by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 07, 2009

One of the major strategies that many decks use in order to deal with green is to avoid actual combat with the creatures. There are a few ways to do this. The first, in the order they would be used are discard abilities. Force an opponent to throw away a card and they can not use it to attack you. The next in the counter spell. By not allowing them to put a creature into the battlefield you save yourself the need to deal with that creature. Finally is creature removal, from lightning bolt to terror they are common as water in the game of magic the gathering. Quagnoth has an answer to each of these meaning that short of a wrath of god the opponent is going to have no choice but to enter combat with this creature.

Quagnoth is a rare beast from the future sight expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs one green and five colorless to put into play and is a 4/5 creature. All of this is reasonable but where this creature truly becomes remarkable is in its three abilities.

The first of these three is Split Second. The reminder text for split second reads "As long as this spell is on the stack, players can't cast spells or activate abilities that aren't mana abilities."

What this means for a creature is that it can not be countered. This means that no blue spell is going to be able to keep you from putting this creature onto the board.

The next of the abilities is shroud. This means that once it is on the board you will not have to worry about removal spells that kill just this creature. Though it does limit your ability to improve it as well.

Finally is the most interesting of the three. This reads "When a spell or ability an opponent controls causes you to discard Quagnoth, return it to your hand."

This is clearly designed to stop discard decks from keeping this from reaching the board, but there is another value for this and one that you might miss. Many of the discard spells in modern magic the gathering simply make an opponent discard a card. This means that if you use this as a sideboard card against a discard deck you can reduce the value of any card that uses the target opponent discards a card mechanic considerably as you can continue to discard this card every time.

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