A "fixed" throwback to Astral Slide? Being able
to blink things out for a turn is a great trick.
Even with Bestow existing, making a big
enchanted creature into one or two small ones
can be a big help. Taking a blocker out of the
equation for a turn can win races, and if you
can get a second Skybind onto the field, your
opponent effectively has no board during your
turn. You can also use it to re-trigger your own
ETB abilities. The "non-enchantment" clause
actually stings a bit in Theros block, but if
need be you can always blink a land. The land
comes back untapped, too, so blink one of the
ones you tapped to cast the enchantment that
triggered Skybind, and it'll be untapped on your
opponent's turn! If need be, all your
enchantment spells cost [1] less now, except you
don't get the extra [1] until next turn.
Today's card of the day is Skybind which is a
five mana White enchantment with Constellation
that exiles a target non-enchantment permanent
until the next end step whenever it or another
enchantment enters the battlefield under your
control. The non-enchantment part is a
drastic limitation when it requires enchantments
to reliably trigger.
An enters the battlefield theme can be made, but
the deck would be a bit conflicted at best and
with the five mana cost attached to this it
really isn't worth the effort to make this work.
In Limited this can help clear the way for an
attack by temporarily exiling opposing
creatures, but not working against enchantments
is a notable weakness in the block. As a
rare this is a little underwhelming and can be
difficult to combo with, so passing it in
Booster for a strong creature or true removal
will often be a reasonable choice. In
Sealed this isn't a compelling reason to run
White and even if you are there is only some
situational benefits from having this in play,
so it can probably be sidedecked to help
streamline the mana curve.
Skybind is a pretty narrow card - often
referred to a "build-around" card. This means
that most of the time, it's a pretty useless
card unless your deck is specifically designed
to get the best use out of it. Let's put on our
rose-colored glasses for a moment and figure out
what that perfect deck would look like.
Two things are going on here. First, you have
the constellation ability, which means you want
a pretty high number of other enchantments in
your library so you can trigger this multiple
times. Secondly, you have to have
non-enchantment permanents that have
enters-the-battlefield abilities you want to use
over and over again. This already creates a
conflict since, by definition, a card cannot fit
both of those categories. So, the non-land
portion of your deck pretty much has to be half
enchantments to trigger the constellation and
half non-enchantments to flicker in and out.
Then, there is the issue of 5 mana to cast
Skybind in the first place. You need to make
sure you can get to 5 mana reliably without
being way behind on the board. That's a lot of
hoops to jump through to make one card work.
Put simply, this is a casual card. It makes
my mind race trying to think of the ways to
fully utilize the potential benefit of this
card. The combo potential is high, and it could
be really fun when it works right. But the
likelihood of making a truly competitive deck
with this is remote.
In short - If you're not playing a casual
deck built around making the most of this card,
it's not worth playing.
It's a reusable Oblivion Ring/Banishing Light!
Wow! And- er, wait, no, the thing you banish
comes back at the end of turn. Well... then it's
a reusable Flicker/Momentary Blink! That's
great! And- er, wait, no, it costs 5 mana to
play and the thing doesn't instantly return.
Hmm.
The problem with Skybind is that all of the
things it WANTS to do are already done better by
the things it's trying to be. Do you really want
to spend 5 mana to, what, get rid of a
troublesome blocker for a turn? That's really
not worth it, even if you get it to happen more
than once. You'd rather just play some removal
and kill the thing. In that case, do you really
want to spend 5 mana to get another use out of
an enters-the-battlefield ability? That's a
little better, and certainly the stronger way to
use this card, but still underwhelming at 5
sorcery speed mana.
Take a closer look at Skybind's text as well.
"Exile target nonenchantment permanent." No
bouncing enchantment creatures, no bouncing
Banishing Light, or any enchantments with
counters on them that you want to reset. Those
situations probably won't be relevant very
often, but it's still a limitation to remember.
There are a lot of hoops to jump through here to
make this even sort of kinda work. Get to 5
mana, be playing heavy white, play this card,
have something already out with a good enters
the battlefield trigger, then have good low
cost enchantments to play next turn to get
actual value out of Skybind, assuming of
course it and the creature you want to bounce
live. This card is one of those things that
sounds good in theory - the idea of reusable
bouncing of enter the battlefied triggers in
order to gain a big advantage just from normally
playing your enchantment creatures or
bestow guys - but it's just far too expensive,
far too slow, far too unreliable, and the effect
on the board can end up being far too week.
The best case scenario here is you build some
fun casual deck to abuse the hell out of this,
getting it out and having a bunch of really good
creatures with enters the battlefield triggers,
a bunch of really good low cost enchantments to
play, and then pray that the stars align so that
it's all in your hand at the same time.
And EVEN THEN what are you getting out of it? 5
mana for a reuse of Solemn Simulacrum to get an
extra tapped basic land?
It's not to say Skybind is completely useless in
all scenarios. And I know there are better
examples than Solemn Simulacrum; things that
generate creature tokens for instance. But the
30% of the time you're able to pull off a combo
like that isn't worth the 70% of times you
won't. You really have to ask yourself in the
end, what else could I be playing for 5 white
mana? You could be playing Celestial Archon. You
could be playing Sigil of the Empty Throne. You
could be playing Dictate of Heliod. You could be
playing Battlegrace Angel.
