The curse of the Wicked Slumber roils through the fairy tale lands of Eldraine, and while Wil and Rowan do their best to save their kingdom and perhaps their plane, we’ll be taking a look at how the new colorless cards seem poised to shake up formats with the upcoming release.

Agatha’s Soul Cauldron

BPhillipYork: There’s several infinite combos that this card enables, which is kind of nice, though it also makes it sort of a threat. For example, Pemmin’s Aura or anything else which requires colored mana to untap, there’s also whole cycles of spellcaster type creatures that have neat colored mana abilities like the guildmage cycles, where you could throw this in to help enable a deck built around lots of mana and using those abilities, which tend to be fairly expensive (since they are repeatable). The ability to exile a card from a graveyard essentially also makes this a stax piece with value add, you can exile a land in response to a Deathrite Shaman targeting or in response to a reanimation spell. Given that I think it’s just a solid card, good counter to reanimator decks and also can be used to buff your creatures, and at 2 mana very reasonable.

Marcy: This card is quite the powerhouse, and is already finding itself in quite a few different Standard shells and infinite combos, as Philip mentioned. The cost to value ratio is amazing, in the sense that you get graveyard hate that grows your own things and allows you to replicate activated effects. Even better, those effects will stack with every new card you exile, meaning that it can truly make for some bizarre combos that shouldn’t be possible normally.

Loxi: I’m here to chime in for the last goodies of the set! This card is great for some sweet combo potential, and the mana fixing for high color creature decks is solid. I think this might find a great home in Slivers or some other tribal decks that tend to have a decent chunk of value-based activated abilities. This also can be some sweet graveyard hate for your opponent’s junk too. Overall: a lot of good for a super low entry cost, which always makes a great package.

Candy Trail

BPhillipYork:  Pretty solid Food and Clue, 1 mana for a scry and then sacrifice to draw and gain life is right in line with a whole cycle of artifacts with similar abilities. The lifegain is a bit lackluster, but there’s ways to recur cards like this to make them valuable.

Marcy: Sadly a card without any real home, but it is a decent little card for what it does. 1 mana scry 2 and then draw a card and gain some life isn’t terrible in something like limited, but there’s no real home for this that I can think of other than perhaps a Commander deck that looks to abuse artifacts somehow.

Loxi: I would rather run something else that generates Food rather than this, but it’s a neat egg-like effect for decks that want those sort of artifacts. In food-focused decks though, I think I’d more than likely either have dedicated draw or dedicated food-generators separately.

FromTheShire: Not terribly exciting in a vacuum although it’s not bad certainly, in a Daretti, Scrap Savant style artifact recursion deck the repeated scry adds up quickly.

Collector’s Vault

BPhillipYork:  The way this card interacts with Containment Construct and Currency Converter and Conspiracy Theorist is awesome, it’s card selection which is useful but expensive in terms of mana, but if you bolt several of these pieces together it can become a really effective card advantage engine with treasure generation. That being said, 2 and 2 mana makes it kind of a gimmick (unless you maybe have Galazeth or Urza to turn your treasures into rocks)

Marcy: Honestly if there were a way to use this in Standard or similar smaller deck formats, I think this would be kind of nice. Your initial investment aside, you pay 2 mana to loot and then get 50% of it back. If you had some way to negate the cost, this is really quite nice.

Loxi: I’ve seen a lot of back-and-forth about where this card sits power wise, but I think it’s a good spot for decks that run treasure or artifact heavy. Since one mana is effectively “banked” in the treasure token, one cost to make an artifact and filter your hand can have some serious value. Two mana might be a tough sell for things a lot of general use, especially since you’re never going to be net positive on cards with this, but if you have synergy with the artifacts you’re making I can see it putting in some work. Bonus points if you like to put things in the graveyard as well.

FromTheShire: Cheap to get down, cheap to activate since it makes a Treasure, draws cards, fills your yard…. a nice little utility piece.

Eriette’s Tempting Apple

BPhillipYork:  To me this is a weird card because it’s a red ability bolted onto an artifact. Black really shouldn’t have access to this, with its many ways to gain value from sacrificing. It’s okay with just one card, I suppose. It also has weird value for say a blink deck, where it can be entering over and over again, grabbing you creatures, you need some way to get rid of them. It’s also worth noting this is, in an edge case, just a colorless source of haste, since you can target a creature you already control.

Marcy: I think the food token aspect of this is a little weird except for the aspect of it which makes it a drain, but it almost feels like they didn’t think it did enough. At 4 mana this can literally steal you a game at a crucial point, but I’m not really sure. This seems really scary in Commander, though, if you had a deck that could abuse the effect and cause the card to ETB often enough.

Loxi: This is cool but I don’t really think it’s worth the cost. Maybe if you can blink it a lot? I think the food synergy is a nice touch but I don’t know of a food deck I’d want this in.

I should specify I also am not a cuisine cultivator like some other deckbuilders: food is not my forte.

FromTheShire: Threaten effects usually cost 3, so paying 4 for a colorless one seems okay-ish, especially since it sticks around and offers a little extra upside. Single threatens aren’t particularly useful in Commander unless you’re heavily built around them though, and even then the decks tend to struggle.

Hylda’s Crown of Winter

BPhillipYork:  It’s potentially a lot of card draw for 6 colorless mana, like, a lot. That’s good. It’s also potentially recurrable, which is nice. I think the issue is just how expensive, but this set has a lot of “when you tap” so maybe there’s enough value synergy there to make this worthwhile.

Marcy: Without the discount on your own turn, it feels like this is super useless. In limited, maybe, this could be a big game winner. I do think otherwise the cost is really high to get a lot of value off the card draw, unless you have some way of tapping things down easily and then paying 3 mana. That said, in Commander, I could certainly see that being easy.

Loxi: I like this card a lot, but I worry that the 6-cost for the draw effect might be a bit much at times. Being able to freely tap things and then sac it on the same turn is really a neat single-card synergy though, and since tap effects are easy to come by in the colors (which also inherently are colors with great artifact synergy!), I don’t mind the cost as a whole when you factor in the full package.

Obviously, great synergy with Hylda herself and you should run it for flavor alone.

FromTheShire: Decent but slightly pricey card draw that can potentially nullify the biggest creature on the board, I like it. You’d be surprised how often being able to tap things down comes in handy if you can do it repeatedly.

Scarecrow Guide

BPhillipYork:  More scarecrows to support Reaper King is always good.  Other than that uh…this is a bad card.

Marcy: This is… a card that exists.

Loxi: Banger in Reaper King, pretty meh otherwise.

Syr Ginger, the Meal Ender

BPhillipYork: Okay everyone else is going to wax on and on about how great this card is, so I’ll be staking out the opposite position. Unless you’re cycling through treasure madly, this is overhyped for Commander. It does seem like a fun card though. Okay also for that Food Golem commander, good for that since you’ll see artifacts hit the yard constantly.

Marcy: I LOVE Syr Ginger. She is such a girlboss. I love this in Standard Cookie Aggro, and I really love how the preponderance of Planeswalkers in Standard and Commander turns this card from a joke into a legit threat. I still think there’s even some value here to use this in tandem with Affinity in some way, but I do not know if I’ve seen a shell that looks viable yet.

Loxi: My original take on this card was that it was a niche use-case for limited and 60-card formats and fun goofy card for commander. Turns out, a really easy-to build tempo piece is still nuts in Commander, and even being limited to colorless doesn’t matter when all of the synergy you need is colorless.

Just take a look at the card for a second as if those top lines of text were gone: it’s a growing, scrying creature that you want to make huge and whack things. Make some Foods, Treasures, & Clues to get her beefy. Throw some equipment on there, and watch her go to town. I was pretty low on this card at first, and I’m glad I’ve been able to rethink my opinion because I’d like to take a crack at a deck for her.

The Irencrag

BPhillipYork: It’s a 2-cost mana rock that comes into play untapped with upside, making it one of the better mana rocks in the game at this point. Auto like top 20 rocks, though I’m not really sure why you’d want to make your creature lose its abilities. Maybe for like weird Black creatures that are cheap but have downsides, like the OG Lord of the Pit but it would then lose flying and trample, and just be a 7/7. You could do some weird stuff, like equip it to a creature with echo or vanishing to remove the downside.

Marcy: This card is really quite nuts in Standard. I think the other ability it has gets ignored a little. I have seen it do some crazy things to other creatures, and even if you never use that part? Still a mana rock that fits really easily even into formats that aren’t Commander.

Loxi: At face value, a 2 mana rock with upside is basically always good. It is a legendary, so if you’re in a deck where that matters…that’s kinda neat. The effect is pretty cool though, it’s no home-run but it can come in handy at times. This is realistically a 2-drop rock that will sometimes do a thing, and that’s still solid.

Three Bowls of Porridge

BPhillipYork: It’s a decent riff on a faerie tale, but Flaxen Intruder has a very very different feel, this is like Disney vs Grim.

Marcy: It’s a cute card and I love the theme. Uh. Nothing else.

Loxi: The Flavor? A+.

The Flavor of the card is also A+.

But the Power of the card? Just right.

Eldraine Dual Lands: The “Restless” Manlands

Wilds of Eldraine introduces their own set of dual lands, the “Restless” lands, which all come into play tapped, produce opposing colors, and turn into manlands of varying costs, powers, and abilities. Standard will likely see these cards the most often once other lands start to rotate next year, but they could be very strong in limited or Commander, since turn 1 or 2 ETB tapped lands that do stuff is pretty normal there.

Restless Fortress

Marcy: A strong contender for powerful land here. It’s got a big butt to block with if you save it for your opponent’s turn, and on your own turn, it becomes a way to drain your opponent’s life and restore your own. 4 mana isn’t really that much, either, as games drag on or get longer.

BPhillipYork: It’s a bad dual, and the odds you will attack with it are low.

Loxi: I’m not sold for constructed, but I always do like to see rare lands that are solid to draft in limited. This can be pretty scary to deal with in draft and will probably do some serious work there.

Restless Spire

Marcy: I think this costing 2 mana is about all that saves it from being absolutely terrible, and even then, I feel like an Izzet deck should be doing something better with 2 mana than whatever this is.

BPhillipYork: It’s a bad dual, and the odds you will attack with it are low.

Loxi: Also not really a constructed card I’m sold on, but if you’re pretty aggressive it’s not bad. I do always like seeing lands that you sort of know will end up being on the cheaper side of the monetary range of dual lands, since it opens up more options for budget deckbuilding.

Restless Cottage

Marcy: 4 mana for a 4/4 that gives you a food token AND eats a card in a graveyard seems like easy and fair value. Solid manland.

BPhillipYork: It’s a bad dual, but the attack trigger is much more useful and so would have a lot more potential, but still it cost 4 to get a food and exile a card.

Loxi: I can see merit for this in Food as a mana sink, but I don’t know how much I’d drop for it outside of that. Also a stud for limited, but that’s probably a normal trend for these.

Restless Bivouac

Marcy: Dear reader, do YOU know how to pronounce ‘Bivouac’? It’s ok, you can try it now. No one’s listening. Nope, that was wrong. Try it again. Ok, anyway, 3 mana that can grow itself or other creatures seems really good for a Boros land, so I think this one has some potential value.

BPhillipYork: It’s a bad dual, and the odds you will attack with it are low, however the +1/+1 could be to hit a threshold to do something useful, so I see some slight, very niche potential there.

Loxi: This card is a fine manland that’s a touch better than Needle Spires, however I really want to mention how SICK that art is. Like seriously, hands down one of my favorite land arts in a while even though it’s barely even a land art.

Restless Vinestalk

Marcy: The largest of the manlands at 5/5, Restless Vinestalk has a really interesting ability that messes with the power and toughness of another creature. It doesn’t specify it has to be yours or an opponent’s, which means that even though this is the most expensive manland at 5 CMV, you could potentially force an unfavorable block on your opponent or turn some small 1/1 creature in a 3/3 body as you swing.

BPhillipYork: It’s a bad dual, and the odds you will attack with it are low.

Loxi: I’m a bit hung up on the cost for this, if you have five mana to sink I feel like you have better options or you’re probably stuck anyway. Maybe as a grindy control finisher, but dumping 10 mana across two turns for this feels tough.

Edgewall Inn

BPhillipYork: This is an ETB tapped land but it has enough upside in niche adventure focused decks you could not care about the loss of a mana for a turn enough to run it, it does also help you fix, so for like tri-color or more adventures, could be playable.

Loxi: Sure, it’s fine if you have a lot of colors and adventures. That is the only use case for this, but it’s usable there no doubt.

That wraps up our look at the set’s colorless cards. Join us next time as we return to our usual Commander content! 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.