By Shay Muscarella and Jeremy Rose
Welcome to the Card Coliseum! In this series, the Foxy Proxys Gaming crew will be taking a look at some cards with similar effects or uses and comparing them against each other to see which one we think comes out on top. We’ll be looking at these cards through the lens of more casual commander games, certainly not competitively played formats.
This installment in the series is going to be pitting red interactive spells against each other, namely Abrade, Pyroblast, and Tibalt’s Trickery. While Red Elemental Blast is almost the exact same thing as Pyroblast, we’ll be using Pyroblast for the purposes of this article. All of these spells interact with our opponent’s gameplan either by countering a spell or acting as a form of removal. Importantly, we chose Abrade and Pyroblast specifically because they are flexible red cards that can be helpful in multiple situations.
Abrade
Abrade tends to be an underplayed interaction spell in Commander, considering the number of permanents it can actually hit. Of the top 100 commanders on EDHRec, Abrade can pop 36 of them, either due to them having three toughness or being an artifact creature. Worse than Pyroblast for sure, but not why we’re interested in playing this card.
Taking a look at the top 200 cards on EDHRec, Abrade hits 67 of them, which is considerably more useful than Pyroblast. Abrade can easily be the downfall of opponents relying on mana dorks or cheap artifact ramp in the early game.
Pyroblast
Of the top 100 commanders on EDHRec, 58 of them are blue, which gives Pyroblast a 58% hit rate against the most popular commanders in the format. While 58% isn’t terrible, it’s not too impressive either.
Looking at the top 200 cards on EDHRec, only 38 are blue (13 of which are permanents), giving Pyroblast a 14% hit rate which is not quite what we’re looking for, especially when a lot of these permanents are mana rocks and mana dorks.
Pyroblast’s benefits lie in its flexibility and efficiency, being able to both counter spells and hit permanents for one mana. The issue is that there is not a high enough volume of targets for it to be effective a lot of the time. It gets to be even more of a dead draw when you’re playing in a pod or meta that’s low on blue decks.
Tibalt’s Trickery
An almost unconditional counterspell in red, Tibalt’s Trickery became well-known very quickly due to its interaction when countering your own spells and flipping into game winning cards. As cool as that is, Trickery is also just a solid interaction piece in red decks and should see more play for that reason alone.
Tibalt’s Trickery hits 99 out of the top 100 commanders on EDHRec. That’s a 99% hit rate, and it’s only 99% because one of the commanders is uncounterable. Of the top 200 cards, four are uncounterable which means Trickery hits 196 of them. These hit rates are as good as they get and counterspells in colors that aren’t blue can be hard to come by as is.
We would be remiss not to acknowledge the downside of Tibalt’s Trickery, because there certainly is one. However, the times when Trickery is best are the times when it is saving you from potentially losing the game. It might suck to flip an opponent into a Sol Ring from time to time, but it’s bound to be better for you than letting their Torment of Hailfire resolve. This card requires a little more strategy than the others, but it can pay off big time if you pick your moment correctly.
And the Winner is…
For general purposes, we’re going to have to go with Tibalt’s Trickery on this one. They’re all useful and you may want different ones depending on what your deck is doing (or what colors it is), but Trickery gives you the most bang for your buck. Being able to interact with an opponent’s game winning play or integral combo piece is always good and particularly harder to do when you’re not in blue.
That will do it for this edition of Card Coliseum! How do you think we did? What did we miss? Is there some red interaction you think should have been included in this discussion? Leave us a comment and let us know!
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