Magic: The Gathering card game witnessed a change in its standard, the likes of which have rarely been seen, on Oct. 1. The new expansion, titled Scars of Mirrodin, was released rotating the Shards of Alara block out of standard and changing the face of the game as players knew it. Not only was the popular archetype Jund, which at its prime was played by no less than 40 percent of all players in every major event worldwide, thrown to the wind but the classic archetype of Blue-White Control was given even more power and has been seeing Top 8 placements in every event since Scars came out.

Now, why did Scars of Mirrodin have such a profound impact on constructed play? With the last Magic block, Zendikar, the card that broke standard was a little Planeswalker known as Jace, the Mindsculptor or Jace 2.0. He grew in popularity and price literally overnight, surpassing Baneslayer Angel and Tarmogoyf as the most expensive cards ever to see standard play. As of the writing of this article, Jace 2.0’s approximate value is $75 and that is after his price dropped. Twice. This new set has not one, not two, but three playable Planeswalkers. Koth of the Hammer, Venser, the Sojourner and the new and improved Elspeth, Elspeth Tirael. All three of these cards are currently valued at anywhere from $30 to 40. All three of them see some play in standard, but are they the culprit?

Sources say yes. Looking at Star City Games’s State Championship leader boards across the country: Red Deck Wins featuring Koth, Blue-White Control featuring Venser and Valakut Ramp seem to be the top three decks in our format. Two out of three new Planeswalkers are being used competitively and all of the Titans from Magic 2011 are being used to some degree and with much success. As if that weren’t enough, players in Legacy Opens across the country are playing, of all things, Necrotic Ooze. That’s right, the 3/4 creature for four Mana that steals activated abilities from dead creatures is seeing play in Legacy. Evan Erwin of Star City Games talks about it in his weekly show, “The Magic Show.”

Using Fauna Shaman, Survival of the Fittest and cards like Triskelion, Necrotic Ooze and Vengevine, Rion Marmulstein was able to take seventh place at the Star City Games Legacy Open in Nashville, Tenn. That is four different cards, totaling 11 out of 60 cards, from just the last two blocks being played in a format that allows you to use almost any card ever printed. Not since the Ravnica block have so many cards from the same time period been played in a single deck.

Scars of Mirrodin is so big that the only cards mentioned so far have been colored creatures and Planeswalkers. The set is 40 percent artifacts, and nearly every one of those artifacts has made it into long-established Elder-Dragon Highlander lists. For those of you unfamiliar with Elder-Dragon Highlander, also known as EDH, it is a casual format that is growing in popularity. The decks themselves consist of 100 cards. One of these cards is that deck’s General. The deck cannot have any cards that have any Mana symbols listed anywhere on the card that are different than any of the colors in the General’s Mana cost. This is true of the General him or herself. For example, cards like Rhys the Exiled cannot be used as generals. If you are using Karrthas, Tyrant of Jund as your general, you can only use cards that have Red, Black and Green Mana symbols on them. A deck can have no more than one copy of each card in them, excluding basic lands.

But what cards from Scars are seeing play in EDH? Sword of Body and Mind, which is the brother to Sword of Fire and Ice and Sword of Light and Shadow gets shoved into every deck that can conceivably run it. Mindslaver, a reprint of an old Mirrodin favorite, sees play in many EDH decks. In fact, all but the weakest of artifacts in Scars sees play in an “official” EDH deck list somewhere on the Magic: The Gathering Salvation forums. Once again, very few sets released in the past have had this much of an impact on a format. Lorwyn saw the rise of tribal EDH decks (decks based off of a common creature type). For the most part, this just means new generals and new creatures to supplement the old creatures. No new mechanics affected the format to any high degree. Speaking of mechanics…

Proliferate, Metalcraft and Infect. These three new mechanics, unique to Scars of Mirrodin, have changed the face of Magic as we know it. Poison has been around for a very long time. Many players reading the Comprehensive Rules come across poison and wonder, “Hey, what happened to that?” Well, Infect brings poison back. Only having to deal 10 damage, even in games like EDH where you start with 40 life, was never really viable. There was never a way to make it work. Now there is. Infect does one simple thing: It replaces the damage a creature does with -1/-1 counters when damaging creatures and with Poison counters when damaging players. While it differs from the old Poison mechanic, this is what makes it so strong. One single hit with a 10/1 Infect creature to a player will win the game, giving the defending player 10 poison counters right off the bat. If you hit a player with a 20/1 creature with Poisonous 2, it would deal 20 damage to that player but only give them two Poison counters.

No tournaments have seen any very successful Infect decks but this is probably because there is so little support for Infect right now. There are only 15 Infect creatures so far, but we’ll likely be seeing more with the next set in the Scars Block, Mirrodin Besieged. In the mean time, Blue-White Control and Valakut Ramp will likely be butting heads for most-played in standard.

By: Chris Pilcher

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