Much Abrew: Are Mind Twist and Living Death in Standard?
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to our new Standard format to build around a card that I think might be a bit of a sleeper from the Spider-Man set: Superior Spider-Man (or, once we get to the games, Kavaero, Mind-Bitten on Magic Arena). When I first saw Superior Spider-Man, it looked like a Body Double but without combo potential since you have to exile the card it copies, which made me think the card would be more fun than strong. But then I realized Superior Spider-Man actually interacts powerfully with creatures with "when this enters, if you cast it" triggers like Bringer of the Last Gift and Myojin of Night's Reach! How strong is Superior Spider-Man if you go all-in building around it? Let's get to the video and find out!
Much Abrew: Superior Spider-Man
Discussion
- Record-wise, the deck crushed it, going something like 12-4, although this was during early-access day, so I don't really put much weight in the record. Instead, on early-access day, I'm really looking for how cards and synergies feel, and Superior Spider-Man felt super strong and definitely feels like a sleeper from the set.
- What makes Superior Spider-Man so good? Well, it's basically Zombify—a four-mana reanimation spell—but with a really unique twist: you give up some stats (since Superior Spider-Man will always be a 4/4, no matter what it copies) but gain access to abilities that only trigger if the creature was cast, which is something other reanimation spells can't do.
- We have two big payoffs in the deck to copy with Superior Spider-Man. The first is Myojin of Night's Reach. The eight-mana 5/2 enters with a divinity counter (which makes it indestructible) but only if it was cast from our hand, and we can remove that counter to make our opponent discard their entire hand! Reanimating Myojin is horrible—all you get is a vanilla 5/2. But copying it with Superior Spider-Man is actually pretty absurd since we'll get the divinity counter, which means we can wait until our opponent's draw step and then remove that counter to make our opponent discard their hand as early as Turn 4, which beats a lot of decks all by itself. It's basically like having Mind Twist in Standard, but it even leaves behind a body!
- Since we're comparing our payoffs to iconic old cards, our second one is Living Death in the form of Bringer of the Last Gift. When Bringer enters, if we cast it, each player sacs all their creatures and then returns all the creatures that were in their graveyard to the battlefield, which is pretty busted with Superior Spider-Man. Let's say that all we have in our graveyard is a single Bringer of the Last Gift, and then we play Superior Spider-Man to copy it. We'll get a 4/4 Bringer thanks to Superior Spider-Man, and then, thanks to a weird quirk in the way the card is written, we'll actually reanimate the original 6/6 Bringer of the Last Gift as well. While Superior Spider-Man does make you exile the card it copies, because the "exile" is the last part of the card, when our Bringer of the Last Gift Superior Spider-Man enters the battlefield, the reanimation will happen before the exile, which means that we'll end up with a total of 10 flying power across two bodies! But it's even better than that. Ideally, we will have way more than just a single Bringer of the Last Gift in our graveyard and will get back a bunch of Overlords and Myojin as well! Basically, Superior Spider-Man copying Bringer of the Last Gift should usually win us the game within a turn or two by wrathing away our opponent's board and building us a massive flying army!
- The rest of the deck is pretty simple: removal to stay alive and cards to fill the graveyard. But Lively Dirge deserves a shout-out. The spree sorcery gives us an expensive Entomb that we can use to tutor a Bringer of the Last Gift or Myojin of Night's Reach in our graveyard for Superior Spider-Man. If we use the second spree mode, we can also reanimate up to two creatures with total mana value 4 or less, which means that for five mana, we can tutor Superior Spider-Man into our graveyard and immediately reanimate it. Unfortunately, if we reanimate Superior Spider-Man, we don't get the "if you cast it" trigger by copying Bringer of the Last Gift or Myojin of Night's Reach. But being able to copy an Overlord of the Balemurk or Overlord of the Floodpits is still fine; plus, remember that Superior Spider-Man can also copy things from our opponent's graveyard. In one game, we managed to snipe an Ardyn, the Usurper from our opponent's graveyard the turn before they could reanimate it!
- And that's basically the deck. Overall, I feel like Superior Spider-Man has the power to be a real player in Standard, although with a big asterisk: we might have to wait until November and the upcoming bannings for the deck to really take off. As good as Superior Spider-Man felt, it lines up pretty poorly with the Izzet Cauldron meta since Agatha's Soul Cauldron itself can exile the big finishers we want to be copying with Superior Spider-Man from our graveyard. There are a lot of powerful reanimator cards in Standard, but we've seen those decks almost completely disappear from Standard since Izzet Cauldron took over, and I worry that Superior Spider-Man will face the same fate, as a strong card that just doesn't line up right with the best deck in the format. Once the bannings happen in November, though, I think Superior Spider-Man could be very legit. And in the short term, I could see it being very strong in best-of-one Standard, where you don't have to deal with as much graveyard hate or Izzet Cauldron very often.
- So, should you play Superior Spider-Man in Standard? While I never like making definitive statements based on early-access day, I think the answer is yes, but mostly in best-of-one Standard until Izzet Cauldron gets banned. The card is way, way better than I expected. While relying on the graveyard does make it a bit fragile, overall, I came away from playing the deck feeling like Superior Spider-Man has a chance to be a very good Standard card, if not immediately then at some point during its long life in the format.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
