The Old Ones are Coming

Omens of the Third Age is shaping up to be one of my most anticipated sets in a while. If you’re a draft connoisseur such as myself, it feels like we’re coming out of quite the drought since the last real supported season of limited gameplay from High Seas. Limited in Flesh & Blood has always been something I’m passionate about, and from what public information we have on the set so far I’m dying in anticipation to dive right in and start drafting. Even Bryan Gottlieb himself has foretold of the upcoming golden era of limited, with this being the first of three consecutive sets designed with limited as a priority. But the fun doesn’t end there, I’m also expecting big implications for the Classic Constructed format from this set with the addition of at least* 3 heroes–spoiled by LSS in their official trailer.

• Oscilio, Forked Continuum
• Zyggy Starlight
• Aurora, Legacy of Tempest

If somehow you’ve missed it, I highly recommend you watch the trailer to get a true feel for the thematics of the set, and perhaps pay particular attention to 2:01. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

Space Dust is Back on the Menu

I know everybody is just as excited for spoiler season as I am, and without further ado I introduce you to Corrosive Space Dust, the latest and greatest way for you to partake in the great game of Flesh & Blood.

As a red 1-cost Lightning Illusionist instant, this is currently only playable in Zyggy Starlight. The playstyle of Zyggy is looking to be quite interesting, with a balancing act of juggling instant auras with incidental effects alongside his weapon Aphrodias. These synergies are especially enticing because they remind me of a playstyle similar to a blend between Iyslander and Enigma, where you’re playing on both turns and trying to control the game with your incremental arcane damage and instant effects at opportune times. Let’s also just take a moment to appreciate what stellar artwork this is from Mark Poole, I love his style and, if you didn’t know, he’s also created the art for some other cards I’m a huge fan of: Aether Wildfire, Waning Moon, Elemental Strike, & Insidious Chill to name a few.

Mechanics Breakdown

For those of you wanting to dive a little deeper, the next step is for us to evaluate this card and determine its playability in both CC & Limited. In order to do that, we need to start understanding the keywords coming out in Omens and the core mechanics of the set. Fundamental to all the new heroes is consistently accumulating enough of these Lightning Flow tokens.

The ease at which you can create these in CC is going to determine how much potential these heroes have as they’re going to be a core resource for utilizing your hero’s text alongside cards that will have additional payoff such as Astral Strike and Corrosive Space Dust. I expect to see a few more of these types of cards in the set, and I think this concept is very similar to the desire for High Seas heroes to create Gold. Given that Lightning Flows are textless tokens, I’m thinking that these are going to be easier to generate than what we saw with Gold. We’ve already seen a few engines for this in Cosmic Duality, Circular Flowtide, Flowstate Embodiment, Static Shelter, and Flowing Stormstrike. These cards are all on-rate, and provide you with some flexibility in terms of how you want to pursue generating these tokens. Puffin is a great example of how the ease with which you can accumulate these important resources impacts your viability in CC; If Puffin could easily trigger her passive hero text on every turn she’d be a much more fearsome competitor.

Meanwhile, on the limited side, these Lightning Flow tokens are still relevant for all the reasons highlighted in CC in addition to the Omens of Arcana macro that will start in the arena each game. It seems unlikely that there will be any Arcane Barrier in the equipment pool of this set, which means you’ll have the option (and sometimes forced responsibility) to block normally unpreventable arcane damage with them. The gameplay is probably going to be similar to Rosetta where some decks might be built around primarily arcane damage and others might just splash it as evasive damage. Balancing the use of Lightning Flow tokens between offense and defense is definitely going to be an important aspect of limited, which you can only capitalize on if you can make enough of them.

In regards to Zyggy specifically, holo counters are looking to be important as they turn on your weapon. Currently, it seems the primary way to gain these is by activating Zyggy, but perhaps there’s some majestics lurking in the set that can enable this, similar to Sacred Art: Immortal Lunar Shrine, and allow Zyggy to take advantage of extremely powerful pivot turns that develop more auras than you ordinarily could. Important to note here is that it does not seem like there are ways to banish and replay an aura with a holo counter if it already has one, preventing you from doing shenanigans by replaying the same instant aura 2-3 times in a turn (until we introduce Blast to Obilivion, that is). Regardless, getting enough Lightning Flow tokens to use your hero text every cycle seems important to maximize the value from cards that need holo counters or to cheat out instant auras. Unlike most Illusionists that capitalize on cards with Phantasm, it seems that Zyggy is built more around Fragment, where our opponents are punished for not blocking in a similar way, but our attacks aren’t stopped in their tracks by a single blocking card with 6+ power. This is an interesting concept, and I think it will have significantly less variance than traditional Phantasm attacks had in CC when they were popped.

Play Patterns and Archetypes

Now I want to look at how all this background context can be used to piece together how Zyggy’s turn cycles might look, and how certain cards synergize with each other. One of the important things to point out is that both Zyggy’s hero text and weapon require you to tap when activating them; meaning we can only activate this either once on our turn or on the opponent’s turn. I imagine it is going to be very important in both CC and Limited to try and activate our weapon every turn cycle that we can.

What I find interesting, is that so far we’ve seen very few 0-cost auras (ignoring the obviously very powerful Stardust Spike). Given that it costs 3-pitch to both activate Zyggy to add a holo counter to an aura and then activate Aphrodias, this means that we’ll likely need to carry auras forward into our opponent’s turn and treat Aphrodias almost like a Waning Moon that we usually leverage before our turn begins again, or by generating extra resources from something like Fyendal's Spring Tunic. For example, by attacking with any 2-cost attack and preemptively developing something like Corrosive Space Dust on our turn, we would set up a clean combo for the opponent’s turn: utilize the Zyggy hero ability to replay the Corrosive Space Dust, doing 1 arcane damage as it leaves to reenter with a holo counter and another 1 arcane damage when it wards 4; by pitching a blue you also allow yourself to activate Aphrodias. The end result here is sending 7 physical damage on our turn and then another 4 arcane on theirs while still blocking 4, a very high value proposition.

You even have ways to step on the gas and apply more pressure, such as by attacking with Blink of an Eye pitching a blue, and if the opponent blocks, in response to the Fragment trigger we play Auric Shards. We’d then get the additional +1 power, followed by another +4 power when we resolve the Blink of an Eye trigger, resulting in a 3 card 12. Even if they choose not to play into our Fragment, we could still simply do the same line and pitch an extra blue to activate Zyggy and throw an Aphrodias in there as well, resulting in a similar line where we still go up to 12 physical but also get 2 arcane. I always find heroes who have flexibility in how to punish opponent’s decisions–regardless of how they play–to feel very rewarding and allow me to express my skill. I hope that these lines can start to highlight some starting points for how to evaluate Zyggy’s play patterns as more of the set is spoiled. 

Banned and Restricted Impact

One elephant in the room we need to address is the B&R impact for Omens release. LSS, in their testing, has decided that perhaps an all Lightning set might break some things if certain bans aren’t implemented. Our focus here is on Zyggy, and the bans that impact us the most are Channel Lightning Valley, Electromagnetic Somersault, & Phantom Tidemaw. These bans make sense as Zyggy seems like they will be bouncing auras in and out of play on a regular basis, creating some broken interactions with threatening to draw an extra card on each player's turn for the entire duration of the game. Electromagnetic Somersault also doesn't surprise me given its extreme flexibility both on offense and defense, allowing you to break traditional game limitations. The spicy ban here is Phantom Tidemaw, I've seen this card have niche play in old school Illusionist decks where it's primary focus was to stack large quantities of counters for fatigue matchups, which had real difficulty in removing it from the board. My best guess for how Zyggy could've exploited this was getting lots of counters from doing his traditional gameplan, which he could incidentally combo with Restless Coalescence leading to a very steady engine of value generation with Spectral Shields for largely free. Important to note is that Blast to Oblivion is untouched, which I expect to be a staple in any Zyggy list. I wonder how wide decklists will attempt to go, will they be using Flittering Charge in combination with Embodiments of Lightning from an Astravolt Elemental or Sigil of Lightning? Perhaps we end up doing tall turn cycles where we send big Illusionist attacks and also develop auras that we leverage on our opponent’s turn. Early on, I expect there to be builds that are all over the place, but it’ll be interesting to see where we end up come National Championship season.

Author Notes

Overall, Zyggy is looking to be a different flavor of Illusionist with their own unique twist while still juggling some of the permanents the class is known for. I’m excited to see where they end up in the Classic Constructed format. The National Championship season is quickly approaching, and I think I’m not the only one who sees a lot of potential in Zyggy. I’m jealous of everyone who will be attending the World Premiere in Prague later this month; I’m sure it’ll be an amazing experience! Even if you aren’t attending, I hope everybody enjoys cracking their packs of Omens of the Third Age whether that’s at a local pre-release or opening boxes come release day on June 5th!