Dismember and some random thoughts

Dismember
Dismember is probably my most favorite card in New Phyrexia. This card gives -5/-5 to target creature until end of turn which easily kills creatures like Phylactery Lich or Baneslayer Angel. But who cares about that? It does not entirely kill Titans but 1/1 creature can do the job and if the creature is bigger than it still stays alive.

But well this is not the reason why it should be the best card of a set.(well might not be in your eyes but for me it is. I wanted to write about this a while ago, but got to it now). Anyway this card is an instant removal for any deck. The card costs 1 mana and 2 black (phyrexian) mana. So you can either pay the black mana or pay some life. 4 might seem a lot but the possibility of playing this spell on turn one or for just one mana when needed is so great. My little Nacatls could be telling you stories about this...You can do the maths yourself (killed Nacatl costing you 4 life or Nacatl staying alive and swinging for three each turn? (till t3)).

I spent some time trying to figure out how to build a UW control deck and this card is one of those that just want to stay in the deck. It is also one of the cards that can destroy Inkmoth Nexus (after tectonic edge rotates out).

Since my beginnings of playing Magic: The Gathering I always had to have an instant response to something either good spot removal or counterspell, many times both. I usually played Blue/Black or Blue/Red or Red/Blue decks that always had access to control and removal/burn. Lately these combinations weren't possible (oh yeah Tezz combo, Vampires with Kalastria/Viscera Seer). Last time I played Grixis Control when Alara was still T2 legal. But even at that time my primary deck was UW Tapout deck. At that time I had hard time figuring out what I wanted to play. Grixis control decks were the type of decks I wanted to play but UW control was simply better. (I kept Grixis for Extended for a while but I gave up on playing Grixis at Standard.) White color is the one being strong and still is. My decks are UW and now there's even more white! But still the decks usually tapped out completely and were dealing with stuff at sorcery speed and that's were Dismember comes in. Dismember adds a good instant speed removal for one mana and that's what counts.


Phyrexian mana also starts to mess up with the color pie even more than cards like Damnation. Well there are many cards that could count for a different color (I know in the case of Planar Chaos it was a real intent but still I couldn't get over it) but now you can ignore the color of the card completely.

Some time ago we played a sealed deck with NPH boosters only and our first match looked like: My opponent played vault skirge, spined thopter, porcelain legionnaire
only to be hit by marrow shards and be overrun by the same creatures I could pay for with phyrexian mana. I actually lost the first game as I messed up my five color manabase because that way I had to pay more life than I could spare. I changed it a bit for the remaining games and it worked much better. The decks were a 5 color phyrexian zoo but it was doing wonders - in the limited format we played.