Spoiler Highlight: Pick Your Poison on Pauper, Modern & Legacy

As the preview season for Magic's latest expansion - Murders at Karlov Manor - continues, a common feeling among players i that has not yet delivered anything that is exciting enough to deserve more attention and/or change the competitive Metagame, especially for Pauper.

Interesting additions appeared, such as Gearbane Orangutan, Demand Answers, Extract a Confession and a power creep from Evolving Wilds in Escape Tunnel, but none of them seem relevant enough to bring about significant changes.

The most recent spoiler has the potential to work in some of its main decks, with an efficient cost and comprehensive effects that make it an excellent Sideboard option for both Pauper and other eternal formats, such as Modern and Legacy!

NOTE Pick Your Poison is also the name of a playtest card released in Mystery Booster and which is invalid in tournaments. Therefore, it is possible that the card tag will show the previous version until a solution is provided.

In this article, we delve into Pick Your Poison's potential for eternal formats, how it interacts with the Metagame and which decks can benefit from the new card!

Many TCG mechanics can be reinterpreted with metrics that go beyond the usual scope. For example, with RPGs, fighting games and other terms.

If you've played Final Fantasy, especially the classics, you may remember the Red Mage job, capable of using swords and shields in addition to carrying low and medium level spells, but without access to the most efficient equipment and more powerful spells that more specialized classes could use.

This “exchange” of scope for efficiency made the Red Mage an excellent class for the beginning of the game, but caused it to lose its space and prominence as progress in the story demanded stronger spells and equipment.

Pick Your Poison is the perfect example of what a “Red Mage” would be in Magic. Its effect at a very friendly cost offers a wide range of effects and flexibility to join different games and save space on the Sideboard, but it loses its value on two fronts: firstly, due to its sorcery speed, which can worsen it on certain occasions.

Secondly, giving the opponent the option to sacrifice the permanent - that is, the more of them enter the battlefield, the less efficient the new spell will be in trying to deal with it.

However, versatility is the keyword for Pick Your Poison and the main reason to consider it as an option in the Sideboard of decks in Modern, Legacy and Pauper, three formats where mana efficiency makes a lot of difference and which dedicate slots to better, but less comprehensive, answers demand more concessions than benefits at an open and unknown Metagame.

Pauper is the main format where Pick Your Poison can make a difference and has a wide range of valid targets, especially given the high popularity of Affinity decks in its Metagame!

The current iterations of Affinity, in the Azorius and Jeskai combinations, have a significant range of targets for the new card - starting with the fact that it bypasses the indestructible Bridges and can, in the first turn, transform into a Sinkhole with steroids. Furthermore, Pick Your Poison manages to maintain its viability as the match goes on due to the popularity of All That Glitters in current versions, giving another target for the card late-game.

We can also find ways to take advantage of Pick Your Poison against other matchups. For example, it can deal with indestructible lands transformed into creatures by Kenku Artificer, in addition to doubling its usefulness against Caw Gates and other white decks with Journey to Nowhere and similar effects in enchantments.

On the other hand, it is not perfect and competes directly with Deglamer, which despite costing one more mana, allows targeting the artifact or enchantment, being more efficient as the game progresses.

Today, the main deck with green in Pauper is Black Gardens, a Midrange based on card advantage and out-of-game mechanics to generate value. In it, Deglamer has become a staple for its scope and ability to deal with a surprise attack of All That Glitters, and Pick Your Poison seems a bit It is more interesting in this archetype due to its mana efficiency, in addition to the fact that this is a deck that already includes many removals and ways of interacting with creatures, but can lose ground due to its sorcery speed.

Ponza is another archetype that can be overly interested in Pick Your Poison. Given its strategy aimed at denying resources and mana, it is more likely that the new card will find space in its Sideboard than in Black Gardens, perhaps replacing Deglamer or Cast into the Fire in favor of mana efficiency.

Green is a notoriously low in Pauper for non-linear strategies, which require a high number of creatures and/or a plan in which you cannot afford to spend mana and turns trying to interact with the opponent.

Therefore, while this spell presents itself as a potential staple, its space seems limited in Pauper outside the archetypes already mentioned until we have other small pushes in green to make it more present in the competitive scene.

Pick Your Poison is a good modal card in Modern due to the amount of permanents it can interact with when there isn't an abundance of them on the board, while being flexible enough to not be a dead card in your hand on many occasions. Among some of the main targets for it are The One Ring, Blood Moon, Murktide Regent, Leyline Binding and Urza’s Saga.

A curious point about it compared to other effects in its category is how it works for different purposes in the same matchup. For example, against Izzet Murktide, it is common for an Amulet Titan player to need answers to deal with Blood Moon, but if the opponent opts for Magus of the Moon to hold their game, cards like Force of Vigor lose their usefulness and become dead draws.

Pick Your Poison, on the other hand, can retain its usefulness by working as a removal against Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Murktide Regent, thus improving your draw even in the face of another hate category.

This logic also applies in other games, for example, forcing the opponent to sacrifice an enchantment to get rid of an Urza's Saga, or destroying Leyline Binding with the same card slot to deal with The One Ring.

This won't make the new spell an instant staple, but it will certainly make it worthy of consideration and testing on archetypes like Amulet Titan and Hardened Scales.

As in Modern, the scope and low cost of Pick Your Poison could make it a useful option worthy of space on the Legacy Sideboards, where the popularization of Up the Beanstalk and the already popular presence of Murktide Regent allows you to deal with two distinct Metagame problems with a single piece, this same logic expands to a dozen other archetypes present in the format today.

The card also stands out as a method of responding to hate pieces like Defense Grid, dealing with Carpet of Flowers without needing more specific slots, forcing the opponent to sacrifice the Marit Lage token created by Dark Depths, destroy Phyrexian Dreadnought, which had recent Challenge appearances, with the clause of sacrificing artifacts, among other minor uses that add up to its scope.

The speed factor is the biggest weakness of Pick Your Poison in Legacy, given the need to cast it on your own turn, which makes room for more efficient Tempo plays from our opponent to make the card lose its utility.

On the other hand, Legacy is a format with a high diversity of answers, where decks, especially with blue, that resort to many one-ofs or two-ofs in their Sideboards are not uncommon, and in this case, the new spell has the necessary coverage to deserve a slot and enter different games where there may be more than one good target.

Pick Your Poison is an excellent example of an average card, and it needs to be average to be fair.

Any change that occurred in it, whether in speed or in the number of targets, would make other concessions necessary to balance it, either with a reduction in modes and/or an increase in costs.

For one mana, it offers much more to Sideboards than several more recent spells and staples from the decades, but it doesn't bring with it the same excellence in dealing with specific situations.

Having a single answer for three different categories of cards makes it worthy of consideration and space on the Sideboard in eternal formats, but it doesn't look like it will become a must-have staple in them yet.

Thanks for reading!