Diminishing Returns

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Yesterday was certainly a day of days up in our neck of the woods - not only did we ride through a 5.0 earthquake (nearly spilt our herbal tea), but a tornado tore through just north of us and threatened to knock power out. No power means no Internet which means we would have had to watch the telly by candlelight.

Anywhoos - just doing some catch up - the name and number crunch folks have nearly 70% of the cards slotted about 50% of the cards with a solid confirmation. Over at the official Wizards M11 visual spoiler, there are almost 90 cards up so things are progressing rather nicely. MTG Mint Card happens to have a nice visual spoiler here as well.

One new card we did want to yatter about is Diminish . .

Diminish,
Instant, Common
Target creature becomes 1/1 until end of turn.

We like this - this is essentially a slick blue removal which is most welcome in the current game. The trick here is that, just like boxing, if you don't follow up with your left jab with a haymaker, you could be well and seriously pooched.

The very fist card we thought about was Snakeform, which by the way we loved.

Snakeform, 2(/)
Instant, common
Target creature loses all abilities and becomes a 1/1 green Snake until end of turn.
Draw a card

The big difference here is that although Snakeform did cost an additional two mana, you did get to draw a card and most importantly, that nasty critter you were targeting had lost all static / activated abilities.

We do not really care about the card draw due to all the Scry we may be looking at with M11 but the loss of the ability to knock that creature down to a base 1/1 could nip ya in the buttocks. Having said that, blue mages will welcome this card along with other removal and removal-like spells like unsummon. We can see this also being used to couple with Prized Unicorn and Irresistible Prey for some great gaming.

'Nuff said . . .
Time for a awesome image party from the banners that went up yesterday at the mini-site - Please speculate away in the comments below . .

Critter on the left is Garruk's Companion, the one on the right is most likely Cloud Crusader (a 2/3 flying first strike).

Both of these images have not yet had a solid name confirmation yet but obviously a human (or elf?) knight and a merfolk with Yu-Gi-OH hair.

The one on the right is of course Ancient Hellkite but the one on the right has not had a name confirmed yet.

We have no clue what that construct on the left is. The Nightwing Shade on the right is Nightwing Shade (we love redundancy in our sentences) d

Stay tuned for more inane ramblings latter.