Spoiler Highlight: Formidable Speaker on Eternal Formats

Once a year, a new Magic: The Gathering set brings with it the greatest honor a competitive player can achieve—being immortalized as a card after winning the World Championship. The practice, which began in 2019, has become one of the most anticipated moments for the community, as it represents recognition of the pinnacle of competitive play and the opportunity for a player to help create the card on which they will be represented.

In Lorwyn Eclipsed, after a delay due to a change in dates, it was finally Jean Emmanuel-Depraz's turn on the new card Formidable Speaker.

Formidable Speaker screams "combo" in almost every line of text and was even designed by Depraz to be a card that works in lists with creature combos. Just to give a potential example: besides being the right creature type, Speaker can search for Craterhoof Behemoth while untapping Priest of Titania or Gaea's Cradle to cast Behemoth.

In other strategies, the ability to untap permanents can also be leveraged in some way: The One Ring, for example, can be activated twice per turn, in addition to being found with Green Sun's Zenith, enabling cards like Vengevine with its ETB, and when searching for another creature, untapping Bounce Lands or Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, among a dozen other possibilities that make it the perfect card for eternal and non-rotating formats!

But before delving into these scenarios, there's one thing to add: We're not covering Standard in this article because a lot can change between the release of Avatar and the next banned and restricted announcement. Therefore, speculating around a creature that requires interactions with other cards seems counterproductive given the state of the format and the potential changes that will occur with these two events.

While Formidable Speaker's untap ability is important for interactions with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, its most important part is the ability to discard any card to search for a creature.

With the new creature, you can discard Parhelion II and search Greasefang, Okiba Boss directly while triggering Monument to Endurance, put a Cauldron Familiar into your graveyard to fetch Ygra, Eater of All and start the loop, discard a land and search Lumra, Bellow of the Woods, or even set up Soulflayer by discarding Atraxa, Grand Unifier — all of which are powerful plays in the archetypes they fit into, and Speaker perfectly matches each of them simply by having an ETB at a versatile cost.

Things get just as interesting in Modern as they did in Pioneer, starting with a two-card combo.

How about guaranteeing a hit-kill for Samwise Gamgee with Cauldron Familiar using the same card, and one that we can easily include in the Birthing Ritual slots while also gaining some redundancy in the archetype's toolbox?

Or what about using Formidable Speaker to search for Primeval Titan and, the next turn, generating extra mana with a Bounce Land to speed up the Titan's casting? What if the enabler of this "combo" in both cases is also a target of Green Sun's Zenith?

Could we also consider discarding creatures for Agatha's Soul Cauldron like Walking Ballista while searching for Heliod, Sun-Crowned or Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, which now also have a "pseudo-tutor" in Formidable Speaker through the same combination mentioned above with Green Sun's Zenith?

In short, there's so much potential in the Depraz card for Modern that I wouldn't be surprised if the player chose it considering the format itself and not the possibility of it being a Cube or Commander staple. We just need to figure out where exactly the new elf will be most effective.

Survival of the Fittest was banned from Legacy over a decade ago for enabling an overly efficient toolbox with Vengevine, and Formidable Speaker is clearly too far from being a Survival, but it has the same ability in the ETB that allows for an efficient toolbox in green archetypes that have been emerging since last year, more effectively running a card that was once relegated only to Elf decks.

The variants of Cradle Control with Atraxa, Grand Unifier is certainly a potential home for Speaker, but the card likely fits better with another Gaea's Cradle list in Legacy: functioning as "extra copies" of Nomads en-kor that can be "searched" by Green Sun's Zenith for 3G and closing the combo with Nadu, Winged Wisdom while offering almost double the mana with Gaea's Cradle if we untap with it, which allows for a line with Craterhoof Behemoth or any other bomb—maybe even Emrakul, the Aeons' Torn.

Searching for any creature by discarding a card is a powerful effect for a new tutorable creature for formats like Modern and Legacy, making Formidable Speaker a potential staple for Magic: The Gathering's eternal formats. It's also not far behind in effectiveness in Pioneer, where combos based on discarding and/or reanimating something are a recurring theme for some creatures.

World Champion cards, like Invitationals before them, are always a big hit or miss. While some are hugely successful in the competitive scene, others end up forgotten and/or have no lasting impact on the metagame—for Jean Emmanuel-Depraz, the potential is there, and perhaps his card will become the most powerful in its category for a few years.

Thanks for reading!