In highschool, I had a job as a janitor for the local elementary school. During the summers, a group of us would come in and do a deep clean of the school, wax the floors, and assist with routine maintenance. You really learn the importance of testing when working with some of the chemicals we did. You never know how a chemical will react to the material you’re cleaning. It’s usually wise to pick a small innocuous area before diving in head first. If you’ve ever used an at home carpet cleaner, chances are you read that specific instruction on the back of the bottle. Whenever you’re trying something new, it’s nice to do a test run first, somewhere innocuous, to get a proof of concept.
This isn’t the first time this type of effect has been printed in white. The origins of group hug draw date back to the 1995 set Homelands with the card Truce which gave you and your opponents the choice to gain life or draw cards. Portal later introduced the card Temporary Truce providing the same effect at sorcery speed for one less mana. Following Portals' release in 1997, another group hug draw effect in mono white wasn’t seen until Throne of Eldraine and the enchantment Happily Ever After which drew each player a card upon entering the battlefield.
The evolution of this modern design has now seen its first interpretation at the uncommon level. Now, with this new three mana sorcery questions swirl on what it does or doesn’t do for white’s supposed card draw woes. Frankly, as an individual card, it doesn’t do much. According to edhrec.com Temporary Truce, Truce, and Farsight Adept see play in a combined 514 decks out of 219,637. If filtered by just mono white decks, those numbers don’t change very much. The card is far from an auto include, and I wouldn’t be looking to put it in a majority of my own decks. Group hug draw just is not an efficient or effective way of generating card advantage outside of group hug strategies, but frankly, the playability of this card is irrelevant. Rendezvous is an uncommon. It’s a pretty innocuous rarity. This isn’t to say that all uncommons are unplayable, but the vast majority of them will never see the light of day in constructed formats. While this card may have been designed for commander it was still designed at the uncommon level. It’s a bad card, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad design. Rendezvous does two important things for mono white design. First, it tests the scale of Farsight Adept. The kor wizard was a nice proof of concept for the “target opponent” technology, but Rendezvous asks the questions “how many cards is too many?” Each individual player’s determination of this question will affect their perception of the card. I expect to find that the cost of giving an opponent three cards will greatly exceed the benefit of getting my own three considering the card draw engines that already exist in mono white. However, that’s the other key feature of this card. It’s not an engine. It’s a single card that gives the mono white player three new cards in hand, and that is certainly appealing to a lot of people. White’s issue isn’t card draw, it’s the fragility of that draw. Where other colors can cast a card and get an instant return, white doesn’t have that. In fact, this is the first non-permanent in white that says “draw three cards”. Each color has sorcery speed cards that give that level of card advantage upon resolution, except white. While the need for that effect doesn’t appeal to the way I play, it will appeal to many others. This card isn’t meant to be the apex of white card draw. It’s just a step in the exploration of it. It’s built upon the lessons from cards that preceded it, and it’s pushing boundaries in a design space that hasn’t yet been fully explored. I don’t think this individual card will have a great impact on commander as a whole, but it appears to be the first step in consistently providing spell based card draw white has never seen. We may look back at this card in five years with the same reverence we do with Act on Impulse, and I expect it to see the same amount of play too.
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AuthorMonoWhiteBorder -- A man who loves MtG and his small dog. Archives
June 2021
Categories"MonoWhiteBorder" and corresponding content is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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