by Elton Gahr

Created on: September 22, 2009

Although Zendikar has introduces several new ideas into magic the gathering is is also bringing back an old favorite. Kicker is keyword that was very popular the first time it was used. It allows for spells to have two costs, the first less expensive cost lets you play the card early in the game, while the kicker makes it useful late in the game.

Kicker is even more powerful in Zendikar than it was before though, because it is matched with the keyword Landfall. This is the ability that strongly encourages the player to put more land into play to get effects from cards. And so, combining these two elements, having a spell that, with its kicker costs 9 mana is something that might become reasonable.

"Rite of Replication" is a blue sorcery that costs two blue and two colorless and allows you to make a copy of any creature. This is not an unreasonable cost and by itself might make it into some interesting decks but that is only the first half of "Rite of Replication" this card has a kicker of 5 colorless mana, making for a total of two blue and seven colorless for this effect, but if you do that instead of making a single copy of a creature, you make five.

There are very few creatures in the game of magic that will not be useful in increments of five if only for attacking.

I do not believe that this card will be used to create creatures to attack with though. There are far to many other advantages that do not include a turn of summoning sickness or risk being blocked.

I think it is far more likely that any deck that uses this as a kill card will have creatures with come into play effects. Five copies of a creature that does four damage when it comes into play is enough to kill an opponent, and if you include the damage done by the first three damage adds up to 18. Also possible are discard effects(leaving the opponent with no cards left to kill the creatures with) or even life gaining effects. Whatever they are though I suspect that when "Rite of Replication" is played if it successfully resolves the opponent will be dead before those creatures have been on the battlefield long enough to have attacked, the only question left is if this can be done fast enough to make it a truly effective card.

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