Judging by the rest of the set, it looks like
Nissa didn't really stick around for long after
the storyline Great Aurora, which is too bad.
There were some great ideas in Shadowmoor and
Eventide, and it would have been fun to explore
them more. It's not all bad - I just need to
figure out a deck concept that can reliably
start out casting cards from Lorwyn, cast this,
and somehow end up with cards from Shadowmoor
after I shuffle. While I work on that, you might
like to ponder what will happen now that green
has an effect - albeit expensive - that has odd
similarities to Timetwister, not to mention the
strain on the fabric of reality when two such
effects are in the same expansion. It
practically begs to be exploited, especially
since you get the first shot at rebuilding the
plane and the vagaries of randomization may make
your opponent/s have a huge discard phase when
the time comes.
Today's card of the day is The Great Aurora
which is a nine mana Green sorcery that
dramatically alters the game state by shuffling
all hands and battlefields and drawing new cards
of an equal number. The very high mana cost puts
this in the realm of an endgame play for a mana
acceleration build, but it can be extremely
situational. It generally requires a noticeable
permanent advantage that wouldn't directly win
the game, so a token swarm shuffled away to
force more card draws would likely just be able
to attack for the win instead. The opponent has
to be in a position that leaves them unable to
capitalize on the card draw as well, which adds
even more variables to an already questionable
concept. Overall this is a very powerful card
that can cause extreme disruption, but there are
more efficient and self sufficient designs that
should prevent this from being more than an
offbeat Casual gimmick.
In Limited the high mana cost and situational
effect prevent it from being truly playable and
it is a Mythic that can very safely be passed
and shouldn't be picked early in the pack even
if already in Green. In Sealed this belongs in
the sidedeck and shouldn't even be a
consideration for seeing play.
I'm just going to keep this review strictly
filed under EDH, because in the cases of
everything but EDH and casual, you'll almost
never see this. It's great. It resets a game
where if you have struggled to maintain board
presence and automatically puts your opponent on
the defensive. If they're not running counters,
go nuts. Hell, just go nuts. Turn 9 in EDH means
you're going to be drawing 12+ cards at least
and getting lands on the board. It's one
of those cards that you love playing, but hate
playing against. But in green, especially mono,
I highly recommend this card.
