Welcome all to the Daily Dose of War of the Spark, where today I’m going to be talking about a new cycle of Mythic Rares from War of the Spark that will have you counting to 10. Each color in this cycle of cards is a sorcery that costs two colored mana as well as X generic mana. Each of these amazing spells does an effect that gets amplified the more generic mana you spend for X. Each spell has a bonus ability that is only triggered if X is 10 or more. There will not be very many times, even in constructed formats, that you will have that much mana in a given game and for that reason I’ll be focusing mostly on the main ability of these spells.
Let’s start off with a token creator. Here is Finale of Glory.
Being able to create 2/2 creatures rather than 1/1 creatures with an X spell makes this a strong token generator. My first thought for comparisons to this card is History of Benalia. When X = 1, it will be worse spell. At X = 2, you will get the same number of creatures and all at once. When X = 3 or more, you will have surpassed the value when it comes to creating creatures. There will be times where I’ll play this on turn three just to get a 2/2 on the battlefield, but most of the times I will want to save this until later in the game, where I have nothing else left to cast and I’ve accumulated many lands throughout the course of the game. The X = 10 ability of this card will most certainly win you the game thanks to having 10 or more 4/4 Flying Angel tokens.
Next is a spell that reminds me of a card from Revised called Braingeyser. Here is Finale of Revelation.
The value of this card is evaluated by testing out different values of X. If X = 1 you are only drawing 1 card for three mana which is much worse than almost any draw spell ever printed. If X = 2 you are getting an over costed Divination. If X = 3 you are getting the same casting cost as Jace’s Ingenuity. If X = 4, you are getting a sorcery speed Opportunity or an over costed Tidings. If this card is worse than all those other card draw spells, why would you play this? You play this because it can be all those spells rather than being just one of them. If you need less cards early on, play it. If you can save it for later in the game, you can do that and get more value out of it. It shines if you can use it with the new Teferi, Time Raveler and cast it as an instant. If you do get the X = 10 ability of this card, you will have a full hand of cards and be able to cast some of them this turn thanks to your five untapped lands.
One-sided removal spells are always in demand for Magic players. We have a good one here in Finale of Eternity.
As with the other Finale cards, the value of this card lies in determining when you want to cast this card. The only time you will get value out of X = 1 is if you are playing against either a token deck or Mono White Aggro. At X = 2, you will hit even more creatures, including most creatures from Mono Red, but you will miss most creatures from Sultai Midrange. At X = 3, you should be able to hit most creatures on the battlefield. At X = 4 or more the only ones you might miss out on are large Hydroid Krasis or a Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I would like to run this spell out of the sideboard in certain situations, but most often I would rather just be playing Kaya’s Wrath to make sure I’m not missing anything. The X = 10 ability plus the main bonus of Finale of Eternity is that it doesn’t hit your own creatures so it will be better in Limited and creature-based decks compared to control decks.
The next card I’ll talk about is one that looks to reuse and recycle your spells. Here is Finale of Promise.
I absolutely love this card. This card will shine in a deck like Izzet Drakes or a Grixis Control deck. The issue right now with trying to play this card in say, a Mono-Red deck, is that that deck doesn’t play any sorcery spells except for Light up the Stage and Skewer the Critics. I feel there will always be an array of great instant spells to choose from like Shock and Lightning Strike. If you open it up to other colors the pool of sorcery cards increases. You can add cards like Chart a Course, Thought Erasure, Duress, Cry of the Carnarium. I feel that the sweet spot for this spell is when X is 2 or 3 mana, as that should allow you to target most of what you want to cast from your graveyard. If you do get to 10 mana with this spell, you will probably win the game when you send 6 direct damage spells to their face.
Finally, I want to talk about a card that is one mana away from resembling a banned card in Modern. Here is Finale of Devastation.
Green Sun’s Zenith did get banned from Modern, correct? This slightly more casting cost variant of that spell adds a little extra kick to the spell. In Standard there isn’t anything worthwhile that you want to get with X = 0. It’s nice as well that you can get any creature and not just a green creature. The ability to get a creature from your graveyard ia nice as well! The versatility of this card will be completely dependant on how you have built your deck. I think it would shine in a deck like a Bant Vannifar deck where each creature has a sweet enters the battlefield ability. You can even use it to get Prime Speaker Vannifar herself. The X = 10 ability on this card should basically say, “Win the game.”.
Five crushing spells that will take over the game, especially if you can find an extra 10 mana lying around (12 total). Thanks again for reading the Daily Dose of War of the Spark. Join me again tomorrow as I finish off the third week of previewing cards as we inch closer to the release of the new set.
