Well the first week of spoiler season for Hour of Devastation has concluded. Like many of you, I’ve looked at spoilers all week long, just absorbing in all of the Nicol Bolas goodness. I breath deep of his coming. One week in, and we have more than 80 cards spoiled at this point. But I have noticed something missing in some of the spoilers and follow up articles.

Amonkhet had a bunch of these subtle but great tools and cards that worked quite well for adding versatility and options at the kitchen table. Cards like Angel of Sanctions, the Cartouche Cycle of auras like Cartouche of Strength, Dusk // Dawn, Gift of Paradise, Lay Claim, Shefet Monitor and many more. The combination of aftermath and cycling gave the set a ton of great diverse options for many casual players, and added a lot of tools and options for doing things at the kitchen table.

Take, as a good example, the Threaten effect. If you are playing kitchen table Magic, then what are the best ones printed for you to use in multiplayer?

Besmirch — Great with the goad afterwards to force it to attack elsewhere.

Harness by Force — Strive lets you get more than one target in if you have the extra mana.

Limits of Solidarity — Your normal Threaten, but if you don’t want it, or are looking for something else, you can cycle it away.

Now, Threatens are nice effects, but you don’t often want to run them in your decks and tie up space, because they aren’t always useful. So the Limits is one of the most playable Threaten variants out there because you can just cycle it away when it’s not worth it or you are digging for something important or better for the battlefield.

Amonkhet brought a lot of Limits of Solidarity to the conversation. It also has the aftermath cards to consider as two-halves of one card with multiple effects to proffer that are often both worth a card, but together are just awesome. And we get the normal utility cards as well that you get in any set. So the first set has a lot to offer deep for these effects. And we can expect its follow-up to do the same.

And Hour of Devastation looks no different. There are a number of useful tools and additions for your decks that were just added. Does Hour of Devastation have aftermath and cycling? Yes, it does. There are a number of valuable cards out there that may not be getting the press they deserve among casual circles, with their conversation either reduced to conversations about Standard, Legacy, Modern or Limited or similar official formats. But they have a lot to offer use as well.

Let’s take a look at some cards I want to explore more with you, and unpack the potential of these cards.

Honorable Mention – Abrade

Strictly better than Shatter, and having an option to pop an artifact rather than shoot a creature for three damage at instant speed is pretty sexy.

10. Solemnity

It’s nice to have an answer for all things counters (like infect and other poison counters) and shutting down junk like energy, keeping counters from going off, and more. Note that it doesn’t work on Planeswalkers, they can still get loyalty counters, so you can break the effect that way. But it’s still a solid answer to decks that go all Doubling Season crazy with their counters. It’s nice to have some answers ready in case you need to stop someone from going off, and this is along the lines of cards like Hex Parasite, Aether Snap, and Kulrath Knight. It also works well with a lot of other fun cards too, like Dark Depths and uh, Dark Depths.

9. Sunset Pyramid

Card drawing is great. Scrying is great too. I run scry-only effects that repeat, like Mystic Speculation and Crystal Ball all the time. And this card can give you that with the recursive scry. And then you have three cards to draw as well. Getting up to three cards and repeatable scry is a powerful addition for a lot of decks, especially in metagames or decks that are going the long game, such as Commander. I mean, who doesn’t like drawing cards? Who doesn’t like scrying their deck? Exactly!

8. Desert’s Hold

The first of these cards (in White)was Pacifism and that was good, but it allowed folks to run their abilities. So, Arrest came along to shut that down, and we’ve had variants of both ever since. Desert's Hold is clearly an upgrade on Arrest. You don’t have to be running a single Desert to play it, and it’s still an Arrest. And if you have just a few cycling Deserts in your deck and that’s it, you get a free three life for your synergy. Don’t forget that in today’s era in Commander, these are one of the few ways to shut down a lot of Commanders out there that are being too ornery. No, you can’t attack, block, or use it, but you didn’t kill it to send it back to the Command Zone for another run in the sun. If someone has an abusive Commander, these are potential answers. Take another look at Desert's Hold and similar cards.

7. Hour of Glory

There was a time when Black never exiled target creatures. That was White’s side of the color pie. Black had an epic amount of ways to destroy target creature, but not to exile. That began to wane with cards like Gild, Sever the Bloodline, Oblivion Strike, Grip of Desolation, or Final Reward. It’s happening so often that I think we just have to admit that there has been a color pie shift on exiling target creature from Black. At this point we should just be looking for it. Hour of Glory does that. It’s better than most because it’s an instant and it’s just four mana, compared to many of the examples above. And you can see their hand if you hit a God, and finish any tricks with it. It’s good to be the exiling color too, so welcome Black.

6. Doomfall

So yes, we are now expecting more exiling from Black, right? And you can see where Doomfall, ummm, falls into that category as well as an exiling version of Diabolic Edict and friends. There are going to be a lot of times when you are going to exile Edict someone hard and get that crap off the board. Often someone has just one big giant indestructible creature post-board wipe. Go away Blightsteel Colossus. Or they have one big creature that survived a damage-based one, like Multani, Maro-Sorcerer. Lots of people play safe, and don’t protect their big creatures from Edict effects, so that they aren’t hurt too much by mass removal. Punish them for their ignorance. And then if you don’t want to get your exile edict on, you can just Coercion someone instead, see their hand, and exile something from it that’s not a land. Often cards are most vulnerable when they are in the hand, like buyback spells (such as Capsize) or self-recursive tools (like the new Gods in this set or something like Genesis). You can exile something with aftermath or flashback to prevent it from being used twice. Either of these two modes is very very strong, and together, you have a package that always has value at the kitchen table.

5. Supreme Will

I like Mana Leak. I like Impulse. After they printed Impulse, WotC realized it was a little too good, and every variant of Impulse made since has been weaker, either costing more mana (Thieves' Fortune) or weaker by number (Anticipate, but only digs three cards). Supreme Will is the one-more-mana version of Impulse, but still gives you that flexibility, while also netting a potential Mana Leak instead. It’s never a dead card. You can always Impulse away for the best card among your top four and dig the rest of that crap down into the bottom of your library. It works with cards like Sensei's Divining Top and Scroll Rack quite nicely as well. And it can counter something! This is the sort of great tool that you can play in a lot of decks out there.

4. Scavenger Grounds

Frankly I think this might fly under the radar a little less because it’s a rare. There are two major tools in Hour of Devastation that hose all of the graveyards out there. The first is Crook of Condemnation. It’s a more expensive to play Relic of Progenitus that does not replace itself when you use it. On the other hand, note that the Scavenger Grounds does not enter play tapped or anything, so you can use the mana early, and then you have to sacrifice a Desert. Now if you want, you can sacrifice the Grounds and just move on. That’ll work. But like Dust Bowl, you can sacrifice something else and keep it around for more graveyard cleansing. There may be enough Deserts to care. This is precisely the sort of tool you can have and use as needed, and unlike something such as Bojuka Bog, it has not color identity to keep it out of non-Black Commander decks, and it doesn’t require the commitment of a non-land card, such as Tormod's Crypt or the Relic would do. There’s a lot to recommend in the Scavenger Grounds.

3. Driven // Despair

I really like this aftermath card a lot, and it has a lot of potential as a solid tool. Cast the first end, and the trampling creatures of card drawing smashery await. Because it works on all of your stuff, it can reload a deck that goes wide and drops creatures fast. It’s a great iteration of cards like Bident of Thassa. You can only use it once, but it’s half the mana and gives you trample to boot, so it’s rocktastic at getting you those cards. Speaking of getting you those cards, Despair is not a bad call either. Give your stuff menace instead for a different sort of evasion, and then turn them into Abyssal Specters. You are still up in card advantage considerably, and with the horde out, you can almost drop an entire person’s hand. At multiplayer, the ability to split attacks and strip cards from multiple foes is particularly enticing. And don’t forget you can cast both. Four mana and you get your stuff with menace, trample, card drawing and forcing discards all over the block. And yet you don’t have to. Each half is great on their own and adds a lot of value to your options.

2. Nimble Obstructionist

Clearly, Nimble Obstructionist is a great tool at the kitchen table. Forget the creature for a moment. Imagine you saw this card printed:

Abe’s Happy Blast,

Instant

Counter target activated or triggered ability

Draw a card

This cannot be countered.

Would you play it? Of course you would! An uncounterable counter of abilities that draws a card and costs just three mana? That is an obviously powerful spell. You could counter ETB abilities of creatures that are about to throw down, like a key Nekrataal or the activation of that Oblivion Stone. My favorite is to counter the tap ability with a Sensei's Divining Top (which is often done in response to removal to tuck it) and kill it dead. Now, it’s not truly uncounterable, someone could use a card like Nimble Obstructionist to counter your Nimble Obstructionist, but you get the idea. And in addition to all of that, you get an on-curve 3/1 flyer with flash. It’s powerful, tricky, has a lot of dials on it, and can do a lot of stuff for your decks moving forward. Nimble Obstructionist indeed!

1. Cycling Deserts

Yeah baby! Another set of cycling lands. Cycling lands are key for a lot of decks, and we’ve now got three full sets of lands you can use in any Commander deck with the right colors, as well as stuff like Ash Barrens, Blasted Landscape, and Canyon Slough. These are awesome and only going to get awesome-r. They work well with, well, pretty much any card that likes lands, mana, filtering cards, Deserts, and more. Basically, pretty much any card in the game. Don’t forget to grab these and cycle them for a card in order to turn land searching cards like Weathered Wayfarer into card drawing engines.

And there we are! Ten more cards ready to rock your block so you can stop. Are you ready to get your Hour of Devastation on? Here we go! Now it’s time for a breakdown.