Entry 9: In Appreciation of Taranika ~ I like to think Kytheon keeps watch over all of us ~ (Taranika, Akroan Veteran) Before I delve into Taranika, I want to touch on the change I made for this week. Emeria’s Call likely isn’t many players’ pick for the best white card from 2020. I’m not most players though. The dual faced card is a great addition to a mono white mana base. The opportunity cost of this card is extraordinarily low, and though over costed, the spell face is valuable to a white deck with a board state. The three life is a rather negligible cost to having this come into play untapped so swapping a basic plains feels totally acceptable. Most importantly, this card gives the deck a nice boost while keeping it relatively unchanged giving me more time to compare the differences from having the partners at the helm. The swap at commander has, unsurprisingly, felt like one step backward to take two steps forward. I outlined in my previous entry how the ceiling of Taranika was naturally capped by her ability and my card pool. That said, she was a magnificent lead for this specific deck and having a new set of commanders at the helm has only served to solidify that thought. Livio and Alharu seem like much better long term fits as the strength of the deck continues to grow and new printings are released, but in the meantime some of the synergies feel a touch strange. A 1/1 double striker doesn’t quite feel as terrifying as it used to.
I think I was wrong on both accounts. Tanazir has an attack trigger just like Taranika, but that’s about where the similarities end. I built both a Taranika and Tanazir deck side by side thinking my lessons from Taranika would apply to Tanazir, but the cards play extremely different and it centers around the idea of scale and growth. Taranika does one thing, and she does it the same way everytime. Tanazir alternatively does two things that can vary depending on the circumstances. It feels almost ironic, but the same reasons I switched from Taranika in my 2020 deck are the reasons I disliked actually building Tanazir. I love the consistency of Taranika. I know what she’s going to do, and she’s going to do it the same way every time. The emphasis is then placed on me to get the most value I can from this single ability. I’m not chasing more value. I’m making the most I can in the moment. Tanazir is different. As I was building, I felt like I was constantly chasing that ceiling and as such it felt like I lost some control. My Unchained Taranika list is a soldier tribal list. It developed that way somewhat naturally. As I looked for more creatures that worked well with Taranika, I found that a lot of them were soldiers. A few scryfall searches later and I had a list of soldier creatures and some noncreature slots to fill in. Alternatively, my Tanzir list is part +1/+1 counters and part 0/0 creatures. The cards feel intrinsically more powerful and also appeal to me significantly less. To some extent, it feels like the power of the deck doesn’t come from my play decisions, but from the cards I choose to add. The cards themselves feel like they do their thing as best they can regardless of how I use them. The ceilings feel both variable and completely out of my control. Tanazir is the perfect example of this difference. Instead of presenting a choice upon attacking, Tanazir affects all of your creatures. Despite this power increase, I find the absence of this decision less enjoyable. I want that decision. I want to see that opportunity cost, and I want to have to make the correct choice. Taranika provides me with the scale I love. Whether correct or not, I feel in control when I play her and when I play mono white. For me, it’s about achieving the play experience that makes me happy and in most cases, I find that when I play Mono White.
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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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