After a very disappointing Legacy Open for me, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to put the older formats on the backburner and focus on the amazing new spoilers in Amonkhet. As of this article’s writing, there are a number of awesome and powerful spells that appear ready to shake up Standard at least a little bit, despite the overwhelming presence of powerful archetypes like Four-Color Saheeli and Mardu Vehicles. Let’s go over my ten favorites, cards that stand to make an impact on Standard (provided that Wizards of the Coast chooses not to ban anything pre-Pro Tour Amonkhet).

10: As Foretold

This card is busted, pure and simple. An Aether Vial of sorts for spells, the card goes from moderately fair to completely broken when you consider the Suspend cycle of null-mana-cost cards from Time Spiral. A Control deck gets to go absolutely buck wild with a turn-three Ancestral Vision followed by numerous free card draw spells, counterspells, removal, and the like. Eventually, this hypothetical deck would win via casting multiple free spells a turn combined with an air force of Celestial Colonnades, or possibly casting free Planeswalkers and protecting them via free removal spells. Better still, a deck could be built around Restore Balance with As Foretold providing an outlet for naturally drawn Balances as well as up-ticking to provide free Planeswalkers (think Nahiri) or Blood Moons. The words “without paying its maan cost” are some of the most dangerous words in all of Magic, and this card lets you cast free spells twice per turn cycle!

The combination of cheating on Suspend cards, cheating by letting you cast spells for free during both your turn and your opponent’s turns, and allowing you to use your mana for other things while effectively never tapping out leads me to believe that As Foretold will lead to some super-degenerate game states in Modern. Honestly, I can’t wait for the shake up. But that’s not the only awesome enchantment in this set, not by a long shot.

9: Drake Haven

Cue the opponents humming “Hotline Bling” as they make armies of Aubrey Graham tokens during your end step and murder your Planeswalkers with piles of fliers. Just as As Foretold stands ready to reinvigorate Control in Modern, Drake Haven stands ready to spawn an archetype in Standard we haven’t seen in over ten years. Cycling-based Control hasn’t been good in ages, and Control in general has been pressed between the proverbial rock of Mardu Vehicles and the hard place of Four-Color Saheeli. Despite intermittent success with Temur Tower, the truth of the matter is that the threats are too much better than the answers in this day and age, too great at building traction to be answerable with traditional one-for-one removal, too sticky, and occasionally simply too powerful for their mana costs. Drake Haven (along with a supporting cast that we will get to in a minute) can potentially reinvigorate a new engine-based control deck. The card is sticky, generating battlefield presence like a Planeswalker, and asking little else besides that you include great cycling cards in your deck to turn it on. This card, and the cycling package that will go hand in hand with it, stands to compete with Dynavolt Tower for foremost control threat in Standard. I suspect that the supporting cast for U/W Drake will be stronger than the one for Temur Tower, enough to offset the disadvantage of having to pay mana for the privilege of turning your key engine card on. But let’s not focus on the flashy engine piece. More often than not, it’s the enablers for decks like these that can make or break them in Standard.

8: Censor

Miscalculation, eat your heart out! Though this card is slightly less powerful on the front end than the Urza’s Legacy common, the fact that it cycles for only a single mana in the mid — and late — game means a world of difference, especially for a deck that may be trying to get one or more Drake Haven triggers out of this card in the waning turns of a game. Having a two-mana universal counterspell in Standard means a ton of common play patterns will be disrupted, and I foresee a lot of players unprepared for the way this card slows down games. I love how this card creates a game of cat-and-mouse with opposing Tireless Trackers, where you’ll want to play a land first to play around the opposing Force Spike, but you lose the extra Clue token and open yourself up to getting your Tracker removed with nothing to show for it. More importantly, this is the kind of card that leaves Gideon, Ally of Zendikar in a cold sweat. There’s a ton of incentive to play around Censor (as trading your four mana for your opponent’s two is a losing proposition), but taking a turn off of casting your haymaker to allow your opponent to cycle Censor and set up removal + counterspell on the subsequent turn is horrible in its own way. As Ari Lax mentioned on Twitter, the fact that many of the lands come into play tapped on turns four through six means that playing around Censor blowouts will lead to one-and-one-half turns off, on average, rather than a one-turn slowdown. Expect Censor to do a lot of good work, but beware the potential in a Saheeli Rai shell. Jeskai Saheeli with Censor could be just too damn good.

7: Cast Out

This card holds a similar place in the metagame to Censor, but sort of the flip side of the coin. This is a card you’re going to be reluctant to cycle, simply because of how awesome a four-mana flash Oblivion Ring is. The card cleanly answers Gideon or Archangel Avacyn, Saheeli Rai or Verdurous Gearhulk, and never sits stuck in your hand (because one-mana cycling is so freaking awesome). Flexible instant-speed answers have never been more needed in Standard, and having one as an immediate slam-dunk four-of in control shells bodes well for a more balanced metagame in the future. It also bodes well for a certain under-appreciated Planeswalker, but we’ll get to that later.

6: Archfiend of Ifnir

Paging Travis Woo! Paging Travis Woo! We have a card for Living End here, and I know you’re excited about what it can do for the deck. The Archfiend is obviously better than Jungle Weaver right now in Living End for a number of reasons, including the fact that it’s a flyer in a deck without any flyers, and that it’s just a great reasonable creature to cast on its own. Living End is secretly not supremely reliant on its namesake card to win, and the Archfiend makes that more true than ever. I mean, seriously, how is a deck like Abzan Company supposed to beat a resolved Archfiend? The card just lets you decimate your opponent’s battlefield position each turn while clocking for five in the sky. Affinity boards in Relic of Progenitus? No problem, just stick an Archfiend and watch as your opponent struggles to build any sort of reasonable offense. This Demon stands to singlehandedly revitalize a struggling Modern archetype, and for that I am both excited and terrified. Excited, because it’s amazing that Wizards of the Coast manages to find cards to inject new life into Modern, and terrified because, well, let’s face it. New Living End might just be able to fight through giant piles of graveyard hate now, and I don’t really know how fair decks can stop it!

5: Manglehorn

We needed a Viridian Shaman in this format, and Manglehorn is coming to the rescue. Not only does this bad beast stop an opposing Saheeli Rai combo dead in its tracks (as the tokens are all artifacts, and thus would enter tapped under a Manglehorn), but it also ekes out value against Vehicles decks, and can be blinked or copied for value from your own Felidar Guardian or Saheeli Rai. If Wizards of the Coast doesn’t ban a piece of the CopyCat combo, expect well-tuned versions of the deck to pack at least a few neo-Viridian Shamans in the 75 somewhere. Killing a Clue and forcing opposing Hearts of Kiran to enter the battlefield off-duty is a lot to get out of a three-mana 2/2 (and the body is blinkable and copiable, so it’s better than Release the Gremlins), so I’m ready for Manglehorn to come through and start breaking some fragile artifacts while the targets are juicy!

4: Rhonas the Indomitable

Rhonas is my favorite god of the new batch, bar none. While other gods are hard to turn on, Rhonas’ ability will almost always immediately allow your God to get into battle. While other gods don’t help their subjects break through board stalls and kill opposing Planeswalkers, Rhonas’ trample is just what the doctor ordered. While other gods’ abilities require a large mana investment for little in board presence payoff, Rhonas can help your little guys trade up for larger opposing creatures, and easily stop all ground assaults on his own. Green already finds incentives to play big beefcakes, and now Rhonas is another piece of that puzzle. My only worry with Rhonas is that Green decks are already so flush with great threats that this god might find space very tight on the employment rolls at the Standard Green temp agency. If any god is going to break through in competitive Standard play, though, it’s the one that actually, you know, lets your creatures break through. And really, doesn’t that just make sense?

3: Liliana, Death’s Majesty

Ah, yes. Her Majesty. You may all be wondering why Liliana is on this list, but you haven’t seen the new Gideon making waves here. Well, where the new Gideon doesn’t build a battlefield presence, our friend Liliana does exactly that. Battlefield presence is everything in Magic these days, and a card that builds up your graveyard, generates 2/2 tokens, and threatens to reanimate giant burly monsters is exactly the type of top-end threat I’m excited to play. Ultimately, Liliana is a bit of a slow clunker in a format defined by game-ending combos and 4/4 flyers for 2 mana, but if the format does slow down as predicted, this Liliana might actually see play as a one- or two-of in the very same decks that happily house the three-mana version of the ‘walker. Plus, once rotation (or a banning) turns over large swaths of the format, there’s no telling what might suddenly spike in playability. Liliana is powerful enough that I’m unwilling to ever count her out, and as such I’m excited with the potential that this value-ridden card offers for Black decks moving forward in Standard.

2: Glorybringer

Ah, yes. The elephant (or in this case, Dragon) in the room. Part Chandra, Torch of Defiance, part Stormbreath Dragon, and 100% certifiable Gideon-killer, this is a 5-drop Dragon to hunt down creatures and Planeswalkers alike. Flying and Haste is a potent combination in the current Standard format, because there are basically no threats out there currently that allow you to surprise opponents and kill their Planeswalkers. The closest thing we have right now is Verdurous Gearhulk, which can distribute counters to creatures that immediately attack, overwhelming an opponent who planned for a specific combat scenario to happen. Glorybringer offers some of the surprise element of Verdurous Gearhulk to swing entire games on a single combat step, while offering a juicy incentive for Mardu decks to shift back away from Archangel Avacyn + Walking Ballista and towards Veteran Motorist + Glorybringer.

I’m excited to see this card in action, mostly because in the first few weeks it will necessitate unfamiliar play patterns for most players, offering the Glorybringer player the chance for some rather choice blowouts. Think back to the first time you got destroyed by a mid-combat Archangel Avacyn, and how it changed your combat math every time you saw up from your opponent on the fifth turn. Tapping out for a Chandra on a clear board suddenly doesn’t seem so safe, and a new cat-and-mouse game will develop between players with Planeswalkers and players with Glorybringers. If you tap out for a Planeswalker, you risk losing a creature and your ‘walker from a big Glorybringer hit. If you tap out for a Glorybringer and just strike your opponent for four, you might lose your game-winning Dragon to a Nahiri or a Chandra, Torch of Defiance hit. Regardless, the presence of this threat stands to shift the play patterns of Standard as much as if not more than Censor, and I’m thrilled to watch it all unfold. Plus, hey, it’s another awesome threat whose exert ability synergizes really well with both Felidar Guardian and Saheeli Rai. As a one- or two-of in Saheeli combo decks, I could see this badass Dragon going places. But one more (or, really, five more) cards excite me even more than powerful Standard threats, simply because they stand ready to imbue Life from the Loam engine decks in Modern with new life.

1: Cycling Dual Lands

What is there to say that hasn’t already been said? These lands will be great in Drake Haven decks in Standard, but the real joy lies in getting the Seismic Assault/Life from the Loam team back together. I think that Dredge is the deck to incorporate this engine as a possible sideboard juke, but even a normal Aggro Loam deck could do a ton of damage to the current Modern metagame. Raven's Crimes for combo and control, repeated free Shocks to take care of aggro decks, and a dusting of Dark Confidants and Abrupt Decays to keep fair midrange decks in check. If Death's Shadow Jund is the way to make Jund as lean and aggressive as possible, then Jund Loam will rise as the opposite end of the spectrum. Clunky to start but unbelievably powerful when it gets going, the Loam engine has lain dormant in Modern for too long, and these innocuous new lands are going to push it into the realm of playability, if not competitive excellence.

Now, the craziest thing is, we haven’t even gotten the full spoiler yet, and I haven’t started actually brewing decks in earnest! Next week the spoiler completes, we can start predicting a basic metagame, we can analyze the level-two cards that stand to gain if and when specific archetypes and threats move up the Standard power rankings, and we can start brewing up Modern skeletons with cards like Archfiend of Ifnir, As Foretold, and Life from the Loam with the cycling lands. Exciting times lie ahead!