It's an interesting effect, to be sure, and not
always one that you want. You have to pitch your
own hand, but your opponent does as well, which
could make it a reasonable tactic if there's a
specific card in your deck you need to fish for,
or if you just have nothing of consequence left
in your hand. Playing out all the rest of your
hand and then casting this while your opponent
still has cards would be an interesting play.
On the other hand, playing this when your
opponent has one card left would basically just
make them discard it, making it a less efficient
Raven's Crime sans the retrace. But just playing
this for its own effect isn't really the point:
this is at its heart a combo piece. The flavor
marks it as a Sultai card, so the cards you
discard can fuel future Delves. Sultai is also
blue, so you could bounce an opponent's
creature, Dark Deal to make him discard it, and
them possibly even re-animate it out of his
graveyard. Moving out of Tarkir block, you could
play this in a deck full of Megrim and
Underworld Dreams as the "finisher", or maybe
you'll think of some other clever use for it?
Many of you were probably not around to see it,
but one of the most dangerous cards in Alpha was
Wheel of Fortune. Somehow it's never been
considered one of the Power Nine or even the
Nine Plus X (when people started adding things
like Sol Ring and Library of Alexandria),
despite the fact that it's been enabling
reanimator combos and Underworld Dreams and
messing with opponent's carefully stocked hands
for more than twenty years. But somehow I doubt
that putting it in a different color and adding
some kind of nominal tie to the current game
state is going to make it that much weaker.
First of all, there's no chance that this will
ever be the only draw effect in a deck, and I
expect it will rarely draw fewer than three
cards when used appropriately. Second of all,
sometimes you don't care what or how many cards
the opponent draws, or even how many you draw -
if you know they have something expensive and
nasty in their hand, this gives you a decent
shot at replacing it with something more
manageable. I simply can't imagine this card
failing to make an impact in some form.
Today's card of the day is Dark Deal which is a
three mana Black sorcery that has each player
discard all the cards in their hand and draw
that many minus one. This Black variant on
Wheel of Fortune is excellent when paired with
Fate Unraveler (the creature version of
Underworld
Dreams) or Blue bounce and is a fairly low cost
way to fix a problem hand or put some cards in
the graveyard for other effects like Mortivore.
Overall this is a card that will see some play
in decks that benefit from some self-milling and
the advantage gained by an opponent of new cards
is mostly outweighed by a Black or Black/Blue
deck built with Dark Deal in mind.
In Limited this has some advantages and can be
timed to clear out a bomb card from an
opponent's hand, but is more situational when
the deck can't be tailored around it. In
Booster it is safe to pass in most situations
and for Sealed it is more of a hand fix or Delve
feeder than anything else which leaves it in the
sidedeck fairly often.
