Hi folks! We had no ties at all in Round 3, but yesterday in Batch 4.4 we had our first one of this round, with 665 votes each!

If you want to read previous tiebreakers, they are all here.

I am doing things a bit differently from previous times. Firstly, I am not doing this the day of the tie, but instead leaving it a day - that allowed people to weigh in with their arguments to help inform (or sway) my decision; the main Reddit thread is here.

I am also changing up my decision-making system a little. I am still going to write and think about the same five categories - Design, Power Level, Flavour, Art, and Place in Magic History - but I am going to not just do it by whichever card wins the most categories, but instead use scoring. I am going to weight things a little by scoring Design out of 10, and the other four categories out of 5, to reflect my priorities.

OK, so let’s get into this!

Wake Thrasher

Design

Lorwyn/Shadowmoor-block Merfolk have a theme of caring about tapping and untapping, with a mild water / tidal flavour to it. Shadowmoor and Eventide (where Wake Thrasher is from) of course also have the untap symbol mechanic, adding a bit more to this card’s unique ability. There really aren’t other cards like Wake Thrasher and it has a very unusual trigger and effect.

The card’s uniqueness actually cuts both ways to some extent - it’s an unusually giant beater for green to be getting, and sees play in a lot of Cubes due to filling a role that blue is generally weaker at. Bending the colour pie to that extent is a demerit in my opinion, but the uniqueness and originality of the card are a bigger plus that the bend is a minus.

It also has a neat play pattern where it’s quite tidal - it’s almost always tiny in your opponent’s turn and huge in yours. Again that’s a bit out of sorts for blue, but it achieves that in a neat way and in the best colour available for this kind of effect.

Power level

(just to clarify: a perfect score here implies a Competitive level power level; lower scores would be for over- or under-powered cards)

Wake Thrasher is a pretty potent attacker in a colour that doesn’t usually get many individually big stompers, which as I mentioned above has meant that the card is a common Cube include. It was played a tiny bit in Standard and hasn’t seen other Constructed play.

Of course, when it was printed, mana burn still existed, which meant tapping additional lands to grow it further was a potential risk; it got a big power-up with the Magic 2010 rules change. I don’t particularly weight that either in favour or against my measurement of the card, but it’s an interesting footnote.

Flavour

Some faintly amusing flavour text (if unsubtle) here. It’s definitely from the school of “badass impressive” flavour text, with some humour injected, which isn’t a style I hugely appreciate, but it’s well done enough.

The name is decent and gets the watery theme across. The actual flavour of the design is a bit weak as untapping doesn’t have a strongly consistent flavour meaning and isn’t really tied in to the card all that much.

Art

Jesper Ejsing’s piece is super-saturated in blues and greens, making details harder to see. The foreground figure is menacing enough and looks strong and scary, but not that much like other Shadowmoor merrow. His big weapon is good and the pose of the upper body is strong. We also have some nice post-Aurora scary trees in the background and the night sky to get that Shadowmoor feel across.

The tail is kind of weirdly positioned and makes the figure’s motion and body position look a bit odd. And the lack of variation of colours (particularly when the palette is so close to the blue card border) does make it a bit washed-out to look at.

Place in Magic history

The unusual untapping trigger is interesting, but this card was neither the first (Mesmeric Orb) nor the last (Inspire mechanic) to use it. It didn’t particularly inspire other cards or later changes in the game.

(scores will come below in the final reckoning)

Ghoultree

Design

A very straight shot here at two Magic psychographics here - Timmy (a giant 10/10 for little mana!) and Jenny (I could make this so cheap with my self-milling!). The card has very little text for a rare but does promise a lot - even the base rate of 8 mana for a 10/10 is appealing. The cost reduction is on-pie for green, if a bit more at home in black, but a lot of Innistrad / Dark Ascension cards bleed or bend a little to fit the setting.

The cost reduction would be used again on cards like Karador, and while it is a little counting-heavy it does get points for only making you do that when you cast it rather than constantly (unlike the inferior descendant Nemesis of Mortals).

Overall, a well-designed cheap fattie with no unnecessary text.

Power level

This one was a bit too low - the ways of making it cheaper are all about either self-milling or searching creatures into the graveyard, but those strategies both have better payoffs. The creature itself is also offering only size and no evasion or immediate impact, which for a big payoff creature is often not enough and leads to the classic “dies to Doom Blade” criticism. Overall the card is just not pushed enough to really make it to Constructed level.

Flavour

The name is great, selling “scary tree” (a theme today apparently) very well, and fitting nicely in to the Innistrad block setting.

The flavour of a tree that builds its body out of bodies - and the flavour text that tells us it will uproot graveyards to do so - is great and spooky. It also ties into the card text really well, which is good work for a card with so little text. My only real criticism would be that, like the rules text, the flavour feels a bit more black than green. It’s even a weird monogreen Zombie!

Art

Volkan Baga’s twisty, skull-filled tree certainly looks menacing enough. The dark palette and faceless-but-vaguely-humanoid form is imposing and the viewer is the direct subject of the creature’s attention.

On the flip side, the creature’s scale is unclear (it doesn’t look 10/10 compared to the trees looming in the background), and the chain weapon doesn’t really fit with the feel of the card. The skulls and other bodily details are also a bit hard to spot at card scale.

Place in Magic history

I think any double-digit creature deserves a little automatic credit here due to how few of them there are, but otherwise not much to write home about here.

Final verdict

Wake Thrasher

Design - 7/10

Power level - 3/5

Flavour - 2/5

Art - 2/5

Place in Magic history - 2/5

TOTAL - 16/30

Ghoultree

Design - 8/10

Power level - 2/5

Flavour - 4/5

Art - 3/5

Place in Magic history - 2/5

TOTAL - 19/30

So there we go - Ghoultree is the winner!