For One Mana: White
We’ve finally arrived at the last part of the ‘For One Mana’ series, which I originally intended to write together with Chief. Our schedules didn’t line up this week so you’ll have to make due with just me. He’s editing and proofreading the article, so it’s safe to assume he’ll pop in here and there for some of his own feedback and opinions.
Chief: That’s right. I can do what I want.
For One Mana highlights one mana cards you could be playing but aren’t, in an attempt to make you diversify your one mana plays over grabbing the easy auto-includes you keep seeing in every game. There’s a whole bunch of cool cards beyond Esper Sentinel, Land Tax and Silence that should find their way into your decks, especially when you’re looking to steer away from running the same few cards over and over. A link to every article in the series can be found at the bottom.
Artifact Ward
Ah, Antiquities. Let’s grab the updated oracle text:
Enchant creature. Enchanted creature can’t be blocked by artifact creatures. Prevent all damage that would be dealt to enchanted creature by artifact sources. Enchanted creature can’t be the target of abilities from artifact sources.
Artifact Ward is great to play not just on your board but it can severely hinder your opponent’s Voltron plan — check out our Voltron video on YouTube by the way — by preventing them from putting any equipment on their Balan, Wandering Knight or Wyleth, Soul of Steel since the equip ability reads ‘Attach to target creature you control’. It can also turn off your opponent’s best Conjurer’s Closet target or prevent them from untapping their combo mana dork they intended to target with Staff of Domination.
On your own battlefield, if you run a Liquimetal Torque, attach Artifact Ward to your biggest creature, then turn their best blocker into an artifact until the end of turn and swing in for free, or protect your own creature fully against an incoming Wurmcoil Engine.
Porphyry Nodes
Hey look it’s a white Drop of Honey. And at the time of writing, Porphyry Nodes is 18 cents where Drop of Honey is 435 USD. I mentioned Drop of Honey in the green article in this series. Every upkeep you get, destroy the creature with the lowest power. This enchantment will just keep on going until there are no creatures left. It’s amazing to take down value pieces your opponents deliberately never do combat with, such as Llanowar Elves, Esper Sentinel, or Drannith Magistrate. Strip your opponent of that Crashing Drawbridge, Soulless Jailer, or Electrostatic Field which are outside of bolt range but might not be your preferred targets for targeted removal either.
Chief: My biggest concern with this one is that a lot of white decks have plenty of small creatures, so you might wind up having to kill a lot of your own stuff if you aren’t careful when playing it.
High Ground
Insert Star Wars meme here. If you have high toughness blockers open, or blockers with annoying keywords such as deathtouch or first strike, High Ground can make it that much harder to swing into you. It’s interesting to see this card in less than 800 decks on EDHRec while Brave the Sands shows up in over 30,000. The addition of vigilance makes it that much stronger, but ‘can block an additional creature each combat’ is such a unique effect, and in the format where most people claim to slot cards for redundancy, or still wrongfully cling to the 8x8 theory, you’d expect High Ground to show up more.
Hallow
In my eyes, the amount of red damage based wipes the past few years has gone up. It used to be you could expect a deck with red to run Blasphemous Act, but nowadays Delayed Blast Fireball, Magmaquake and Earthquake see tons of play as well. Hallow prevents the board from getting wiped all together and you gain huge amounts of life instead. Enjoy going ‘in response’ to someone’s uncounterable Banefire that was hoping to shoot you down for lethal.
Chief: It is worth mentioning that if you target a spell that becomes a permanent when it resolves, the effect of this spell will continue to apply to that permanent for the rest of the turn. This can come in handy with creatures like Orcish Bowmasters.
Visions
Visions – the spell, not the set – gives you knowledge on the top 5 cards of any player and you can choose to shuffle that player’s library after. Shuffle away opponent’s top deck tutors or reveal to the table which 5 cards the Bolas’s Citadel player will be getting next turn. On your own board, see what’s on top before committing to a Scroll Rack activation or wheeling. We’re used to seeing this effect in blue, where you get to reorganize the top n cards you look at too, make sure you don’t do that here as that isn’t part of the spell. Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird?
Festival, Moment of Silence, False Peace, Empty City Ruse
I don’t think I’ve ever put four cards that do roughly the same thing back to back in this article series. They all do similar things, but there’s intricate differences between them and how one might be useful over the other. Festival and Moment of Silence can be cast at instant speed, which obviously matters a lot. I feel these might see more play if we didn’t already have Mandate of Peace. Let’s look at their updated oracle text:
Festival: Cast this spell only during an opponent’s upkeep. Creatures can’t attack this turn.
Moment of Silence: Target player skips their next combat phase this turn.
You have to cast Festival on an opponent’s upkeep, which immediately makes it harder to cast than Moment of Silence. Your opponent still gets a combat phase, they just can’t attack. This means ‘at the beginning of combat on your turn’ effects like Greasefang, Okiba Boss or Helm of the Host will still trigger, which wouldn’t be the case if you cast Moment of Silence. In my eyes Moment of Silence is better, but it can be redirected or your opponent could have hexproof or protection, so I still thought it was worth highlighting Festival.
False Peace and Empty City Ruse have one small difference between them that could matter a whole lot. Let’s get the updated oracle text for those as well. Don’t you love old cards ?
False Peace: Target player skips all combat phases of their next turn
Empty City Ruse: Target opponent skips all combat phases of their next turn.
Note how both of these say all combat phases, which is how they differ from Festival and Moment of Silence. These cards can prevent cards like Aggravated Assault and Najeela, the Blade-Blossom from taking repeat combat steps, where Festival and Moment of Silence could not.
False Peace says ‘target player’, where Empty City Rue says ‘target opponent’. This means False Peace can be Deflecting Swatted back at yourself, whereas Empty City Ruse can only be deflected onto another opponent. Each of these cards has their own use in some way shape or form, and if you know your local pod relies on turning creatures sideways to load up on umpteen combat or attack-related triggers at which point they reach critical mass, surprise them next time.
Chief: In addition to Mandate of Peace, I’m a big fan of Orim’s Chant because of its ability to stop attacks from ever happening. If you’re really high on that effect, you might consider some of these cards as interesting alternatives.
…And scene! The For One Mana series has concluded. I might do a For Two Mana series in the future, if that’s something people are interested in. The two-mana legal in Commander card pool is nearly twice as large as the one-mana one, so I’m sure I’d find enough underused cards that could see more play.
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