Hello again! Battle for Zendikar is here and we have officially returned to one of the most popular settings in Magic history.
Let me bring to your attention the awesomeness of [card]Bring to Light[/card], the best Swiss Army Knife Standard has seen in quite a while.
I believe we’ll see this card played in Standard and Modern fairly heavily, and it may even drop into Legacy (though, I admittedly know very little about Legacy). I saw this spoiled and my mouth dropped open.
There’s a lot going on with this card. First, we get one of the flagship abilities of Battle for Zendikar, Converge. Converge is sort of the anti-Devotion. Instead of worrying about how much of a particular mana you have, it’s all about the multiple colors of mana. So, this presents a hard limit to the range presented on cards with Converge, nothing will go further than five… unless Wizards brings us the long awaited PURPLE MANA in Oath of the Gatewatch.
If we do get purple mana (or something like Eldrazi-colored mana) in the next set, I get to say I called it and you all have to worship me as a modern day Nostradamus, as my legion of sycophants. Second, Oath of the Gatewatch is the worst name for a Magic set we’ve yet experienced. I look forward to 2037’s premier expansion, “Handshake of the Combatants”.
But, I digress. Back to [card]Bring to Light[/card].
So, we already have a hard limit before we get to what the card actually does. It costs five mana, there are five colors, yada, yada. What do we get for five mana?
“Search your library for a creature, instant, or sorcery card with converted mana cost less than or equal to the number of colors of mana spent to cast Bring to Light”
First off, it’s a Converge tutor. Five mana for a Standard legal tutor is not “horrible.” It’s pretty much par for the course at this point in Magic history. The fact that it is limited to a creature, sorcery, or instant does make it less than optimal, so let’s see what else we get for the cost.
“exile that card, then shuffle your library. You may cast that card without paying its mana cost.”
The most broken mechanic in Magic’s history is free mana. It’s not close. It’s what makes six of the “Power 9” so powerful, it’s why Affinity was busted, it’s what made Cascade such an awesome ability, and it’s why Phyrexian Mana resulted in multiple cards being banned in multiple formats.
So, right now, we’re dabbling in dangerous territory.
If a five mana tutor is already marginally playable, I can’t even begin to tell you how much better a tutor that plays the tutored spell for free is. This card is crazy. It has the ability to be absolutely bonkers.
Look at it another way. Right now, the best card in Modern (not named [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]) is all about versatility. [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card] allows you to turn your graveyard into a second library, selecting the best spell at the most opportune time. I think [card]Bring to Light[/card] is similar, allowing you to plunge through your library for the card you need most, the card that will give you the best chance at surviving or winning.
Now, you may say to yourself, “But, it needs to be played in deck with access to a ton of colors to be successful!” Sure, that helps, in Standard at least. But, I don’t think we have fully grasped just how easy it is to play four or five colors right now. A base two color deck can use the fetches available to hit four colors by turn four with relative ease. Especially when one of those colors is green. Building a GWUB deck is ridiculously easy. And, it doesn’t need to hit five colors to be busted. At four, you could tutor and play: Gideon, Sorin, [card]Siege Rhino[/card], Jace, Nissa, Anafenza, Kiora, [card]Ruinous Path[/card], [card]Abzan Charm[/card], [card]Ojutai’s Command[/card], [card]Languish[/card], [card]Utter End[/card], [card]Collected Company[/card], [card]Valorous Stance[/card], and [card]Dromoka’s Command[/card]. And that’s just off the top of my head. This thing could see play if it was “only” [card]Siege Rhino[/card] 5-8. The fact that it can double as [card]Languish[/card] in a pinch, and allows you to really go wild in your sideboard means it has the power to be a format defining card. I can’t emphasize enough how good I think this card could be.
And that’s just Standard! It may be even better in Modern.
Pop quiz, what was the most popular deck in Modern at the MTG World Championships? [card]Living End[/card]. The deck has been a fringe tier-1 staple in Modern for years. The deck’s namesake card is undeniably one of the most powerful cards in the format, but it’s restriction is one that lends to very narrow options when brewing.
Or, at least it did before we had [card]Bring to Light[/card].
The casting cost-less cards from Time Spiral block have been exploited before. [card]Hypergenesis[/card] and [card]Ancestral Vision[/card]s are already banned in Modern for a reason. Of the remaining three, [card]Restore Balance[/card] and [card]Living End[/card] are flagship, build-around-me cards that have had to focus on the Cascade ability to find a way to cheat their drawback, at the expense of making one and two mana spells unplayable in the decks. [card]Bring to Light[/card] allows us to bypass the need for Cascade and look at the cards in a new way.
At this point, cast on the back of a [card]Bring to Light[/card], [card]Living End[/card] is just a color-shifted [card]Living Death[/card]. It’s time to give reanimator another whirl in Modern.
[deck title=Travis Hall – Griselbrand Lite]
[Lands]
4 Bloodstained Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
2 Scalding Tarn
3 Steam Vents
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Breeding Pool
1 Stomping Ground
2 Blood Crypt
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Swamp
1 Island
1 Forest
2 Blackcleave Cliffs
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Griselbrand
4 Borborygmos Enraged
4 Simian Spirit Guide
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Bring to Light
3 Living End
4 Thought Scour
4 Faithless Looting
4 Pentad Prism
4 Through the Breach
2 Nourishing Shoal
1 Autochthon Wurm
[/Spells]
[/deck]
Having a card that can double as both a reanimation spell and a [card]Through the Breach[/card] gives the classic [card]Griselbrand[/card] reanimator deck unprecedented versatility. In addition, replacing [card]Goryo’s Vengeance[/card] with [card]Living End[/card] allows us to play a spell that reanimates both of our major combo targets at once, instead of trying to chain into a second reanimation spell off of [card]Griselbrand[/card].
But, that’s been seen before. [card]Bring to Light[/card] may make it more versatile but how about an all new reanimation deck? The fact that [card]Gifts Ungiven[/card] curves perfectly into [card]Bring to Light[/card] for [card]Living End[/card], allows you to play any two creature combo in Modern into a quick victory.
[deck title=Travis Hall – Reanimating Light]
[Lands]
4 Windswept Heath
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Breeding Pool
3 Temple Garden
1 Overgrown Tomb
2 Plains
1 Island
3 Forest
2 Lumbering Falls
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
3 Archangel of Thune
4 Spike Feeder
4 Birds of Paradise
2 Noble Hierarch
2 Snapcaster Mage
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
3 Bring to Light
3 Living End
4 Thought Scour
3 Gifts Ungiven
1 Unburial Rites
4 Path to Exile
4 Remand
[/Spells]
[/deck]
I went with this version first because I wanted to try out a Bant style reanimator deck that can either go for a combo, or just win with mana dorks into Elesh Norn. With the help of the mana dorks, you can go infinite with this on turn four.
It may be that a Grixis style deck is better, allowing you to focus on disrupting your opponent on turns 1-3 with Bolt, [card]Thoughtseize[/card], and Liliana, until you win with the classic [card]Deceiver Exarch[/card] + Kiki Jiki combo.
If you like my suggestions, you can follow me on Twitter: @travishall456. I throw around random observations and deck ideas every day. You can also hear me on the Horde of Notions podcast, discussing deck ideas for FNM level events and the PTQ grinders.
Travis Hall is a resident Mana D rogue deck brewer with an unhealthy addiction to Heartless Summoning and Birthing Pod.