Drawing 7 in Standard

Why is six afraid of seven? Because the original "seven" in my countdown to 100 blogs was lost to the aether. I just hope I didn't send it to some random person in my work email address book instead of to myself. Here's an approximate recreation. Happy Thanksgiving!

One of my favorite parts about Vintage is the use of Draw-7s. They’re wonderful cards that can refill your hand (and usually your opponent’s) at the cost of just a few mana. Though they used to be common to refill a control deck’s hand with counters, now they’re mostly used to let combo pick itself up and dust itself off for another go-round.

Also, Timetwister is an emergency hoser for Ichorid.

Anyway, Standard now has two reasonably priced Draw-7s:

Magus of the Jar
3UU
(see Memory Jar)
3/3

Wheel of Fate
Suspend 4, 1R
Wheel of Fate is red.
(see Wheel of Fortune)

I really want these to be broken in Standard, but I really don’t think they are.

In Vintage, Memory Jar and Wheel of Fortune are great because you can accelerate into them with Dark Rituals and Tinker and Moxes, then use them to get more acceleration to do something incredibly broken.

Standard just doesn’t have enough (or any) of that brokenness going on.

It’s a matter of looking at your opening hand. If you could win a game with a second hand that looked just like yours, Draw-7s are the way to go. That doesn’t happen in Standard, though.

The best you could do is play something damaging (creature or burn) on turn one, suspend Wheel of Fate on turn two, do some more damage turns three and four, Wheel into a killer hand on turn five. Also, hope your opponent isn’t playing blue because you wasted a lot of time and effort to see either your Wheel countered or a whole bunch of spells afterward.

Magus of the Jar would be best if reanimated at a discount, and even then you have to wait to use his ability. What are you going to do with him then? I don’t know; find a counter maybe? At least you can use him when you want and when your opponent is least able to do something about it.

I recommend pairing both of these up with Megrim. I’m not sure if that’s still in Standard, but it should be. New players love that card because it deals damage based on an already solid policy: hand destruction. (Old players hate it because they realize that once you can play Megrim, your opponent’s hand should already be destroyed. But it’s much more fun to let noobs figure that out for themselves.)

Anyway, probably another no-go on this strategy. The best Draw-7 in Standard is still your opening hand. To do broken things, you’ll just have to play Vintage.