In any Morph-heavy deck, this makes an excellent
Turn Two play. That's probably exactly why it
costs two mana. Being able to repeatedly thin
your deck and smooth out your land draws is a
useful effect, even if it doesn't actually
accelerate your mana.
The built-in pump effect when unmorphing is very
nice too. Unmorphing itself is usually a combat
trick, as your opponent can never be sure what's
under there or how much it costs to unmorph, and
most Morph creatures are bigger than 2/2 anyway.
This guarantees that whatever's under the shell
will be bigger than the shell itself, at least
for the turn on which it emerges.
I have to say, this card's first ability feels
rather random to me. I suppose it helps you get
the mana you might need for three-color morph
costs, but that seems a little boring. Still,
it's a green enchantment that lets you draw
cards repeatedly - Greater Good feels like it
was in Standard an awfully long time ago,
doesn't it?
Welcome back readers I have returned from an
extended hiatus being trapped in a cage studying
to become the best magic player of all to bring
you Trail of Mystery! Trail of Mystery is an
interesting build around me enchantment that
focuses on pumping your flipped morph creatures
and having rampant growth in enchantment form
even for morph creatures only is kind of sick.
In standard I don’t foresee a deck running
enough morphs to justify this card and it does
nothing before you cast another spell or pay to
flip something face up making it far too slow in
my estimation. In other competitive formats this
card also will not be built around maybe some
weird combo deck to generate a lot of mana. In
casual and multiplayer this card requires you to
build around morphs but there is a ton that have
been printed over the years so it’s definitely
doable and the reward of more and more mana ramp
can be quite powerful. In limited its kind of
bad unless your heavy into the morph theme with
the other card Secret Plans to make it worth it.
Overall a really fun and somewhat powerful
casual card.
Today's card of the day is Trail of Mystery
which is a two mana Green enchantment that
allows you to search your library for a basic
land card and add it to your hand whenever a
face down creature enters the battlefield under
your control and whenever you turn a creature
you control face up it gets +2/+2 until end of
turn. This is purely support for the Morph
effect and mediocre support at that, which will
keep it from seeing much play outside of very
specific theme decks in Casual.
In Limited this is a small potential source of
acceleration or deck thinning and possibly a
minimal combat boost for specific creatures in a
particular scenario. There is no reason to
draft this early in Booster even if running
Morph and it can be safely passed around the
table at least once. In Sealed this is a
desperate inclusion if running Morph and you
absolutely need to fill in Green slots to reduce
splash options, though an extra land or working
with the three color nature of the set is likely
preferable.
When there's a big theme in a set, we often find
a card or two that is completely built around
it. It's completely useless without the
mechanic, and encourages you to put as much of
that particular mechanic in your deck as
possible to exploit the one card. In this case,
Trail of Mystery is the card, and morph is the
mechanic.
If you have a lot of morph creatures, this will
help you dig the lands out of your deck, giving
you the right mana to flip them over and pump
them up. But are there enough good morph
creatures to make this playable? Is a deck that
has mostly 2/2 creatures for 3 mana that can
become bigger for an additional cost good enough
to warrant building around this card?
It's a cool ability, and I'm somewhat tempted to
try out an all morph deck to see how good this
really is, but my first thought is that it's a
trap to try to make you build a deck that's just
too slow.
In limited, if you pull this early, you might be
able to snag a bunch of good morphs and make
this work, but then again, you have to fight the
temptation to grab poor morph creatures over
overall better cards.
