Why is snapcaster mage so great

Call me dumb, but if we did not have Snapcaster Mage to compare to this card, I would not be as excited as I am right now. In fact, I would be sitting here wondering how good it is. Snapcaster Mage does not work this way. The new wording means you can target Force of Will and actually pay the alternate cost. That is huge. It essentially means that all blue decks now have four extra targets, making them less clunky on top of the redundancy of essentially having access to eight Force of Wills.

So what are the benefits to Mission Briefing over Snapcaster Mage? When combined with Ancestral Vision , you can use it to cast a free Ancestral Recall. This combo also happens to work with Mission Briefing! You can target an Ancestral Vision in your graveyard with the Briefing and use As Foretold to play it for free.

Let's look at the two ways to approach playing against any card — the macro and micro approaches. Taking the macro approach against Snapcaster Mage means that we want to attack Snapcaster Mage from an angle of deck-versus-deck. Snapcaster Mage, as mentioned earlier, is found in a variety of archetypes, but most of these decks revolve around a high density of non-creature spells that slowly build card advantage over time or are tempo decks that rely on one or two creatures as the sole source of board presence.

The best way to punish slow decks in Modern is to go over the top by casting threats above the curve. This can either be done with big mana decks or decks that can accelerate into mana via Eldrazi Temple.

Titanshift is generally a great foil to Snapcaster decks because of the threat of the Scapeshift combo, an early Primeval Titan , and the difficult-to-answer inevitability of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. Finally, Green-based Tron decks are a nightmare for Snapcaster decks, as seven mana on turn three and even more later on put these slow, blue decks at a severe mana disadvantage.

Even worse is the cast-trigger from Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger , which ensures a two-for-one most of the time and demands an immediate answer to the threat.

Another way to about fighting Snapcaster decks is to play midrange decks that simply out-value them. Jund, especially the variations with Bloodbraid Elf are also fantastic because of the hand disruption that can cleanly answer the card advantage spells such as Snapcaster Mage itself and then develop a board presence in the form of planeswalkers, creature-lands, and creatures such as Bloodbraid Elf. Once we've moved away from the macro approach, things become much more interesting, as Snapcaster is a card that has tons of counter play to it.

Oracle Printed. Card Name:. Mana Cost:. Converted Mana Cost:. Card Text:. When Snapcaster Mage enters the battlefield, target instant or sorcery card in your graveyard gains flashback until end of turn. The flashback cost is equal to its mana cost.