Orcish Bowmasters
– The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth
Date Reviewed: December 28, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 5
Casual: 4
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 4.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.75
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale: 1 is bad; 3 is average; 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
David
Fanany
Player
since
1995
This card was 2nd on my Top 10 list.
If you look back over the whole history of Magic, you’ll notice something interesting about hosers – think cards like the Circles of Protection, Flashfires, and such. The great majority of them historically targeted colors, with graveyards coming in second. There’s even the odd hoser that targets casting spells in general, which feels like a . . . strange design choice, to say the least, when that’s the fundamental mechanic of the game. There are surprisingly few that go after drawing lots of cards, despite the fact that it was the most powerful strategy in the game for much of Magic’s history. When Underworld Dreams was the most powerful option in more than one format, something’s gone wrong.
With Orcish Bowmasters, we finally have a card that attacks historic blue card drawing at its own power level, or possibly even higher. It already would have been easily the best card in Standard in 2002 or 2006, and hilariously, it’s arguably even better now that the non-blue colors have the best card drawing options they’ve ever had (not all released at the same time). It’s well-positioned even in Legacy because of the “Xerox” strategy with the redundant one-mana cantrips, and its floor is sniping key 1/1 creatures and thus ruining a lot of strategies’ day. Since one of the things you eventually realize from reading Lord of the Rings is that Sauron had all the strongest stuff on paper, and the Free Peoples’ victory was pretty much a miracle, it’s kind of fitting.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4.5
Commander: 4.5
This card was 2nd on my Top 10 list.
In all honesty, the top two slots of this list for me were the easiest to lock in, and the rest took longer. Orcish Bowmasters feels like the deliberate Constructed plant of Tales of Middle-Earth that…maybe overshot the target. It’s a powerful card that punishes opponents for playing the game in a optimal way, and while there are a couple decks that this will just be a two-mana source of two bodies and one damage, there are a lot of ways to force this to create a ton of chaos. And “any target” is carrying a lot of weight here, turning wheel effects into machine guns and cascading spectacularly in Multiplayer formats. Expect this card to be played a lot until it gets banned, which is not wholly impossible.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 5
Commander: 5
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