V.A.T.S. – Fallout
Date Reviewed: March 11, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I’ve spent more time on the Elder Scrolls series than on Fallout, but I recognize the high points – and I’ve learned a lot about other elements of it from the cards, which is a testament to how much care went into their design. Aside from its clever design, V.A.T.S. is a spell that will play a lot, lot better than it reads. For every game where it feels oddly specific, there’s another where it annihilates a swarm of tokens with the same name for much less mana and time than it took to produce them. It would be the most hilarious answer to Splinter Twin if that card weren’t banned; I should point out that the very similar Kiki-Jiki plus Restoration Angel combo sees play in casual, and you may find it helpful there too. There are also certain classes or even kindreds of cards that tend to make strange clusters at various points on the toughness curve: mana producers at one toughness, knights at two, beasts at four, among others. Even when it’s “only” a Murder with split second, that’s sometimes what you need to win the game. I really like this card.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
One of the neat things about the Fallout crossover is that several cards are actually pretty clever references to the game mechanics of the series, particularly the tranche of “modern” Fallout titles handled by Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment. The games, while heavily action-heavy shooters, have plenty of RPG elements to hearken back to the series’ roots and ways to emphasize those, and one of those is V.A.T.S., or Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System; it’s a mechanic that lets you pause the combat, aim for limbs, and go wild.
V.A.T.S. here, in Magic, does a pretty decent job. Pause the action, aim at things, and go wild. Split second carries a lot of weight in making this function, since you won’t (usually) have to worry about your clean kill getting thwarted. While I wouldn’t normally count on V.A.T.S. to kill more than one thing at a time, think of this as a near-guaranteed kill with the potential to go wider in the right board. As with many things, timing is key, and you can reap a lot of value if your aim is true.
I’m not too high on this being a Legacy force…that said, it is a kill spell that dodges a lot of the ways kill spells get stymied, and morph is quite sparing in Legacy. Four mana is definitely not great, but it’s four mana to almost always kill something with the upside of killing more things on occasion. That, to me, is more than worth the price of admission.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4 (can spread the love out nicely)
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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