CardName – Foundations
Date Reviewed: December 11, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Magic is officially running out of things to count. Fortunately, the “different mana values” concept has only been done a couple of times – counting Lunar Insight – and there are some interesting ways to build around it. I can think of a few decks from history with eyebrow-raising diversity in their mana curves, but in practice, the best vehicle for this is probably going to be a control or synergy deck that plays to the table. Think of the decks that try to exploit cards like Manifold Key and Panharmonicon. If all you need is reliably drawing the same number of cards each time, you’ll probably be looking at something else; if you’re playing a more aggressive strategy, you probably won’t have much space for something that doesn’t reliably advance the game state. But in a deck designed to take advantage of it, Lunar Insight is powerful, fair, and unique – a casual player’s dream.
Constructed: 3.63
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 3.88
The starting point best suited for Lunar Insight, I feel, is its theoretical maximum: among tournament-legal cards, the highest printed mana value is 16, so the cap on this is “three mana, draw 17”. As far as blue spells go, this is a pretty good deal, but if someone actually manages to pull that trick off, it might well be a sign of the end times.
More realistically, Lunar Insight’s upside is going to be closer to Divination, and except in the case where your board is bereft of non-land permanents, this will usually be an upgrade over the iconic blue draw spell. The effect is powerful, but the downside is that it’s definitely fiddly and can be terrible as a comeback tool (since you’re likely to only draw 1 or 2 cards). It is a powerful weapon to push an advantage, though; even four cards would be quite a good rate of return for casting this spell, and it might be a potent tool for efficiently pushing an advantage. Again, though, this demands board presence to shine, and blue might be the worst color at it…alongside green or another color, though, I can really see this shining.
Constructed: 3.75 (decks tend to be a bit more homogenized here, but if you consistently can get 3+ cards, it’s a good rate of return)
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
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