Urza Assembles the Titans – Dominaria United
Date Reviewed: September 13, 2022
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.13
Casual: 4.75
Limited: 1.75
Multiplayer: 3.25
Commander [EDH]: 3.50
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
It couldn’t be a Dominaria set without sagas, could it? I love that this is a semi-evergreen mechanic now, and although there might not actually be very many design twists on them, ones with the read ahead ability are sometimes eyebrow-raisingly flexible. While I think that the time taken is part of the card type’s balance and shouldn’t be eliminated entirely, it’s interesting to have a few with that option. In this card’s case, for example, reading ahead to Chapter III is sometimes worth spending five mana and doing nothing else – when you have three or more planeswalkers in play, it means you’re basically about to win the game. Reading ahead to II is less superficially useful, as many popular planeswalkers cost four or five anyway, but it suggests a theme deck where you ambush people with Ugin, the Ineffable and off-color bombs like Nicol Bolas. It’s obviously at its best in the “superfriends” archetype, and I’m not sure whether that archetype will be at its best during this Standard rotation; but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t make waves at the casual tables.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 2.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4 (part-white planeswalker decks are definitely possible here, though I wish there was a way to get it into a deck led by the Kenrith twins)
Sagas are back again, and this time with a little wrinkle. “Read ahead” comes with every Saga enchantment in the set, and it allows you to start at any point in the saga. So if you just want to get to the end, that’s cool, though whether or not you want to get there at the outset is separate.
So, Urza Assembles the Titans is a nice story reference (to the events of the long-running Weatherlight arc) and planeswalker support on its own. Dig for a planeswalker, cheat one in, get their abilities twice…you may have cause to skip the first one if you have a suitable friend to bring in immediately (like Elspeth, Sun’s Champion in deeper formats), and popping its third ability might be useful in an established board. It’s also not completely dead if you need to dig for one, too.
This strikes me as the kind of card whose fortunes rise and fall on the back of the “superfriends” decks that float on the periphery of formats, and I think that it’ll see play accordingly. It’s narrow, but it does its job well enough, and sometimes that’s all you can ask for out of a card.
Constructed: 3.25 (I suspect this one will be a fringe player, and it’s probably a bit too slow for deeper formats)
Casual: 5
Limited: 1 (this literally only works with planeswalkers, so you’d be paying 5 mana to scry 4 unless you opened one of the few in the set)
Multiplayer: 3 (probably shines best with particular ones)
Commander [EDH]: 3.25 (not for every deck, but it has places where it puts in work)
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