I will say this about Ultimate Masters: the spoiled cards are fun the look through. Since I already ranked the top spoilers from the Box Topper promotion, it’s time now to look at some less splashy reprints. These are the cards that caught my eye, for various reasons.
Let’s start this off with a bang. Glen Elendra Archmage is one of my favorite cards. A cube all-star and all-around headache inducer, it even shows up in Modern decks from time to time. Double Negate on a stick is pretty good, and unlike Snapcaster Mage they probably can’t block the 2/2 faerie wizard.
I don’t know how much Limited anyone will get to play with Ultimate Masters. If you end up playing Sealed, say at Grand Prix Vancouver, Glen Elendra Archmage seems like an absolute house. It basically eats two removal spells, and that’s one of the most powerful things you can do in Sealed. As a regular rare, it’ll show up a bunch.
The new artwork looks different-enough from the old version that this printing won’t affect the secondary market value of the card too much. Still, it’s not a card in high demand—people want one or two more than they want four—so it should drop below it’s general $20 ballpark. Nice value from the rare slot if you crack a box, at least.
Speaking of sweet new art, check out the Ultimate Masters version of Life from the Loam. They can’t all stay as $20 rares, but this is a card that is always in demand somewhere. Legacy Lands decks have been around forever, but they’re actually good these days. Modern dredge or graveyard decks sometimes make use of it too. Some have even called it the green Ancestral Recall. Perhaps not, but Life from the Loam does serious work.
Seismic Assault is another lurker on the fringes of Modern, and one that often associates itself with Life from the Loam. More cool new art to drive demand. Is there any demand for the actual card, though? It’s been reprinted often enough and isn’t really that good. Molten Vortex ends up being better in most situations—basically unless you are going off with Swans of Bryn Argoll—but I will always have a soft spot for Seismic Assault. If this reprint motivates a few more people to play nonsense land-discarding decks, I will cheer for that.
Perhaps Runed Halo wasn’t in urgent need of a reprint, but it won’t hurt to have more copies. My experience with the card in Modern is that casting it leads to losing the game. But there will always be those who seek to pillow fort people to death, and it’s a reasonable sideboard option in the right metagame. Dropping the secondary market price on this one will be good.
Is the new Slippery Bogle the first time a black-bordered card has made fun of its pronunciation in it’s flavor text? Umezawa’s Jitte doesn’t have room to do that, so probably. Ultimate Masters has a bunch of Umbras, too, so I guess this is a thing they want people to do.
I am reminded of the time I borrowed Matt Jones’s Bogle deck for a Modern PTQ. In round four I was trying to mine some PWP at 1-2 when I got paired against mono-black Pox or something. He kicked three Gatekeeper of Malakir in game one. So much for that fancy fetch-a-Dryad Arbor tech.
Resurrection was one of my go-to cards back in the day. I mostly played bad blue-white decks and would use this to rebuy Serra Angel or something along those lines. Now it’s available at common, which means it joins the Pauper format. I’m not sure that will mean much, but reanimation is a powerful effect and one that white decks can’t always get.
Now here’s a blast from the past. Fire // Ice is the quintessential split card, and a very powerful one at that. It’s another new downshift to common. Considering how good Fire // Ice can be with Goblin Electromancer, I’d expect this to show up in Pauper. Too bad this reprint doesn’t make it legal in Modern.
Giant fish mouth returns. While Gurmag Angler will never be as cool as Dandan, but it’s still a great card. My stacks of Fate Reforged copies of this card just plummeted in value, but that’s fine. Nobody really struggles to find copies of Gurmag Angler. Now there will be plenty more, just in case.
All aboard! Treasure Cruise is the real Gurmag Angler, other than being banned in basically all formats. I had a copy of this card in my PTQ-winning Sealed deck, though back in Khans of Tarkir basically everyone did. How hard is it to pay one blue mana in a five-color format, after all? I don’t know why this needed a reprint, but I will gladly cast some cruises if I get the chance in UMA Limited.
The new art of Ancient Tomb reminds me of Cyclopean Tomb. Also, this is a card that people play instead of Force of Will, which must mean it’s good. Some people play both cards in the same deck. We call them monsters.
Here’s an irrelevant reprint! I don’t know, I guess people want copies of Sovereigns of Lost Alara because it’s cool, or nostalgic for past Standard. At least they did us the favor of including Eldrazi Conscription in the set, so you can try to relive the glory. You can also grab Hyena Umbra, which seems a lot more likely.
Get ready! And if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, be safe.
Carrie O’Hara is Editor-in-Chief of Hipsters of the Coast.