Wish – Set
Date Reviewed: Sept. 26, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed:
Casual:
Limited:
Multiplayer:
Commander [EDH]:
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
The variants of this effect tend to be viewed as very Spikey cards, but thanks to Ellywick and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, whenever I see one I think of proverbial expressions like “if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast our nets”. I think of the forks in the road of life, of regrets and entropy. I think I was always actually too sentimental for competitive Magic, and am grateful someone invented cube variants.
I quite like that Wish is the most straightforward effect of its type, and I like that it’s in red – red is a spell color and it’s good for it to have tricky things like this in its arsenal. This particular card doesn’t work as well for reactive spells, as it telegraphs them quite severely. It’s also at its most effective when you have a lot of mana and can play the wished-for card the same turn, but presumably you’re doing so because you have a card that can change the game on the spot, and for some such cards, having them cost an extra three mana still leaves them as powerful.
By default, Commander doesn’t have sideboards and many other casual decks don’t bother making them, so you’ll need to agree with your group on how to use it. I’ll note, though, that people like “potionseller” on CubeCobra even devised a way for cards like this to work in Jumpstart (pick out the cards with the “x-sideboard” tag), so it might be worth having that conversation, even if only to enjoy Ellywick’s song.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 1 for default rules, 3 if agreed with your friends
Wish is an interesting riff on the Wish cycle of cards we’ve gotten over the years, where Wishes let you fetch cards to your hand. The card, hailing from the original Dungeons & Dragons crossover set, has an interesting twist in that it lets you play any card, but it stays outside the game if you can’t play or cast it somehow. In Constructed formats not called Commander, this means your sideboard, so Wish is effectively an overpay of three mana for any silver bullet card lurking in your sideboard. That said, that sometimes is exactly what you need, and being able to be any card is a massive boon (particularly in Modern, a format with only one Wish and a limited one at that). It’s not a card every deck will need, much less want, but sometimes you can turn it into a salvage of a lost game, and that’s always worth it.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4.5 (any card looks better if you bring your bnders)
Limited: 2 (can only fetch from your Limited pool, which is more akin to a puddle in most games)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 1 (Commander doesn’t usually have sideboards or “Wish boards”, sadly)
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