After looking at the spoiler, what are your picks for the best cards in the set? What leaps out at you? What are you chomping at the bit to open up this week when it goes on general sale?

This set has a large amount of great card stock, but it's not top-heavy. The mythics are all right, but some of the sexiest cards in the set aren't at the typical level of salaciousness. But that's all right—look at stuff like the new Typhoid Rats (Pharika's Chosen), new Rampant Growth (Font of Fertility), new Naturalize (Consign to Dust), and many other solid deck stock entries. We’ll be running Triton Shorestalker, Interpret the Signs, Agent of Erebos, and more for a while. In fact, many of the most useful cards from the set are just new versions of removal, mana, utility creatures, and more.

In my opinion, the set is missing the pure power in the top ten, but it has a ton of useful stuff later on—sort of the opposite of Born of the Gods. So, what appear to be the ten best cards for Casual Land from the set? Let’s take a look!

10. Brain Maggot – I adore this new version of Ravenous Rats. Sure, you can't force the discard of a land, and the card will eventually come back, but you are able to choose anything else from the opponent’s hand. Already, it's better because you see the opponent’s hand and can choose the good card. But then the card is exiled rather than discarded. That's huge. Our newest Maggot will have an immediate impact on kitchen tables everywhere. Exiling the card removes any tricks. Later, when your Maggots die, the opponent gains the card back, but often, cards are situational. Use this proactively to exile an opponent’s Swords to Plowshares when you have the nastiest creature, and then, after the Wrath of God inevitably kills both your major target and the Maggot, your opponent has the Swords again to use on something else, so you have pushed the table. You can play great politics with this guy.

9. Hall of Triumph – if you play janky colors like blue, black, or red, you don't have a lot of this stuff. Sure, you can unearth the occasional Bad Moon, Gauntlet of Might, or Sunken City. But all of those cards pump opposing creatures of the color. Why do that? You can just run this handy, 3-mana artifact to pump the whole team! Your mono-colored decks will rejoice at the fast Gaea's Anthem effect. You can add these to that blue Lord of the Unreal deck or your red Sligh deck with ease. I'm going to pick up a veritable cornucopia of these for my deck stock. They'll be cheap and flexible for a while.

7. Tethmos High Priest – Whoa! I'm not someone whose been extolling the virtues of heroic triggers from on high. These decks can have some issues with long-term stuff. But instead of dorky triggers like a +1/+1 counter or gaining a keyword for a turn, this does something very intriguing. Just target our good uncommon with a spell, and you can bring a friend back to life from your graveyard as long as the creature is not overly big. The High Priest is a potent card to build around since it costs just 3 mana to drop. You can combine it with creatures that sacrifice for effects, or other fun, in order to build a great, synergetic deck. Thanks, heroic uncommon!

In order to gain any use from it, you have to block or be blocked. That means swinging with something blockable. So, you equip your Elvish Mystic and swing. All right, now I can take 4, block and lose a creature immediately, or block with multiple creatures, lose one, and then kill the Mystic. The exiled creature can't be played—so yay. Normally, this is going to play as Whispersilk Cloak that swaps shroud for +3/+3. It's not as good as Sword of Fire and Ice and its cycle. However, where it shines is on defense. No one wants to attack into Godsend. Just imagine it on a simple Serra Angel or Darksteel Sentinel. Not only can you push in a vigilance attack, but you keep your guy back for blocking—and people won't come your way. Since the exile trigger happens before damage is dealt, Godsend is powerful on defense. Therefore, it's pretty interesting, and it's strong enough to play—no question.

Top 5 Time!

4. Silence the Believers – Exile-oriented creature removal is a powerful tool in multiplayer decks, especially in Commander. You end virtually any recursion shenanigans. Barring Riftsweeper, Misthollow Griffin, or the actual commander, you can take out virtually anything. This does so at instant speed in a color that doesn't have a lot of exiling pinpoint removal. That alone is pretty useful (it’s why I run Gild in my decks). But this can also exile more creatures if you have the mana and opponents have the targets. The ability to set up two- or three-for-one trades later in the game grants powerful plays for this card from the beginning to end. That's a tool that should last the test of time.

Green has a lot of these little Weaver-esque tricks, so you can dig deeply and discover anything from Fertilid to Gyre Sage—you'll reach into an established bag of tricks that goes back to cards like Triskelion. So, whether you are pumping up a beater to smash through defenses or playing counter tricks, the first ability alone is quite strong. Then, you can use him to basically draw a business card (critter, 'Walker, or enchantment). And since both of those are +1 abilities, nothing is holding you back from that plus-100-life ability. In Commander, you can fight that life-gain with stuff like commander damage, but outside of that, the ultimate is even worse, and it’s one I dread encountering.

2. Mana Confluence – Sure, people can talk about the corner cases in which City of Brass might technically be better than this by putting the life-loss on the stack and playing something like a life-gain spell or a Lightning Bolt to kill your foe before you would die. I think we all know how rare those cases are. In my opinion, City of Brass is one of the best-designed cards from the sets from Arabian Nights through Antiquities. As recently as last summer's Modern Masters, it is still being published. And here, we have a version that will almost always be slightly better than City, and note that Mana Confluence has a generic name. It could easily see print in Magic 2016 or some other future set. My guess is we'll see it instead of City of Brass moving forward (just like we'll probably see Banishing Light rather than Oblivion Ring in the future). Mana Confluence will be an amazing card, from here on out, for any deck that wanted City.

Black was the winner of Journey—it has the best cards overall of any color. It has three of the cards in my top five, and I also have Thoughtrender Lamia in my #12 spot. Don't forget the aforementioned cards such as Pharika's Chosen and Agent of Erebos, and you have a solid Wrath variant (Extinguish All Hope), a spell version of Mindslaver (Worst Fears), another Nightmare variant (Squelching Leeches), and a fun commander (King Macar, the Gold-Cursed). That's a great injection of quality to decks everywhere.

Which cards are your favorite? What did you agree or disagree with on my list? Join me next week when I build a few decks around Journey into Nyx cards.

See you next week,

Abe Sargent