Turning Red: Exclusive Double Masters Previews
Today, thanks to Wizards being cool, we've got not just one but two Double Masters preview cards to show off for all of you! Oddly, one of the cards is on the shortlist of my all-time favorite cards in Magic, while the other is on my least favorite list, thanks to all of the times I've lost to it over the years. Anyway, there isn't much of a point in delaying the reveal any longer. Soon to return in Double Masters: Blood Moon and Goblin Guide!
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As you can see, not only are Blood Moon and Goblin Guide in Double Masters proper, Blood Moon with the art that has been used in every printing since The Dark and Chronicles and Goblin Guide with Modern Masters 2017 art, but both cards will also come with special alt-art, borderless printings that will be found as box toppers and in VIP boosters! Blood Moon getting new art is especially important. One of my all-time favorite Modern decks is Free-Win Red, built to stick a Blood Moon as early as Turn 1 and use it to jank the opponent out of the game. And the correct way to play Free Win Red is to make sure that all of your Blood Moons have mismatched art to maximize the tilt factor. The box-topper version of Blood Moon in Double Masters means that the enchantment now has four different arts: The Dark art, the Core Set art (which is also featured in the regular Double Masters version), and the Amonkhet Invocation art!
Goblin Guide also has four arts now, so if you're a Burn player who wants to pull the same "tilt your opponents with mismatched art trick," the possibility exists. Along with the new box-topper art from Double Masters, Goblin Guide has the original Zendikar art, the Modern Masters 2017 art (also the pack version art for Double Masters), and the Grand Prix promo art.
One of the strange things about previewing cards from a Masters set is that since Masters products are often stuffed full of some of the best cards in Magic, the uses of the cards in the set are already pretty well known. Both Goblin Guide and Blood Moon are staples in both Modern and Legacy, where Goblin Guide is perhaps the best red one-drop of all time and, as a result, shows up in most Burn-style strategies and occasionally Zoo decks as well. Meanwhile, Blood Moon shows up in the sideboard of various decks to fight Tron and decks with greedy mana bases, and it also creates archetypes all its own, like GR Ponza, Free-Win Red, and Blue Moon.
As such, rather than spending a bunch of words describing cards that are already so well known, instead, I wanted to mention some of my all-time favorite decks featuring these cards. Unfortunately for Goblin Guide, the list is pretty short. Goblin Guide is really more of a card that I lose to constantly rather than play with, although there are a couple of sweet examples.
GR Vengevine
One of the most innovative Goblin Guide decks in recent years was Julian Grace-Martin's GR Vengevine deck, which came out of nowhere shortly after Insolent Neonate and Hollow One were printed to steal an SCG Open and briefly became the hottest deck in Modern. While the popularity of GR Vengevine was short-lived, it was an important step in the evolution of the Hollow One archetype, which would go on to become the best deck in Modern a few months later, albeit without the Goblin Guides.
G Is for Goblins
While GR Vengevine was a sweet deck, by far my favorite Goblin Guide deck was my G Is for Goblins Commander deck. The reason I remember the deck fondly isn't so much that it was good but because of how angry is made Vince (also knows as PleasantKenobi on the Internet). The theme of the week was Alphabet Soup, with the restriction being that all of the cards in your deck has to start with the same letter. I decided that "all of the cards" really meant "all of the non-land cards" and played a Field of Ruin, which I promptly used to blow up Vince's bounce land, leading to complaints about the "Gield of Guin" flavor fail for the rest of the season. Looking back, I regret nothing (and also have a better beard than Vince).
Blood Moon
Picking out my favorite Goblin Guide decks was pretty easy because there were only a handful to choose from. Blood Moon is much harder. When I searched my MTGGoldfish account for Blood Moon decks, I ended up with 102! Considering that the oldest was from November 2015, that means that over the past five years, I've played or created an average of about 20 Blood Moon decks per year.
Free-Win Red
I've played and built a lot of decks over the years, but the one that has likely had the most lasting impact was the original Free-Win Red deck back in 2015. There's just something about ritualing out a Blood Moon on Turn 1 and watching the opponent scoop that can't be beat. While the deck has undergone many evolutions over the years, the same basic idea—casting Blood Moon as quickly as possible, with Ensnaring Bridge and Chalice of the Void as additional lock pieces and planeswalkers to finish the game—remains to this day.
Against the Odds
The entire idea of the Against the Odds series is to try to win with some really janky cards, which are often super slow for the formats we are playing them in. As such, especially in the early days of the series, Blood Moon was my go-to way for a red-based Against the Odds deck to slow down the game long enough to win with our janky win condition. There are a bunch of examples, but one that sticks out was the Burning Tibalt deck, where we were trying to discard flashback cards to Tibalt and eventually flash them back to win with damage from Burning Vengeance.
Double Moon Walkers
There was a brief moment years ago where playing Doubling Season into planeswalkers (to ultimate them immediately) was a semi-legitimate strategy in Modern, based mostly on the fact that the deck played Blood Moon on Turn 2 with the help of a mana dork to slow down the game. While the deck itself was sweet, the main reason why I wanted to show off Double Moon Tamiyo is because it features one of my all-time favorite stream moments. I'm not going to give away the ending—you can see it in the stream highlight video above—but let's just say we learned a bit about the power of Deflecting Palm in the most brutal way possible.
White-Border Jund
Traditionally, when a Commander Clash season ends and a member leaves the cast, we do an episode in their honor. In the early years of Commander Clash, this mostly involved playing friendly decks in the player's style, although more recently, it has developed into an opportunity for friendly trolling. Andrew (probably better known as MTGMuddstah) has a well-known hatred for white-border cards. When he was leaving Commander Clash at the end of season seven, I couldn't resist the opportunity to play an all-white-border deck for Andrew Week. What's a card that happens to have several white-border printings and can go in a Jund deck? Blood Moon, of course!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Thanks again to Wizards for hooking us up with two awesome Double Masters preview cards! How hyped are you for Blood Moon and Goblin Guide to return to the multiverse? What decks do you want to build with these cards now that they'll be more accessible? What do you think of the new box-topper art? Let us know in the comments! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
