Nexus of Fate – MTG 2019 Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

My favorite professional wrestler might be Jeff Hardy, whose birthday I share, so he was one of the first things I thought of when I saw this card – one of his signature moves is called “Twist of Fate“. The second thing I thought of was, “Well, extra turn effects are getting pretty expensive now.” The third thing I thought of was not until some of the decks started coming out, and it was something along the lines of “Turbo Fog is back again?!”. I consider it a sort of quintessential Turbo Fog card released years after the archetype was first recognized, much like Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh is for Big Red and Bloodbraid Elf is for The Rock. It’s one of the most effective tools for making the game go long when it’s in your advantage to, thanks to that clause that returns it to your library from anywhere. In larger constructed or casual settings, it’s far from out of the question to end up with a Nexus as the only card left in your library, thanks to Howling Mine or Jace Beleren style cards, and there are very few ways for an opponent to come back from that.

Constructed: 4/5
Casual: 4/5
Multiplayer: 4/5
EDH/Commander: 4/5

No Limited score, as this is a Buy-A-Box promo you will never be able to draft.

When they were announced, the Buy-A-Box promos were a huge source of controversy, but the positive feedback convinced Wizards to go ahead with more of them. Firesong and Sunspeaker was a quirky enough little creature…unique, but not particularly powerful in Constructed.

Nexus of Fate…may have been a bit more powerful than they are intending.

Of late, extra-turn effects usually have a lot more hoops to jump through, between the self-exile of a lot of them and their general expense. While Nexus of Fate wisely avoids the graveyard to stop chaining into it with spells like Mission Briefing or Snapcaster Mage, it…shuffles itself back into your deck when it’s put into the graveyard from anywhere, the old Darksteel Colossus “anti-reanimate” strategy. This opens up another can of worms, as I’ll detail!

So, Nexus of Fate is, more or less, a better Beacon of Tomorrows. It returns to your deck on cast, it’s an instant(!), and it’s 1 mana cheaper. That’s a powerful starting point. Where Nexus of Fate gets really degenerate is in multiples: since they keep returning to your deck, if you have someone like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria out, you can use it as an engine to take all of the turns and leave your opponent with nothing. Even a single Nexus of Fate can help drag a game out, as trying to deck someone with one in their deck is a Sisyphean task.

Nexus of Fate is a powerful card in this format, and it even has a marginal home in the “Extra Turns.dec” deck of Modern and Legacy. It’s a perfect storm of recycling itself, being decently efficient, and playing well with the pieces we had. It’s likely this will be the most powerful Buy-A-Box promo in the foreseeable future, thanks to how this one turned out.

Constructed: 4.5
Casual: 5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander: 4.25