Tectonic Reformation – Modern Horizons MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

Tectonic Reformation is a game-changer. The thing that burn decks fear most is drawing a bunch of lands in the late game, and this card lets them dig their way down to more Lightning Strike variants at a bargain price. While it’s widely held that burn decks don’t want to include cards that don’t deal damage, we’ve actually been seeing some movement away from that as a universal principle of late: witness the likes of Ramunap Red with their semi-midrange elements.

Beyond that, Tectonic Reformation also synergizes with old favorites like Terravore and Mystic Enforcer, inflating them to monstrous proportions at instant speed while drawing you new cards. It even makes it a lot easier to use cards like Astral Drift in singleton formats and in limited (although in the latter case, you’ll need some luck to see them both in the rare slot). It’s a deceptively powerful effect and it will take some experimentation to find its best application, but I have no doubt that such an application will come.

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

Now this card is interesting, a weird piece for all of the cycling decks and for all of the red decks that want to blow things up at record-speed. Red often is a color that has problems with running out of gas in the late game, so being able to swap your lands for more cards is a major boon to a deck that has less need for lands overall. And this card even has cycling itself, which helps to mitigate the risk of running a lot of copies of it in your deck. The downside is that it’s an enchantment that doesn’t immediately impact the board or your board state, and red often has little use for those in their “all-out” strategies; it also has a mana cost that makes it very poor for the cycling-based deck of Modern infamy, Living End. (It relies on using Violent Outburst to cascade into the only spell cheaper than it in the deck, the eponymous Living End.)

I do think this will see some experimentation; extra fuel for red’s fire is nice, and this can provide a lot for it. How powerful it is remains to be seen, but it’s a nice role player.

Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 3.25
Multiplayer: 3
Commander: 3.75