Those are quite sexy!

land will no longer be 15th picks in draft. If I saw a pack with yawning fissure, bountiful harvest, angel's mercy, tome scour, and a full art basic land, that land would be gone in an instant.

People are saying it's not good in limited because it's not good in limited. If and only if you have Jace can you run Tome Scour in limited.

And Angel's Mercy is horrible in limited, but fine in a constructed deck that's centered around exploiting life gain.

Syd Lexia wrote:

Despite M10's best efforts to the contrary, there's more than one way to approach both MTG in general and limited in particular.

I understand that milling is a way to win the game. I love milling and did it a lot in Ravnica and Shadowmoor. However, Tome Scour will NOT win you the game without Jace. This is the best analogy I can come up with to explain why Tome Scour is bad for limited without Jace:
Imagine a card, Venom Scour, that said "Target player gets 2 poison counters". You would need to play 5 of them to win the game, which is similar to the number of Tome Scours you would need to play to win. Knowing that, would you run Venom Scour in your deck if you had less than 5 of them? Of course not, it doesn't do anything and without 5 of them you're not winning the game. Let's say you had, I don't know, 6 of them. Would you run them then? The answer should still be no.

Venom Scour has absolutely no effect on the game. Sure it gives your opponent 2 poison counters, but so what? Nothing else in your deck deals with poison counters. That means that every time you play a Venom Scour you are spending mana and discarding a card from your hand for ZERO effect. If you cast the fifth one of them you win the game, but that means you have to draw 5 of your 6 Venom Scours and survive long enough to play them all despite the fact that your opponent is playing creatures and and spells that are dealing damage to you while you're casting spells that have no individual effect, only a potential total effect. It just doesn't make sense to do this. Don't forget also that counterspells are VERY good in M10, so while your opponent may let you cast Venom Scour 4 times, if they're playing blue they'll be holding a counterspell for that 5th one. And again, even if you have 6 Venom Scours in your deck, you need to draw FIVE of them. Drawing 3 in a game does absolutely nothing for you.

I know you're gonna bitch that milling is nothing like poison, but in M10 it is. You need to cast at least 5 Tome Scours to win, and that's 5 spells that aren't stopping your opponent from killing you. I know it LOOKS like Tome Scour is doing more, because you can see cards going to their graveyard. I know you MIGHT mill a Captain of the Watch that would have killed you. Know what? You also might mill a couple land and small creatures and put Captain of the Watch on top of their deck instead.

If you remember, I never called Drowner Initiate or Memory Sluice bad, and I never called Vedalken Entrancer or Psychic Drain bad (I HAVE called Lurking Informant bad I'm sure, but it was playable if you needed some extra mill cards). Milling is a perfectly legitimate strategy, but Tome Scour is not strong enough to do it alone.

I knew you'd consider it idiotic, but you're wrong. Tome Scour is indeed 5 cards out of their deck. If they're playing black, that's not necessarily a disadvantage since Gravedigger, Rise from the Grave, and to a lesser extent Disentomb are all completely playable cards, as is Nature's Spiral for green. If they're playing anything else, they probably won't care. Sure it sucks to see Fireball milled away, but if you absolutely couldn't win the game without it then your deck is bad anyway. The problem with Tome Scour is that it doesn't effect their relevant resources. Their cards in hand are the same. Their permanents in play are the same. The only change is that they are drawing a different completely random card. Again, it sucks to see something like Fireball milled off the top of my deck, but you didn't manipulate my deck. You aren't controlling what I draw, just eliminating some of the possibilities (And there's absolutely no guarantee that the result of that is in your favor).

And suspend is a terrible analog. A suspended card will effect the game state because it will either come into play as a creature or is a spell with some other effect, like Rift Bolt which deals damage. Tome Scour doesn't do this at all.

If you're so convinced that Tome Scour is a good card, then force blue tonight. Draft every Tome Scour you see and play all of them in your deck. In fact, no one else is going to take Tome Scour so you don't even need to force blue, you can just splash for them. I want you to play a deck with 3-6 Tome Scours in it in draft tonight and let's see exactly how much Tome Scour helps.

#edit: You're looking at this too passively. You play Tome Scour and think "Now you can't kill me with Fireball and Earthquake". I think "I'll just kill you with my other cards, since you're not actively trying to stop me".

There are 4 cards from Zendikar that were spoiled at Gen-Con. They're all generic commons, but one of them has Kicker, so that's back. The other is an "Instant - Trap", so there's a new subtype of spells. Yes, it's going to be hilarious hearing "It's a trap" or "That activates by trap card!" over and over again, very loudly.