by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 06, 2009

Perhaps the most powerful and popular phrase is the game magic the gathering is draw a card. This ability is one that makes any mage happy and is always useful but sometimes wizards of the coast gets tricky and has card drawing effects that do not have the phrase draw a card written on it. In these cases you have to look more carefully and think about what is actually going on.

Magus of the future is a rare human wizard from the Future sight expansion set of magic the gathering. It is a 2/3 creature that costs three blue mana and two colorless mana to put into play and has one small side effect and one powerful, though veiled draw effect.

The side effect is that it makes it far more difficult to bluff, something that blue is typically good at. The reason for this is that you must play with the top card of your deck revealed meaning that an opponent who is paying attention should eventually know most if not all of the cards in your hand.

The draw effect though strongly outweighs that if you take advantage of it. That draw effect is that you can play the revealed card from the top of your deck. Though it doesn't say it what this really means is that so long as you are playing cards from the top of your deck they are all effectively giving you a free card. After all as soon as you play one you are able to look at the next giving you another spell you can play.

This leads me to the desire to take advantage of this card by playing spells that I can play. The first and most valuable in this situation is land and though you are only able to play one land a turn being able to do so without having to lower the number of cards in your hand is very valuable.

But that isn't enough for me. What I really want to do, if only for a casual deck, is to build a deck that has very cheep spells. Things like Ornathoptor leap to mind, though any one casting cost blue spells could also work as would a great many of the suspend cards which are generally inexpensive.

This is a card with a side effect that can limit its power some but it is also a very effective draw engine in the right deck and the only real question is whether that deck can be toned enough to be used in any time of non casual format.

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