I thought I'd share a few photos of this awesome set which looks great.

Mirrodin Besieged Event Deck - Into the Breach

Skin oils are visible on the box – which is responsible for some of the streaking you see.

Feels good to be playing for the good guys.

The deck box is cardboard – so it won't last you as long as your Ultra-Pro ones, but it's still pretty darn good.

The Event Deck deck box is pretty awesome.

The product contains the main deck in one pack, the sideboard in another pack, an Into the Breach folded insert, a standard Magic 2011 introduction insert and a cardboard divider so that you can separate your sideboard from your main deck. I'm not sure if the deck box will still fit your deck with proper deck protectors – I believe it'll be a snug fit if your deck protectors are thick ones similar to Ultra PRO ones.

Fanned out as if it were a product shot. Oh wait.

Take for example, a Mycosynth Golem deck I used to play.

My slight change allowed the deck the win in one turn – but the deck is easily stopped by something as trivial as a single Essence Scatter. Unfortunately, awesome one turn wins are easily stopped – so they generally fail at being resilient. Does that mean that I should stop playing them? Absolutely not. There’s nothing quite like going from doing absolutely nothing – to doing absolutely everything.

One of the easiest ways to build a resilient deck strategy is redundancy. Four copies of every card! Multiple functional copies of the same card! Multiple combos! If each of your cards will be a problem, can you imagine drawing into multiples? Having four copies help. Having multiple functional copies = more copies of the same card. Can you imagine how consistent you’ll be at having 3 mana by turn 2 if you played 4 copies each of Birds of Paradise, Arbor Elf and Llanowar Elves? Multiple combos makes things even better – they can deal with one combo – only to run into the next one they usually can’t deal with. In addition, your deck becomes unpredictable. You can win one of many ways – but you only need to pull off one. Redundancy has its problems – there are a lot of cards you don’t want to draw too many of.

Another way to be resilient is to be able to deal with the problems other decks give you. This is what a lot of decks do. If you can deal with anything your opponent can throw at you, they’ve then got nothing. If you know that you’re weak against a 20/20 Marit Lage token from Dark Depths, then you should have an answer – be it Path to Exile or Into the Roil.

You could also just play great cards. Every deck has a finite number of answers. You can always have more problems than solutions for your opponent. If you play a 2/3 on turn one, followed by a 3/4 on turn two, and then you follow with a 4/5 on turn three, and then an Umezawa's Jitte on turn four, you’re well on your way to winning. To me, the best strategy is simply playing great cards – it’s also the easiest. Continuously playing cards your opponents have to deal with is great.

There can also be another way to have resilience – resistance to removal. If you play a lot of good cards requiring your opponents to have very specific hate cards, you can count on your threats staying on the table a lot longer. An example would be anything with shroud. Calcite Snapper is good for precisely this reason. Protection is also a bane for a lot of decks: Kor Firewalker and Great Sable Stag are both stubborn enough to stay around for a long time. It’s also why something like Progenitus is so darn difficult to get rid of. There are also other ways to be resilient against removal – a good example would be the ability to recur from the graveyard – Bloodghast and Stinkweed Imp are both ridiculously good at this. There are other ways to be dodge solutions – but that would be a story for another day. (Arcbound Ravager is an example of that.)

Having a good late game plan is also never a bad idea. Many decks have a good early game – but at the cost of their late game plan. Having cards that are equally devastating regardless of when you play it is great – especially if you expect to run into a lot of slower control decks that are full of enough answers. It is for this reason having a deck filled with 12 mana producing creatures is a bad idea – but it’s rarely a bad thing to draw a Baneslayer Angel or even a simple card like Lightning Bolt.

Why this new obsession over resilience? I don’t really know. That’s just how it is now. I decided that for now, I’d rather play a deck that can win against just about anything, rather than a deck that can win against most things.

It's unfortunately, but it looks like little from Worldwake is changing anything, yet. I'm guessing me thinking people would be able to build, test and optimize new decks was a little optimistic.

All that was really new was an Open the Vaults deck making Top 8. I think. (I'm terribly outdated in this department.)

Niels Viaene - Open the Vaults

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lands (20) 2 Celestial Colonnade 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Island 2 Kabira Crossroads 2 Marsh Flats 3 Plains 1 Swamp 2 Terramorphic Expanse creatures (17) 4 Architects of Will 4 Filigree Angel 4 Glassdust Hulk 1 Sharuum the Hegemon 4 Sphinx of Lost Truths others (24) 3 Courier's Capsule 3 Day of Judgment 2 Fieldmist Borderpost 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 2 Journey to Nowhere 1 Mistvein Borderpost 3 Oblivion Ring 4 Open the Vaults 4 Spreading Seas sideboard (15) 1 Day of Judgment 3 Flashfreeze 2 Hindering Light 1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor 2 Journey to Nowhere 4 Negate 1 Oblivion Ring 1 Sanguine Bond

I'm not really sure how the deck works, but the idea appears to be to keep the board clear of creatures with Day of Judgment, Oblivion Ring and Journey to Nowhere while maintaining some card advantage with Courier's Capsule and Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

When you've stabilized, depending on what's in your hand, you swing with one of your big creatures – be it Sharuum the Hegemon, attacking with your Celestial Colonnade or more likely, either a Filigree Angel or Glassdust Hulk.

Although there are four copies of Sphinx of Lost Truths, I think that the Sphinx of Lost Truths and Open the Vaults ‘combo' is probably not reliable enough to count on going off often enough (especially since it's really only awesome with Filigree Angel in your graveyard or Glassdust Hulk on the table – rather situational to me).

The synergy between Open the Vaults and a lot of cards in the deck is notable – because you play it late in the game – when most people have exhausted their cards trying to deal with you.

You have to think of changes to make for your deck. Remember that list of key cards you should’ve made? These are the cards you should be looking at keeping – or making better by putting other cards that work well with these cards, like fetchlands for Knight of the Reliquary or Esper Charm for Bloodbraid Elf.

Too much of a good thing can be bad. If you have a lot of cards doing the same thing, they could hurt you in a different matchup. If you find yourself losing to a particular deck quite badly – think about why. It could be because you don’t have any flying creatures. It could also be because you don’t have a blocker – these things happen when your deck has too narrow a focus, and only wants to keep trouncing a particular type of deck, rather than the whole range of them.

Sometimes, you might have to trade a whole set of key cards for another, simply to give you a better chance against a particular deck – this could change your deck’s focus, or it might simply streamline your deck’s theme. Be sure to be mindful of this – I did this when I switched from Naya Ramp to Naya Zoo – and while they might share a similar mana base, the deck’s strategy, speed and methods changed entirely. This might not be to your liking.

It’s just as important to like the changes as it is to change your deck. Transforming your deck from simple Unearth + Discard strategy to a pure Unearth combo strategy could easily turn it from mediocre to awesome – but if you don’t like how a pure Unearth combo strategy plays – there’s really no point. The point to playing Magic is to have fun. If you can’t win with it, have fun with it.

There’s really nothing quite as exciting as pulling off that Luminarch Ascension – over say, simply attacking with small white creatures. It’s rewarding to make your own strategy work rather than use someone else’s tried and tested crazy token deck instead of building your own token producing engine. It’s also fun to watch your opponent’s get a sense of foreboding as your innocuous looking Khalni Heart Expedition gets ready to chop his life count via Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.

Sometimes your deck just doesn’t work out – it doesn’t matter how much testing you do, how much tuning you do – you just keep losing. Don't keep working at it – try a new deck. Sometimes the deck simply doesn't suit your play style, and sometimes it just simply doesn't work. Some decks sound like awesome ideas – but they have some vulnerability only a larger card pool could fix. When rotation came along, the deck may have lost only a few important cards – but sometimes that's enough to take it from the top to being just mediocre.

A note – if you recall, many years ago I talked about why you might want to play 61 cards. However, fetchlands provide many of the advantages of playing 61 cards – while allowing you to play a 60 card deck. Fetchlands easily provide that half-a-land effect needed for that just-right land ratio – they also thin your deck of lands for the latter half of the game – so there’s really no good reason to play 61 cards currently. So don’t. (If you’re poor like me, play Panoramas and Terramorphic Expanses – unless your deck absolutely needs to have less comes into play tapped enter the battlefield tapped lands)

The most important thing to learn from testing is how to play your deck. There’s nothing more embarrassing like playing TEPS and not knowing how to pull off the turn 1 win.

All-In-Red

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land (14) 14 Mountain creatures (16) 4 Demigod of Revenge 4 Deus of Calamity 1 Dominus of Fealty 3 Magus of the Moon 4 Simian Spirit Guide other spells (30) 4 Desperate Ritual 4 Manamorphose 4 Seething Song 4 Empty the Warrens 4 Rite of Flame 3 Blood Moon 2 Chalice of the Void 4 Chrome Mox 1 Chandra Ablaze

This deck is a fun, fast deck that proves Magic is still an unpredictable game.

The deck aims to do two things – play Blood Moon or Magus of the Moon early enough to screw most other Extended format decks over – punishing them for their over reliance on nonbasic lands for mana and their mana fixing. The other is to drop something big and scary that costs 5 mana.

There's also always Empty the Warrens – with its Storm count being fueled with your mana spells for extra craziness.

Every once in a while you can pull off the turn 1 drop – and really wreck their day. I haven't tried the deck with Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs – but I bet in some metagames he's way awesome.

The most difficult problem most people still aren’t good at solving is a deck’s mana base. To some of us, building a multicoloured mana base as easy as pie – to others, it’s like an unfathomable pit of despair. This is among the first problems you must always be on the watch out for during testing.

This is among the most limiting factors for a deck – fixing your mana. In Extended and Legacy, there’s lands for nearly every situation – and fetchlands allow you to play more lands than you normally would – you could easily see decks with less than 12 mana producing lands that nearly never get bad starts, simply because they play with a well tuned mana base. This is something that you need to do a lot of testing to get right.

It might never seem like it, but taking out one land, swapping lands and even adding lands change the deck’s consistency a lot. You’d never think swapping out one Swamp for one Caves of Koilos would help too much in a black-white deck – but even Caves of Koilos, which has been now superseded by the likes of Marsh Flats and Godless Shrine – is way better than a Swamp.

The next thing to watch for is for key cards. Watch which cards in your deck win you games, like Baneslayer Angel, Vampire Nocturnus, Hedron Crab and so on. Even better – play against your own deck and see which cards are really putting pressure on your opponent. A lot of good cards which might seem mediocre in your initial judgment like Qasali Pridemage and Chandra Nalaar may change your opponent’s play style in such a way that you never notice how good they are.

You should also identify every other popular decks’ key cards. Lotus Cobra, Nissa Revane, Hedron Crab, Luminarch Ascension and even Wall of Denial are some examples. This are cards that could easily win games for you and your opponent. Think about solutions – remember to think about whether you need to treat the symptom, or deal with the underlying problem.

For example, you could get rid of Lotus Cobra – but the real problem is actually stuff being put into play with Lotus Cobra. Similarly with Hedron Crab in Unearth decks, destroying it might slow him down – but he might still eventually win. It might be wiser to steal stuff being put into play – stealing a Baneslayer Angel is an awesome way to ruin someone’s day; Act of Treason might be way more useful than Pyroclasm in dealing with Lotus Cobra. Graveyard hate like Jund Charm and Ravenous Trap might be a little better than trying to kill their Hedron Crab (when they probably still have Tome Scour, Traumatize and so on in their decks).

Make sure you know what your best hand looks like. A really awesome hand for one deck can be a nightmare for another – for an Unearth deck, Hedron Crab, Grim Discovery and 5 fetchlands is an awesome hand – but most people will probably mulligan a hand with 2 spells costing less than 2 mana containing 5 lands. Similarly, make sure you know what the best hand for the popular decks in Standard looks like against you. Imagine how you’d deal with their ideal hand – it’ll help you a lot when it actually comes up instead of staring in wonder at your opponent’s miraculous plays. More importantly, imagine what cards you need to take on their ideal hand.

Why do you need to know these things? Your sideboard can only be at most 15 cards. Generally, unless your match up against a particular deck is ridiculously bad, you won’t be putting very narrow cards in your sideboard to deal with the problem. You want to put in cards that can deal with the problem in general. Oblivion Ring is an example – it can hit everything but lands. It helps if you need removal against something unusual (like a planeswalker), it also helps if you just happen to need more removal to deal with something.

I don’t believe in single cards in the sideboard (unless you are playing tutoring cards like Gifts or Wishes), so in general that leaves with a choice of 4 cards to deal with the problem (4 + 4 + 4 + 3). Most of the time in Standard, it’s some kind of removal to deal with noncreature threats or graveyard hate. This can easily range from something simple like Pyroclasm to something as complicated as World Queller.

Occasionally, people use a transformational sideboard – which can be useful for surprising your opponent in both the earlier games! Some people don’t even need a sideboard – because they’re playing a deck with multiple strategies. Hybrid combo decks are generally slower than their focused parent versions, but they’re something to be wary of as you can’t always tell what’s going to happen next!

Popular sideboard choices should also be taken into account during testing – you must know how vulnerable your deck is to disruption. If your Unearth deck strategy is vulnerable to Jund Charm, it might be wise to put counter spells into your deck – Negate is a good choice – and it is bound to counter something else you don’t like – Path to Exile, Lightning Bolt or even Nissa Revane.

Sometimes the card you might have to deal with is resistant to tampering – like a Sphinx of Jwar Isle. You might need to look into less (or perhaps more) conventional manners of dealing with it, like blocking it with a Vampire Nighthawk or hard casting an Extractor Demon (how usual sounding if you don’t play Unearth).

It’s just as important to know how your deck does after sideboarding. It’s no good to win game 1, and then lose games 2 & 3. It’s important to ensure your deck isn’t easily disrupted, and make sure that you’re not particularly vulnerable to popular sideboard choices.

We all call it testing, yet in fact; it’s also a lot of practice. Some Magic decks play themselves – and require little to no skill to play, probably needing little more than a novice’s knowledge of the rules. Some decks on the other hand are so convoluted, so complex and so confusing that rules knowledge is useless.

Testing a deck is really not as complicated as it sounds. Sit across another person who’s pretty good at piloting the deck you want to test against – and play. There’s no need to be complicated, take statistics and all just to know everything. Really, most good players know quite well from maybe 3-5 rounds of Magic how well a deck actually performs against another.

Taking numbers really only helps in borderline cases – where your advantage over another deck is slim. The most important thing to take out of testing is which cards are important, which cards are great and which cards are just so-so.

The easiest way to build a deck currently is pretty simple – pick two or three colours, look at the pool of cards available to you and choose those that are the best – and fit your play style. The Standard card pool has shrunk considerably in recent years, and the focus on creatures has made building good decks easier than ever.

No longer do you have to ponder for hours over which card draw to run, which removal to put in and which enchantments and artifacts to play, you simply put in the best creatures at each converted mana count up to 5 or 6, and then just play.

This might seem mindless – but it isn’t. Subtle differences are extremely important to decks. Currently, the few dominant decks in Standard are Jund, Naya, Vampires, Nissa Aggro and maybe a few others.

A Jund deck ran by simply playing cards that gave incredible card advantage. It wasn’t fast, it wasn’t great – it simply trounced your opponent by simply playing cards that became 2 spells instead of being the 1 spell cards traditionally are.

A Naya deck aims to do differently – it tries to play situation changing cards. The idea is to drop a big creature every turn past turn 3. To me, this was the deck to play – it had a good chance of beating Jund, simply because everything that it could play was simply better than anything Jund could play.

There were two variants of the Naya-based decks: Naya Zoo and Naya Ramp (I consider the Naya Lightsaber deck that won the World Championships to be a Naya Zoo variant containing Ajani Vengeant). The defining difference (to me at least) was that Naya Ramp ran Lotus Cobra. I tested Naya Ramp for three games against an old mono-green aggro deck. The old mono-green aggro deck isn’t really representative of Standard currently – but it is fast, hits hard and plays like a lean mean damage dealing machine.

Even without testing against Standard archetypes (which are slower than this green aggro deck), I decided immediately against Lotus Cobra. I never saw what others saw in Lotus Cobra – besides a possible turn 3 Baneslayer Angel. In the 3 games I played using Naya Ramp, I found myself either never needing Lotus Cobra in the first place – or I was drawing it late game, where it was a dead card. I hated that fact that I was, at times, contemplating holding land for the next turn where I’d be able to cast something big. Maybe this was just my lack of experience with the deck, but Lotus Cobra was so dependent on land drops to be useful that it just didn’t fit my play style.

I eventually tuned the deck to be closer to a Naya Zoo build. I’m no Pro Player – and my play style has become very sloppy after many years of not playing – but I’m still an excellent deck builder. The Naya Zoo deck I built from the wreck that was Naya Ramp made me feel happy. I wasn’t yet familiar with planeswalkers (although I later built a deck filled with planeswalkers to remedy that) – so I opted to not put anything besides 3 Qasali Pridemages for removal.

The deck then became something I was more comfortable with – it no longer mattered that I had removal, just that I could play creatures. Wild Nacatl and Noble Hierarch became my turn-1 drops – and what made them even better was that I didn’t mind playing them late game. While a turn-3 Baneslayer Angel wasn’t possible anymore – I had a lot more problems for my opponent to deal with.

Even without my best possible hand, Arid Mesas made sure Wild Nacatl was always a nice 3/3, and Noble Hierarchs enabled my turn-2 Woolly Thoctars. A 5/4 on turn 2 or 3 is ALWAYS a problem. It’s gonna hit for something on turn-3. It doesn’t matter how small or how big – you’ve probably made your opponent’s plays for the next few turns problematic. It falls out of the range of most removal, and Noble Hierarchs and Qasali Pridemages often made those problems bigger for my opponents. More often than not, my Woolly Thoctar was a 6/5 or my Wild Nacatl was a 4/4 when attacking – at that early point in the game, few decks can compensate.

The idea was simple – attract removal so that when it comes time for your Baneslayer Angel or Scute Mob – your opponent was out of solutions. I find that a lot of people don’t main deck artifact and enchantment removal – in the current state of Standard (the last time I played it was still Jitte wonderland, it still is in Extended) – I’d forgive you – most decks don’t play much of either – and when they do, it’s rarely important to their strategy.

However, I’ve always liked artifact and enchantment removal in my main deck. It’s just my style. I’ve never liked playing against artifacts and enchantments – most people play them for a reason, and it’s rarely going to be good news for you. Luminarch Ascension, Eldrazi Monument, even the innocuous looking Khalni Heart Expedition can easily mess with your path to victory. Although, ever since the dominance of Umezawa's Jitte, we haven’t really seen much equipment again – although I think that might be a sign that equipment is going to get important real soon.

Of course, nowadays, there’s a new problem – planeswalkers. It’s rarely good news when one hits the table – and it’s almost always a must to get rid of them ASAP. There are few, if any, good answers to a planeswalker besides a good thrashing – or even better – your own planeswalker (which I believe is pretty common ).

I realise I’ve deviated quite a bit from testing – so I guess I should make another post on testing. Which will probably get sidetracked. Again.

Unearth Combo

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lands (22) 4 Crypt of Agadeem 2 Drowned Catacomb 3 Island 2 Misty Rainforest 1 Mountain 4 Scalding Tarn 3 Swamp 3 Verdant Catacombs creatures (29) 4 Architects of Will 4 Extractor Demon 2 Fatestitcher 4 Hedron Crab 3 Monstrous Carabid 4 Rotting Rats 4 Sedraxis Specter 4 Viscera Dragger other spells (9) 4 Grim Discovery 1 Ponder 4 Tome Scour

I know it's a little late. But I still love this deck.

This is in particular was played by Michael Jacob at Worlds 2009. Some lists have Kederekt Leviathan, Corpse Connoisseur or even Consume Spirit. This is just one of the many variations of the deck with tweaks either made to suit the player or the metagame.

I've always been fond of graveyard based decks, despite the constant hate cards and other things being printed against it. This deck is basically aiming to abuse Crypt of Agadeem and the new milling powerhouse found in Hedron Crab + fetchlands.

You mill yourself using Hedron Crab and Tome Scour, and cycling Architects of Will and Monstrous Carabid to provide more fuel for Crypt of Agadeem. Once your graveyard is filled with enough copies of Extractor Demon, Sedraxis Specter and Viscera Dragger, you Unearth the whole lot and swing for your opponent's entire life count.

The deck is obviously weak to graveyard hate and a lot of faster decks, but it goes off surprisingly consistently with Grim Discovery to pull back any Crypt of Agadeem you happen to lose to your (sometimes) overzealous self-milling.

An important note is to not be afraid of hard-casting Sedraxis Specter. That card is still worth its three mana cost if you can afford it.

Is Doom Blade better than Hideous End? Is Disfigure better than both or them? What about old faithful Terror and Dark Banishing? A lot of these questions have different answers depending on the metagame of the play group you happen to be in.

How useful is Grim Discovery, really? Grim Discovery + fetchland is awesome – not to mention the creature you’d get to play again. But I always go back and think: how often do I really want to draw Grim Discovery? It’s a great way to recur my Terramorphic Expanse, Marsh Flats or Verdant Catacombs, but really, do I need to? Then there’s the creature I recover – if it died earlier, would it help me now? More often than not, all I can pull back with Grim Discovery is stuff you don’t really need back anyway.

But there are times when it shines. If I happened to get hit by a Mind Shatter, something like that would be lovely. I get my beloved land back! I also get my (put big creature you like very much) back! It’s not always a dead card – but it’s not as good as I’d like it to be. Why? It’s because we’re used to the idea of losing something permanently in Magic. It’s very easy to lose something and we don’t expect to get it back. Instead, we do what we should be doing – instead of mulling over the past, we play more stuff that attracts even more removal. If our plan works, by the time our best, most annoying creature shows up – your opponent has no more answers.

However, if you think about Grim Discovery, if you use it at the optimal time – it gives you some card advantage. A fetchland back from the grave is two landfall triggers (and an extra land as bonus!) and a good creature back from the grave is awesome.

Of course, in a deck without fetchlands or creatures, Grim Discovery is most certainly dead. So I guess it really depends on your deck – and your opponent’s deck.

This brings us back to statistics. How often does your deck come into the situation on its own where the card is useful? (Ignore the opponent for now.) Can you create the situation if it doesn’t happen? How good is the card in that situation? How good is the card if you aren’t in that situation? For example, let’s look at Needlebite Trap and Archive Trap.

Needlebite Trap: Never. Grove of the Burnwillows. Pretty good. Really expensive.

Archive Trap      : Always. Path to Exile. Pretty good. Still playable.

Traps are good examples because they are good in a very well defined situation, but they can be bad – or even terrible in others. Needlebite Traps are great to buy one turn off a Baneslayer Angel, but if your opponent never gains life, it’s pretty awful.

Some cards are almost always good. Lightning Helix is a good example. There are very few situations where you don’t want to gain life while dealing damage at the same time. It’s cheap enough that should be able to play it eventually (even if you are colour-screwed). Yet at the same time, you need to be careful. Cards like Rampant Growth are also almost always playable – but you don’t really need it if your deck doesn’t have cards needing more than 4 mana.

Then, you have to consider – your opponent’s deck. A card like Tarmogoyf seems weak when you happen to be goldfishing, but it’s a real monster when you have an opponent. You yourself might not be playing as many card types as needed to make it big – but together with your opponent, you probably are. Harms Way is useless without an opponent – but it’s almost always useful with one. It’s like a counter spell – it’s a dead card to you by itself, but in response to your opponent, it’s a great card.

Whether a card is dead depends heavily on the decks in play. One With Nothing seems useless – but combined with graveyard strategies and Rakdos-themed cards, it’s really quite the powerhouse. Even Path to Exile is no good if there aren’t any creatures – or the only creatures around have shroud. Yikes.

Let’s go back to my example of Doom Blade, Hideous End, Disfigure, Terror and Dark Banishing.

Doom Blade and Hideous End are really about the same, just that Hideous End gives you the additional effect of taking away 2 life from your opponent. Dark Banishing is similar – but for 1 extra generic mana, it takes away the possibility of regeneration!

To be fair, we’re comparing Doom Blade to Terror. If you are facing a lot of regeneration, Terror is awesome. If you aren’t, then Doom Blade hits more things and is even more awesome than Terror. It even makes Dark Banishing look obsolete if you don’t see much regeneration. If you see regeneration, then Doom Blade is looking pretty dead. I’ve talked about a strange card – Disfigure. How does it fit in? It’s better than all the other cards in the sense that I can hit everything – even stuff that’s black. The problem? It can’t hit anything bigger then 2 toughness. If everybody is playing small fry that’s annoying – it’s great. If everyone is playing huge things – it’s terrible.

If you notice that some of my cards are missing their apostrophes, that's deliberate. I don't have time to go through the mouseover plugin to fix them. Yet.

4 to cast 6/6 flying trample – with a drawback black can easily deal with. I'm not so sure about its viability in tournaments, but it's certainly a chase mythic (unfortunately).

First, let's take a short glance at white. White hasn't really gotten much of a boost, and the only thing that interests me now (because it's Extended season, if I'm not mistaken) is a timeshifted version of Kird Ape too. It's called Loam Lion.

Other notable white cards are Rest for the Weary and Stoneforge Mystic.

They printed a counterspell for instants – which isn't too bad, considering the number of good instants in the current metagame (Lightning Bolt and Path to Exile come to mind.)

I don't know what to think about Jace, the Mind Sculptor. It's still an awesome card with plenty of power, but as I've learned with planeswalkers – the one time a turn thing can really bum you out sometimes.

Other notable blue cards are Mysteries of the Deep. Selective Memory, Thada Adel, Acquisitor and perhaps, Treasure Hunt.

Besides Abyssal Persecutor, I think Death's Shadow and the reprinting of Smother is interesting.

As for red, Bazaar Trader is interesting, being a Donate that ignores enchantments (and planeswalkers). Although, I think my favourite red card is:

In green, there's Canopy Cover, although I'd imagine the all green version of Woolly Thoctar (I know it's not exactly the same – but the idea is the same.) is the most interesting green card to me.

Everflowing Chalice is useful in many of my decks, although in many cases I would play Gilded Lotus instead. Basilisk Collar is also interesting, and although I'm not sure how good it is, I'd sure like 4 copies of it.

Among the five new dual colored manlands, Celestial Colonnade, Creeping Tar Pit, Lavaclaw Reaches, Raging Ravine and Stirring Wildwood, I like Celestial Colonnade the best.

And that concludes my quick look at Worldwake. I'll post more once I've actually played with the cards. No time to go to the prereleases yet again, sadly.