Eventide: Green-Blue

As of yesterday's post, six more cards have already been spoiled, one of which is red-white. So before getting into today's discussion, I'd like to mention the newest red-white card briefly.

This card reinforces what I mentioned in the last post: red-white's emphasis on first and double strike makes power boosts especially useful for them. Well, this new card is an enchantment that does two (completely separate) things. First of all, when it comes into play, you can pay X and put that many 1/1 red-white Goblin Soldier tokens into play. This gives you more dudes that can get pumped by Balefire Liege, or just chump block. But the second ability of the enchantment is amazing: pay r/w, and ALL red and/or white creatures you control get first strike until end of turn. For simply one mana a turn, most or all of your guys get first strike; and if you have stuff to pump their power, like Balefire Liege and Nobilis of War, you could have all your attacking guys be 5/3 first strikers, or bigger. Man I love red-white.

Anyway, today I'll be talking about the green-blue cards in Eventide. Green-blue is another color combination I especially like, and the one that I feel reflects my personality the best. (I might truthfully be closer to white-blue in some ways, but I prefer to distance myself from white-blue's cold and controlling nature.) Anyway, on to the cards!

Green-blue is hard to place flavor-wise. In Dissension, they were biologists and their unusual creations, but in Eventide, they're just various weird dudes such as Selkies. Some of them are cool, though. Their Avatar is basically Aeon Chronicler, but with the card drawing while it's in play. That is, its power and toughness are equal to the number of cards in your hand, and it lets you draw an extra card each draw step. This means that you have to be careful of what you play to avoid making it too small, but even if its potential for combat isn't fully utilized, its card drawing is still extremely powerful. That said, I would certainly be happy to get this guy in a draft or a sealed deck and would probably try to play him if I could.

His corresponding aura isn't especially synergistic with him, but it is a great aura for evasion. It gives vigilance for green (somewhat off-color) and flying for blue, which can be great for any meaty dude. Or, a dude like Cold-Eyed Selkie, which is a green-blue Eventide creature that lets you draw a card for each point of combat damage it deals to players. It's a 1/1 with Islandwalk for 3 mana, but if you give it +2/+2, flying, and vigilance, it can fairly reliably get 3 points of damage through AND let you draw THREE CARDS whenever it connects. This, in turn, pumps your Overbeing (the Avatar), allowing for significant quantities of ownage. So although the aura doesn't directly synergize with the Overbeing, it certainly can do so indirectly.

The green-blue Liege is pretty awesome too. It's a 4/4 for 5 mana, which on its own isn't even that bad, but it pumps all your other blue and green creatures, and allows you to UNTAP ALL OF THEM DURING OTHER PLAYERS' UPKEEPS. This means, essentially, that all your green and blue creatures have vigilance. Furthermore, they can use tap abilities twice as often. There aren't many green-blue creatures in Eventide with tap abilities (in fact, there aren't any, yet), but there are certainly green ones and blue ones, as well as those in Shadowmoor (such as Presence of Gond). Even so, just a simple equivalent of vigilance is great, especially for colors that don't usually have it. A tiny bit redundant with the aura, but it's not that big of a deal.

Now that I've covered the three main cycles (there are others - the Hedge-Mages, the Hatchlings, the Mimics - but they're not nearly as unique or interesting), there are several other green-blue cards that are definitely worth talking about. One extremely cool one is Gilder Bairn. He lets the untap symbol creep into green; by paying 2 and a green or blue and untapping him, he basically doubles the number of every counter of every type on target permanent. That's ANY type of counter: +1/+1, -1/-1, charge, age...what have you. He can make a Goblin Bomb go off many turns sooner; he can make your Solarion ridiculously huge; he can chip away at anyone with a -1/-1 counter; basically, he is super great. There's a green card in Eventide that would be ridiculously powerful with him, but it has shroud, so he can't target it. But that's for later.

Anyway, since there are plenty of -1/-1 counters in the Shadowmoor block, this guy will probably be used mostly for accelerated removal in Limited, but his applications in other formats will surely see much wider use. The number of possible hilarious combo decks with Gilder Bairn is quite large indeed. But enough about this guy. He's cool and all, but not as cool as Spitting Image.

Spitting Image does something green-blue did a lot in Dissension: make dudes into copies of dudes. However, this one doesn't just reshape other dudes, it CLONES them. Spitting Image is a green-blue sorcery for 6 mana (2 colored) that allows you to put a token into play that's a copy of target creature. This has many applications. You can clone dudes that are super cool to make them even cooler, like Primalcrux. You can kill any legendary creature. You can reuse a guy with a neat comes-into-play ability. There are lots of things. But best of all: IT HAS RETRACE. For the uninitiated, retrace allows you to replay the card from your graveyard by discarding a land in addition to paying its mana cost. By the time you have 6 mana, it's reasonable to imagine you might have some extra land in your hand that you don't especially need; so what better use than to make ANOTHER Primalcrux? Retrace isn't one of my favorite mechanics, but on expensive cards, it is nothing to sneeze at.

There's also a card that does something recognizably green-blue: a 3-mana instant that turns a dude into a 1/1 Snake with no abilities until end of turn, and you draw a card. Always useful, especially with the proliferation of abilities in Eventide, and rather dangerous ones at that. There's also a card that gives all your guys flying and grounds all the opponent's guys; a 2/1 faerie that doesn't fly but can become a 3/4 flying as long as your enemy has a creature with flying; a 6-mana enchantment that puts tokens into play whenever you play a green or blue spell; and one more card that has yet to be spoiled.

So in conclusion, although green-blue isn't especially aggressive or focused, it has some reasonably good evasion, some neat combat tricks, and a slew of unusual or surprising abilities that will trip up your opponents at worst, and overwhelm them at best. I can say that I am proud to have these guys representing me and my personality, and I would be equally proud to draft them. There are enough good and synergistic green cards in Eventide (like Primalcrux, and also Primalcrux, oh and did I mention Primalcrux?) that I might even recommend using many of these green-blue cards in a mono-green deck. For Primalcrux. Man that guy is awesome. But I'll talk about him another time. That's all for now!