Tonight marks the first day of week 2 of official Gatecrash previews on the mothership, and it's a blue kind of day. Both of the previously unknown cards from today are from the Dimir guild, and the previously-spoiled one is Enter the Infinite, the enormous blue mythic draw spell. First up, Dave Humpherys shows off a repeatable cloning spell in the feature article, "Developing Gatecrash." Mike Cannon's From the Lab this week gives us confirmation on Enter the Infinite. And, finally, Mark Rosewater gives us the mill spell to end all mill spells in Making Magic. Have a look at Stolen Identity and Mind Grind, and then let me run down my first impressions.
Stolen Identity - Phyrexian Metamorph is extremely good; I hope I don't really need to remind anyone of this. It's not only the fact that it can make copies for only three mana and a life payment; the Metamorph's flexibility makes it nearly never a dead card. What if you doubled that cost from three mana to six, and, in return, were able to produce another of your favorite creature or artifact on the board every turn? Cipher is an incredibly strong mechanic, a fact that is demonstrated very well by Stolen Identity, because of the plethora of evasive creatures available to blue and black. A Stolen Identity encoded on a sufficiently large unblockable creature can be a finisher in its own right, not to mention how it can copy some very powerful things.
Mind Grind - Strictly speaking, this is almost as hard-to-control of a spell as Epic Experiment, with the consolation that it will never fall completely flat but the risk of using it against a deck whose contents you don't fully know as opposed to being able to build around the Experiment. But if you put the right number of mana into that X cost and have a bit of luck, you can shave off nearly your opponent's entire deck for perhaps the cost of a Traumatize or less.
What do you think of the Secret Guild's two new tools of deception? Let me know in the comments.
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