because getting rid of spells in your graveyard is exactly what storm decks don’t want to do when they’re playing cards like past in flames, underworld breach, or Kess. That means the decks where this is most powerful are also the ones where it’s most costly. That’s really cool! I’m also impressed with the templating and the flavor text, I think you did your research. I kind of wish it had a higher color concentration, since 2UURR would make this a little harder to splash and feel more like a dedicated spell slinger deck, and it also just feels so impossibly red-blue that I feel like it’s earned it, but that’s not a big deal. Another funny thing is I don’t think this card is most powerful in the precon it’s for, since this card would work better in decks with many small spells rather than a few big ones, but that actually just makes this a card that’s fun to swap out and into another deck without being a dead card if played out of the box. That’s a minor thing, but a cool thing when it happens. The fact that it’s so heavily spell-slingy but also powers up massive spells, along with the flavor and flavor text, makes this a great card for Prismari.
I’m really impressed with this card. It’s so weird and narrow and requires a bit of thinking to figure out but when you do it feels so eye opening. At first I thought it wa sundercosted, since paying two mana for a repeatable almost strictly better cascade effect seems ways to cheap, but you still need to feed more spells into it, and you need to pay the extra mana each time, so it’s not really much worse than a twincast. Still, the fact that only black can interacti with it while it’s in hand is scary. But it’s such a cool card! It feels so very much like what this deck wants to be doing. It rewards casting big spells while also letting you reuse some of your smaller spells, which is perfect for a deck based around both spell size and speed.
This card is doing something well that so rarely is. Political tools are often very hard to do right, but the fact that this gives you modes helps with that. You can always just pick the option worse for your opponent. You can also just use it on their end step to try and minimize the usefulness to them. The flavor is also great, it is one of the better uses of inklings I’ve seen (why are they never tied to writing, like, anywhere?). It also feels like a great fit in the black white deck, but the fact that you made it an artifact feels appropriate. It feels very much like a trading post, if anything moreso than the original! Making the silverquill mascot makes it truly feel a part of the deck, but still allows it to be put in any deck. I only really have one complaint. The inkling ability feels a little tedious, giving any player a token at instant speed makes combat annoying and slow, with deals being made mid-combat. If they entered tapped that would be fine, and I think would help break the symmetry, to, since you could make it on end step and immediately untap with yours. But those are pretty minor, and arguably I’m just wrong. This card is just fun all around and shows real craft with card designing.
And that’s the end of the semester! Congrats, you made it through! This turned out to be a little harder than I expected. A lot of cards were either good cards but only for STX, or flawed cards that were great for the deck, it made it very hard to choose winners. I’ll be back tomorrow with the rest of the commentary as well as the runners-up.
