Soul Ransom

Not gonna lie, this card should be better as an Orzhov card. I get it though, stealing creatures is a blue/red ability and the color pie need to be maintained. I think for the flavor, though, it is very much Orzhov. Who holds people ransom? Crime Syndicates. Who is the nominal big named cirme syndicate? They have Extort as their mechnic? Orzhov. Whatever. I like the card personally. However, I don't think I've ever come across cars that involve giving opponents choices that end up with the choice you're looking for chosen.

In general, I am liking Dimir. Before writing this so briefly on Soul Ransom, I was hoping to find a way to write an article about Angelic Skirmisher, or as I've taken to thinking of her, as Concerted Effort Charm.

Then, I started looking at Blue/Black cretures and I've been noticing something. I never considered how much being a saboteurs mattered within Blue/Black creatures. There's around 128 Blue & Black cretures (including 3-5 color ones, too) and 17 of them are Saboteurs. More than 10%! This is actually not a recent development. It is fairly spread out over the existence of Magic. I can say most of them came about starting at the release of Ravnica and afterwards. In fact, Ravnica has the highest concentration of UB saboteurs at 3: Dimir Cutpurse, Mindleech Mass, and Szadek. Now with the Return to Ravnica and the release of Gatecrash, there's a whole mechanic around turning any creature on the board into a secrt Dimir agent. This is honestly so much better as a mechanic for the guild than transmute could hope to be. The best thing I enjoy about this development? It wants Dimir to attack. Use an Invisible Stalker, Rakdos Shredfreak, Thragtusk, whatever. You just have to deal combat damage.