Replacements: Cyclonic Rift

Welcome to the first installment of “The Replacements,” where I’m going to take an expensive, EDH staple and try to find some cheaper replacements. The cards I choose to replace this staple will always be $5 and under. Why $5? That is the price (depending upon where you live) of a coffee from your local chain with that fancy green mermaid logo. Just skip the coffee, drink the cheap office stuff, and pick up a new card for your deck.

This week, I’m going to help you replace Cyclonic Rift. We will only look at cards that fulfill the following requirements:

• Instant speed
• Mass removal
• Leaves your stuff alone

Why is Cyclonic Rift so expensive

At the time of writing, the cheapest copy of Cyclonic Rift you can get is about $30. For two mana, Cyclonic rift can bounce your opponent’s biggest creature or combo piece. For seven mana, it bounces EVERYTHING, except lands, for ALL of your opponents. You may be asking “ok, well seven mana is a lot, what makes it so much better than something like Wrath of God?”

There are two main reasons:
1. It can be played at instant speed. Cast this on your opponent’s end step right before your turn, and imagine the damage you can do when everyone’s boards are empty.
2. It only resets your opponents' boards, not yours. It is completely one-sided.

Depending upon whom you ask, it may be the best board wipe in the game!

Blue on a budget

Close your eyes and imagine this: Your opponent has managed to generate about 30 goblin tokens with Krenko, Mob Boss, and they are swinging them all at you. You are running Blue so you are probably more focused on spell slinging than having tons of creatures. Lucky for you though, you planned for this moment by leaving open four mana so you can cast Aetherize.

You’ve just stopped their goblin army and set them back an entire turn.

Aetherize is great if your play group tends to run creature heavy or combat focused decks. Unfortunately, Aetherize only works on one opponent. How about you leave one more mana open for Evacuation?

Ok, I'm cheating a little. This one could affect you, but often blue decks are about spell slinging and combo instead of creatures. I personally run Evacuation in any mono blue deck because most of the time, it hurts my opponents way more than me. My opponents never see this coming, as they think “He has five mana open, it is not seven for Cyclonic Rift, so it must be a counter spell. I’ll just attack them.” It gets them every time.

In a similar vein, Perplexing Test gives you a choice.

Why I would choose to run this over Evacuation? Its ceiling is that it can be a one sided board wipe. Running this in a creature tokens deck leaves your stuff alone. Some commanders it would shine in as a part of the 99 include:

• Orvar, the All Form’s main strategy is to create a bunch of token copies of things
• Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver has you amassing an army of zombie tokens.
• Kykar, Wind’s Fury is a spell slinger deck that rewards you for casting spells by giving you token creatures, which you then can sacrifice for mana.

Maybe the next one is more situational depending upon your playgroup’s meta, but Hibernation can absolutely destroy your opponent’s if they’re heavy in green.

Speaking of situational mass removal, how can you deal with decks that create tons of treasures? Or, think about how many mana rocks you see on your opponents' board.

Rebuild can really set your opponent’s back, especially if you are playing heavy land ramp yourself (looking at you Simic).

For the last blue replacement, Engulf the Shore will pretty much return every creature to their owner's hands. It is really only good in mono blue decks because it requires you to have lots of Islands in play. Because of this, and how I said earlier that mono blue decks are mostly focused on spell slinging, this is can be a mostly one-sided board wipe.

Don't feel so blue

I started playing Magic right when Ixalan came out. My first Standard deck was Blue-White control featuring a bunch of cheap bounce spells, copies of Gideon Martial Paragon that turn into 5/5 beaters every turn, and a play set of Settle the Wreckage.

Settle the Wreckage was a bomb back then. In 1v1, it obliterated your opponent and left them wide open for a counter attack the next turn. Plus, exiling (instead of destroying or bouncing) their creatures halted any sort of re-animator shenanigans.

I haven’t seen it much in EDH since it is a single opponent mass removal spell as opposed to hitting every opponent. Even so, this is the format where you always run the risk of a Blightsteel Colossus one-shotting you or an Eldrazi making you sacrifice permanents turn after turn. Since Settle the Wreckage exiles, it can take out just about anything.

You could even make the ultimate hipster move and use it on yourself as a form of mono-white ramp. Attack with three to five creature tokens (not a hard thing to do in white), cast Settle, and get that many basic lands.

The last card has been creeping up in price since it hasn’t been reprinted, but it still can be considered a budget replacement. Pretend your opponent created a bunch of tokens with Rhys the Redeemed. On their end step, you play Force of Despair for free by exiling a black card and destroying every token they made. You’ve basically Timewalk-ed them!

At $4 it’s still very cheap, and definitely underplayed.

Cleanup

In a time when Wizards is constantly releasing new products to bleed our wallets dry, it can be tough to find the right card for the right price. Plus, playing with these removes some of the homogeneity that we’re seeing in Commander. Of course, if you own a Cyclonic Rift, I’m not saying you need to be a hipster and not play it. But if you don’t want to drop $30 and instead want to try some cards your friends likely aren’t playing, give some of these a shot!