Avacyn Restored EDH Set Review; Part Six: The Rest

Heading up the final section of our EDH Set Review is a trio of Multicolored cards, followed by a handful of Artifacts and Nonbasic Lands. This section is full of awesome and win.

Angels

Well, by now, you already know where this is going. Already, all three of these beautiful Legendary Angels are generating a metric ton of buzz and hype in the EDH scene.

Bruna is on overwhelmingly powerful creature, balanced nicely by the fact that's she's very specific about what she wants to do. Obviously, she is drawing all sorts of comparisons to Zur, Uril, and Sovereigns of Lost Alara. She's not the kind of card you just throw into every UW deck you've got, but if you build around her, she's insanely powerful.

She can clearly stand on her own, or be a finisher in some other General's Aura-themed deck (like a Zur deck, for example).

Gisela is the only card in the set to drop more jaws and cause more squeeling nerdgasms than Avacyn or Griselbrand themselves. Gisela seems poised to be the breakout star of the set, with the fourms and blogs going nuts over her incredibly sexy set of abilitys, not to mention she sports one of the best illustrations in the set, possibly even the whole block. Jason Chan really outdid himself her, and so did WotC's R&D department.

Gisela's high CMC makes her very unlikely to make any sort of waves in Standard or any other competative tournament format, so the demand for her should come almost entirely from the EDH crowd. Hopefully this will keep her affordable, because I expect we'll be seeing her all over decklists for a long while now.

This is easily my favorite card in the set, no question.

Sigarda is the odd lady out, in this trio. Not that she's not good in EDH - she most certainly will see plenty of action in our format - but she's also the most aggressively costed, at 5 mana. This means she has a bit more potential to have some crossover success. She's definitely a constructed-worthy card, in a vacuum, but it really depends on if there's enough other good stuff in her colors to build an archetype around her.

Fortunately, she is, in my opinion, the least exciting member of the trio. Not to say I dislike her - not at all! She just hoses things I happen to like quite a bit - cards like Barter in Blood (whose presence in the set may well contribute to Sigarda seeing a bit of tourney action).

She's very good, just has less of a "holy shit!" impact when you first see her.




Artifacts

This lacks impact. Will probably not have enough presence on the board to matter much. Seems good in a Tempered Steel deck, but I don't think that's a particularly viable archetype in EDH.

Well, this is certainly interesting. EDH is a format where creatures with ETBF effects are played extremely often. This combos with any of them nicely. Titans. Mulldrifter. Shriekmaw. Eternal Witness. Nucklavee. Woodfall Primus. Sharuum the Hegemon. Karmic Guide. The list is endless.
This isn't going to break the format in half (it's already broken!), but it will see play, guaranteed.

Well, this will be fun in mono-White Soldiers! Until someone gets annoyed and just Wraths all your Humans away. The problem with cards requiring you to tap multiple creatures is that they pretty much force you to overextend into a Wrath of God.

Then again, White already has pretty good removal options. It's probably worth noting that there are a LOT of Blue Wizards that are also Humans... this might not wind up being too relevant, but it's nice to have a potential removal card for colors that don't get a lot of good options.

 Terrible. Just posted it cause it's cool art.

Ooh, ooh! I know! Put this on Geist of Saint Traft!

Yeah, that's pretty much what every single person ever thought when they first saw this a few weeks back. It's super obvious, to the point that it's already going to be lame by the time anyone every actually does it in real life.

Problem is, I still haven't come up with any other use for it. Believe me, I'm trying.

I've had pretty good success with Temple Bell so far. It doesn't even matter that it's not in a Group Hug deck. Sometimes I'm just so desperate for a card-draw solution that I run the Bell anyway. This is likely going to just be a stricly worse Temple Bell. It costs one more mana, AND you have to put a charge counter on it before you can use it.

But, I can't wait to play with this anyway. I can imagine being able to set it up nicely enough that I don't care that my opponents are drawing cards too. Obviously if I have Consecrated Sphinx in play, I'm still coming out way ahead.




Well this is certainly an usual and interesting take on the three-mana, any-color mana rock. It's an unusual melding of disparate utility effects. The kinda, sorta issue here is that you really want to be droping mana rocks as early as possible, and at that point, Graveyards are likely to be empty that early in the game.

However, mana rocks are usualy kinda dead draws late game, so this little bit of extra utilty keeps it from being a completely useless draw at the late game stage. It's a nice gesture but I don't see this replacing Darksteel Ingot or Coalition Relic in most decks, but for metagames where GY hate is desperately needed, this will be a godsend to players.









Lands

Holy cow, this is amazing! Pretty much an auto-include into every deck with the right color identity. There's almost no strategy out there that can benefit from being able to play everything at Instant speed.

Bomb land! Basically it's a Command Tower meets Boseiju. Set this to your General's creature type, and you never have to worry about Hinder or Spell Crumple again. The only downside here is that this is gonna be highly sought after for nearly every format in existance, so it's never going to be cheap to acquire.

Obviously, it's best in a Tribal-flavored deck, but really this can be played in almost any deck.

Another great land. This one is just a little bit less awesome than the other two in it's cycle. Still it's going to be pretty good in almost any deck it fits into. Unearth and Flashback are just two of many mechanics that will be happy to see this land.

Obviously, you're only playing this in heavily Angel-themed decks, with enough Tribal support to matter. Not great, but narrowly useful when it does fit in.

 Wow. Another exceptionally strong ability for a cheap activation cost. I've already been biting the bullet and playing Hall of the Bandit Lord in a number of decks. Clearly, Hall can go into any and all decks that want it, but this will be VASTLY better than Hall in those decks lucky enough to have the proper color requirements. Without question, this land is extremely strong.















That wraps up our Avacyn Restored EDH Set Review. The final verdict: Awesome! The set is chock full of playable cards in every color, and nothing, save the two flagship Legends seem to be over the top, power-level-wise. It's not quite Ravnica: City of Guilds levels of awesomeness, but it's the closest they've come in a long while. I'm very pleased to say that WotC appears to have knocked this out of the park.

Enjoy!