by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 30, 2009   Last Updated: March 05, 2012

Fireball has long been a key card in red. Able to kill a player or a creature, the main weakness of this card is often that it sits in your hand waiting for the chance to be truly useful and then finally being used to kill a single creature because you never had the mana to finish off the opponent.

Titan's Revenge does not have the ability to hit extra targets like fireball, but it has something else that makes it nearly as useful. A rare sorcery from the morningtide expansion set of Magic the Gathering; it costs two red and X and does X damage to a target player or creature. The real reason that you would use this though is its clash ability. When you play this, you clash with your opponent, each revealing the top card of your deck and if the casters card has a higher cost than his opponents he wins. If he does win, he gets to return Titan's Revenge to his hand.

The first point is to consider Titan's Revenge to other burn spells. It is only one more mana than a basic Fireball, but in the end that is a considerable amount. One of the things that was always good about fireball is that it scaled at about the same speed as creatures. This means that on the sixth turn, you would hopefully have enough mana out to kill the creature that your opponent put out on the fifth turn, a single extra mana makes that far less likely to happen.  On the opposite side of the argument the chance of being able to play this card again is worth something. But in order to understand this you need to consider how likely it is that you will win the clash.

The first weakness of Clash is that the decks are set against you. If you reveal a tie, you don't win and therefore lose the clash. This means that if you reveal a land it is impossible to win. Since about a third of your deck is going to be land this means that you have a guaranteed loss about a third of the time. Playing higher casting cards is not the solution either as it simply puts you into the position of it being harder to cast any of your spells and making it more likely you will be killed before you do. And so this means that you are going to win about half the time in those times when you don't draw land. But in that one third of times when you do win this card is going to be of vital importance either allowing you to kill another creature or to do twice the damage to an opponent.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.