$20 For Parts, $500 For Labor

"Yup, looks like your problem is that your tower is just 250 lands."

Good morning (or whatever time o'clock it is when you read this) pals! Today is that day of the week that let's you know we are still alive. It's Wizard's Tower Wednesday! Dan and I are back from our week of being gone and we are writing articles with the fierceness of two dudes who haven't written articles in a while.

Before continuing on, if you are confused by what Wizard's Tower is check out our intro article that will explain at you the best format in Magic you didn't know existed. Now I feel like the past couple of articles have all started with "I'm gonna do something a little different this week..." and if I keep saying that it's not really different is it? While I'm busy having an existential crisis trying to figure out if always different means the same, read on ahead to see something a bit different from other WtW (Wizard's Tower Wednesday) articles. (I will be typing out WtW for the rest of the article if I need to say Wizard's Tower Wednesday anymore in this article and hopefully can make this the norm for future articles so that I can spend less typing that one phrase and more time trying to help you be the best you can be.)

The whole point of WtW is to help you, using our vast experience in the format, to see what are the best and most fun cards and type of cards to add to your tower for maximum weird stuff. Every week we will talk about a couple cards of good examples and bad examples for a tower. Today will be a bit broader because we're gonna talk about which mechanics are gonna add stuff or take away from your tower and your fun/jank level.

Cascade - Good

For those of you like me who don't know what bituminous means, it is of bitumen, a sort of coal. So essential "coal blast"

Cascade is one of my favorite mechanics in all of Magic. I don't know where it lies on the storm scale so I don't know if we'll ever see it again, but I feel like the answer is no. Any form of deck manipulation is awesome in Wizard's Tower and this card in particular is also removal which is also always good for your tower. You burn something for 4 and then just get a free random spell and if you have any sort of decent tower you'll have some awesome spells to get to play randomly. There aren't many cascade cards that exist but there are only 1 or 2 that are too good to be in a tower and the rest feel free to throw them in. No one will want to turn a cascade card in to a land because it's basically two spells for the price of one. It's like buying a 10 piece of tendies at Burger King for $1.50, there is just no way you can say no to that.

Delve - Bad (or Too Good)

Too smug to be in your tower

Even bad delve cards just become ridiculous in Wizard's Tower. If you have 4 or more people playing and even just a handful of people play some stuff that gets into the graveyard early on, you can play a 6 or seven cost spell on turn 2 and with having no color restriction, you can play some pretty crazy stuff. Now I'm all for graveyard manipulation because it is just as fun as deck manipulation, but this is the wrong kind. When you delve away cards they are essentially out of the game forever since there is no easy way to bring things back from exile. The whole point of graveyard manipulation is for people to be able to play things that were already cast or put stuff back into the library. Every card you delve away will not only paint one more target on your face, but will also bring one more tear to everyone's eye as you take cards out of the game. "But what about using delve to get rid of certain cards so their graveyard selection is my choosing." You can try and argue and tell me I'm wrong because I am wrong a lot, but if you think delve is a good idea, then you can just go read some other scrubs blog and I guarantee it's probably more helpful and less funny. So who's the real winner?

Scavenge - Good

He just wanted to be a tiger so he got a bunch of battle scars

Now scavenge is that good shit graveyard manipulation. This card in particular where it gives every creature in the graveyard scavenge is a hilarious one to play. Scavenge gives use to any creature that dies in order to buff other creatures. Because you can only scavenge as a sorcery you don't have to worry about dealing with everyone shouting over who gets to scavenge when something dies and figuring out priority and going through the "I pass priority, do you scavenge? No? Priority passes to player 3, do you scavenge? No?" and so on. You have to get the luck of the draw so that the timing of the death and the mana cost lines up with your turn and at a time when you have the extra mana or lack of other options in order to scavenge. Again, just go out and get this card because it's not expensive and no one really wants to kill it when it hits the field since it gives utility to all the creatures in the graveyard. "But you said exiling cards form graveyard is a bad thing." It still is but exiling only cards that have scavenge is no biggie, and if you do have this on the field, you're not exiling 5 graveyard things for 1 mana, you're exiling 1 graveyard thing for 5 mana so the process is much slower. Yes I'm contradicting myself a bit but isn't that what Magic is about? "No." MOVING ON!

Madness - Bad (as in Actually Bad)

This would give me nightmares but my apartment is sitting on concrete, so good luck zombies

Unless you have an Innistrad or discard themed tower (which again, themed towers could be super cool) madness is just too mediocre on it's own to be good. Even From Under the Floorboards, which is pretty decent on it's own, doesn't really shine unless you at least have the option to pay its madness cost. Your tower might have some looters or rummagers that get you to discard but in a deck of 250 cards with 4+ players, you probably won't be lucky enough to pull both. Don't make your friends hate this format because every game they get the madness card that's almost good but isn't since they have no way to activate madness. Sure you can tell me about the one game where you were forced to discard a card by another player and instead got 6 zombies, but that is exception. The one time you used madness effectively on accident probably felt better than the time you got 2 extra tendies for free, but again, exception, not the rule. Don't bog down your tower with a specialized mechanic that will only make new tower-comers immediately turned off to what is clearly the best format.

There are plenty more mechanics that we will talk about in the future. Maybe we'll cover whether flying or trample can fit into a tower. If you really need to be told whether or not evergreen words work in a tower then you're wasting both our time. I'm gonna use my extra un-wasted time to not talk about evergreen mechanics and walk to the mall and get a soft pretzel. It's gonna be a good Wednesday. We'll just keep rolling out cards and mechanics until some point when we stop. Who knows when that is? Enjoy the rest of your week and check back later this week for more fun things.





Already have these mechanics in your tower? Not really sure how flying or trample works? Get lost in your local mall and need help? Send us a comment or a message!