Today's card of the day is Peregrination which
is a four mana Green sorcery that allows you to
search your library for up to two basic lands,
put one into play tapped, and the other into
your hand then Scry 1. This is an adequate
acceleration and deck thinning card that
probably won't see a great deal of play outside
of Commander as the mana cost is slightly too
high to be competitive. Even the Scry 1 addition
is not enough to make it stand out and overall
there are other choices to fulfill this role in
most formats.
In Limited this can help improve the quality
of future draws both by pulling lands and the
use of Scry and there is some card advantage by
getting two cards for one, so it is worth
including for a Sealed deck using Green mana. In
Booster it is a bit weaker if running a single
color, but is useful after a multicolor first
pick or as middle to late game acceleration.
There are times when I rue the fact that Magic
basically has a language all its own, which is
capable of being more obscure than Sanskrit and
more contrived than Esperanto. Once you get to
the end of the thesis that is Peregrination's
rules text, you stop and go "Oh, it's Kodama's
Reach with scry. That's a pretty good card." And
it is, although the four cost is slightly on the
late side for a mana ramp spell; on the other
hand, Commander and the like can never have
enough of an effect. But it might be nice if
there were a way of expressing that idea which
didn't rival "Le Morte d'Arthur" for reading
time, and if there were suitably epic flavor
text to go with this card's great name.
