I hope you’re ready for the vigilance-haste-countered up zoo because it’s coming your way. Is this where I make the obligatory ‘Who Let the Dogs Out?’ joke for Tesak and unleash?

Being the one person at the table that doesn’t get to play their deck isn’t fun, so is focusing more on making sure you actually get to play the cards you draw a bad design decision?

Who better to guide you through empowering your holy host than I? Don’t answer that!

You need untapped lands to do that though, sorry. Only Alela gets to play at instant speed ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Bone Sabres seems like just the type of card your tokens need without being ‘too strong’. If this card also gave a keyword to the equipped creature I’d feel we see it played more often. Bioshift can make a huge difference with how combat flows for you and it’s still wild to me that this isn’t a bigger staple in +1/+1 counter decks. We’ve seen this card printed once in Gatecrash and it’s only $0.14 at the time of writing.

Trigger Guardian Scalelord, returning Abzan Battle Priest to the field. Riot choice is a +1/+1 counter here, trigger Shalai for 2 damage, trigger Enduring Scalelord, trigger Shalai for 2 damage again. Your attackers now have lifelink. How much damage are you taking? Math is for blockers - or for editors, right Chief? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

It’s weird to see this effect on a mono blue card knowing only 37 cards with at least Blue as their color identity exist (excluding changelings). I’d like to believe this was a deliberate design choice, just like with Vodalian Wave-Knight. Now, can we get a reprint of Riding the Dilu Horse already? Without updating the rules text to say ‘until end of turn’ obviously

I’d question the edibility and logistics of forcing an animated Ichor Wellspring into a cake tin, but I’m sure you can ask Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar on how to make that recipe work.

I don’t know what the plan is for this product line moving forward. I would have been very surprised if they put Anointed Procession and Rooftop Storm in these decks, but it’s so much more fun to predict spicy cards! We already know that they’ll include some popular staples every time. Even though we did poorly on our predictions, I wouldn’t change a thing about how we did it.

Exxaxl: Dimir precon! Woo! Blue and black, before you attack, hold that thought while I respond on the stack. Banishing Knack and tap my zombie token to send your commander back…to your hand.

Chief: Are you done? 🤦

Exxaxl: Yes.

Finally I was surprised that Calgar appears to be bald in his art. While the "Bald Space Marine" has been a great joke for many years, his most recent model does indeed have hair.

I don’t know if this was supposed to be a card for Standard and they simply ran out of room there, and I think it’s an interesting ability to play around with, but to me boxed precons really shouldn’t have cards that don’t work in the deck they got printed in. Putting Greed, Phyrexian Reclamation or fetchlands in the precon would have prevented this card from just being a glorified Vampire Nighthawk.

Deep Gnome Terramancer seems like an instant staple that’s never going away until they release something even better. I feel this is what WOTC originally intended to do with Boreas Charger or Cartographer’s Hawk, but maybe at that point there wasn’t as high of a demand to ‘fix white’ in EDH or they just weren’t sure how far they could push white while still staying within the boundaries of the color pie.

You can’t have a Mindflayer captain without a ship! Nautiloid Ship gives you another graveyard exile effect - but this one allows you to use the cards exiled by it, making it a nice card for both its mechanic and its flavor.