Looking forward to Saviors of Kamigawa

Saviors of Kamigawa fever is gripping the Magic community as we try to get as much advance information as possible in preparation for Regionals. Here's the three preview cards we've seen so far and my comment on each.

5/10 preview card
Enduring Ideal
5WW
Sorcery
Search your library for an enchantment card and put it into play. Then shuffle your library.
Epic (For the rest of the game, you can't play spells. At the beginning of each of your upkeeps, copy this spell except for its epic ability.)

Given the enchantment pool as we know it this is far overcosted for its ability, but the "as we know it" is the key phrase here. There are lots of hints that Saviors will contain a lot of enchantments (see below).

I still think this is too expensive to see play in anything but perhaps block constructed. I think decks will need to be built around this (and the other epic spells if they are similarly costed) and I would be surprised if a well-tuned Epic deck turns up at Regionals. I think it would be too easily disrupted by MUC.

5/11 preview card
Measure of Wickedness
3B
Enchantment
At the end of your turn, sacrifice Measure of Wickedness and you lose 8 life.
Whenever another card is put into your graveyard from anywhere, target opponent gains control of Measure of Wickedness.

This is another specialty card but much easier to use, especially in a black green Rock-type deck. Sakura-Tribe Elder will be key to using this effectively especially against decks such as white weenie which don't have many Instant-speed abilities. It could also be effective against Tooth and Nail if they don't have an Elder on the board (or, of course, an Oblivion Stone with five mana free).

5/11 bonus preview card
Cloudhoof Kirin
3UU
4/4 Flying Legendary Creature - Kirin Spirit
Whenever you play a Spirit or Arcane spell, you may put the top X cards of target player's library into his or her graveyard, where X is that spell's converted mana cost.

This will be great in block or Limited as a 4/4 for 5 will be difficult to deal with, especially with any kind of acceleration (hello again, Elder). It begs to be used in a Millstone deck but those haven't been playable for some time. It's hard to imagine anything but a dedicated mill deck wanting to tap out to play this creature in Constructed, and MUC already has a better five casting cost creature in Meloku.

5/12 preview card
Promise of Bunrei
2W
Enchantment
Whenever a creature you control is put into a graveyard from play, sacrifice Promise of Bunrei. If you do, put four 1/1 colorless Spirit creature tokens into play.

Promise of Bunrei could be key to new build white weenie decks. WW can play Wrath of God now and have two uses for it: as possible Shoal material or a safe way to Wrath away green threats or a Mephidross Vampire/Triskelion lock without losing their entire army. As noted in the preview article, a simple Kami of Ancient Law could be used to quadruple WW's army at instant speed (which also plays against opponent's Measure of Wickedness). Promise also helps WW rebuild after a well-timed Hideous Laughter.

This will be particularly useful in builds which use Spawning Pit. Sacrificing one creature to activate the Promise can create six creatures, four from the Promise itself and two more if you have to sacrifice those Spirits to the pit and create a couple of 2/2 tokens. It will be difficult for any other non-green deck to keep up with that many creatures.

Scour and Cleanfall are going to be much more useful cards if enchantments are, indeed, rampant after Saviors. And why do I think Saviors will be enchantment-heavy? Check Wizard's new Orb of Insight for Saviors. The Orb lets you search card text (excluding flavor text) for any one word. Enchantment results in 17 hits! Presuming there are not many cards which target enchantments that implies a lot more targets for Scour, Cleanfall and Kami of Ancient Law.

Naturalize and Wear Away just got even more useful as well, and there is a stronger argument for running Viridian Zealot over Viridian Shaman in green decks.

Another interesting result from the Orb is the seven returned for Zubera. All you casual players disappointed in the Zubera-less Betrayers should have something to look forward to here. Will there be uncommon and rare Zubera to make a Zubera Spirit deck competitive? Will Zubera be the next Sliver deck? There is reason to hope, at least. I have seen red/black Zubera decks which use Kiki-Jiki and Plunge into Darkness to interesting effect and those decks should get stronger.

Black and green decks should get some love too as there are 30 mentions of graveyard! There are only seven hits for Soulshift so there must be a lot of interesting graveyard recursion going on here. Consider that there are also 16 hits for discard---perhaps Megrim has a place at least in the sideboard of discard-based black decks now?

At least some of these discard hits are due to one new mechanic called "Channel," which allows you discard a card for a given effect. Arashi, the Shattered Sky is a 5/5 green creature for 3GG, not bad in itself, but he can also be discarded for XGG to deal X damage to each creature with flying. That will give the Skies version of WW pause. It will be interesting if there is a red Channel spell which destroys artifacts as that would provide an uncounterable way to destroy Shackles.

Black should also be hopeful in the 13 hits for game coupled with nine for remove and four for removed. Since black is the color which usually gets to remove things from the game (the uncommon block of removal spells from Betrayers/Urza's Destiny not withstanding) then black should have even more answers for Tooth and Nail's indestructible fatty and for getting rid of Kokusho's and other nasty creatures which trigger graveyard effects.

Other interesting results include 10 hits for bushido and four for equipment. If the bushido creatures are even mostly white these results seem to give WW yet another boost.

The last new mechanic we know about is Sweep (thanks MTGNews), which allows you to return X lands to your hand when you play a Sweep spell to create an effect. There are several white Sweep cards which give a target creature or all your creatures +1/+1. In a deck which doesn't need more than four plains this could be a very powerful effect without much drawback. It might also provide an interesting answer to Death Cloud.

So what effect will all this have on the Regionals metagame? We haven't seen anything yet which gives a big boost to either green or red decks, and red decks already have trouble with enchantments so they could get even worse. Green may have to move those Naturalizes back to the main deck if they haven't done so already. WW gets lots of new toys and should be a solid Tier 1 deck. Mono blue doesn't seem to gain much from what we've seen but it didn't really need a lot of help. Black has reason to hope but it also has trouble with enchantments and WW is already a tough matchup. Tooth and Nail? It's already crammed full of as much acceleration as possible and we haven't seen anything likely to work into the main deck yet. TnN definitely needs those Naturalizes in the board though.

I hope I've given you some things to think about. Remember, the prerelease tournaments are May 21-22. Go and have fun!