C
Chaos Turtle
Guest
by Todd “Mr. Pestilence” Parker
When you opened your packs of Planeshift, most of you were probably looking for the “chase” cards – Phyrexian Scuta, Doomsday Specter, Orim’s Chant, etc. While feverishly ripping through packs, you might have paused briefly to glance at your uncommons. Among them, you may have come across the subject of this article, the Razing Snidd. This card isn’t very impressive at first glance – “6 mana for a 3/3?!? Sacrifice a land?!? Return a creature to my hand?!? Crummy name, bad art. No thanks!” After tossing it into the “useless” pile, you kept ripping, visions of Scutas dancing in your head.
However, a closer inspection has revealed to me that this is a very powerful card, indeed, at least in the right kind of deck. Allow me to demonstrate. In a B/R Land Destruction deck, this card is simply brutal. Let’s assume (always a dangerous thing, but useful for our purposes here) that you have the usual LD spells, and that entering mid-game, you have whacked almost of your opponent’s land, but depleted your hand to the point that you have to topdeck LD in order to destroy any more land. Since your opponent probably has more land in his deck than you have LD, he/she may be able to recover and start making a game out of it.
Enter the Razing Snidd. Here’s the situation – you have 6 land (or more) in play, and a Razing Snidd in your hand. The Snidd turns every other land card in your library into a Raze. At 6 mana, you shouldn’t need any more. So, draw and play a land, play the Razing Snidd, sac a land (your opponent of course has to do the same), and return your Snidd to your hand as your target Red or Black creature. Voila! – buyback LD!
There are other benefits to this strategy. You don’t have to worry about having your spell Misdirected to your own land, and since you don’t target your opponent’s land, you don’t have to worry about the White enchantment that basically makes your opponent’s land untargetable. Not too shabby, eh?
When you opened your packs of Planeshift, most of you were probably looking for the “chase” cards – Phyrexian Scuta, Doomsday Specter, Orim’s Chant, etc. While feverishly ripping through packs, you might have paused briefly to glance at your uncommons. Among them, you may have come across the subject of this article, the Razing Snidd. This card isn’t very impressive at first glance – “6 mana for a 3/3?!? Sacrifice a land?!? Return a creature to my hand?!? Crummy name, bad art. No thanks!” After tossing it into the “useless” pile, you kept ripping, visions of Scutas dancing in your head.
However, a closer inspection has revealed to me that this is a very powerful card, indeed, at least in the right kind of deck. Allow me to demonstrate. In a B/R Land Destruction deck, this card is simply brutal. Let’s assume (always a dangerous thing, but useful for our purposes here) that you have the usual LD spells, and that entering mid-game, you have whacked almost of your opponent’s land, but depleted your hand to the point that you have to topdeck LD in order to destroy any more land. Since your opponent probably has more land in his deck than you have LD, he/she may be able to recover and start making a game out of it.
Enter the Razing Snidd. Here’s the situation – you have 6 land (or more) in play, and a Razing Snidd in your hand. The Snidd turns every other land card in your library into a Raze. At 6 mana, you shouldn’t need any more. So, draw and play a land, play the Razing Snidd, sac a land (your opponent of course has to do the same), and return your Snidd to your hand as your target Red or Black creature. Voila! – buyback LD!
There are other benefits to this strategy. You don’t have to worry about having your spell Misdirected to your own land, and since you don’t target your opponent’s land, you don’t have to worry about the White enchantment that basically makes your opponent’s land untargetable. Not too shabby, eh?
