Today's card of the day is Mardu Ascendancy
which is a three mana Red, White, and Black
enchantment that puts a tapped 1/1 Red goblin
token into play attacking whenever a non-token
you control attacks and the enchantment can be
sacrificed to give your creatures +0/+3 until
end of turn. This is decent support for a
swarm deck as it adds tokens, though the triple
color requirement and three mana cost are a
little problematic for tempo and deck design
outside of Commander and Multiplayer. It
likely won't see much play in competitive
formats and even Casually it is too far on the
support side to be popular, though it might be a
small response to Pyroclasm style effects.
In Limited the tokens equal card advantage or at
least some added threat, though it is not as
powerful as other rares and being three colors
makes it a moderate first pick in Booster.
In Sealed it alone isn't reason to force the
theme, but can be splashed alongside others if
all three colors are being used anyway.
The way this card gives you an extra attacker
every turn reminds me a lot of Goblin Assault,
from Shards of Alara. I wonder if they thought
that was a little too hard to deal with, and so
added the extra requirement of already having a
nontoken creature when they used it as the basis
for this card. Still, if you have a larger card
pool, you can easily trigger it each turn with a
creature land or something like Rakdos Keyrune,
which is kind of neat and gets some extra use
out of already good cards. The sacrifice ability
seems slightly less generally useful, but there
will still be times when you can force your
opponent into unfavorable creature trades. Since
this card encourages you to do a lot of
attacking, it's probably a good thing the
sacrifice ability is there.
