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Featured
Writers Deck
Garage MTG Fan Articles Community
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Jeff Zandi is The
Southwest Paladin
Prophetic Bolt There's a new Impulse in town, and it's name is Prophetic Bolt There are a lot of great cards in Apocalypse. Magic: the Gathering's newest expansion contains many cards that will be very popular in Standard, some that will gain fame in the upcoming Invasion Block Constructed season, and some cards that are good in both. There are obvious winners like Mystic Snake, Vindicate and Spirit Monger, not to mention all five opposing color dual lands. Looking at the new set, players look first for game-breaking cards, cards that will bring your opponent's strategy to a screeching halt as soon as you play them. Game breaking cards usually need a deck to be built around them, so that the greatest possible use can be made of them. Beyond the game breaking cards is a category we'll call tool cards. Cards in the tool card category can go into a variety of decks because they provide a basic function that many different decks can make use of. The card I would like to talk about today is one of the best cards from Apocalypse in this category. Prophetic Bolt is a card that for a cost of 3UR you get to blast a creature or player for four points of damage. Damage is nice, and four points is more than most damage spells provide, but this card is just starting to get good. After you deal some damage, Prophetic Bolt also has you looking at the top four cards of your library. Put one of those cards into your hand and put the rest of them on the bottom of your library in any order you choose. Oh, by the way, this card is an instant, so you can deal a big donkey-punch to your opponent at the end of their turn. Yes, it's true, red and blue will not be as popular an opposing color combination as black and white, green and black or even green and blue. Nevertheless, every blue or red deck with any amount of the other color in it will want four of these in them. Testing the card in a blue and red deck with a little white, the Prophetic Bolt has turned out to be a very aggressive card. Used at the end of the other guy's turn, your counterspell-wielding opponent will want to counter this spell. Good players hate to waste counter technology on search spells. The old wisdom is to not counter the search card, counter the card that the search spell delivers. By saving the counter for the potential threat that the opponent's search spell finds, a certain amount of card economy is achieved. It's a little harder to remain calm and allow an opponent to search for a card when that search spell is also delivering a big four points of damage straight to your dome! Of course, the timely countering of the opponent's search technology has become more of a science with cards like Fact or Fiction and Accumulated Knowledge. If you have one counter in your hand, you probably can't afford to counter your opponent's search, even if they will be netting a lot of cards. But there is a limit. Like Fact or Fiction and Accumulated Knowledge, Prophetic Bolt will definitely cause your opponent to worry every time you cast it. Here comes a new deck archetype: blue and red "controlled aggression". The blue cards in your deck let you counter important threats from your opponent. Cheap search cards like Accumulated Knowledge and Opt make sure you put more land in play faster than the other player. How do you win? Blast, blast, blast! Prophetic Bolt and Urza's Rage give you more than enough damage in just eight card slots to let a red and blue deck win without using any permanents whatsoever. Are you an Urza's Rage player tired of hearing overconfident blue mages talk about Misdirection? Cool, just play some counterspells of your own. Better yet, play YOUR OWN Misdirections. You will never have to worry about Impulsing like a putz Back in the olden days, when Sega Genesis was still a good game system and when you found out what your DCI rating was from magazines, there was a common affliction among players using Impulse. You saw it all the time. Player Impulses, looks at four cards, and selects a card. Then, surprise of surprise, they would Impulse again. Impulsing for more Impulses was a habit that was hard to break. Players that were guilty of doing it a lot would always tell you "it was three land and an Impulse, I had to take it". Obviously, this is the right move, but some players just couldn't help themselves, passing up cards found by the Impulse that could help them in their current game situation, just to grab another Impulse and keep the search alive. The point is, sometimes it was a mistake to Impulse for another Impulse. This compulsion is much less of a problem with Prophetic Bolt. Testing the card, I enjoyed removing 20% of my opponent's life and looking at four cards. Many times, just as in the past with Impulse, another Prophetic Bolt stares at you from the four cards searched. TAKE IT, Impulse-lovers, you don't have to feel guilty about it anymore. Next turn, Bolt 'em again! Four damage for your opponent, four new cards to look at for you! It's a beautiful thing. Prophetic Bolt is expensive two ways Is five mana a lot to spend for an instant? Think Fact or Fiction is too expensive at four mana? Prophetic Bolt's casting cost is easily managable for two reasons. First, the function provided by this card is not something that you need to be able to cast right away. Be patient and you will have five mana in play in no time at all. Second, and more important, this card is an instant. Chances are, this card will be played 90% of the time at the end of your opponent's turn. Tapping out for an instant at the end of your opponent's turn is usually okay, especially with the functionality that you can get from this card. Of course, this card is expensive in another way that is not true about Fact or Fiction or the original Impulse. Prophetic Bolt is a rare. Rares cost money. Wizards of the Coast seems to be getting better at giving players great cards to play with, and also at making the really good cards rare. Here is a Standard deck that I've been working with that contains four Prophetic Bolts. This deck is almost completely comprised of cards from the Invasion block. Have fun! Passive-Aggression 2.0 4 Counterspell
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