With 266 votes each, these two cards tied in Batch 240 today. As is traditional, I’ll be laying out my assessment of each card before picking a winner to move on to Round 2.

You can see the previous tiebreaker contests here.

Wild Defiance

Design

This effect is almost unique in Magic - quite the rarity. Some more limited effects exist on cards like Daru Spiritualist, but those are normally only toughness pumping. The closest precedent is probably Mossdog, but that’s only your opponent’s spells. Wild Defiance doesn’t trigger from abilities (which is good as that would make it massively overpowered), but does give a much more substantial boost.

The effect is twofold - it adds an additional kick to your own pump spells, and it also punishes your opponent for interacting with your creatures. That second one is a bit more hazy, though, as your opponent can usually either play their effects at a time when the pump won’t help you, or just target them with a spell that will kill the creature regardless. But Wild Defiance does dramatically reduce the effectiveness of damage / toughness reduction-based removal.

This is ultimately a very green card, with a theme of growth and abundance and a classic Giant Growth effect attached. It’s also a fun puzzle to think about building a deck around.

Flavour

The name and flavour text both push in the direction of green’s resistance to civilisation. From a colour pie perspective, this makes perfect sense as green believes in accepting nature and the natural order, rather than trying to impose artificial rules. This doesn’t quite tie into the mechanical elements of the card, however - while the card does trigger on your opponents’ spells too, the majority case is amplifying your own spells. A growth or community based flavour would have fit the mechanics better, to my mind.

The flavour text itself is slightly off, to my ear. Garruk and Liliana’s presence and arc in the Innistrad storyline was never very clear to me as a reader, and Garruk in particular has lacked in characterisation. The wording just sounds a bit clunky.

Art

Slawomir Maniak has done a great job with the foreground animal, creating an indistinct and threatening shape covered in spines. It radiates menace and really draws the eye.

Slightly weaker is Garruk projecting generic green magic in the midground. We get that Garruk is the source of this effect, but the storytelling from the flavour continues to be a little confused. We see the creature getting stronger, but the defiant element doesn’t really come through as well.

The background is a good Innistrad-feeling forest - all twisted trees and very little greenery. It’s correctly shown a little lighter to increase the contrast with the shadowed beast in the foreground. The feeling of danger is palpable.

Place in Magic history

Wild Defiance has seen routine occasional play, most commonly in Infect where the effect is twice as potent. The ability to turn off damage-based removal also provides a powerful motivation for including the card, and there are plenty of fun stories of huge blowouts fuelled by this cards.

Other than tournament play, Wild Defiance doesn’t really have any other historical significance.

Crush of Wurms

Design

STOMP! Playing on a very different element of green’s identity to its opponent, Crush of Wurms just plays up the dream of making as much power and humanly possible. And if eighteen power wasn’t enough, you can use the flashback to make another eighteen! Crush of Wurms isn’t subtle, but it is fun.

The triple-green costing is interesting, and actually quite unusual - usually very large spells don’t bother with high coloured requirements, as they already ask for so much. But I do like that both costs divide evenly by three, so that we can imagine that our Wurms are 2G each the first time around and 3G each the second - like a super-Call of the Herd.

Flavour

No flavour text to run on here, but we do see the use of a name using a collective noun. These poetic and often comedic terms have provided the names for a fair few cards over the years, such as Crash of Rhinos or Murder of Crows. Wurms, of course, don’t exist, so Wizards have made up a collective noun for them - and “crush” is perfect.

Flashback is more or less flavourless, but that’s not Crush of Wurms’s responsibility.

Art

Christopher Moeller’s art here is straightforward - it shows you three wurms. I like the green palette and the design of these wurms, though, with their Dune-esque mouth parts and coiling bodies. I do feel a bit sorry for that wurm that’s getting crushed by his colleague, though.

It’s hard to make out much background detail here, and overall the piece is lacking “x-factor”. What would really push it over would be a sense of scale - these are massive wurms doing a massive crush, and the high viewpoint and lack of comparatives makes that harder to really get a sense of.

Place in Magic history

For a good long time, Crush of Wurms made the most power of any one card - eventually surpassed by the 26 / 52 that Army of the Damned makes.

There’s no record I could find of Crush having any kind of Constructed record, however.

Final verdict:

DESIGN: Crush of Wurms

FLAVOUR: Crush of Wurms

ART: Wild Defiance

PLACE IN MAGIC HISTORY: Wild Defiance

When the four categories are tied, my own history and feelings for the card are the final tiebreaker. For me, I can’t say that I’ve ever had much connection to either card, but I can tell you that Crush is the one I enjoy more. From ramp deck dreams to fun things to cheat with infinite mana, Crush is just a more fun card, and Wild Defiance’s occasional sighting in Constructed isn’t enough to overrule that for me. So, the winner is Crush of Wurms!