The first real spoilers for Secrets of Strixhaven have arrived, drip-fed to us via this MTG set's online story articles. They include an old mechanic from 2015 making a grand return, though sadly the Converge cards we've seen so far are pretty pants. Luckily, there are some pretty fun new commons shared alongside them.
Converge is an ability-word mechanic on cards whose effects get stronger the more colors of mana are spent to cast them. We've seen two Secrets of Strixhaven cards with the ability so far: Arcane Omens and Archaic's Agony - both five mana Sorceries, both incredibly garbage. Forget Standard, I wouldn't even play these in the five-color draft deck Wizards is clearly trying to seed here, not without some serious additional support!
Arcane Omens, for instance, is a discard spell that costs five, already a black mark, since three mana 'discard two' effects have long been highly cuttable. Here, if you can marshal together many different mana colors, you can force an opponent to discard up to five cards. The thing is, by the time you're ready to do this, it's unlikely your opponent will have three or more cards in hand.
It's also an atrocious card to draw when you're top-decking.
Archaic's Agony is a little better, but not a lot. This is red card draw bolted onto red removal, with an impulse draw effect that lets you play the exiled cards until the end of your next turn. But it's clunky and inefficient removal attached to clunky and inefficient card draw.
Whether you spend five mana to kill a weak creature so you can draw more cards or target a stronger creature and draw nothing, you're always going to be left unsatisfied.
The similarity of these two cards makes me wonder if there'll be a full cycle of Converge sorceries that cost five mana, one for each MTG color. In which case, there surely has to be something in the set that makes them more playable than they appear, right? Some kind of cost-reducer or something? Right?
Honestly, the commons that have been shared so far seem way cooler than the Converge cards. There's a dwarf that can disenchant - which could be neat if dwarf typal decks get a big boost in the Hobbit set - and a Soul Sister frog. Look at him, he's a good boy, yes he is!
What do you reckon, am I being to hard on the Converge cards? How do you think Wizards might make 'em playable? Let me know your thoughts over in the Wargamer Discord.