Kavu Enthusiast wrote: ↑4 years ago[
I'm going to have to disagree on 'trash'. A 'free cast any permanents in the top 5 cards of your library and put the rest in your hand' isn't garbage at all. I think the only one from this series that fell under the bar of being in the same ballpark as the rest is the Jeskai one. All 4 of the rest of the effects can be game winning on cast, just with more or less game presence and setup required of the player. Clearly the BUG one is the dumb 'lol I win out of no-where with no previous board state' sort of spell that most people hate games ending with and is too much. One sided board wipe or mass graveyard res require you have a board or a GY, but they are going to completely end games when played in the decks they belong in.
It's similar with the RUG ultimatum, it will require some *actual* set up to abuse, but it's *very* abusable to get to cast up to 5 free permanent cards off the top of your deck; especially in a format like EDH with huge game ending permanents and lots of tutors that put stuff on the top of your deck. I'm perfectly ok with requiring a player jump through a hoop to get a really powerful effect, but it's really not something I would call 'bad' unless I was letting the outlier that is the BUG ultimatum skew my grading.
I think an honest objective tally of the cards would be more that the RUG/RWB/WGB ultimatums are all strong effects cards that are going to be kept somewhat in check by requiring setup on the part of the player....with the RWU ultimatum being a super weak outlier for the cycle and the BUG ultimatum being a super busted outlier for the cycle.
1. it's not a free cast, it's a put them onto the battlefield. So no eldrazi abuse.
2. it compares basically to a fixed cost non-scaling genesis wave that can't be recurred; G-wave costs 1 more, does not put the leftovers in your hand, but can be recurred and scales with infinite mana/large amounts of mana.
Its only place is in a deck that manipulates its topdecks in some way because at 5 cards deep it's almost always going to be worse than genesis wave. 7 mana draw 5 and maybe put a couple permanents into play.
The two scenarios it's better than g-wave:
1) you know what your topdeck is
2) you are cheat-casting spells, and don't want x-spells as a result
I will certainly not replace genesis wave with this in any of my decks that run it, and most people shouldn't. It's very narrow.
Even in maelstrom wanderer where this card should be really good, the odds of me hitting 3 mana dorks, a land and a chaos warp are high enough I'm not super interested.
This card is not even in the same power park as one-sided planar cleansing and surely nowhere near as powerful as splendid reclamation plus primeval's glorious rebirth plus roar of reclamation plus replenish.
edit: and that is all okay. It's fine for cards not to all be balanced in EDH. This one just isn't very good