Name:
Critical Blade
Type:
Spell
Civilization:
Darkness
Cost:
2
Effect#1:
Shield trigger (When this spell is put into
your hand from your shield szone, you may cast it
immediately at no cost.)
Effect#2:
Destroy one of your opponent’s creatures that has
“blocker”.
Mana#:
1
Set:
Evo Crushinators of Doom
Card#:
#25/55
Rarity:
Common
Attributes:
It’s a Darkness Spell card. Dark is fairly easy
to work into a deck. Only cost 2 mana, so it
doesn’t need to do a whole lot to compensate for
that. It’s a shield trigger, which is excellent
(and means the effect needs be even less good to
still be worth the mana). This card is shaping up
quite well indeed.
Abilities:
So, what does it actually do? It nukes a
blocker. So probably 1/3-1/2 of the monsters you
face are viable targets for it. Pretty snazzy.
Uses/Combinations:
If Darkness is your thing, chances are you are
running this. I rank it with Death Smoke right
now, at least for Darkness, which seems to lean
towards Control and “Suicide” Beatdown decks.
Blockers ruin both of those decks. Getting rid of
them for cheap is great. Its low cost also means
that you can snipe most early blockers, allowing
your early attackers (Darkness and Fire both have
single mana monsters that can attack). Add to it
that Darkness now has a cheap blocker (for one
mana, who cares if it self-destructs when it
attacks a player), and you see that blockers,
while not important to winning, are important to
not losing.
Ratings
Newbie Format:
4/5-Still haven’t seen a “casual” format really
come out for this yet, so still not dropping this
category. Anyway, here it seems a deck is often
mostly blockers, or nearly no blockers. If it’s
no blockers, you are sitting pretty anyway, and
can just use this as mana to fuel Death Smoke and
Terror Pit. If it’s mostly Blockers, then this
gives you a serious edge.
Tournament:
4/5-As is common with good cards, the score stays
the same here, because now people know what they
are doing, so if you see a blocker, it’s usually
important for setting up.
Limited:
4.5/5-Blockers are better here-stalling an
opponent out is feasible. It is possible to lack
any general monster removal, and a single big
blocker might out-do everything you got.
Summary
A specialist, but in a growing field.
