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Pojo's Magic The Gathering Card of the Day


Image from Wizards.com

Bitter Ordeal
Future Sight


Reviewed May 15, 2007

Constructed: 2.50
Casual: 2.13
Limited: 2.13

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale
1 being the worst.  3 ... average.  
5 is the highest rating

Click here to see all our 
Card of the Day Reviews 


Jeff Zandi


  7 Time Pro Tour Veteran

Player since 1994

Level II DCI Judge

Member of the Texas Guildmages

Bitter Ordeal

This card offers you the capability to reach into your opponent’s deck and literally rip their heart out. Unfortunately, the ability to pull more than one card from their deck depends on something you may not have very much control over, the number of permanents that have gone to your graveyard this turn. It’s hard to imagine that you will have Bitter Ordeal in hand, that you will hold Bitter Ordeal until the turn when your board has been severely thrashed by your opponent. That seems like the time you would LEAST be interested in playing a card like Bitter Ordeal, you would probably be more concerned with, oh, I don’t know, rebuilding your board position or destroying your opponent’s permanents. If this card’s gravestorm ability doesn’t matter, and I don’t think it does, then Bitter Ordeal is basically a bad card. Paying three mana to remove one card from the opponent’s deck is instant card disadvantage for you. I guess you bring a card like this from the sideboard to rip a card out of your opponent’s deck that you have no other good answer for. Yuck.

CONSTRUCTED: 2.5
CASUAL: 2.5
LIMITED: 2.5


DeQuan
Watson

* Game Store Owner

Bitter Ordeal - Tuesday
 
This is an interesting card.  You could potentially remove 6-8 cards at one time from an opponent's deck.  Usually, it's going to stop just one card though.  I'm not sure it's over the top, but I wouldn't be surprised as all if a deck was created to utilize its power.  Even in limited, you can use it to remove your opponent's one bomb that they opened.
 
Constructed: 2.5
Casual: 2
Limited: 2

BMoor

Bitter Ordeal
Keep in mind, Gravestorm counts PERMANENTS put into a graveyard. Not cards from anywhere else other than in play, but any type of permanent and it doesn't matter who control them. You could set up a pretty devastating turn by playing Wildfire, Damnation, or Bust (of Boom//Bust) followed by this, and then remove all the relevant cards from your opponent's deck. Or you could just send plenty of creatures into combat, or send Nantuko Husk on a feeding frenzy. There's plenty of ways to up the Gravestorm count, but the trick is making sure you remove all the right cards from your opponent's library.
Constructed- 3
Casual- 4
Limited- 2.5

-David N

Tuesday - Bitter Ordeal

Wow...the new version of storm. This card is great to play right after a mass removal such as wrath or god or damnation. After all the creatures hit play this card to stop any combo. This may have the ability to take out virtually all of the combo pieces in one swoop. Great sideboard against any combo decks. Might see some maindeck just to see what the opponent is playing.

Constructed: 4
Casual: 3
Limited: 4
David Fanany Bitter Ordeal
Even though Bitter Ordeal looks like the new Cranial Extraction, it's really much more of a Johnny card than that. You need a Gravestorm count of at least two to make it comparable with Cranial Extraction in terms of the average number of cards removed. There are ways to do that - Smallpox and Damnation spring to mind - but they're all a little unreliable, and the ways to make the Ordeal large enough to remove all the lands from someone's library are also frightfully expensive. If you cast something like Obliterate, you don't need Bitter Ordeal to win the game. In multiplayer games, enough weird stuff happens that the Ordeal's Gravestorm count will often be high, but you still often have better options. I could see this card working okay in limited, especially after a particularly brutal combat step.

Constructed: 1/5
Casual: 1/5
Limited: 2/5
The Missing Linc
Bitter Ordeal
 
I know this card will be made useful by someone but it's competive play may be limited.  For 3 mana and a sorcery, there is little way you could get this to work with less than 5 mana available and that may only allow you a smallpox (a good combo) or a pyroclasm (when the conditions are right).  Later in the game this could be real fun.  I could see this used with Armageddon or the Bust side of Boom/Bust.  All lands gone and I think I will go into your deck and remove the rest...game over.
 
Constructed: 3 (only because the potential is there)
Casual: 2
Limited: 2
Necro
nomikron
Bitter Ordeal:

This is like a jester's cap, but colored and requires cards to have gone to a graveyard to be really effective. If this were done after a wrath, you could cripple the opposing deck. However, if you're at 7 mana, and playing control, you should already be winning.

Constructed: 2/5
Casual: 1/5
Limited: 1/5
PsychoAnime Gravestorm can be used like Brain Freeze as a win condition that doesn't get
owned by Gaea's Blessing or it can be used to remove some cards from combo.

The first option requires an infinite storm count. I don't recall any decent
way to achieve this in Standard right now so yeah... it's not that great.

The second option requires some setting up if your deck isn't made to abuse
the gravestorm mechanic. You'll probably need 4 copies of this to mess up
combo decks badly and that can be difficult in a normal deck, with the
easiest way coming into mind right now being this following Damnation. This
still requires 7 mana though.

It's not completely junk, but not really playable either.

Constructed: 2/5
Casual: 2/5
Limited: 1/5, doesn't do much here

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