This card was obviously designed with Origins'
Thopter mini-tribe at the front of the
designer's mind, but I think it's worth pausing
to appreciate how it works with other artifact
archetypes as well. Darksteel Colossus, Inkwell
Leviathan, and Arcbound Ravager really don't
need any help, but imagine this creature in,
say, an aggressive deck for a casual setting
that makes use of Salvage Slasher or Lurebound
Scarecrow. It's easy to overlook effects like
this until some jokester shows up with a Wall
tribal deck.
Today's card of the day is Whirler Rogue which
is a four mana 2/2 Blue that puts two 1/1 Flying
tokens into play and can tap two artifacts to
make a creature unblockable until end of turn.
This is fairly efficient at four mana and the
effect can be used both immediately and possibly
more than once with other artifacts. It
does benefit from additional low cost artifact
production and something worthwhile to make
unblockable, with Juggernaut being one possible
choice in Standard.
Overall a solid card that can support a deck,
but may see some competitive play with a
Blue/Artifact theme built around it.
In Limited this offers three creatures for four
mana and a notable win condition that can bypass
nearly any stalemate scenario which gives it a
high value when designing in Sealed. In a
weak rare pack this should be picked first in
Booster even with the double Blue mana cost and
really has nothing holding it back from being at
least a minor threat at any stage of the game.
With anything in the middle range of power this
forces the opponent far into the defensive as
they have to deal with either the Whirler, the
unblockable target, or the artifacts being
tapped. While this does make the situation
easy to disrupt there is little cost in
maintaining it and rebuilding is possible even
in the format.
So, continuing with the U/R thopter theme, an
interesting little creature that in a way gives
you 4 power for 4 mana, plus the tap 2 artifacts
to give unblockable to a creature. I've seen a
lot more wasteful ways to grant an unblockable
hit, so there's definite value here. Gives new
life to howling mine. That's pretty killer in my
book. play 2 mines, tap both each turn to give
something hefty unblockable and draw 3 cards a
turn. yeah, I like this card.
