Will is Part of the Top 5? Okay!

Four is never the lonliest number, especially when it's the number of days left before blog number 100.

It turns out there are lots of things having to do with the number 5 in Magic.

There are five colors, for example, which lend themselves nicely to their own format, 5-Color. Perhaps if I was more versed in the subject, I could talk about it. As it is, no.

Fact or Fiction lets you get to choose some combination of the top five cards of your library. I wasn’t playing Vintage in the time of Mono-Blue Control, but I hear chaining one Fact or Fiction into another is pretty good. You can still use multiple copies of Fact or Fiction in Extended and Legacy, but you never hear about their degeneracy. Must just have had something to do with Vintage’s superior acceleration.

Back in the day, you wanted to get to five mana because it allowed you to cast your deck’s best beater: Serra Angel or Sengir Vampire. Sigh, things were so much simpler then. Now you have to accelerate to seven pretty much, so you can drop things like Simic Sky Swallower. Usually this happens on about the same turn.

Chaos Confetti, yes, the common from Unglued, has to be torn into pieces, of course, as part of its effect. (No, not its cost, so don’t tear it up if someone Stifles it). Then Chaos Confetti has to be thrown onto the playing surface from a distance of at least five feet. Coincidence?! Probably not.

Doomsday is incredibly sweet and leaves you with five cards. I won’t go into the whole thing here, but I wish that deck was more commonly played. The stack of Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Mind’s Desire, and Beacon of Destruction is like a line-up of Magic’s most powerful cards, and Beacon of Destruction. Unfortunately, Yawgmoth’s Will is used in the Tendrils-kill stack.

One card that doesn’t get talked about enough, and the one I’m going to end on, is Peer Through Depths.

Peer Through Depths
1U
Instant
Look at the top five cards of your library. You may reveal an instant or sorcery card from among them and put it into your hand. Put the remaining cards on the bottom of your library in any order.

I used this a lot in Standard (and, I guess, Block Constructed) because I was playing Arcane-Splice-Ire-of-Kaminari.

It’s amazing.

It was really good at finding cards in there, like Glacial Ray (to splice onto future Peer Through Depths, perhaps!) and Ire of Kaminari for the win. In a deck with a lot of four-of instants and sorceries, it might as well just be a tutor. At instant speed. For two mana. To your hand.

Seriously, I’m going to start looking into this card’s viability in Vintage, because I had totally forgotten about it until I started writing this.