The more cards that get spoiled for Theros, the more exciting the flavor gets. Like Christina Aguilera, it Keeps Gettin' Better. Er, no wait. That's something else. Onto the cards!
"You have how many creatures over there ready to block my armada? Just four? Hmm. Bacon-wave for 4."
Curse of the Swine is crazy. I had an awesome deck that abused Ovinomancer a million years ago. I turned my opponent's creatures into sheep and then attacked into the flock with wolves. Endless fun. Now, I'm getting ready to relive the fun with boars.
Actually, Curse of the Swine seems like an incredibly efficient way to deal with lots of creatures - permanently. Even if X is something miniscule like 3, it exiles 3 creatures for 5 mana. How crazy is that? Sure, they get 2/2 boar tokens to replace them, but I can handle bacon beats. I really like that the card "sweeps" without actually sweeping.
"Your best blocker? I chain him to a rock and leave him to die."
Chained to the Rocks makes me want to high-five someone on the design team. That card totally gets it. Chaining something to a rock has to be one of the coolest ways to deal with a problem that anyone on any plane can muster.
"How many creatures do you have in your graveyard again?"
Nighthowler has restored my faith in the bestow mechanic. Go-go-gadet rare cards! Every spoiled "bestow" card so far has left me wondering when I would run this. I just keep thinking that the casting costs should be switched with the bestow costs. Mechanically, the designers came up with a new way to make the 2-for-1 nature of enchantments a little less of a problem: bestow the enchantment on a creature and when it dies, you get another creature out of the deal. How cool would it have been to make it more expensive to cast as a creature and less expensive to bestow instead of the other way around?
In the way, way back time, Casting of Bones from Alliances was one of my favorite black cards. I was into flavor back then too. I put together a deck designed for my creatures to die and to come back full of Nether Shadows and Ashen Ghouls, and fueled my hand with dark magic by reading dem bones. (Gosh, check out how much worse the templates were for rules text back then.) Throwing bones is back in style in Theros with Read the Bones.
Unlike Casting of Bones, where you have to wait around for the creature it is enchanting to die, Read the Bones gets you sweet, sweet cards right away. Reminiscent of of Night's Whisper from Fifth Dawn, Read the Bones costs one mana more, but gives you the ability to manipulate the cards on top before you draw. This feels more like a blue card, but I just don't see a blue wizard tossing a pile of bones down to change fate. Black wizards just draw and bleed.
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