Pointed Discussion

That's a big Twiddle.

Sleep is better for end-game.

This will be an excellent combo enabler like gigadrowse, not as good but also not as color intensive. Turbo Turns and Polymorph should both benefit from this as well as Pyromancers Ascention just tap your opponent down the turn before you go off.

Sleep might be better in some decks, but does Sleep untap your creatures for a major attack? No. This does, but I think it all depends on the deck. I'm going to use both to murder my enemies.

The untapping part really gets my creative juices flowing. This card feels breakable to me.

Break it with the Echo Mage. with X=4 or more, infinite mana with him targeting it on the stack if he's leveled to 2-3, and X=2 or more if 4 or greater. Right?

I'm unimpressed by the mechanic, but it's got the best artwork in the set.

Strictly better than Word of Binding.

Word of Binding is a different color. It can't be strictly worse or better.

Seems to have many uses:

Gives all of your creatures vigilance
Prevents massive assaults
Lets your own massive assault be unblocked.
Untaps or taps artifacts

nice artwork

Permanents guys. Permanents. That means lands.

Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #26, 11/1/10

At one point in Rise of the Eldrazi design, there were quite a bit more colorless instants and sorceries in the set. I submitted the following common card, which was in the file for at least one playtest:


Instant
Untap up to X target creatures.

The idea of it was that it was a limited trick that any color could have access to. I never got to try playing with it, as it was decreed by the creative team pretty quickly that they wanted Eldrazi defined first and foremost by their hugeness and second by being colorless, so all colorless Eldrazi cards should cost at least 7 mana. Thankful for the direction, we kicked all the cheap colorless spells out.

The card that would become Reality Spasm entered the file a short while later, as a rare and with a mana cost of ; the team was looking for interesting finishers to sink a bunch of Eldrazi Spawn into, and it didn’t hurt that the card was clean and elegant and also had potential interesting combo implications.

Comparisons were immediately drawn to Gigadrowse, the sleeper card that finally made the Dragonstorm deck unbeatable by counterspell-based strategies, but it was ultimately deemed safe because this card, unlike Gigadrowse, could easily be countered itself.

The development team moved it to uncommon, and later added a mana to it (the reasoning for this change is sadly undoçumented, so my guess is that it was done to balance colors in limited).

While it isn’t a card that interests me personally, it did generate a lot of conversations on its uses and a number of positive comments from other people working on the set, which goes a long way toward a card seeing print in my book.

Goes infinite untaps with echo mage or sigil tracer. Nothing to scoff at.

I use this in my mono-blue proliferate deck which also runs everflowing chalices.

It's a nice card for when I have thirty mana and I don't know what to do with it. Sometimes, I end up just tapping everyone else's lands and monsters before my turn and taking the opportunity to kill everyone without having to worry about things like safe passage or fog. Usually though, I just use it to untap my chalices and contagion engines/clasps and my voltaic keys and just proliferate a few more times so my board position becomes even stronger and more ridiculous.

So many ways to break it...

To begin with, this is really good in Vintage, where you can use it with your Tolarian Academy, Urza lands, and the like.

Reminds me of Candelabra of Tawnos. I wish we had some kind of High Tide effect in standard so this could have been abused :(

"At one point in Rise of the Eldrazi design, there were quite a bit more colorless instants and sorceries in the set."

At one point in Rise of the Eldrazi design, there were quite a lot of awesome cards...

"...it was decreed by the creative team pretty quickly that they wanted Eldrazi defined first and foremost by their hugeness and second by being colorless..."

...which apparently got nixed by the creative team. Y'all should have been furious. It's not like the Eldrazi spawnish critters cost or more. Creative dropped the ball on this one.

Jason Felix's art for this is fantastic. The electric-blue-tinged-purple vibe is great. Your card as first drafted, mechanically, was much cooler. :)

This is surely one of the most versatile cards in Rise of the Eldrazi. It can:
- lock your opponent by tapping his or her lands
- tap opponent's creatures paving the way to your massive alpha attack
- untap you creatures after a massive attack
- untap your lands for more mana, if you can produce several mana with a single permanent (Gaea's Cradle, Tolarian Academy, Rofellos, Elvish Archdruid, ...)
- make infinite combos with Sigil Tracer or Echo Mage, as someone already posted; these combos can create powerful effects with cards like Fallowsage, Corrupted Roots, Betrayal, Goblin Medic, Hollowsage, Insolence, Judge of Currents, Relic Putrescence and many others.
I don't think Word of Binding is worse than this card, because it has a very powerful effect which is rarely seen in black, while blue is good at manipulating reality.
Finally, yes, this artwork is really beautiful.

So much potential, so little time. Really wish the Eldrazi had been 5 color rather than just Jund colored, this would have made for a lot of fun times.

I like gigadrowse better, altho this card is muuuch more versatile.

4/5, strong but not overpowered. Compare to the 5/5 exhaustion for tapping or murkfiend liege for mass untap in blue.

I like this card. Lots of combo potential without being too powerful. A good balance. Plus, I love that art and the name.