Among the endless drumbeat of anecdotal criticisms, few have been as steady or as enduring as a Magic player complaining about the relative strengths or weaknesses of their favorite colors. It has been around as long as the game itself, and it’s become such a mainstay talking point within the game itself that it’s clearly here to stay.
Dabble for any amount of time with the game and inevitably, without fail, you will either hear someone bemoan the color balance in the game…or you’ll be the person doing it.
There has been endless words written, spoken, and conjured via arcane wizardry that speaks to this point, both here and elsewhere, about the overall balance of Magic’s five colors and how, yes, in the early years there was some discrepancies on how certain colors interacted with one another, a large part of that had to deal with the power level of spells and the comparative weakness of creatures. That paradigm hasn’t been true for many, many years, however. Still, the legacy of those times lingers on in the collective psyche of the player base, particularly among Eternal formats such as Legacy and Vintage that are weighted heavily with cards from the game’s first decade or so.
At this point, it’s doubtful the game will ever truly escape that specter, but only time will really know for sure.
Another aspect that keeps this drumbeat of inequity going is how players are interacting with the game themselves. For one, new players particularly have a tendency to assume all colors existing in parity with one another means that each are fully capable of handling the litany of tricks the game can throw at them. This has never been the case, and it’s often one of the first major lessons a Magic player learns: the colors are all collectively balanced against one another, but they each have advantages and disadvantages against certain colors and play styles – and that’s all intentionally done by design. Not every color can do everything, and they each have their blind spots. How you choose to correct for or exploit those gaps is integral to the fluid nature of the game. Indeed, that is among the game’s greatest selling points as to its impressive longevity.
Of course, criticisms are also frequently brought by way of the format players themselves are partaking in, often remarking about how colors are fairing at that moment in Standard or Limited. Naturally this is a skewed and anecdotal approach to their views on how color balance is going. What’s often overlooking there is that while the five colors do remain balanced over the lifespan of the game, that doesn’t mean a color can’t be a little stronger or weaker from one set to another. This too is by design.
For instance, in one of the game’s more recent sets, if you were playing competitively, the obvious choice was to go Black/Red. Any other deck choices paled in comparison. This doesn’t mean that Black or Red is overpowered overall, just that within the confines of one particular set, in a couple particular formats, that color pair did tend to be a bit more potent than the others.
By contrast, in the recent D&D themed Forgotten Realms set, drafting Blue was considered the worst possible choice. Like comically bad. Blue had been deemed the weakness color of the set by far. And yet that certainly doesn’t jive with the longstanding claims that Blue writ large is too powerful compared to the other colors.
If anything, all Forgotten Realms really did is show that, no, each of the colors has time to shine now and again, and no single color is the clear favorite within the game overall.
As a longstanding Blue-minded player (whether that’s the color used or not), the ‘Blue is OP’ trope has long been one I’ve tried to dissuade people from, though sometimes it can be harder than others; again, historical precedent, even if inaccurate, is hard to overcome.
What is true, though, is that Blue does tend to have a fair amount of guile in its toolbelt – which is kind of its thing. For players who enjoy Blue’s more cunning and manipulative side (without necessarily going into being punitively controlling, leveraging some of its effects – particularly some of the lesser seen ones – can be quite entertaining. Since being tricksy is sort a hallmark of mine within my play groups, and I wholly embrace that mantra when playing Blue. And this week’s pick fits squarely into that mindset.
Today we have: Blessed Reincarnation
Name: Blessed Reincarnation
Edition: Dragons of Tarkir
Rarity: Rare
Focus: Spot Removal
Highlights: It has been a mainstay argument one of Blue’s inherent weaknesses is that it has a hard time permanently removing creatures from the equation. Its best odds of dealing with a creature on the battlefield is to simply prevent it from ever reaching it by way of counterspells. Should a creature inevitably reach the main stage, its second best option is Blue’s tried and true ability to bounce permanents back to a player’s hand. It’s a highly valuable part of Blue’s arsenal surely, and situationally can be incredibly worthwhile, but it’s often just a matter of time until that creature returns. Permanent spot removal is not simply something Blue does.
Most of the time, anyway.
Although rare in appearance throughout the game’s history, in actuality Blue does occasionally get a means of dispensing with a creature in a more definitive manner through polymorph-styled cards. This line of cards goes all the way back to Mirage’s aptly-named Polymorph. Such cards allow Blue to dabble with the kind of spot removal you find in other colors…with a catch. It comes with a highly flavorful tradeoff that’s not always without repercussions: something else needing to take that creature’s place.
While such substitution cards are found in both Red and Blue, Blue’s slice of it (generally) tends to be focused more on individual targets, whereas Red tends to be more global. In both situations though, the end result is the same: trying to take care of a permanent you don’t like in the hopes of replacing it with something far less concerning. But it is a gamble, and it can certainly backfire.
Yet one aspect to this card effect that never quite sat well with several of the game’s designers is that Polymorph and similar cards tended to mechanically destroy the creature, meaning that the creature it used to be sat in the graveyard while the new one sat on the battlefield. That is, it wasn’t being thematically transformed so much as replaced. Eventually, Magic addressed this by exiling the afflicted creature as part of the polymorph process instead, which much better reflects the spiritual intent of the effect without sacrificing efficiency. If anything, it strengthened both. One of these newer generation polymorph cards is the straightforward but often overlooked Blessed Reincarnation.
Similar to Polymorph, both it and Blessed Reincarnation are a four mana spell that turns one creature into another. In this card’s case, the targeted creature is exiled. Then that creature’s controller reveals cards from their library until they find another creature. That creature is put onto the battlefield and all other cards are shuffled back into their library. The base effect of these cards is self-evident: trying to permanently deal with a creature you don’t want coming back. Blessed Reincarnation deftly provides this power, but it does come with three important differences from its progenitor.
First, and most importantly is that unlike many similar cards, Blessed Reincarnation is an Instant rather than a Sorcery. This makes the card incredibly useful from both an offensive and defensive vantage in Commander – such as allowing you to remove a creature attacking you during combat or in response to an opponent trying to enchant/equip one of their creatures.
Second, Blessed Reincarnation itself has Rebound, essentially providing you two copies of the card on back-to-back turns for the same cost – making it an excellent ROI for the already affordable mana investment. Blessed Reincarnation alone could be justifiable as a decent EDH removal card, but getting two uses for the same cost value added benefit makes it all the more worthwhile.
The only negative change is a small but notable one: unlike many polymorph style cards, Blessed Reincarnation can only be used on your opponent’s creatures. Not being able to target your own creatures for this effect is technically a downgrade in corner case situations, such using it on your own creature to potentially morph it into something much more potent, or to make use of a creature slated for the graveyard. However, its upside additions more than make up for this largely situational tradeoff.
As much as folks continue to try, there remains innumerable Magic players who like to argue that Blue doesn’t really need upgrades to its already considerable arsenal of control cards in the game, but just as other colors continually evolve newer and better effects, so too must the means to disrupt those acts. This helpful polymorph rendition certainly does that, albeit with little effort or fanfare.
Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.
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