by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 11, 2009

The suspend mechanic in magic the gathering is one of the more interesting of mechanics in recent years. Playing far different than others it is useful in most situations but there is one major problem with it and while this doesn't matter for every card there are certainly cards in which it matters considerably. That problem is that there is no surprise in using a suspended card. Your opponent knows it is coming and are going to act accordingly.

Dichotomancy is a rare sorcery from the planar chaos expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs two blue mana and seven colorless mana to cast directly, but if you choose to suspend the card with suspend 3 it costs only two blue mana and one. The reason for this change in cost is that this is a card that is reliant on surprise to be most effective. It reads "For each tapped nonland permanent target opponent controls, search that player's library for a card with the same name as that permanent and put it onto the battlefield under your control. Then that player shuffles his or her library.

Suspend 3-one colorless mana and two blue mana(Rather than cast this card from your hand, you may pay one colorless mana and two blue mana and exile it with three time counters on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter. When the last is removed, cast it without paying its mana cost.)

As you will recognize immediately your opponent is going to simply not tap his non land permanents the turn before this comes into play making it a card that does little besides stopping them from attacking for a single turn.

This can be improved considerably though. And the first and most obvious way to improve this is to have your own way to tap the opponents cards. Cards like icy manipulator can do some of this, and a spell like stasis, or the winter orb could make it more difficult but most likely you are going to way to play blue with its numerous spells and creatures that tap multiple permanents. All of this costs a considerable amount of deck building effort though.

Another possibility is to alter the predictability of the card. One of the best ways to do this is the rift elemental. A red creature that costs one red to put into play and can remove suspend counters for one red and one colorless. If you have this in play and your opponent can't remove this then you can potentially turn a one turn annoyance into a three turn sword of Damocles hanging of their head so that they can't really afford to do anything but cast spells.

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