Chances are you don’t see a lot of people running Commander decks with Echoing Calm or Echoing Ruin. Heck, you probably don’t see people use them in normal decks. Generally that’s because players don’t tend to have 15 enchantments of the same name running around, let alone three.
The card of that cycle you do see people frequently slot is Echoing Truth. When used on a single target, Echoing Truth is effectively a harder-to-acquire Disperse. However, while it’s useful in a pinch to temporarily remove a piece in your enemies doomsday machine, that’s not why so many people who play multiplayer formats seek it out.
It’s because of these:
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Having multiple copies of the same permanent – usually creatures – is where Echoing Truth’s power really comes to fruition. The overwhelming majority of the time, this means tokens. As many players can attest, leaving a token army to its own devices is an invitation for disaster. Tokens, be it Elves, Goblins, Hippos, or anything in between, can quickly reach unmanageable levels if they are going to be buffed by creature lords or can be effortlessly generated in mass quantities.
Red, White, and Black all have ways of wiping out hordes of creatures. Blue, by contrast, has a difficult time. It has the lowest creatures by volume, and counterspells aren’t voluminous enough to stop them all. No, Blue’s options to handle them are to find means of preventing them from attacking / setting off game-ending abilities, or, alternatively, send them back to the aether from whence they came. Echoing Truth is one of the better tools Blue has to achieve that end, but if a player has the means to easily replace what was lost (which they often do), it might take something with a little more kick.
Today we have: Wash Out
Name: Wash Out
Edition: Invasion
Rarity: Uncommon
Focus: Permanent Removal
Highlights: Wash Out can take care of more than a few dozen Elves. It can remove the tokens, the Imperious Perfects aiding them, the Parallel Lives speeding the process along, the Beastmaster Ascension making them even scarier, and the Garruk in waiting.
Wash Out is a focused, but very dangerous color hoser. That it can be used for any color and is a mere four mana allows you to leverage it in whichever phase of the game is needed. It can be cast earlier if one player is running away with the game, or if you’re taking a lot of damage from them. Similarly, it can be used later on to wipe a player’s board for delivering a decisive blow against them.
Granted, with decks of several colors, it isn’t as dangerous, but don’t discount its usefulness because of that fact. It still can be a crippling table move. Be cautious, however, in your delivery of it. The card doesn’t discriminate – using Wash Out to wipe away Player A’s Green permanents will affect anyone else using Green as well. A good multiplayer truism is that the only more annoying thing than a board wipe is a one-sided one. So time it well.
Still, if you want a way to cripple an infrastructure, token or otherwise, this will do the trick. Well, unless you’re getting swarmed by Myr…
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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Do you have a particular Commander card to suggest for us to shine a future Spotlight on? You can send suggestions to ryan@cardboardrepublic.com