As has become a rather frequent occurrence, the instants and sorceries inMagic: The Gathering’s Phyrexia: All Will Be One set feature a new cycle of X cost cards in each color. While these are the most highly talked about and anticipated sorceries in the set, All Will Be One does also introduce a handful of notable common and uncommon rarity instants and sorceries worth playing.
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Some of these lesser rarity instants and sorceries are flying under the radar right now, but you may bet they’ll rear their heads once All Will Be One goes constructed legal. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the impact of these cards in competitive constructed formats like Standard, as well as the casual favorite format of Commander.
9Bring The Ending
This is a useful new trick for decks interested inpoison counters,while also potentially being a playable counterspell for Standard. After all, many decks make use of the similar spell Make Disappear and that counterspell only hits creatures.
That being said, this is likely a simple “counter target spell unless opponent pays 2” for most Standard decks interested in playing it. It’s difficult to imagine that poison counters will get enough support in this single set to become a truly viable threat. Deck archetypes almost always need multiple sets of support to become competitive.
8Expand The Sphere
Ramp (fast mana) decks haven’t really had a place in Standard since the printing of Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. However, that may all be changing thanks to this uncommon. Expand the Sphere looks like a poor man’s Explosive Vegetation at first glance, but it has some worthwhile upsides when the two cards are more closely compared.
Firstly, Expand the Sphere doesn’t restrict you to finding simple basic lands. This means it works great for ramping multicolored decks that might include as many as four colors. Secondly, in the highly unlikely occurrence that Expand the Sphere misses two lands, you’re still rewarded with proliferate triggers.
It’s worth mentioning as well that this card ramps perfectly into a turn five Atraxa, Grand Unifier. How’s that for a fast mana payoff?
7White Sun’s Twilight
This card may not end up seeing much play at all in Constructed due to the existence of Farewell. Nonetheless, it’s a really cool card for Commander decks that acts both asa board wipeand a game ending threat at the same time. Usually, board wipes present players running them with the problem of failing to retake initiative on the board.
Since a board wipe hits your own creatures as well and usually takes all of your available mana, you’re forced to pass and allow opponents to repopulate the board before you can take action. White Sun’s Twilight not only solves this problem, it gives you creatures that will end the game in the next couple of turns if left unanswered.
6Blue Sun’s Twilight
Mind control effects like this are always powerful, as they are inherently a two-for-one trade. Not only do you ‘remove’ your opponent’s creature, you also present it as a new threat under your control.
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As a result, the potential of Blue Sun’s Twilight to turn this effect into a 3-for-1 trade thanks to the added token is very powerful indeed. Take into account that you’re usually stealing your opponent’s most powerful creature, and this effect looks even better. Unfortunately, this card doesn’t make you immune to the legendary rule, so watch out for targeting legendary creatures with this.
5Green Sun’s Twilight
This is a great card for searching through a library chock-full of powerful creatures. Not only does it allow you to put one of those creatures directly on the battlefield when cast for enough mana, you also get the benefit of putting a land onto the battlefield.
That might not seem like a great bonus at first glance, but there’s no shortage of powerful land drops to find with this spell. Examples include Castle Locthwain, manlands, or even a card like Dark Depths for decks capable of removing its counters.
4Black Sun’s Twilight
Here’s agreat removal spellthat also doubles as a threat when cast for enough mana. Black Sun’s Twilight allows you to return any creature card of your choice from your graveyard, as long as you spend enough mana on this removal spell to equal the creature’s mana cost.
This is an expensive cost for a removal spell. While that’s typically not a good thing, decks that rely on keeping specific creatures in play can get a ton of use out of Black Sun’s Twilight. For instance, Greasefang, Okiba Boss builds certainly wouldn’t mind one more way to put their key legendary creature back into play. Especially when it’s a method that doubles as removal.
3Red Sun’s Twilight
While this might seem like a rather niche card at first glance, Commander players know better. Artifacts like Sol Ring are abundant across the Commander format, making it inevitable that Red Sun’s Twilight will have no shortage of proper targets in your average Commander battle.
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Furthermore, the artifacts you’re destroying in Commander are often some very powerful cards. Gaining access to token copies of them with haste, even if only for a single turn, is a very powerful and potentially game winning effect. And all of this goes without mentioning that you can slot Red Sun’s Twilight into a deck that uses it as a combo piece.
2Tyvar’s Stand
Hexproof and indestructible are some of the most powerful keywords in all of Magic. Now, there’s an instant that provides a creature with both for the incredibly low cost of a single green mana.
More than that, this instant can be pumped with mana to provide its target with a huge power and toughness boon. There’s no doubt that this instant will see play in Mono-Green Standard decks that are sure to precipitate out of the insane curve of green threats printed in All Will Be One.
In case you’re curious, these threats include Evolving Adaptive, Bloated Contaminator, Evolved Spinoderm, and Nissa, Ascended Animist.
1Sheoldred’s Edict
Last but not least, Sheoldred’s Edict is sacrifice removal that actually appears to be good. In most cases, sacrifice effects fall to the wayside of other removal due to the fact they allow your opponent to choose which creature is sacrificed.
However, this Edict comes with three modes that are likely to prevent your opponent from having any choice in the matter. Creature tokens are commonly one of the biggest pitfalls of edict effects, so it’s especially important that Sheoldred’s Edict most common mode get around creature tokens.
On top of that, though: if a single creature token is the problem, this edict has a mode for that too. Perhaps most importantly, this instant spell is the perfect answer to often difficult to remove planeswalkers, especially when they enter the battlefield with a ton of loyalty counters. With the printing of this instant, it’s hard to argue that Sheoldred didn’t succeed in unleashing the apocalypse. Prepare yourselves for compleation: All will be one.
