Card of the Day: Path to Exile

So I really didn't get off to a very good start with my daily "Card of the Day" posts but I'm going to attempt to keep up with it better in the future. Anyway, on to today's card: Path to Exile! Arguably one of the most powerful cards in the current standard. For just one white mana you can permanently remove a creature from the game. At instand speed!! In a standard dominated by decks running white as one of their colors I just have one word for this card: Overpowered! While there is the inevitable drawback of letting the creature's controller fetch a basic land and put it into play it is still a rediculously strong card. You can actually use this to your advantage with a card like Knight of the White Orchid. Aggro and control decks are actually having their mana bases altered to include basic lands just because of this one card!

Strengths:

-Low mana cost (W)

-Instant speed

-Creature is removed from game

-White card in a standard dominated by decks running white spells

-Highly Abusable

Weaknesses:

-Gives land advantage to opponent

-Can only run 4 of them per deck :P

Ways to Abuse:

-Knight of the White Orchid: Path their creature and then play the Knight nulling the land advantage of your opponent!

-Tidehollow Sculler: Path your Sculler as it comes into play. It's leaves play ability goes on the stack above its comes into play ability before you even look at your opponents hand. This allows you to permanently remove a non-land card in your opponents hand from the game and get land advantage at the same time!

-Reveillark: Path your own Lark to get it to leave play quickly and gain land advantage at the same time!

(Picture Courtesy of Wizards of the Coast inc.)

EDH-ification

EDH or Elder Dragon Highlander is a form of constructed magic that my play group is getting involved in and its been pretty fun to think of deck ideas. Basically an EDH deck consists of a "General" creature which starts out the game removed from game and can play it any time you normally could as if it was in your hand. You can only put cards in your deck that share colors with your general. The other limitation on construction is that your deck must have a minimum of 100 Vintage-legal cards and cannot contain multiple copies of the same card (besides basic lands). If you play your general throughout the course of the game and it is killed, instead of putting it into your graveyard you remove it from game again. You can play it again once it has hit RFG but every time you do, the cost increases by two colorless. It leads to some interesting deck building strategies and some out of the box thinking! I threw together a mono white soldier deck with Akroma, Angel of Wrath as my General. I'm also toying with the idea of a blue/black deck with Circu, Dimir Lobotomist as the General or a Red/White/Green deck with Rith, the Awakener as the General. I will post a decklist or two tomorrow after Ive had a few hours of sleep and a few cups of coffee..