by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 01, 2009

There are some cards that simply may you laugh. Silly cards that appear on the surface to be worthless or worse hurt you, except that sometimes these cards let you do things in a way that is different than any other card in the game. One of the most entertaining of these is Forced Fruition.

Forced Fruition is a rare enchantment from the Lorwyn expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs two blue and four colorless, putting it out of the range of the average deck but the average deck will not play this card. This is a card for a very specific type of blue control deck and in that deck holding out until you have six mana must be possible or the deck is pointless.

What this card does is almost laugh out loud funny it reads "Whenever an opponent casts a spell, that player draws seven cards." This seems almost the same as casting one with nothing until you begin to look at it more carefully.

The first thing to recognize is that this is not an option. The opponent is forced to draw seven cards, and just like any other time, if he can not draw a card he loses. Now to do the math. Since the average deck is 60 cards, and your opponent will have drawn seven to begin the game, leaving him at 53, and there will have been about six turns before this card is played in which he will draw a card he is now at 47 cards, this means that he will be able to cast approximately six spells before he decks himself. This can be even worse if you have been able to cast any of the other cards that run down the opponent's deck.

Since everything that an opponent plays besides land in the game of magic is a spell this makes the seven cards that they draw far less useful, as using them will drain their deck even faster. And while you have to be careful with this that your opponent isn't able to cast several large creatures you can't block, beyond that it is actually far more safe than it may seem.

Counterspells seem a good back up to this, but the problem with them is that countered spells will not trigger this spell, so while they are useful, more useful are bounce spells. Allow your opponent to put out his creature, draw the seven cards, and then calmly return it to his hand and laugh as he draws that forty seventh card losing the game because he has done too well what so many decks want to do.

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