by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 25, 2009   Last Updated: February 29, 2012

In magic the gathering there are only a handful of cards that rely on a random mechanic which have truly be considered good. The most famous and powerful of those is the chaos orb, which allow you to drop the card to the table and destroy anything that it touched. There have been a great many others as well, but one of the only keywords which has used a random mechanic is clash, and it took all of the things that are unpopular about random and at least tried to address them a little. Revive the Fallen is an excellent example of how they have attempted to overcome some of the problems that people have with random cards. It is an uncommon sorcery from the morningtide expansion set of magic the gathering. It reads "Return target creature card in a graveyard to its owner's hand. Clash with an opponent. If you win, return Revive the Fallen to its owner's hand.". Clashing itself means that you both reveal the top card of your deck, and the person with the highest converted mana cost wins. The first thing of value to understand is that even if you do not win the clash Revive the Fallen still works. You get the creature in your hand no matter the outcome. This makes the random part of the card far less important. The second value is understanding clash itself. When clash happens both people reveal the top card of their deck and the caster wins if he has a higher converted mana cost card. This allows for you to control at least some the likelihood of winning, and not necessarily by playing high casting cost cards, but by choosing not to play the low casting cost cards in abundance. This may not seem like a major point, but if you put most of your cards into the four and five casting cost slots rather than in the two and three you will win a considerable number of clashes. This is dangerous though as a truly quick deck will have an opportunity to overwhelm you before you can do much. The effect of returning a card to you hand in itself is not one that is uncommon in black and there are other ways to do it, but by paying only a single colorless mana more than the cards that do this the best you have the opportunity to get a second card. This is generally worth it even in decks where you play small casting cost cards. Your opponent has land after all.

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