Hell to Pay – MTG Card of the Day

Hell to Pay – Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Date Reviewed:  April 8, 2024

Ratings:
Constructed: 3.63
Casual: 3.50
Limited: 4.25
Multiplayer: 3.25
Commander [EDH]: 3.50

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.

Reviews Below: 

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Time was, the only advantage you got from a value of X greater than a creature’s toughness (or a player’s life total) was style points. If that, as one of the very first X spells prohibited you from doing excess damage – Drain Life spells it out explicitly. But that’s not going to fly out on the frontier, where we already know that gunfights end in a hail of bullets (think of one very famous scene from the first Red Dead Redemption, for a contemporary example). Nowadays, we’re more likely to get incentives to go big, and this spell provides plenty of those, with not only those red Treasure synergies I love talking about, but also the potential of playing a huge chain of spells on the next turn. That’s the kind of thing that gives red decks resilience against strategies that involve moving lots of cards around, and I think this spell is going to be solid, at the very least, in multiple formats.

Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5

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Into the “Wild West” we go with Outlaws of Thunder Junction, focused on doing crimes and being Bad. Hell to Pay is a fairly simple design we’ve seen before, but the twist is that it rewards you for an overpay by helping set up a future play. There are plenty of interesting ways to make this work even better (like giving it deathtouch), but even past that, this is a pretty straightforward removal spell that has a bit of depth in terms of figuring out how to weigh immediate action versus planning future plays.

Constructed: 3.75
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3.5

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