Wow! We had nine ties in Round 1, but it was looking like Round 2 would go past with none. And then today, in the penultimate Batch 2.127, these two cards tied with 434 votes each!

As it has been a good long time since the last of these, I will remind everyone how it works. I don’t vote in the batches; instead, when there’s a tie, I write up my analysis and choose a winner. Since the last one, I decided to do this by weighing up each card in five categories, and deciding the winner through best 3-of-5 across those. The categories are: Design, Power level, Flavour, Art, and Place in Magic history.

Today’s two cards are both great and interesting, and both very different. It’s going to be a difficult choice. So let’s get started!

Needle Spires

Design

This card had to meet a lot of constraints - the creature lands from Battle for Zendikar block had to follow the pattern established by the Worldwake originals: enter the battlefield tapped, tap for one of two colours, and animate into a land for a cost involving both colours - and do all of that in a finite text box!

That means that really the only space Wizards had to play with here was what kind of creature this would turn into. Luckily, red and white have a couple of good shared keywords - including double strike - that allowed this card to nicely get the RW feel across without crowding the space. Double strike also plays very nicely with the BfZ Awaken mechanic (in case you didn’t know, the +1/+1 counters apply on top of the base P/T and let you make the land larger).

The land is about as simple as a creature land can be but effective. It’s not the most original, but it’s a perfect execution of what it needed to be for this slot.

Power level

This whole ten-card cycle have serious Constructed pedigree, and this card in particular was seen again and again throughout its time in Standard. It’s just a very low cost to add this to many RW decks, and the effect lets you get an extra resource once you have run out of spells. The interaction with power-pumping effects is of course especially potent, and while not a defining card in any deck or format, Needle Spires is a strong option wherever red and white cards are played. It’s simply a great and efficient card.

Flavour

No room for flavour text here, so we are all about the name. This cycle all have fairly straightforward names, but they have to do a lot of work - they have to tie together the two colours in question as well as the type of creature that the land can become. The name here sells “pointy damaging Mountains” and “double-strike” feel to me well, but the white feels like an afterthought and not really present in the creative treatment of this card (including the art, which could easily be for a red card).

Art

Jonas de Ro has a lovely piece here, filled with warm reds and oranges and managing to look like the “natural” Zendikar (as natural as floating rocks can be) while still focusing attention on the emerging hedron-esque creature that is bursting out of the cliff face. The way that the landscape behind fades into the distance is great and gives a real sense of space.

I am not a huge fan of the art direction that created the look of the awoken and animated lands for Zendikar - there are a lot of similar-looking pointy featureless rock monsters; this piece is a bit better for taking an unusual behind / over-the-shoulder angle that gives a feel of “go forth and explore!”. As noted above, this could easily be on a monored card, but I don’t think that’s the end of the world.

Place in Magic history

No particular connection to anything here - its Constructed place earns Needle Spires credit above under “power level”, and of course it is connected to the split creature land cycle, but it’s not holding any important role beyond that.

Arcanum Wings

Design

A glimpse of that Future Sight frame tells us immediately what kind of thing to expect here: An out-there futuristic look at what Magic might become. Of course, as a modern reader looking back at Future Sight from a decade on, we know that Aura Swap never did go anywhere, but that’s besides the point - we should measure the card on its own merits.

One particular gimmick of Future Sight was to tease possible design ideas and keyword mechanics from the future. Aura swap, shown only on this card, is one such example. We have to measure Arcanum Wings on two fronts: on Aura swap as an idea, and on its own merits.

Aura swap, unfortunately, is not a well-designed keyword. It teases being interesting with an unusual effect - exchanging cards in two zones - but has several problems. Firstly, Auras have an inbuilt disadvantage: Your opponent could kill your creature and your Aura with just one card. This mechanic slightly works against that - because you could swap in a card with a protective ability, or at the very least swap out for a less valuable Aura. But it’s still an issue in the design. What’s worse, to make Aura swap work, you need a lot of Auras - but you are restricted in both what you can make those Auras cost, and how good they can be without being unfair. Flight is an unplayable Aura at one mana; Arcanum Wings has to cost twice as much and have a 3-cost effect to be safely printable. Could this really spin out into a whole mechanic? I doubt it.

Ok, so let’s say that Aura swap isn’t and wasn’t ever meant to be a whole mechanic, and imagine that this card just has the activated ability shown in its reminder text. How do we feel about the design of the card as a standalone? It’s certainly tantalising - imagine swapping in an Eldrazi Conscription! Or… Hmmm. This is the problem with this card: The cost for swapping is high enough that a “toolbox” of Auras isn’t really interesting: It only makes sense if you are swapping in some OTT super-Aura, and almost always only if you’re swapping in Eldrazi Conscription. I do like how the Aura itself is simple, and how it provides evasion to make it easier to connect with your buffed creature (attack, lock in no blocks, then swap). But that’s not enough to obviate the fact that the card is not as interesting to play as it first looks.

Power level

Because it kind of overlapped with the previous category here, I spoke about it a bit already above, but: This card has the problem that the mechanic (which lets you cheat on the costs of Auras without any limit) has to be either bad, or broken. Clearly Wizards knew this, and were very conservative - this card is bad. People have tried to make it work in a Bogles shell from time to time, but ultimately there just isn’t much room to maneuver when you need to have a resilient target, draw Arcanum Wings, and also draw your broken Auras. It may well be that this card can’t be costed competitively without being too good.

Flavour

Now here we are in interesting space. The name is great - “arcanum” is the singular of “arcana”, i.e. special or privileged knowledge. It gets across the concept of magical wings made of knowledge and sounds cool while doing it. It also ties into the visual representation very nicely.

The flavour text is a little mixed - it’s a bit vague on the details (What nobles? What sky villas?) while also being a bit too literal on the mechanics (Swap wings for something better!). It’s a bit clunky but serviceable enough.

Art

Carl Frank has beautiful colours to work with here, and actually the angle of the figure works great with the weirdo Future Sight frame, making the eyes naturally follow the gaze of the figure into the distance. What’s particularly nice is that this Aura art really focuses on the aura: The figure’s face is hidden and they are seen from the back, so we really do get to focus on those great wide yellow, green, and blue wings. Note how the feathery appearance nearer the spine gives way into magical writing at the ends - which is a great tie in to the overall flavour and feel of the card. A very successful evocation of the idea of magical wings made of mystical knowledge.

Place in Magic history

The uniqueness is the selling point here: This card has the limited-edition Future Sight frame and is the sole bearer of this effect, either with or without the Aura swap keyword.

Final verdict:

DESIGN: Needle Spires

POWER LEVEL: Needle Spires

FLAVOUR: Arcanum Wings

ART: Arcanum Wings

PLACE IN MAGIC HISTORY: Arcanum Wings

This one showed to me a weakness of my system: I like Arcanum Wings slightly better in three categories, but vastly prefer Needle Spires in the other two. I think overall Arcanum Wings still deserves the win, but should there be future ties, I think I should find a scoring system to help account for future cases like this one.

Arcanum Wings goes through to Round 3.