Twenty-odd months ago, Pat Chapin told us "Cruel Ultimatum will change everything," and he was right. But now, everything has changed. Cruel Ultimatum is still a spell you might like to cast, but it is miles away from the game-over it used to be. Grixis is a decidedly tier-2 strategy despite playing these eleven-for-ones and today I'd like to figure out why.

So why was Cruel Ultimatum such a game-changer? Let's go back in time, to Lorwyn standard, when Shards of Alara was just a glimmer on the horizon. Chapin's article reads, in part, as follows:

Eleven for one may sound like hyperbole but if you agree with the valuation of the life drain effect it is accurate. I am not a fan of universal theories or the like that try and boil the game's resources down to one metric but "X for Y" is a statement of value I can understand. A whole archetype of standard decks grew out of the Lorwyn block quagmire of Faeries and Wx tokens to cast Cruel Ultimatum right alongside Cloudthresher. Few aggressive decks had the gas left to finish a game after getting Crueled. Their attack was blunted and their hand was emptied, while the opponent had gained a nice life buffer; the only reply of any relevance another control deck could muster was their own Cruel Ultimatum off the top.

Fast forward to the current standard environment. Leaving aside the mana cost for the moment, let's look at the effect you get out of Cruel Ultimatum. Firstly, target opponent sacrifices a creature. This is by no means a bad thing to do – unless they have Phage the Untouchable and Endless Whispers - but most decks these days have creatures that are mostly irrelevant by the time you have hit your 7 mana sorcery; Lotus Cobra, Noble Hierarch, Soldier token, Wall of Omens, and so on. Perhaps they have no creatures at all on your turn, and can wipe off the life you've gained with a Celestial Colonnade attack. Essentially decks of modern standard are structured in such a way that getting Edicted is not usually an issue for their board position. Occasionally you get the guy who has a single Baneslayer Angel and is tapped out, which is nice, but mostly killing creatures at sorcery speed is terrible – manlands and planeswalkers are ready to punish you for trying. You also get the opposite effect, getting to disentomb one of your guys. Unfortunately these days that is most likely to be a Sedraxis Specter, not a Cloudthresher or a Kitchen Finks.

Of course, the next effect is usually more significant: target opponent discards three cards. This is Blightning and a half! Discarding three is a significant impairment to your opponent's continued ability to win the game, especially if you can manipulate their draws with Jace. Mind Shattering your opponent is absolutely worth doing, but months upon months of playing against Blightning has inured players to discarding cards and they have built coping mechanisms into their decks, whether it is Ranger of Eos to pad their hands, Mind Spring to recover afterwards, or Vengevine to turn the discard effect into a benefit for them. Additionally, this is no Mind Sludge or Identity Crisis in that it often won't get their whole hand, meaning they can keep their best card. By the time you have seven mana, chances are so do they and their best card is going to be something like Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Sphinx of Lost Truths, Sarkhan the Mad or Brilliant Ultimatum. The best part of Cruel Ultimatum is often getting to draw three more cards yourself, hopefully burn to let you finish your opponent or more Cruel Ultimatums to continue the abuse.

Last on the cavalcade of pain for your opponent is losing five life. I am not going to argue that Death's Shadow makes this a bad thing for you, but unless this five life is putting your opponent to zero it is not ending the game, and nearly any deck can reel in your five life gain with any number of haste creatures or manlands/Gideons. Which is really the root of the issue with Cruel Ultimatum these days, it doesn't end a game like it used to do so resoundingly. A 10 life, 8 card swing in your favour should put the game beyond doubt – so why doesn't it have the same effect anymore?

The answer, as always, is that the environment has changed considerably since Cruel Ultimatum's peak. The standard environment of Faeries and 5CC was more about eking out card advantage and building an unassailable board position for the control decks, and turning progressively more dudes sideways with +1/+1 counters on them for the aggro decks – Faeries was somewhere in between. Nowadays things are different, and decks of both varieties aren't interested in the small advantages, they are interested in throwing haymakers at one another until one player or the other drops. Bloodbraid Elf, Vengevine, Elspeth, Goblin Guide, Emrakul – these are the kind of threats that must be contended with in the modern standard format. You get to draw three cards, sure, but the best you can hope for is likely another Cruel Ultimatum. Meanwhile, nearly every other deck in the format can explode in a single turn without needing many cards in hand – Devastating Summons + Bushwhacker, Bloodbraid into Knight of the Reliquary returning Vengevine, Broodmate into Sarkhan Vol, Sphinx discarding two Vengevines, Hierarch? Even the UW control decks can go Gideon activation, Elspeth token with flying, Colonnade activation to bash you for 14 with no cards in hand.

One major threat that Cruel Ultimatum just can't touch is that category discussed a few weeks ago in this very column – planeswalkers. Jace, the Mind Sculptor doesn't care if you get Cruel Ultimatume-ed – he will cheerfully refill your hand with Brainstorm. Elspeth shrugs off sacrificing one of her soldier tokens, and launches your Rhox War Monk to the sky the following turn to reverse the life drain. Nicol Bolas is my personal favourite – he can steal whatever creature the Cruel player recovers, destroy their lands to keep them off , and eventually deliver an ultimate ability far more devastating than Cruel. If you are tapping out against a player with a – or, heaven forfend, multiple – planeswalkers and not dealing with them, you are not improving your board situation a great deal. Board position is very important in today's standard environment, but it is at a completely different angle to the old tribal environment with armies of elves, faeries and kithkin facing off. Planeswalkers are incredibly powerful, incredibly prevalent, and they could not care less about Cruel.

Making your opponent discard is often actively bad for you currently. Jund decks are sideboarding one of their signature cards, Blightning, until they're sure the coast is clear and they aren't going to just die to Vengevine the following turn. This exact problem came up for a Grixis opponent in my last tournament – they Crueled me, I discarded a Vengevine, brought it back on my turn and killed them. Even worse for discard lovers, M11 card Obstinate Baloth has the Dodecapod/Wilt-Leaf Liege punisher clause, and Cruel Ultimatum-ing a green deck in the weeks to come may well end the game in the green player's favour.

So what might bring Cruel Ultimatum back? The chief issues are firstly that discard is at a real low at the moment. If an answer for Vengevine and Obstinate Baloth – like the recently spoiled reprint of Leyline of the Void – is strong enough to marginalize those cards, one might not be so hesitant to Blightning and Cruel a guy. Secondly, some way to make Cruel effective against planeswalkers will be required. At the moment I think you are better off All Is Dusting than you are Crueling given how many planeswalkers seemingly every deck plays. I don't know what this new tool could be – a creature to return that is worth more than a planeswalker? Three cards to draw that are worth more than your opponent getting to keep Jace and friends on the table? Cruel Ultimatum will also improve if the other decks would just slow down and not be able to recover so quickly. As long as we can cast Bloodbraid Elves, Rangers of Eos and Vengevines there is little to no hope of this simple eleven-for-one stopping us.

Obligatory Spoiler Talk

Just quickly I want to mention a couple of the spoilers that have me interested. The first one is the plenty hyped Primeval Titan. If you haven't seen him he is a 6/6 Trampler that will fetch any 2 lands when he comes into play or attacks. That's lands into play, not into your hand. This is obviously insane card advantage for a dumb green fatty, but how useful are lands when you already have 6? Plenty useful! Apart from the Turboland deck which will certainly try it just to have more lands in play, there are various utility lands that are already seeing loads of play – Seijiri Steppe, Tectonic Edge, Raging Ravine and Bojuka Bog are just a few that occur to me immediately. Get a 6/6 and Stone Rain your opponent, or assemble more threats in the form of manlands? Seems good!

The real reason I am excited about this guy is the applications that he may have in one of my pet decks, RG Valakut. The deck is made up of Valakuts, mountains, a couple of Forests and a load of green spells to search for more mountains. Once you get your engine going it is just a matter of using your multiplication tables to spread your free Lightning Bolts between controlling your opponent's board and diminishing their life total. Primeval Titan can go and get a Valakut and a mountain every turn while attacking as a 6/6 trampler and your opponent will just be dead if they can't answer him – with Path? Nice. Cultivate, the new Kodama's Reach, should also fuel this deck's appetite for basics, and I can't wait to try it out before Nationals.

The second card that I want to conclude with is Redirect. I am no rules guru but this looks like exactly the sort of Swerve I want to play, one with very few restrictions. As far as I can tell all you need is a spell on the stack that has targets, and for and a card you can change those targets. As well as the obvious value in redirecting your opponent's Maelstrom Pulse or whatever from your guy to theirs, this has huge blowout potential in redirecting something absurd with multiple targets like Comet Storm, or insane spells like Identity Crisis or Mind Sludge. This card will only be good in a standard environment with the spells to make it worthwhile, but at worst it is a counterspell for removal or their counterspells. At some point this will be insane tech that will impress everybody, so if you want to become a magical celebrity start jamming this in the sideboard of every $5k and GP deck you play and hope to blow out LSV or someone with it. If you don't, Conley will.

That's all for this week! By the next time I speak to you we will have the full spoiler available [Editor Note: His submission came before the Monday night spoiling of the entire set.], and I will be knee-deep in M11 limited in a vain attempt to eke out some percentage points for the drafts at nationals. See you then!