Hour of Devastation Card Gallery *Updated (8/18/17)

A few things that caught my eyes:

  1. Oh dear. Gideon’s Defeat and Farm might make Starfield deck ridiculously dangerous again. Better start stocking up on support removal (and bye bye, Tezz)

  2. A bit amused to see common cards here after you leave them out of EMN and AER. Any reasoning? (I’m okay with some decent commons in there, but vanillas, I believe, is a no-no in this kind of game; wished you didn’t include them)

  3. Quite a few strong kill spells in there; with Majestic Myriarch having defender, it’s a pretty useless hexproof creature to deal with this rain of kill spells…

  4. Torment of Hailfire… lol, look at that math :wink:

  5. Unesh looks like business. A sort of stronger version of Planar Gate.

Now some posts I think I’d love to reply:

Good find. This reminds me of one tournament where there’s this hyper-broken Prismatic Array + Seasons Past + Nissa’s Renewal + Part the Waterveil combo that’s just impossible to stop, as well as one common problem MTGPQ has in general: Infinite loops. In this one case, I hope they can fix that by, say, “At the start of your turn, your cards become free”, so that even if you mass draw from Panharmonicon and Omniscience, you don’t get to free-cast your decks immediately for free.

I was thinking more along the lines of anti-cycle grief builds utilizing solemnity. These builds used by the AI can be devastating towards players of all types using Cycle to win. Can’t create a 50/50 drake in a turn if the AI has Solemnity out. Or even cycle for a anti support card. I personally think that if used correctly, this card will be huge in changing the outcome of rankings in events. No more easy wins as they say.

My thoughts are the AI cycle grief deck will likely be on node 3 of the next weekend PvE event. In this way, the devs are only targeting those with weaker collections that were “playing up”’ significantly in ToZ because cycling let them.

The problem with Omniscience + Panharmonicon shouldn’t really be a problem at all since it would cause an infinite, unbreakable loop; the kind that you can never get out of once it’s started. Now I’m sure a deck could be built that could still manage to abuse this and win through that loop but it seems too big of a risk. Time will tell though and if it becomes an issue, those three people that got Omniscience and abused it with Panharmonicon will only get to enjoy abusing it for about three months before the devs fix the problem.

I meant to say a deck that causes grief to opposing cycle
decks.

HH

won’t that depend on how many shields omniscience
has?

HH

Partly, yes. If there are too many non-support cards in hand after Omniscience is cast then the infinite loop may not occur if Omniscience has too little shields.

The AI tends to cast cards in the order of Creatures → Supports → Spells. So if the next card in hand is Panharmonicon then it could very likely trigger the infinite loop.

Deploy the Gatewatch is 23 mana for fetching and casting 3 creatures from your deck. I’m guessing that Omniscience as a Masterpiece at 17 mana will have at least 3-4 shields.

So let’s assume Omniscience has 3 shields with a hand of only Omniscience and Panharmonicon, ie. our best case scenario.
OM is cast. OM(3 shields)
Pan is cast for free. OM(2) Pan(4) Support fetched to hand
If the fetched support is OM: OM(5) Pan(3)
If the fetched support is Pan: OM (1) Pan (7), 1 more chance to fetch OM

From this example, you have 2 chances to fetch Omniscience as the next support card from Panharmonicon firing its ability. As the only 2 supports in your deck it’s a 50-50 chance, so the odds are good. And it’ll snowball from there as Panharmonicon helps you to keep fetching extra cards whereas Omniscience casts them for free and keeps building its shields.

On the other hand with 1 additional non-support card in hand (which isn’t Whir of Invention :wink: ), you get only 1 chance to cast a free copy of Omniscience since the free casts become Panharmonicon → Non-support card → Card fetched by the casting of Panharmonicon → Fetched non-support → Fetched support → …

That gives you an average of 1 Omniscience in 4 cards which will not be sustainable for an infinite loop if Omniscience only has 3 shields. It will need 4 shields to sustain this loop. But when the number of shields is only equal to the average number of cards fetched and cast before an Omniscience appears, it’s a fragile loop. So I guess at 3 shields it actually isn’t that bad.

But think about how the AI plays a deck with Omniscience and Panharmonicon as the only supports. After creatures it starts trying to cast Panharmonicon or Omniscience. Once Panharmonicon enters the field it fetches a support to your hand. The next card the AI chooses to charge will be a creature or a support.

If an Omniscience then gets cast we can assume that there were no more creatures in hand* and there will likely be a series of supports** that will get cast next, so your proportion of supports in hand is likely to be higher than 1-1. A ratio of 2 supports to 1 non-support will allow for Omniscience to be cast on average once every 3 cards which supports a fragile loop at 3 shields.

*or a 4th or more creature which cannot be summoned to the battlefield due to lack of space
**or at least one from Panharmonicon’s initial fetch

As a bonus, Whir of Invention helps tip the balance slightly. It adds a support summon on a non-support fetch. So you’ve a deck in Standard that could form an infinite loop.

And the deck is playable from a human perspective because you can order your cards to avoid the infinite loop. Whir of Invention and Panharmonicon to try to fetch Omniscience to cast free stuff is also perfectly legit.

Tl;dr Omniscience at 3 shields makes it hard to trigger an infinite loop with only Panharmonicon. Omniscience at 4+ shields with Panharmonicon and Whir of Invention makes an infinite loop much more likely.

I don’t own it but doesn’t panharmonicon only fetches
support other than itself? ie cast omniscience and it
will only fetch another copy of omniscience if it’s the
only other support available?
if deploy is fetch 3 for 23 mana then I think omniscience
is at most 3 shields for 17 mana(if it’s balanced)?

HH

It’ll be hard for the AI to loop it if at all. It’s more likely to have other cards in hand to eat the free casts before the drawn ones.

Panharmonicon can fetch itself. It just fetches the next card in your library of the same type as the card just cast.

On ‘balance’, Omniscience is a Masterpiece vs Deploy being a Mythic. Deploy has an additional fetch 3 cards function which Omniscience does not have.

As an additional card for comparison, Dark Ritual as a single free cast enabler costs 7 mana. My guess is at least 3 shields. 4 is possible considering the power creep in HOU shown by some of the other cards. Any less would make it not all that great a Masterpiece.

New Hour of Devastation cards are available in-game!

@Brigby - it seems the new cards are no longer available and have not yet merged into the main set.

@ElfNeedsFood
Are you saying that you are unable to see the cards when you search for them, or that they aren’t in the HOU booster packs?

@Brigby They are no longer in the HOU booster packs.

@ElfNeedsFood
Hmm I see. Ok. Thanks for notifying us of this occurrence! I’ll pass this news along to the rest of the team

No news on this?

I’m still not seeing the new cards. I’m hoping that the Thursday store rotation takes care of it.

@Brigby The new cards still do not appear to be in the booster packs.

In vault there are only 35 uncommon cards, I have 40 of my own

Hi Everyone. Apologies for the inconvenience. The team is aware of this issue, and we are currently working to alleviate this issue.