The Vascular Awareness: Better Than All pt 2: The Obscure

Last week we looked at the 5 best cards in the format one for each color, this week will be similar but we will be looking at hidden gems.  Again there will 5 but they won't be separated by color.  These will range from the "why is nobody playing this?" to cards that you simply should be looking to fit in as meta calls.

Sometimes your opponent has a guy that isn't worth using a path on but has to go; think birds of Paradise.  This card not only deals with the issue but makes them draw it in the most awkward spot.  With pod decks on the uptick this gets a lot better and there is no way that every non-red control deck only wants 4 paths.  Some of them are almost certainly misbuilt and this is the reason why.

Two cards??? Yeah, I'm only counting this as one entry.  These two serve as a solid way for combo decks to protect themselves against hand disruption.  Hand disruption hasn't been too big lately but it is bound to have an upswing and these cards will let your storm deck or whatever crazy combo brew you have be ready.

Maybe this is cheating a little bit, considering Dave wrote about a deck with this card on this very blog.  However, with a serious downturn in Jund that means a serious downturn in Abrupt Decay.  Which was this card's worst enemy.  This card fits well in any control shell or tempo shell and acts as a serious lock piece which can often be needed for certain matchups.  I wouldn't be surprised to see this card creep into the higher tables in PTQ season or at GP Minneapolis.

I realize the majority of people reading this already know about this card, but recently I've had to tell so many people that this is one of the very best ways to win the fight against UWR control that I figured I'd make the PSA here.  This card isn't fair, Counterspell is absurd, and against UWR this is Counterspell at literally half the cost. 

Kikipod, Melira Pod, Twin and fetchlands are all among the list of things that get hit hard by this card.  If you are running a deck that can skirt of fetchlands, especially a monocolored deck, you may want to either sideboard, or in extreme cases, maindeck this card.  Hate cards this powerful should never fall off your radar and for the modern format it seems this one has been nearly forgotten.

That's going to do us for this week, hopefully next week I'll have a tournament report for you guys, I'll try to get the article done on time, but these past few weeks have been leading into graduation so I appreciate the patience and your continued support.  Feel free to shout out ideas for content you'd like to see and I'll try to make it happen!

Thanks again guys! Mason out.