These days, I play more Limited than Constructed, which means I see a lot of the same cards over and over again—I dream of Balmor, Battlemage Captain and have a stack of Stone Retrieval Units that rivals your average Commander deck. This also means that I’m constantly re-evaluating cards from preview to release to revisitation through a couple dozen drafts. It keeps me engaged and it keeps me humble, particularly when I lose to a combination or a card that I discounted during initial preview season. I try to anticipate what’s going to be a secret overperformer or sneaky build-around in Limited, and All Will Be One looks like it has more than the usual set. Between Magic Online and Magic Arena, Limited environments are getting solved quickly these days, but I’ve been impressed by the depth of The Brothers’ War and the flexibility of Dominaria United, and looking forward to Phyrexia: All Will Be One. I was a huge fan of Infect back in original Scars of Mirrodin block, where Untamed Might made an unassuming Infect Insect or [/mtg_card]Cystbearer[/mtg_card] into a player-killer, so I’m looking forward to living that dream, but there is a difference in how Toxic and Infect match up. Personally, my favorite part of Infect wasn’t killing opponents with poison damage, but shrinking their creatures into irrelevance, which Toxic doesn’t allow. I appreciate that Wizards is moving away from -1/-1 counters, but they were a superb way to demonstrate the withering power of Phyrexia. In its stead, we have Toxic, which has no impact on creature combat, but does deal damage to players in the form of poison counters.
As someone born in 1986 and as someone currently involved in a production of Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, “Toxic” as a keyword is extremely distracting, as it gets the Britney Spears sting going in my head every single time I see it. I’ll just have to get used to it, I suppose, as Phyrexia: All Will Be One is saturated with poison counters at every level of rarity. While there’s no Skithiryx-level bomb (although Tyrranax Rex is close), the predominance of Toxic creatures creates a real sense of inevitability. Don’t try to beat Phyrexia by attrition; that’s like bringing a Loxodon Warhammer to a Mortarpod fight. On the subject of inevitability, one of All Will Be One’s most interesting uncommons, both in the format and for what it signals for Magic’s future, is Viral Spawning. Centaur Courser was always a fine role-filler in Limited, and the opportunity to flash it back if you meet the Corrupted condition for another 3/3 with Toxic 1 is great. It’s not quite Call of the Herd, which you could sequence on turn three and turn four (unlikely with Spawning), but two relevant creatures out of one card is always welcome in Limited.
The creatures in the art call to mind Mirrodin’s Groffskithur, a forgettable 15th pick 3/3 with a minor recursion ability—have Phyrexians finally perfected the Groffskithur? They’ve certainly made progress—six mana back in 2003 got you a 3/3 with the (essentially ignorable) potential to buy you back another six-mana 3/3; now, twenty years later, six mana (and a poisoned opponent) will get you two 3/3’s with Toxic 1. That “Toxic 1” is where a lot of the nuance of the card comes in. On its own, giving a 3/3 Toxic 1 is futile—as Crypt Cobra proved back in Mirage, if you’re hitting them with a 3/3, they’ll be dead from combat damage long before they die of poison damage—but the wealth of proliferation effects in the set mean you really only have to hit them a couple of times before you can start chaining Proliferation effects to grind out the game. Scars block was relatively stingy with the Proliferation cards, leaving the repeatable ones (Contagion Clasp, Contagion Engine, Thrummingbird) as valuable picks. Unlike Infect, which passed out poison damage equal to the damage dealt by the creature, Toxic is locked to “Toxic X.” To balance it, though, it’s additive—giving a Phyrexian Crusader Infect multiple times meant nothing, while giving a creature Toxic 1 three times will result in it conferring three poison counters to the opponent if unblocked. It’s the different between Lifelink and activating [/mtg_card]Genju of the Fields[/mtg_card] multiple times in one turn.
Conditional flashback is interesting—until now, Flashback has basically been bottlenecked by the cost associated with it, whether that’s mana (Firebolt) or some other cost (Battle Screech, Dread Return, Lava Dart[/mtg]). [mtg_card]Snapcaster Mage, Dralnu, Lich Lord, Past in Flames, Backdraft Hellkite and Lier, Disciple of the Drowned grant Flashback to all your spells (with the Flashback cost equal to the spell’s original mana cost), but we haven’t seen a conditional flashback like Viral Spawning. Coming freshly off The Brothers’ War, where Mask of the Jadecrafter was an overperforming double threat, even at smaller sizes, I expect Viral Spawning to close out a fair number of games.
More than anything, Spawning suggests a new attitude toward’s Magic’s mechanics. Mark Rosewater, on January 20th, confirmed that Flashback will now be “deciduous,” his jargon for “recurring, but not necessarily in every set.” Basically, the only thing this means for Flashback is that, like Surveil and Landfall before it, it can be laid out in shorthand on cards, rather than spelled out. Glimpse the Cosmos, for example, spells out Flashback, whereas now the Gatherer version (or any future printed versions) will simply say “As long as you control a Giant, Glimpse the Cosmos has Flashback (U).” Minor update, to be sure, but it does save characters and triggers any hypothetical “whenever you cast a spell for its Flashback cost” cards.
Flashback was part of Magic’s early innovation, where Wizards was experimenting with making cards more attractive by adding more utility to spells, from Ice Age’s “slowtrips” (Gravebind) to Vision’s “187”/“comes into play” creatures (Nekrataal) to Tempest Block’s Buyback (Constant Mists). Flashback was part of Buyback’s lineage, with some crucial lessons learned: one, repeatable spells can make games stagnate, so Flashback is limited to a single reuse, and two, the value gained by doubling up on your spells is huge, so they may need to cost a bit more. Capsize was a menace, particularly combined with [/mtg_card]Tradewind Rider[/mtg_card] and Forbid, and games slowed to a crawl. Mercadian Masques block combined the worst parts of Buyback with the worst parts of, well, Mercadian Masques block, in the Spellshapers, overcosted and fragile creatures who let you turn any card in your hand into a copy of an iconic spell. Flashback was an unqualified success, as implied by its return in Time Spiral block, both Innistrad blocks, Modern Horizons sets, etc.
Flashback keeps returning because it’s flavor neutral. It can represent necromancy, desperation, studiousness, resourcefulness, or lingering emotion, depending on how it’s deployed. High-level players like it, as it allows you to squeeze another use out of a spell or get value from your graveyard or build flexibility into a spell—Firebolt can either be two [/mtg_card]Shock[/mtg_card]s several turns apart or an expensive Lightning Blast that can divide its damage among targets. It, like Kicker, is easy to understand for newer players, trains players to think of the game in terms of card advantage and flexibility even if they don’t know the terminology, and interacts well with cards printed previously, from Secrets of the Dead to Mizzix of the Igmagus. Really, the only drawback of Flashback is that it can be hard to balance—Snapcaster Mage, for example, defined Modern for the better part of a decade by granting Flashback to cheap spells that weren’t designed to be exploited twice. Odyssey Block calibrated by making Flashback costs prohibitively expensive (
Most of the excitement for Phyrexia: All Will Be One comes from the decade-delayed return to Magic’s most Giger-esque/Beksinski-influenced plane and the return of fan favorite poison counters, tournament staple Phyrexian mana, and members of the Gatewatch in perverse, “compleated” form. But in the margins, there are so many stories told by the more unassuming cards, from Elesh Norn’s teeth motif to the degraded legacy of various Masticores to the transition from Germs to Mites to the reveal of the previously-unacknowledged Domini. Something as simple seeming as Viral Spawning can resonate with decades of history, from the design of earlier pseudo-Flashback designs like [mtg_card]Death Spark" data-card-name="), and they were still pretty potent in Limited, particularly when you were discarding them for benefit from your other cards and still getting a later use out of them. Most of the excitement for Phyrexia: All Will Be One comes from the decade-delayed return to Magic’s most Giger-esque/Beksinski-influenced plane and the return of fan favorite poison counters, tournament staple Phyrexian mana, and members of the Gatewatch in perverse, “compleated” form. But in the margins, there are so many stories told by the more unassuming cards, from Elesh Norn’s teeth motif to the degraded legacy of various Masticores to the transition from Germs to Mites to the reveal of the previously-unacknowledged Domini. Something as simple seeming as Viral Spawning can resonate with decades of history, from the design of earlier pseudo-Flashback designs like [mtg_card]Death Spark">), and they were still pretty potent in Limited, particularly when you were discarding them for benefit from your other cards and still getting a later use out of them. Most of the excitement for Phyrexia: All Will Be One comes from the decade-delayed return to Magic’s most Giger-esque/Beksinski-influenced plane and the return of fan favorite poison counters, tournament staple Phyrexian mana, and members of the Gatewatch in perverse, “compleated” form. But in the margins, there are so many stories told by the more unassuming cards, from Elesh Norn’s teeth motif to the degraded legacy of various Masticores to the transition from Germs to Mites to the reveal of the previously-unacknowledged Domini. Something as simple seeming as Viral Spawning can resonate with decades of history, from the design of earlier pseudo-Flashback designs like [mtg_card]Death Spark
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had a name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.