It's very hard for me to pick one era of Magic
to call my favorite. Every era has had things I
loved, things I liked less, and things I didn't
appreciate until years later. Eternal Masters is
coming soon, and perhaps you will find yourself
saying the same thing when it comes out. Even
repackaged and facelifted and given modern card
frames, Magic's history is rich and still holds
as much wonder and mystery as it did when
Alliances was the current set.
Back then, I knew somebody who was fortunate
enough to open Force of Will in a booster. I
know I find myself saying this a lot when we
discuss old cards, but we didn't really know
what it was for. Oh, we certainly knew what
counterspells were for, but it didn't feel
imperative to be able to do that effect when you
were tapped low; it didn't feel that imperative
on any of Alliance's pitch cards, come to think
of it. This was before we knew what tempo meant,
and even before Cadaverous Bloom opened people's
eyes to the concept of a combo whose pieces must
be disrupted at all costs.
As the number of cards increased, the number of
such combos increased; and thus Force of Will
has held up especially well over time, even if
it's slightly less ubiquitous in eternal
settings than it used to be. It can be rough for
control decks to have to exile another card, and
although most such decks hope to make up for it
by using cards like Thirst for Knowledge and
Ancestral Vision, it's easy to cost yourself a
game by exiling something you could have used on
the next turn. As a subtle skill tester and an
important part of Magic's history, I'm glad to
see it getting a new version in Eternal Masters.
Historically, this has been almost universally
recognized as the most abusively powerful
counterspell-- even more so that the original
Counterspell, despite that one not even getting
reprinted anymore. Why? Very simply, this can be
used to counter a spell even when you have no
mana remaining. The hardest thing about playing
countermagic is finding the right opportunities,
knowing what cards are worth spending a counter
on, and when it's safe to tap out in order to
play your own win conditions. FoW takes all the
guesswork out of that, because it's always safe
to tap out with one of these in hand. Add to
that the fact that you can counter your
opponent's turn one spell, before you've even
played your first land and you have a major
force to be reckoned with in the Turn One Nuke
metagame of Vintage and Legacy. In less
cutthroat formats, the fact that FoW doesn't
even require you to have access to blue mana
means that you could in theory splash it into a
nonblue deck along with appropriate hybrid
cards-- although any format that could support
such an offkey strategy is almost surely
popluated by players who don't want to spend the
money for Force of Wills (Forces of Will?) and
operate under a gentleman's agreement not to.
