Submarine Project

Type: Spell

Civilization: Water

Mana Cost: Three (3)

Rules Text:

• Shield trigger (When this spell is put into your hand from your shield zone, you may cast it immediately for no cost.)
• Look at the top 4 cards of your deck. Put one of them into your hand, and put the rest on the bottom of your deck in any order.

Flavor Text:

"Ballom's death changes nothing. Keep digging to the core." -Emperor Maroll

Rarity: Uncommon

Set: Fatal Brood of Infinite Ruin

When picking the cards to review this week, Submarine Project caught my eye because it is sort of a mini-Crystal Memory. These two cards are strikingly similar, both being a search/draw spell from the Water civilization. Project and Memory also share the Shield trigger ability and give you card advantage by the quality of the card, not the quantity. In contrast, Project comes with a cheaper price tag but the search parameters are restricted to the first four cards of your deck. A couple of the other new cards from Fatal Brood like Kelp Candle and Zeppelin Crawler have identical search abilities as well.

So now that you have a good idea what Submarine Project does, is it good enough to make the cut? I’m still undecided because Water already has strong, established draw cards like Aqua Hulcus and Energy Stream at the three drop. Those cards offer numerical advantages over Submarine Project so they have a leg up there. However, Project does have the Shield trigger advantage as an added bonus and can help you more in a pinch. Say the duel boils down to a sticky situation where you must draw a Speed attacker to win. Project gives you 4 shots to pull one of the top of the deck whereas with Stream you only get two. This is the ideal situation where Project is at its best. Generally speaking though, Stream earns a slight not in my book. Maybe try out 2 or 3 copies of each and see what works best in your metagame.

Limited: 4/5

Abilities like draw power, creature kill, and hand destruction are hard to come by in draft, so you should always deck cards like Submarine Project when the opportunity comes. Just keep in mind that dropping a creature to gain field presence is probably more important early game.

Constructed: 3/5

I see Submarine Project as a card with loads of potential that probably won’t make it past the initial testing stages in most decks. It's effect putting the remaining cards on the bottom could really hurt if they were ones you needed. On the flip side, stashing away three straight dead draws could really help. We’ll see what happens.

Steven Cantrell

Team Galactic Quest

Smcman7@aol.com