Buried Goods

Buried Goods – Into NekroZach’s Crypt Part 1

June 25, 2020 by Zachary McDermott

The Grave Robber’s Work is Never Done.

Hello, and welcome to Buried Goods, a biweekly article series focused on taking cards that you might not be familiar with and bringing them to your attention!

With so many different websites to use when building decks, it is often easy to go with the cards these websites suggest. The reason why this is easy, is because websites like EDHrec.com uses a large sampling of data to gather information on what cards are being used and what builds they are being used in. This means that if you are wanting to build a deck you have the advantage to use the largest groupthink possible to help brew said deck. This is a perfectly fine way to brew and build your commander decks, but sometimes in doing this we lose out on cards that could be great for a build and not be on there. In these articles it is my goal to take the random card database I have in my head from years of playing and maybe help you to add to your lists.

The first card I want to talk about in this series is:

Terrain Generator is one of my favorite non basic land cards in the game. What I believe makes this land so good, is the ability to ramp without being in green. Terrain Generator does require you to have a land in hand to be able to really ramp with it, but is that really such a tough objective to meet? In most commander decks we are running a minimum of 35 lands and a maximum of 40, that means the chances of having an extra land in hand to use this ability will be high. Something else Terrain Generator has going for it, is the ability to play the land from our hand at instant speed. Picture this, maybe you are playing a mono blue commander deck and have Roil Elemental out on the field. Your opponent plays something big and hasty that can knock you out of the game, by playing Terrain Generator you can put a land into play from your hand and trigger Roil Elemental’s ability. Thus, stealing the creature from our opponent! In that scenario Terrain Generator was more of an enabler, but it is tricky uses for the card that make it so good!

Next card on the list:

This is by far one of my favorite forms of removal in the game, such a cool break in the color pie. Ashes to Ashes does something in black we really have not seen much of until recently, and that is exile creatures. The two cards I feel that Ashes to Ashes best compares to are Eat to Extinction and Vraska’s Contempt. Both cards allow you to exile a creature or planeswalker at instant speed with better upsides, gaining 2 life or putting the top card of your library in the graveyard. What is either really doing for us though? Yes, being able to remove a pesky creature or walker at instant speed is very nice, but in my experience if a creature or walker is scary enough it is almost always dealt with immediately. Ashes to Ashes can come out a turn earlier, being only 3 mana to cast as opposed to the 4 mana spells and Ashes will hit two creatures for 5 life loss instead of the one target that we see on the other two cards. I have found in my games hitting the second creature is almost always way more important then the option of hitting a walker instead.

The third buried good to be excavated is:

Riftsweeper, is a 2/2 creature with relevant creature types and has a unique ability. As far as I know there is only one other card in Magic that deals with the exile zone, like Riftsweeper does making this card something special. There have been games when playing my Karador deck that three of my combo pieces got exiled and I was able to play and recur Riftsweeper enough times to put back all my pieces back into my deck. Having the ability to return a card from exile back into your library on a creature is huge! With the right kind of setup (like my Karador deck) if anything gets exiled that is important you can just get it right back!

The last card on the list for today is:

Viashino Heretic is another sneaky card I love to play. Stat wise this card feels like a decent investment a 1/3 for 3 is not the worse rate by far but being able to repeatedly destroy your opponents’ artifacts and do damage to them for it is even better. Viashino Heretic is another card that on its’ own is good but paired around the right synergies it becomes nuts. Playing something like a Mycosynth Lattice along side our little heretic turns everything into an artifact that you can blow up and deal damage to our opponents equal to the cards cmc, probably the most fair thing you can do with a lattice to be honest.

It’s Up all Night and Sleep all Day

This ends our first dive into the crypts of NekroZach, I hope you enjoyed your goods! If you did leave me a comment below and let me know. If there was a card you want to see or think I do not know about, tweet at me @NekroZach. As always thank you for your time, I’ll see you next time!