Ancestral Visions and Living End has no mana cost as there no mana symbols, the cost simply don’t Exist.
It isn’t Zero, or you be able to Flash Back the card with Snapcaster Mage.
Whenever another effect asks Ancestral Vision what its mana cost is (as opposed to its converted mana cost, which would indeed be 0), Ancestral Vision shrugs and says “my cost doesn’t exist.” This is a perfectly valid answer.
Even though its mana cost is nonexistent, its converted mana cost is still definable. Because the mana cost has no mana symbols in it (or anything at all, really), the converted mana cost is 0. As a result, you can cast Vision off of any card with cascade.
Fist of Suns or Mind’s Desire can also be used to cast Ancestral Visions and Living End.
So it seems that the one you want is 117.6. It may end up being that when you have a card with no cost in hand, you can announce it and when you go to pay costs, use the enchantment instead.
Sounds sketchy to me. Without a mana cost to begin with could you even legally get to the point of replacing the cost with 0? Like if you announce it, it doesn’t even look for the mana cost right? It just looks to see if the suspend can be paid.
Like I could understand if you don’t have enough mana for a spell, but you have enough time counters on As Foretold, you announce the spell and as the spell looks for the mana cost you use it. But if there’s no mana cost to begin with it’s not looking for one.
I feel like it’s why they specifically didn’t word it like Brain in a Jar’s ability.
No. There is the mana cost and the converted mana cost (CMC). The conversion to CMC and/or “without paying the cost” is the only way to cast uncastable spells. When you try to put Ancestral Visions on the stack via hard-casting, an uncastable spell would be seen and rejected.
Even just think of long games of Commander where it can tick up and fire off spells for free every turn. It’s not exactly the CMC so you can just tick it up forever and it doesn’t specify your turn so you can counter or draw in their turn and yours for free.
I don’t know about being banned, but it is a strong and dumb card. There’s also the call of the gatewatch in standard. Gideon was already a pain to deal with, since walker removal is rough. Now Gideon can turn into a Platinum Angel. This is stupid.
I could even see Gideon poppiing in eternal formats, too. There’s not much removal for walkers there, and a 3 mana walker is ok.
There are a couple of enchantments that I like, it remain to be seen if they are good enough of an engine.
I think with planeswalkers it’s you can’t have two of the same named walker even if the card is different. But opposing sides can have the same walker out. Unless I’m wrong.
But as stated before as soon as this set drops you’ll be able to play 12 Gideons in standard so if you manage an emblem you have 1/5 of your deck that makes you not lose.
I dunno what you guys are talking about. This Gideon seems fine to me. The problem with walkers is that they demand you kill them right away or they will continue to bury you under an ever-larger advantage. This Gideon is a 4/4 for three mana that you can attack and kill without trading. Strong, but nowhere near broken IMHO.
Yeah but that still doesn’t create the snowballing advantage that makes planeswalkers such a pain to deal with. Even comparing with something like Ajani-3, you had to kill Ajani right away or he would distribute more and more counters. Gideon-4, Xenagos, Innistrad Garruk, and even Elspeth-6 all left behind tokens that had to be dealt with.
This Gideon seems, at best, to be a better Kiora-4. And if you’ll recall Kiora-4 was never a huge threat because when you killed her that was it.
Kiora costed 4 mana, started at 2 loyality and worst offence, was GU. New Gideon costs 3 mana which is big. A 3 mana 4/4 indistructible creature would be dope, and this Gideon is much better. He can deffend himself really well from being attacked (remember how annoying Kiora’s +1 was ?) and the Emblem can be frustrating to deal with.
I’m not saying he’s bad. He looks great actually. What I’m saying is he doesn’t look like a part of the problem, where I define the problem as the tendency of recent threats to demand an answer within one turn or they would accumulate more and more advantage.
From Gideon-4 to Tracker to Constrictor to Ballista to 4C Aetherworks recent decks are defined by threats that accrue more and more advantage every turn. Basically the longer you take to kill them, the harder and more pointless it gets. If wait just two turns before killing a Tracker you’re already 2 cards in the hole. A Gideon-4 left alive for three turns generates 6/6 worth of stats leftover even when you kill it. So on and so forth. This Gideon, while strong and able to defend himself while growing loyalty, at the very least does not leave behind more stuff to kill even when you manage to kill it.