Foundations has been out for about a month now, and while the set was designed to revitalize the Standard format there were plenty of interesting and cool designs for older formats too. Since the set's release, I've been adding a lot of Foundations cards to my commander decks to test them out, and while many have ended up back on the cutting room floor, these are five cards that lived up to the hype they got during preview season.

Bloodthirsty Conqueror

Everyone was excited about Bloodthirsty Conqueror during preview season, myself included, and wow does this card live up to the hype. It is a five-mana 5/5 with flying and deathtouch that, whenever an opponent loses life, gains you that much life. This is the same text as Exquisite Blood, and like Exquisite Blood, Bloodthirsty Conqueror is the second half to many infinite combos that instantly kill your opponents. When combined with cards like Sanguine Bond, which makes an opponent lose life whenever you gain life, an infinite loop begins that drains all of your opponents' life.

Being a creature gives it an edge over Exquisite Blood in many ways, even outside of infinite combos. For one, it can be tutored out with cards like Chord of Calling or Finale of Devastation, it can be made uncounterable with Cavern of Souls naming vampire or knight, and it can trigger its own ability by simply attacking with it in the air.

The part that made the card most exciting to me is that it has two very relevant creature types in vampire and knight. Knights get a lot of support in commander, being an aggressive creature type that likes holding equipment, and nothing holds equipment better than a big flying creature that also essentially gives your board lifelink. The vampire typing opens up even more possibilities, and makes Bloodthirsty Conqueror an indispensable tool for nearly every vampire typal deck (of which I have three). In a vampire deck, you can cheat it into play with cards like Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Strefan, Maurer Progenitor, and you can pair it with fellow vampire combo piece Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose, for consistent combo kills with on-theme creatures. This card has a lot of potential, and I still feel like I'm only scratching the surface.

Loot, Exuberant Explorer

There are quite a few new lands and landfall cards in Foundations, and out of all of them the one that lets you play extra lands has turned out to be the best, probably to the surprise of no one. For three mana, Loot, Exuberant Explorer has a static ability that gives you an extra land drop each turn and has a six-mana tap ability that puts a creature with mana value less than or equal to the number lands you control from the top six cards of your library into play. While the tap ability may be high, it is a powerful effect, letting you cheat in your finishers or digging for additional landfall pay-off cards, and even if you don't activate Loot's ability that extra land each turn starting on turn 3 (or turn 2 with a mana dork) will give you a pretty good early lead.

Helpful Hunter

I may be a bit biased on this one, as it came out the week after I adopted a kitten of my own, but this cat might just be my favorite card in the set. It is beautifully simple, being a 1/1 cat for two mana that draws a card when it enters. Sometimes the simplest cards turn out to be the best, and this unassuming cat has turned out to be an excellent role player in many of my favorite decks. Like its siblings, Spirited Companion and Wall of Omens, Helpful Hunter is a great early-game blink target for slower blink/flicker decks looking to build up an engine, and has also been a great card to copy with effects like Doppelgang or The Jolly Balloon Man. The added cat synergy also gave it a place in cat typal decks like Rinn and Seri or the new Arahbo, and it is a great early threat for original Arahbo decks too.

Scrawling Crawler

I don't really like Phyrexian Arena, despite how often I build and play Black decks. I find it to be too slow at what it does, a sentiment that I'm sure many others share, and it doesn't do a whole lot else other than triggering enchantresses and constellation. In my opinion, if you're looking for incremental card advantage at three mana, Scrawling Crawler blows it out of the water, and it has been one of my favorite new political tools from the past year. For the same mana value as an arena, you get an artifact creature that also drains the rest of the table when they draw cards, giving them an extra draw for more damage as well.

The symmetrical draws may seem like a downside at first, but letting your opponents have a little extra advantage for no additional cost helps them forget the damage it is causing them, until it's too late.

Blasphemous Edict

Blasphemous Edict was one of the cards that I thought highly of during Foundations previews, and in my opinion, it plays just about as well as I thought it would. It isn't a perfect wrath, especially against token decks that are designed to have more than thirteen creatures, but in almost every other scenario it does exactly what you need it to do. Getting 13 creatures onto the battlefield in a four-player pod is trivially easy, and I don't think I've cast it for its full price a single time in a month of playtesting. It also gets around indestructible, which is very helpful when nearly every Green deck is running heroic intervention and nearly every White deck has some variant of Flawless Maneuver or Unbreakable Formation, although it does feel bad to be hit with a Teferi's Protection or Clever Concealment in response. I rank it highly among Black board wipes, not quite as good as Toxic Deluge and not quite as splashy and versatile as The Meathook Massacre, but it does its job very well.