This may at first blush seem like a milling
card, but unless Szadek, Lord of Secrets is
wielding it or you're up against lifegain.dec,
your opponent is going to lose to the damage the
Blade-wielder is dealing far sooner than he
loses to an empty library. Not that that's a bad
thing, mind you. But given the highly variable
bonus Trepanation Blade gives to a wielder's
power, coupled with its relatively high casting
and equip costs, I'm sorely tempted to believe
that there's better, more effective Equipment
for you to choose from. If we assume that the
average person's deck has about a 2-to-1 nonland
to land ratio, Trepanation Blade will, on
average, grant its wielder +3/+0. And put a few
cards from their deck into their graveyard. Now,
for a randomized library, the odds of milling
away their good cards are balanced out by the
odds of milling away cards that are useless in
the current situation, digging them towards
better cards. So that issue is a wash-- we're
neither improving nor ruining their draws. But
in Innistrad, there's plenty of flashback cards,
plenty of reanimation spells, and plenty of
cards that are improved by having a full
graveyard, so there's a chance that the stuff
you're dumping into their graveyard is actually
more useful to them there than it is in their
library. Whispersilk Cloak will usually end up
increasing your damage output by at least as
much, if not far more, for the same mana
investment, and won't accidentally give them
cards they can use.
As you may be aware, trepanation is the practice
of drilling a hole in a person's head for
medical purposes. I'm not sure that's what the
sword shown on this card was ever intended for,
but you do need to be careful you don't
intentionally help the opponent by "turning on"
their flashback cards or their reanimation
strategy. Still, against most "normal" decks,
this can cause some pretty ridiculous power
boosts, and get rid of potential threats at the
same time. Try it with Invisible Stalker!
Today's card of the day is Trepanation Blade
which at three mana to cast and two to equip is
about average for equipments in cost, though it
has a fairly random impact on games as it can be
as low as one card milled and +1/+0. The
potential is high which may have it see play in
a combo that promotes damage dealing for library
destruction, but is not reliable enough for
decks that are along the more standard designs
as one of the Swords can do more for the same
cost.
For Limited this is playable and potentially
strong as the smaller decks and value of
equipment in the format both help to make it
more valuable. Any Sealed build should be
able to fit this in as a colorless source of
damage, though it doesn't add anything to
protect the target, and Booster can draft this
early in weaker packs or when unsure of the
final color scheme of the deck.
