Target Attack Phase

"All the deck does is attack and block". I say that a lot. Part of it is that I generally don't like decks focused on beatdown. But more than that, there's always a very real danger that your attack phase will be shut down. Spike Weaver was the best way to do it before. With just Sixth Edition and Urza's Block, we're down to Pariah and Worship. There are other ways, but they're not absolute. So what MM cards have arrived to carry the torch?

Basically, just one. War Tax.

War Tax 2U Enchantment UX: Creatures cannot attack this turn unless their controller pays X.

The question is, how do you use War Tax? First off, it makes little sense to use it unless you plan to shut down the attack phase completely. It takes three mana a turn before this is more than a very minor problem. If you're willing to spend more mana than that and still let your opponent attack, he'll just kill you slowly. That's one lesson learned from Propaganda. So the goal becomes clear: Every turn, you must spend two more mana than your opponent has.

Option one is to leave your opponent's mana alone. All you have to do is generate two more mana than your opponent. You can even do this with lands. If you and your opponent play the same number of lands, just sacrificing a Yavimaya Elder will get you that kind of mana superiority. So will a single Thran Dynamo. Since you've seeded more mana into your deck than your opponent seeded into his, this mana advantage will only get better as time goes by, and soon you'll be saving Counterspell mana or even casting spells. A reasonable goal would be to activate War Tax for two on turn four and for enough starting on turn five. The obvious deck to start with would be a monoblue or R/U artifact deck. If you draw a Grim Monolith, it's easy enough: Turn three Dynamo and Tax, turn four lock with mana to spare. If you play a turn two Diamond, you can then play turn three Dynamo, turn four lock. A Powerstone can stand in for the Dynamo. Not counting Ancient Tomb or City of Traitors, Kai's entire deck generates (quick estimate) about 50 mana every turn. The average deck generates 25. So you gain a mana once every two turns or so, since you can also use the one time mana sources. The deck can operate fine while shutting the attack phase down. Playing a card that only stops attacks is somewhat risky, since you need to make every action card count every game with so many mana sources in the deck. But the payoff is amazing.

There's also very good interaction with Mishra's Helix. Often, you'll be able to get a Helix lock on someone but will still have to deal with their creatures. Other times, you'll be able to shut down their attack phase with the War Tax but that ties up most or all of your mana. Since every land tapped by the Helix is one less mana to pay the Tax, you can tie up both lands and creatures for the same amount of mana as just creatures. It also prevents the use of one casting cost creatures to escape a Helix lock. Unless they have removal, Tax and Helix are a great team. And because the Tax can go it alone without any other non-mana cards if it has to, and whenever Tax doesn't do anything Helix is generally devastating, you can now get away with more copies of Mishra's Helix, with the deck looking something like this:

I've been sneaking MM cards directly into the sample decks. Can you tell I like Dust Bowl and Rishadan Port? More on those when the time comes.

The other good option is to use War Tax together with Armageddon. You still need to have some artifact mana available, but you no longer have to go crazy. You just need two artifact mana, and the ability to match your opponent land play for land play.

A few words of warning, then, about how not to use War Tax. Don't try to use it in a control deck that doesn't generate a crazy amount of mana. You end up tapping all or almost all your mana every turn, leaving you vulnerable to everything else in your opponent's deck. Do keep it in mind as a potential sideboard card for such decks, though. For other reasons, they will need to be able to consistently out-mana their opponents. And of course, do not pass War Tax in draft.

Finally, there are two somewhat related cards. One is Moment of Silence, which is a reprint of Festival. It's no more useful now than it was then, and won't be until there's a really good and really cheap way to recurse it well, and probably not even then. The second is:

War Cadence 2R XR: Creatures cannot block this turn unless their controller pays X.

Assuming parity of mana, this makes it impossible for your opponent to block the turn he casts a spell that costs more than 1, if you want to spend enough mana to prevent him. It also prevents him from blocking with more than one creature. Certainly it will end a large creature stalemate quickly. If those start happening more often, this could get interesting. But Bedlam overshadows this card in a major way. Any deck that cares this much about its opponent not blocking shouldn't care about its opponent attacking back, and ideally there shouldn't BE a next turn for him to attack in. If Bedlam sees no play, this will see no play. Cards that affect blocking have traditionally been very weak. I don't expect that to change until Urza's Block rotates out.

So those are two cards that keep things interesting. The set doesn't have anywhere near enough interesting cards in it. Overcosting on the side of caution is fine, but there's a limit. If I have to choose between a set like MM and a set like Urza's Saga, then I choose Saga. You can ban the broken cards. What do you do about those that are just unplayable?