by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 22, 2009

Drawing cards is always useful, but unlike many other elements of magic the gathering it is just as useful late in the game as early and in some ways it is more useful. In some of the highest level games a single card advantage can be the deciding factor.

Thought Reflect is a rare blue enchantment from the shadowmore expansion set of magic the gathering. It is quite expensive at three blue mana and four colorless, but the effect has the potential to be quite game changing and though it is likely to be late as a blue spell you have a better chance of delaying the opponent long enough to get this.

The effect of the card is actually quite simple as well, it simply says that each time you would draw a card you instead draw two cards. This will have some effect simply by the fact that you would draw an extra card a turn, but this is far more than you would pay for this. And the real value is in using this with other draw cards. This should not be problematic as blue will already want to be playing with draw cards, but it is valuable to consider cards that you don't typically think of as draw cards.

The most obvious of these are cantrips. These are spells that have some effect and allow you to draw a single card. Creatures are perhaps the most effective. This is because playing cantrip creatures is always valuable but being able to play one that then gives you two cards is very powerful, the same though would be true of cantrip counter spells.

Finally and perhaps most impressive are some of the blues spells that rely on discarding or retuning cards to the top of your deck. Bazaar of Baghdad for example allows you to draw two cards and discard three. As a land this is quite usable without the advancement but if you add thought reflect it would allow you to draw four cards and discard three giving you a net card advantage as well as going through your deck for specific cards quickly. Burning inquiry is another, this is a spell for one red mana that tells all players to draw three cards then discard three. This gains you very little advantage in many situations but if you instead draw six you are considerably better off.

Overall this is a card that is quite expensive and outside of very defensive decks it is unlikely to be truly useful, but in decks that rely on counterspells to stay alive long after most decks would have died this could be a game winning card.

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