One of the major beefs with Cumulative Upkeep
cards is that your mana goes into paying the
upkeep instead of playing new spells, leaving
you falling behind. Not so with this card, since
every time you pay the upkeep, it's like you're
playing a creature right out of your library. Of
course, the card itself doesn't have any effect
on the board like a Ronom Hulk or an Arctic
Nishoba would, but that's the price you pay I
suppose. In constructed, this would need a chain
of creatures that could win you the game to be
usable, if a player can figure one out. In
Limited it's a trash pick since this card needs
a deck built around it.
This card definitely seems neat. It might a card
worth playing against counter heavy decks. The
game is likely to go a bit long, so if you slip
one past all the spell counters, you could
likely be searching out your largest guys every
turn. The only thing to remember is that it
doesn't say "equal to or less than the number of
counters." You have to a creature with converted
mana cost "equal" to the number of counters. It
has some uses, but you'll have to be prepared to
take full advantage of it. Something like R/G
could make use of this.
When I first saw this card I thought it was
really cool and fairly powerful, especially in
limited. My opinion of it has changed somewhat
since then. Yes, it lets you pull creatures out
of your deck and into play. However, you don't
get to start doing this until turn 6 unless you
have acceleration. And even then you start with
a 1-drop. Plus, it sucks up your mana like all
cummulative upkeep cards. And you risk it being
destroyed by a rogue Ronom Unicorn or something.
Mind you, this card can still be devastating.
And I've heard of people accelerating it out on
turn 3 and maintaining it until they got a
Rimescale Dragon from it. But those are the
exceptions rather than the rule.
