For those of you familiar with the more recent
and more limited variants of this card like
Silence, it may seem odd at first that this card
was once as talked-about as it was. It was once
combined with Isochron Scepter in a previous
incarnation of Extended to form a
turn-after-turn lock that a surprising number of
decks had trouble beating. Of course, times
change and formats change, and once more people
started playing things like Krosan Grip in
response to the Scepter activation, it sort of
faded away. Many decks also want cards that do
more than prevent anything from happening ever,
although that's a strategy that sometimes rears
its head and sometimes is good enough - Stasis,
Turbo Fog, and Maze's End were evidence of that.
Originally envisioned as a way to simply hold
off an opponent for a turn, as a sort of
"pre-emptive counterspell", this card became
horribly abused in conjunction with Isochron
Scepter to keep an opponent completely locked
down for the low price of 2W per turn. (You
still needed to play the kicker cost
separately). This was quite rightfully
recognized as a disruption to the game as a
whole, and so Isochron Scpter was banned in just
about every format imaginable. Whether or not
the Chant itself is safe to reprint is up in the
air, as M10's Silence was effectively the same
card minus the option of paying the Kicker cost
(and plus the "all opponents" vs. "target
player" wording, to take multiplayer into
consideration). It saw use in certain decks, but
with no way to reliably recur it, it had much
less of an effect on the metagame.
