Welcome back to Round 2. No intro for this one because you definitely already read [PART ONE, FOUND HERE], right? In this second part, I’ll be covering the Pioneer format, and the cards that we might be familiar with that are entering the format for the first time. 

There are 29 cards in total that fall into this category, though of course, it would be nonsense to try and talk about them all in depth. Magic Foundations offers players a glimpse at “Magic as Garfield intended”, whatever that means, and showcases a very traditional way to play and add to your decks. As such, many of the cards are very straightforward in their design and conception, offering powerful versions of necessary effects. While we’re not going to gush over every addition to Pioneer here, we can talk about how each of these cards might see some play somewhere someday. 

Sideboard Slots

This is a slight spoiler for the cards i’m actually talking about later on, but Foundations offers some premium sideboard cards throughout the set. Amongst staples like Scavenging Ooze and Abrade, we have these cards here. A case can be made for each of their inclusion in some sort of deck, competitive or otherwise, and their applications in the format are tangible. Trygon Predator is one to especially keep your eye on, as that just needs the right sort of meta game to take over the midrange section of the Top 8 report. 

Copies 5-8

Sometimes in life, you just can’t get enough of the essentials. While each of these cards has an upgrade in the format that’s somewhere between slightly and strictly better, they’re still good enough to run some additional copies of in the strategies that want them. Increasing consistency is great for any deck, and there isn’t a white weenie deck out there that isn’t looking for more copies of Savannah Lions. 

New Effects that are just sort of OK

While Pioneer hasn’t had access to these cards before, their individual impact is relatively low and they are unlikely to make a difference in deck building. These are basically the potatoes that Marge Simpson thinks are neat. Each card here has the potential to fit into a strategy somewhere, but the strategy that they fit into currently needs a lot of work in order to break through the rest of the decks available in the format. No shade to Hidetsugu, but the First Rite might have been a bit better than the Second one. 

Deathmark and Flashfreeze

Pioneer’s newest Sideboard Staples, these will be some of the strongest color-hosers available in the format. Deathmark is the lowest rate we’ve seen for the very classic black removal spell with no downside, and will certainly see play if any creature based White or Green deck starts to show up in a serious way. Selesnya Company, perhaps?

Unlike other, more generic Black removal spells, Deathmark in particular helps you to double spell at a very early point in the game, putting you significantly ahead of your opponent. In much the same way that Fatal Push and Cut Down shift the tempo of the game in your favor, Deathmark also has the potential to trade up in mana and stymie the opponent’s development in a major way. While we aren’t currently plagued by some White or Green menace, that may not always be the case, and with Deathmark in the game, that probably actually won’t happen at all ever actually. 

Flashfreeze is one that I needed convincing of. Isn’t this just a worse Change the Equation? Well, yes, but actually no. Flashfreeze trades the utility of countering something even on mana for saying “No, no, absolutely not” to EVERY card the Green or Red player is running out. The most prominent examples of things that this can hit that CtE cannot are a hard cast Atraxa, Grand Unifier or an Emergent Ultimatum. While these cards might not seem like enough to warrant the swap, that list also has the potential to grow, too. We have cards like Genesis Wave coming, and a Green Devotion deck that is perpetually waiting in the wings for its moments to shine. Who knows what the future holds, but it’s always better to have access to tools and not need them than to need them and not have them. 

Gatekeeper of Malakir

Black Devotion has been a fringe deck for the entirety of Pioneer’s existence, and every creature with a cost of BB has been under scrutiny as the potential key to unlock the deck’s full potential. While i’m not fully convinced that this card is what’s going to push Black Devotion through the Great Filter, it is a powerful inclusion that could easily take the spot of any other removal spell in the deck. 

The way to think of this card is not as a creature that can also remove a thing, but as a removal spell that can also attack. Shifting that frame of reference puts Gatekeeper at a higher priority when deck building because it acts as a catch-all that can also bolster the rest of your game plan instead of being a one-time-use tool. At some point, we’ll cross the threshold of “having enough densely Black cards that Devotion has no choice but to be good”, and Gatekeeper puts us well on our way there. 

Mystical Teachings

For those who have never been acquainted, allow me to introduce you to the best Blue card of all time. 

That’s a joke, but also it isn’t, because Mystical Teachings is an incredibly powerful card selection tool that fetches out the actual best cards in your deck. This card’s presence has the potential to reshape the Control deck landscape, allowing slower Blue decks the opportunity to incorporate any number of silver-bullet style cards that can attack anything the meta throws at them. Crypt Incursion to combat aggressive decks and graveyard dependant decks like Phoenix, Hullbreaker Horror to turn the tide in the Control mirror, or even utility spells like Withering Torment or Tishana’s Tidebinder. Teachings can grab basically anything you need whenever you need it, and is the ultimate way to spend mana at your opponent’s end step. 

Combine that utility with the fact that this card negates the downside of some other very strong cards – the new Refute as an example – and can just sit in your graveyard for six turns until you need to find something; that’s all just extremely strong. What I said wasn’t an exaggeration, this card may very well reshape the way that we think of and perceive Pioneer Control decks, and I cannot be more excited to play with it. 

Vile Entomber

To be frank, I have no idea where this card goes, but it goes somewhere. The obvious answer is that it slots into Greasefang decks in some form or fashion, but I think that instead of that the right option might just be that Pioneer will soon have a true midrange Reanimator strategy. Between this, the Survivor from Duskmourn that also Entombs a card, and our new Unburial Rites clone, the odds that there isn’t a Reanimation strategy waiting in the wings is extremely low. This is a deck that can easily be supported by Thoughtseize and Fatal Push, and it’s not like we’re lacking for big dumb idiots to pull out of the graveyard, right?

Burst Lightning

Burn is back, baybee. We’ve been dealing with “bad Shocks with upside” in this format since day one, but with the inclusion of Burst Lightning in the format now, we no longer need to play the best of the worst; this card is actually just strong on its own. 

While the aggressive decks as of late have slanted heavily on the Sligh game plan of pumping up a creature to high heavens, Burn decks offer something that Sligh decks don’t really get access to – true inevitability. You cannot Thoughtseize the top of their deck, and unless you have six hundred Spell Pierces, you can’t stop that lethal burn spell they just drew either. Burn is something that we haven’t really seen competitively in Pioneer yet, and has always existed on the fringes and in Patrick Sullivan’s MTGO account. Between this card, Boros Charm, Boltwave, and some of the other additions we’ve gotten lately, Burn is officially a real deck in the format and will be for the rest of time.

Expedition Map

At the moment, this card really only has one target – Lotus Field. Whether in the dedicated Combo deck of the same name, or the UW Controlling shell that puts up results on occasion, the ability to find that card can definitely be priceless. Increasing the consistency of both of these decks puts some additional pressure on Midrange strategies as they can always just go over the top of whatever the Thoughtseize player is doing.

The real mystery though is whether or not this card will ever have an additional target in Pioneer. Will it be used to dig for Nykthos in Green Devotion shells? Will we be getting a different ramp land suite, ala the Tron lands or Ravnica Bounce Lands sometime in the future? Will we ever see a land-based combo deck such as Dark Depths? Each of these strategies is wholly enabled by Expedition Map, making this a card that you need to keep on your radar. 

That’s all for this one. Foundations is perhaps the greatest core set of all time, and I am incredibly excited to see what we can do with all of our shiny new tools. Keep your eyes and ears alert for all of our coverage of this set and more, in all of the places that we post that sort of thing – from Scuffle’s Limited guides to the Fireside Magic podcast and more, we’ll be yapping about Foundations for a long time coming. Until the next one, stay safe, play smart, and thanks for reading.