Magic’s newest expansion has us journeying to what many consider the home of Magic, Dominaria, to see familiar faces and pick up old plot threads. A new set means new cards to examine, and in this article we’ll talk about the colorless ones, what they mean for the game, and how they’ll play.
Last time we covered the monocolor cards, and this time as usual we won’t be looking at everything, and we’ll be doing this mostly with an eye for Commander play.
While we have returned to Dominaria, the first plane of magic, and where Magic lived for quite a long time, it’s also where iconic stories that helped drive Magic’s storyline started, and upcoming sets will be revisiting and expanding on these events. They include The Brothers War (Q4 of 2023, barring delays), which might as well be Antiquities Part II, and Phyrexia: All Will be One (Q1 of 2023, barring delays) which will lead into March of the Machine and March of the Machine: Aftermath, which is a really long way of saying there’s going to be a lot of powerful, useful, utility, and bad artifacts coming out over the next 6 months.
To tease that, Wizards created the Powerstone Token:
From the Comprehensive Rules (September 8, 2022—Dominaria United)
- 111.10. Some effects instruct a player to create a predefined token. These effects use the definition below to determine the characteristics the token is created with. The effect that creates a predefined token may also modify or add to the predefined characteristics.
- 111.10a A Treasure token is a colorless Treasure artifact token with “{T}, Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color.”
- 111.10b A Food token is a colorless Food artifact token with “{2}, {T}, Sacrifice this artifact: You gain 3 life.”
- 111.10c A Gold token is a colorless Gold artifact token with “Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color.”
- 111.10d A Walker token is a 2/2 black Zombie creature token named Walker.
- 111.10e A Shard token is a colorless Shard enchantment token with “{2}, Sacrifice this enchantment: Scry 1, then draw a card.”
- 111.10f A Clue token is a colorless Clue artifact token with “{2}, Sacrifice this artifact: Draw a card.”
- 111.10g A Blood token is a colorless Blood artifact token with “{1}, {T}, Discard a card, Sacrifice this artifact: Draw a card.”
- 111.10h A Powerstone token is a colorless Powerstone artifact token with “{T}: Add {C}. This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell.”
This means there are 8 kinds of permanently available “default tokens” and of those 8, 5 are artifacts. In and of themselves powerstone tokens are kind of interesting, a reusable source of mana to cast artifacts, or pay for anything else that isn’t a non-artifact spell, or just be artifacts. Some obvious cards that will benefit from this:
- Urza, Lord High Artificer
- Galazeth Prismari
- Clock of Omens
- Disciple of the Vault and its ilk
- Reckless Flameweaver and its ilk
There’s only 2 sources of powerstone tokens right now, neither of which is particularly impactful or will have a huge amount of usage, but I think over the coming sets there will be some ways to abuse them.
Colorless Artifacts
BPhillipYork: I mean it has lotus in the name so it must be good right? There are some tricks to untapping things. This generates a lot of mana, and it could be used for things that need a lot of mana but not infinite, but generally, it’s easier just to set up a combo and end the game rather than just generate a lot but not infinite mana. In a broader sense I wish this wasn’t true, it would be neat if winning the game in magic didn’t so often mean doing the same thing infinite times.
FromTheShire:Â Really like the flavor here, this is a good addition to the collection of cards of the land healing from the Brothers War. As a mana rock, the obvious problem is that it costs 5 and enters tapped which is generally not where you want to be. I can see it for the 5 color decks that need specifically WUBRG but for most decks this is a skip.
BPhillipYork: This is pretty boss, a decent stax effect, and a powerful board clear. Could potentially be cEDH playable.
FromTheShire: I was audibly delighted in I believe War of the Spark when Karn showed up with the Golgothian Sylex, the single most powerful war crime artifact the game has ever seen, and I’m equally delighted to see it getting a proper card here. It’s deeply problematic for the multiverse that Saheeli Rai has been able to build a duplicate, because these things end civilizations and alter the entire climate when they go off, so if they start to proliferate that’s capital B Bad. Love the actual abilities as well, and the activated ability fits excellently.
BPhillipYork: This is a boss card draw effect, you won’t get to draw until you hit 7, but even so it triggers off tokens and non-tokens, which a lot of death draw triggers don’t.
FromTheShire:Â Speaking of things that are Bad, the Weatherlight, a key piece of the Legacy Weapon, semi-sentient planeswalking ship, icon of the Weatherlight Saga, becoming compleated seems like uhhhhh…. a Problem. The actual effect is great though – at worst you’re getting a scry, and soon it’s straight up card draw.
BPhillipYork: This is a really cool way to generate repeated ETBs.
FromTheShire:Â Great piece for blink/flicker decks and vehicle decks.
BPhillipYork: Time will tell, but I think this card is broken. It costs 3, but it is 1 of any color, and you can tap your legendary creatures to get more mana. Turning your commander into a mana dork is a huge thing. And there are just tons, and tons, and tons of legendary creatures now, many of which are just utility and trigger creatures.
FromTheShire:Â Yeah this is pretty powerful. We do have something similar in Honor-Worn Shaku which doesn’t see much play, but crucially this makes colored mana which is a serious boost, and I think this will see a bunch of play.
Lands
BPhillipYork: I think this has potential as a five-color land, since it will invariably let you get your commander and then tap for its identity. The added ability to protect your commander on a key turn, without casting a spell, is also a pretty decent upside.
FromTheShire:Â Untapped 5 color land in most use cases that can also offer you some protection? Very good.
BPhillipYork: Welp another gate, a gate that lets you choose what it taps for, but then pay life; it’s all pretty solid. ETB tapped if you have more than 3 lands, which is troubling, but you can run it to manafix if needed. One upside to this is using it to “domain fix” if you are trying to get large domain triggers.
FromTheShire:Â Yeah this isn’t incredible but extremely solid.
Pain lands reprint
BPhillipYork: Just nice to see the original pain lands reprinted.
FromTheShire:Â Very apropos since they originally debuted in the Invasion block where the forces of Dominaria battled the Phyrexians.
New tapped dual lands
BPhillipYork:Â Given how many ways there are to get mana untapped, the downside of entering tapped is too much. It is really nice that they have the basic land subtypes, so you can fetch them with most fetches, but the tempo loss is too much.
FromTheShire:Â Being fetchable is nice but most of the time these just aren’t going to get there. They’re commons though, so that’s fine. They’re not really meant to be EDH staples.
That wraps up our look at the set’s colorless cards. We know four articles and 281 cards are a lot to remember, so expect an edition of Memory Jar coming soon, listing the top cards from the set you care about. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
