Sea Gate Stormcaller – Zendikar Rising MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

This is actually one of the Zendikar Rising cards that I’m most eager to try out. Her limitation will be felt more in Standard and much less in older formats, particularly when you start adding things like Lightning Bolt to your options. That kicker cost is a little on the expensive side for those kinds of fast older formats, but I suspect it’ll be appreciated in places like Commander, where you have lots of options for getting a lot of colorless mana at once and where cheap spells need all the help they can get. (And yes, both abilities do work on Reverberate, assuming you can get her into play while the spell you want to copy multiple times is still on the stack!)

Constructed: 3/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
Commander: 3/5

kick it

Kicker makes another return to Zendikar, and Sea Gate Stormcaller has a fair bit of intrigue to her. She basically pre-copies the next cheap instant or sorcery you cast…and note that she only cares about converted mana cost, not about any additional costs (like kicker, spells spliced onto it, or so on). There are lots of fun tricks you can pull with this card: copying burn spells, tutor effects (like Merchant Scroll, though tutors are rarely cheap these days), kill spells, mana rituals, or any number of fun shenanigans. And if you can spend seven mana, you get two copies of the spell; this is still a hefty investment of mana, but it gives her some late value, and I’d definitely pay it to copy a burn spell twice to try and end a game!

A mediocre body isn’t great, but being a Wizard is, and her effect is strong enough to make for a worthy consideration if you’re enterprising enough and have the spells to copy with her.

Constructed: 3.75
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 2.5
Multiplayer: 2.25
Commander: 3.25