Great Train Heist | Campbell White

Spree Bird 

Welcome back to Preview Review, the series where we look at some of the cards you might have missed from the endless set release schedule! When a set gets released it’s always easy to identify the most powerful, pushed cards. It’s not always easy to identify the sleeper hits, the ones that prove themselves in the heat of the game rather than in heated online discussions.

Modal cards will help you fly under the radar at the game table. Your opponents will be much less familiar with these than with a Smothering Tithe, which might help you dodge a Counterspell or two. In this article, we’re going to be looking at modal cards with the Spree mechanic. Now, if you’re new to Magic: The Gathering, a modal card simply means a card that allows you to choose one or more modes that are listed on the card. Simply put, modal cards can do a choice of things or many things. 

An example of a modal card you’ll encounter fairly often when you’re playing EDH is Rakdos Charm. This card is potentially one of the best modal spells seeing play in our format. It’s a low-cost spell at two mana, it’s instant speed which complements each of its modes and each mode is relevant. 

The option to exile a player’s graveyard is very useful. Aristocrats and reanimation strategies sit comfortably within our top themes here on EDHREC. This means that you’re very likely to run into a deck down at your friendly local game store that wants to utilize its graveyard in one way or another. If you don’t need to shut down a player’s graveyard you can destroy their most powerful artifact in play or if you’re against a token player with 40 1/1 Soldier tokens, then congratulations you’ve just knocked them out of the game for two mana! 

Now, EDH is a 100-card format, 99 once we’ve chosen our commander, and 98 once we’ve added a Sol Ring. Modal cards are very important in EDH because while they take up one slot in the deck, they solve a variety of problems for that one slot. Let’s dive in and see some of the newest offerings for our commander decks! 

Great Train Heist 

Starting off with the newest Magic: The Gathering set, Outlaws at Thunder Junction, we have the Great Train Heist. Now, this card has slowly crept up our list of played cards from the set after the set was previewed and now it comfortably sits in the number one position. Let’s explore what makes this card such a fan favorite. 

Part of the reason that the Great Train Heist is so well loved is that its modes scale so well with the game. Firstly, when evaluating a card with Spree we’ve got to remember that this ca rd costs us one red mana plus whichever of the modes we want to choose.

Four mana will allow us to untap all our creatures and grant us an extra combat phase if it’s cast in our combat phase. Red is known for generating extra combat steps and this card being able to do it at instant speed is as good a combat trick as it gets, but that’s still not all. If we’ve the additional two generic mana to give our creatures +1/+0 and first strike then we can really capitalize on our two combat steps and bring the pain to our opponents. 

It’s worth noting here though, that we can use these first two abilities defensively as well as offensively to present our opponent with some difficult trades. Our creatures can block and hopefully punch up, trading one of our weaker creatures with our opponents. Combat is a two way street in commander (or should that be a four way junction?) so it’s worth hanging on to this card in the face of a tougher opponent to make them really pay for attacking you. 

I’ve left the last ability to well, last but by no means is it the least. It ensures that whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a nominated opponent then you make a tapped treasure token. This means your opponent with the weakest boardstate just became a treasure battery for you! 

This synergizes perfectly with our first ability of generating additional combat steps because if you’re able to attack that same nominated opponent each combat step, then guess what it’s double treasure time. The fact that the treasures come in tapped is what’s stopping this card from being an absolute powerhouse, but with how much treasures can be abused in Magic right now, that tapped clause doesn’t even really matter. 

Insatiable Avarice

Insatiable Avarice is a lot more of a simple modal card, but in the simplicity lies its beauty. 

This card scales wonderfully with the game. It keeps the card draw flowing, it searches for your silver bullet and if it’s late enough in the game then it can do both. 

If we look at the modes on this card, they’re both very desirable. One black and two generic mana will allow us to cast a slower Vampiric Tutor, one of the most powerful cards in black. Yes, this card costs two mana more than Vampiric Tutor and it’s sorcery speed but that’s because it’s also got the potential to be a draw spell too. Slow is the name of the game if you’re going to cast this card for this first mode alone. 

If you’ve not got any other way of drawing into the card you’re putting on top you might run the risk of putting a target on your back. It’s best to check around the table if you’re going to cast this early game and look for mana open to potentially counter it, because if you get hit with a card like Spell Pierce, you’re unlikely to have the mana to pay for any of these conditional-counter effects.

Regarding the card draw effect, it’s just really nice. It acts as a best case scenario Painful Truths that you can run in a mono black deck. Sure it targets a player, which means you might run into the risk of being blown out by the next card on this list but combined with the first ability this is looking like a long-term mono black staple at the least. 

Return the Favor 

Spree continues to deliver cards that are not only powerful, but hilarious to resolve. All it takes is for someone to cast a juicy spell, like the one I mentioned above and then it’s go time. 

If you’re already running this card in your decks, why not comment below what the craziest spell you’ve stolen with this is. Your comments will convince people who aren’t running this card just as much as this article! The ceiling is unreal with Return the Favor and seeing this card resolve even once will have every blue mage at your friendly local game store taking every copy of Time Stretch out of their decks in pure fear. 

Not only can you change the target of a spell, you can copy it too. Which means that in the case of Time Stretch that four red mana gets you FOUR extra turns! Now, this is the absolute best case scenario but it’s too spicy not to mention. Just start running this one in your red decks and you’ll be surprised to see what mono red can do, actually. 

Lively Dirge 

If you’re a long term reader of Preview Review, you’ll know how much I love cramming more resilience into our commander decks. I’ve written at length about reanimation and how the most surprising thing your opponent has to deal with can often be something they’ve already dealt with. 

Lively Dirge is a little step down from some of the cards we’ve spoken about in this article already, but it’s not to be overlooked. It’s a known fact that one of the ways to win commander games or games of Magic in general is to have card advantage over your opponents. Lively Dirge allows us to spend one card, and we get two or three cards in return. This means we’re up on card advantage by one or two cards. 

This card is great in an aristocrat's strategy because it can grab lots of little utility creatures that add up to four mana value total, such as Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat. But as the power level of EDH increases so does the efficiency of low mana value creatures. If you’re in a high power game you can get back a Dockside Extortionist or Orcish Bowmasters. If you’re someone who likes to brew with the most novel new cards like Aftermath Analyst and Bartolomé del Presidio. There’s a home for this card in plenty of decks, and I’m not sad to see more options like this one. 

Remember that while you can lean heavily on the latter ability, the former will help you fill your graveyard if you’ve no targets to reanimate, combine both these abilities to really complete your combos out of nowhere! 

Trash the Town 

Green shows us once again that in this color even trash can be playable! Green is fairly well known for allowing us to draw cards so long as we’ve dealt combat damage to a player, and this card allows for another entry in that long lineage. While it doesn’t offer the potential of cards like Hunter’s Insight, this card can certainly see play in +1 counter strategies or provide that extra bit of evasion by giving target creature trample until the end of the turn. 

Trash the Town can feel a little overlooked, seeing as it was printed in a set with some phenomenal modal spells rare and mythic but if we really examine this card it’s capable of buffing our creatures, granting evasion and drawing cards. All things we want to do in EDH and this card offers enough variety for its one card slot in our deck that I absolutely think it’s worth a shot. This card could really see a home in a Hamza, Guardian of Arashin deck and shore up the weaknesses of white with that card draw stapled onto a very useful card. 

Shifting Grift 

I wanted to talk about Shifting Grift, honestly because I don’t feel like I need to talk about Three Steps Ahead here. Three Steps Ahead might be one of the bluest blue cards to ever blue and every blue mage has already included it in their mono-blue deck. It’s a great card, but let’s talk about another great card that’s not getting as much love. 

Blue might not feel like it at first, but when you think about it there aren’t many colors with more disposable resources than blue. While it might take an instant, sorcery or artifact spell to get the train going, blue can pump out tokens with the best of them. You can create creature tokens with cards like Murmuring Mystic, Talrand, Sky Summoner or Sai, Master Thopterist. You can create noncreature artifact tokens with Forensic Gadgeteer or Ongoing Investigation. Each of these tokens can punch way above their weight when it comes to Shifting Grift. 

Wouldn’t it be great to exchange control of your Clue token with The One Ring? Wouldn’t it be right to exchange your Thopter token with an Archon of Cruelty? Wouldn’t it be better to do both with the same card! You can also hit enchantments with this card, though I find blue to have a nice amount of enchantments that you’d actually want on your side of the battlefield. 

More Modals, More Problems

Wow, looks like Outlaws of Thunder Junction really did a lot for modal spells in Commander right? Spree turned out to be a mechanic that deserved an article all on its own. I hope you enjoyed a second look at some of these cards now the dust has had a little time to settle, and if you’re discovering these cards for the first time then I hope you can see the value of adding a little flexibility into your Commander decks. 

As usual, I’ve been Joshua and I’ll see you in the next article. Just remember in the meantime, in commander you always have options! 

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Joshua Clough

Joshua is a Medical Researcher from the UK. He's played Magic since Dragons of Tarkir and loves all things Commander, the more colours the better! When not playing Commander, he can be found insisting Jund is still a viable deck in Modern and painting tiny plastic miniatures on Twitter @PrinceofBielTan