Damn, No signal

You don't 'play' cards to use Anthelios...

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

You don't 'play' cards to use Anthelios...

It's not actually necessary to completely sink an MMPA deck - and probably best not to. More than a few MMPA decks are trying to play several masters a turn, though obviously they will use Anthelios where appropriate - if your turn is Villein + Giant's Blood + Pentex Subversion, you have nothing to recycle immediately (two cards went in play, one is once per game), and that wouldn't be a totally unreasonable sort of turn for a deck like that. There are plenty of other good permanents that you might be playing - Parthenon itself, Dreams of the Sphinx, Vessel, Blood Doll, an appropriate hunting ground etc. - and a few cards that recycle badly (Giant's Blood, Ashur), so it's not like all you'd be doing is recycling all the time.

If you can make anti-master tech on the level of hampering such decks and causing it issues but without sinking it totally means:

a) the MMPA deck is probably still viable, just troubled, and so the player playing it still has fun because it's not insta-death for them

and either
b) the card can therefore be cheaper and hopefully more playable, or
c) given some extra funkiness making it more useful, even when you don't see MMPA.

The Law of Perverse Effects says that instead of making an MMPA deck 'slow down'... it just throws its 'not as powerful' Master Cards out through Anthelios and then plays the powerful ones repeatedly.

Let's assume they include other 'major irritant Masters', Golconda being one that comes to mind.

Villein + GB + Pentex becomes...
Play Villein
Next turn play Giant's Blood
Next Turn play Pentex
At any point after that discard Villein or GB to replay Pentex OR if they have also drawn Golconda in the last three turns...

So each turn becomes: discard a master in hand to get Pentex or Golconda and play that.


I doubt it will actually slow the deck cycling its card to the more powerful ones it will want. It will just use the ash heap as a very large handsize (which is one of the major uses of Anthelios as it is).