Better Scarves than Scars

We have a preview card. I know people hate waiting, so here it is:

Silkwrap is a removal card. It is a more limited version of Banishing Light. It can’t hit a lot of the permanents Banishing Light can take out, but Silkwrap is cheaper. That can matter. More importantly, Banishing Light will rotate out of Standard next fall, but Silkwrap will be around for more than a year. And, in limited, you can’t get Banishing Light in a Dragons of Tarkir pack. You can get a Silkwrap.

The first thing to strike me when thinking about DTK limited is that Silkwrap is good against Morphs and Manifest cards. In limited, it should serve much the same function as Debilitating Injury ; a fast removal spell to kill an opponent’s three drop. It is not quite Debilitating Injury, but DI won’t appear in DTK / DTK / FRF drafts.

In DTK / DTK / FRF limited, Silkwrap will be very good at knocking counters and enchantments off manifested cards; thereby negating cards like Lightform and Fierce Invocation . Sadly, though, it won’t get rid of Cloudform . Hexproof can be annoying

Silkwrap is not permanent removal, but it is removal that does not enable Delve for your opponent. That’s something. The downside is that if a Morph is exiled via Silkwrap and Silkwrap is destroyed, the creature will return face up. This would be a nifty trick if you could do it to your own morphs, but Silkwrap is worded to prevent such shenanigans.

Against manifest cards, Silkwrap may or may not be permanent removal. It will exile the manifested card and that card may or may not come back. If you lose control of Silkwrap, an exiled creature will return face up. An exiled land will come into play face up, but as a land. Instants and Sorceries will not return – they will stay in the exile zone. Artifacts will return, Enchantments will return as enchantments, Auras will return and die to state based action, etc.

In constructed, I can imagine playing Silkwrap in a few very limited situations. For example, it would be deadly against UW Heroic, since it could shake all those nasty counters and enchantments off a Battlewise Hoplite . Against that deck, Silkwrap would still stopped only by Gods Willing ; not by Valorous Stance or Ajani’s Presence . Against the rest of the field, though, Banishing Light will almost always be better, so Silkwrap will probably see little play as long as we have something like that to lean on.

In limited, though, cheap removal is almost always good, and that’s what this is.

PRJ