When your goal is to attack attack attack,
nothing is more frustrating than big walls that
do nothing but block or seemingly limitless
armies of insignificant tokens that just clog up
the gears of your war machine. Cyclops Gladiator
solves that problem handily. Wall of Omens? The
Gladiator punches it down before it can even be
declared a blocker. Eldrazi Spawn tokens? It may
seem weak to shoot one down only to have him
block with another, but you'll have to kill them
all to get at the player behind them, and if he
was planning on using them to chump, it's good
to make him spend two to stop a 4/4. Birds of
Paradise? It may not pose a threat itself, but
what was he going to spend that mana on? Sure,
there's the little problem that if you use the
Gladiator to take out a creature with power
greater than zero, that means that a smaller
creature could kill the Gladiator by blocking
it. But that's still a good thing as long as you
destroy both the creature you target and the
blocker-- that's two creatures down with one
card. Cyclops Gladiator will doubtless become a
powerful tool in monored decks, as those have
long lacked ways of gaining card advantage, and
struggled to keep up once they play out their
hands.
You might not think that red would need any more
help dealing with potential blockers, but it's
far from unheard of to run out of damage spells
before your opponent runs out of creatures.
Reminiscent of the popular Planar Chaos rare
Magus of the Arena, Cyclops Gladiator can strike
down hordes of creatures and live to tell the
tale. It's a very dangerous card to face in
limited matches, and I wouldn't be surprised to
see it find a similarly dangerous niche in
larger decks.
Today's card of the day is Cyclops Gladiator
which is a four mana 4/4 that can deal damage
whenever it attacks to a creature in addition to
any normal combat damage with a bit of a
drawback. Obviously skilled at eliminating
zero power targets, but also quite good at
dealing with multiple 1/1 creatures barring
combat tricks. With any kind of evasion
added in, generally from an artifact such as
Whispersilk Cloak thanks to the heavy Red cost,
this can strike down most creatures with
impunity.
Not the strongest creature in constructed, but
solid and decently priced with some potential to
be a bigger threat.
For Limited the triple Red is a very difficult
price to play which places it deep into the
later stages of a game outside of a single color
deck. It is possible to draft mono-Red in
Booster, but without a few playable artifacts
not likely in Sealed. With burn and
removal as support this could lock an opponent
down and can still be a top pick.
If the pool can support it draw it early and try
to build around it for the best results.
