Ever since Wizards of the Coast announced a crossover between Magic: Gathering And Avatar: The Last Airbenderone critical question spoil the news. The Avatar is known to revolve around the four elements (water, earth, fire and air), and Magic is defined by a color wheel with five spokes. So how do set designers compensate for this?
The answer, as it turns out, is to make the color black absurdly strong in Avatar: The Last Airbender to compensate for the fact that it does not have a designated element and bending shape, such as white (airbending), blue (waterbending), red (firebending) and green (earthbending). Instead, many of the black cards in this crossover rely on “aristocratic” sacrifice-oriented mechanics. And based on my experience during pre-event Thanks to Magic Arena's online platform, black suddenly became the brightest color in the set.
Aristocrat decks are designed to sacrifice their own minions for extra gain. For example, you could have a creature like Heartless Inspector that gives you a hint token when it dies. Combine this with June, the Bounty Hunter, who will tell you how to make sacrifices. another creature, and your value doubles.
My favorite Avatar The card used in this strategy is John Dee, One of Many. The card's ability creates a copy of itself and also allows your surveillance to dig into your deck. As an additional cost, you will have to sacrifice a creature or artifact; The obvious answer is to sacrifice the newly created copy of John Dee, but if you have some other food on hand, that's even better. In one game, I assembled an army of spears, then outran my opponent and won the match.
Black also has a variety of removal spells that will help deal with any plans your enemy may have. I especially like Swamp Trap, which costs less if the target has Fly (a fairly common ability in Avatar), and also bypasses indestructible creatures, giving them -5/-3 instead of just dealing damage or destroying the target.
These are all fun cards that work surprisingly well together, but where AvatarThe aristocrat strategy really gets interesting when you add another color. Technically black and white is the aristocratic color combination of the set, but I found that black and green worked much better as it combined the sacrificial strategy with green's signature trait: earth magic.
Consider Beifong's Headhunters, a rare creature card with this ability: “Whenever a nonland creature you control dies, bend land X, where X is that creature's power.” This means that if your 2/2 creature dies (or is sacrificed), one of your lands can become a 2/2 creature in its place. Another black/green card that works well here is Long Feng, Grand Secretariat, which rewards the death of any creature or land with a free +1/+1 counter that you can place anywhere. Once you've created a board full of buffed creatures and lands, join the Dai Li agents to finish the game.
This is just my experience, but I tried several different ones Avatar Arena Prerelease sets (there are five in total), I'm definitely most impressed by what black has to offer. This may say more about me as a player, but if you're intrigued by aristocratic-style gameplay, this new expansion seems like the perfect place to dive in.
