Hello folks! The last batch of Round 1, Batch 255, saw these two tie with 687 votes apiece. It falls on me to break the tie, as I have done before.

I am going to shift up my categories a little from this tiebreaker, as I realised that they weren’t perfect for the job. The ‘design’ category was a bit overladen, trying to encapsulate both the originality and quality of the design, as well as the card’s power level and balance. I am going to split that out into two categories, namely Design and Power level. To be clear, “well balanced” will score better in that latter category than “horrendously overpowered”.

Anyhow, let’s get on to our candidates:

Mana Web

Design

Here’s an interesting one to start off with. This is a very unusual effect; only War’s Toll is even slightly similar. Here we have lands “webbed” together according to the colour of mana they make - your opponent has to tap all their blue-producing lands, or none of them. They can still float mana in response to one of these triggers, but nonetheless there’ll be no casting blue spells in their main phase and still holding up countermagic in your turn.

The idea is certainly fascinating, but the execution is a bit weird. The card produces a trigger every time your opponent taps a land for a mana no matter what, which is annoying but invisible in Magic Offline. You can also play around this a little by playing your lands after Mana Web takes effect. Overall the card works, but is just plain weird.

Power level

This is a very hard one to judge. Three mana for an artifact that messes with your opponents’ freedom to tap their mana how they like seems high, but the uniqueness of the effect makes it tough to evaluate. My gut says that this is easy enough to work around and not worth the three mana and a card it takes to get access to the effect, however.

Flavour

The name is part of a storied tradition of cards called Mana [Word]. “Web” fits nicely here - the art and name and rules text all reinforce the sense of a web that binds your opponents’ lands together, forcing them to tap as a combined unit. What that represents, like many things to do with tapping for mana, is as usual a bit hazy, but overall the card makes sense and hangs together.

Art

Hannibal King’s piece is almost as weird as the card it sits on. There’s certainly some red lines here that show something of a web, but then we have this weird silvery blob in the middle. It has chimneys! And a demon face! And there’s a cat thing in the foreground looking at it!

Overall the piece is confused and doesn’t feel like a “Mana Web” to me; instead we’re seeing some sort of red smoke grenade with no sense of scale to it. A miss for me.

Place in Magic history

Mana Web’s only real claim here is its uniqueness. No history of play I could find.

Aura Gnarlid

Design

A nice straightforward design here: Aura Gnarlid likes Auras. The two abilities of course play well into one another, with the Rabid Wombat text enhancing the Battering Wurm text. It’s a straightforward common execution on the Auras subtheme present in Rise of the Eldrazi, with the Totem Armor cards.

A strike against it however is that counting all Auras - not just ones you control and not just ones attached to Aura Gnarlid - while more powerful, these are odd design decisions. While there’s plenty of historic precedent for “Enchantress”-style cards caring about more than just your own enchantments, for Auras, which have more of a defined location, it just feels a bit weird to me.

Power level

Something of a casual / Pauper beatstick, Aura Gnarlid has done well out of being the most common and easily accessible version of this effect. While “serious” Constructed has gone more down the route of piling on to hexproof bodies, Aura Gnarlid has done well at fighting its corner in the places where it matters.

Flavour

Gnarlids are apparently a Zendikari species, with three green fuzzballs having taken the name. The “Aura” part is on the nose, but there’s no prize for subtlety and this works fine.

The flavour text is from a hoary old tradition of “badass” flavour text that to my ear is a bit tired and overplayed. This isn’t even a particularly good execution of it.

Art

Lars Grant-West gives us an interesting morphology for this creature, with the fur and horns that we see on the other, later gnarlid creatures showing up here. Aura Gnarlid is coarser furred than the others, and has a neat black and orange colour scheme. It also has some neat looking claws and overall looks scary enough to justify its evasion ability. There’s nothing that shows the aura aspect of the ability, and the background is a bit plain, but overall this is a reasonable piece.

Place in Magic history

A consistent player in casual, Pauper, and other places where fun build-a-monster decks are found.

Final verdict:

DESIGN: Aura Gnarlid

POWER LEVEL: Aura Gnarlid

FLAVOUR: Mana Web

ART: Aura Gnarlid

PLACE IN MAGIC HISTORY: Aura Gnarlid

For me at least, this is a clear one - Aura Gnarlid is the last card through to Round 2!