Card Highlight: Temporary Lockdown on Eternal Formats

With each new Magic: The Gathering release, a new sweeper often comes out to keep go-wide strategies in check and allow for Control archetypes, or even slower Midranges, to thrive — these are commonly associated with white, but can also appear secondarily in red or in black.

Among them, there are two categories: the "true sweepers", which normally destroys all creatures, and is ultimately conditional on some drawback, as we see in Depopulate, or coupled with a slight increase in cost, as in Fumigate.

The other category is the "conditional sweeper" — those that don't effectively destroy all creatures, but tend to have some "bonus", like Anger of the Gods — and in Dominaria United, we get a conditional sweeper, but whose restrictions effectively make it far more powerful than any true sweeper could ever dream of being when it comes to eternal formats.

Temporary Lockdown is effectively a Portable Hole for all permanents that fall under the same restriction for triple the mana value. This probably makes less experienced players consider the card to be bad or limited, and it most likely might not even have that much of an impact on Standard. But the closer we get to the older sets, the more the potential of this new enchantment grows.

Magic is a game where mana efficiency defines decks: often, we want to have the most efficient cards for the lowest possible mana cost, or generate the most mana with the fewest permanents. After all, the accessibility of your mana and the amount of it is what allows you to cast your wildest spells, whether it's casting a 10/10 for one mana like Death's Shadow, or generating 15 mana with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, your goal is to take the game to an irreversible point where the opponent can't recover — and the more cards we have access to, the easier it becomes to reduce the costs of your spells to maximize your access to them and sequence several plays in the same turn.

So while Temporary Lockdown doesn't seem, for the time being, that impactful on Standard, it's easy to imagine it as a staple of most eternal formats. Below I show an example of the main permanents it allows you to deal with just one card and three mana.

In Pioneer, despite imagining some situations where Temporary Lockdown could become a maindeck option, I believe that many lists will have a preference for its use on the Sideboard, as there are many strategies where it is virtually useless, such as against Rakdos Midrange, Greasefang, or Ramp in general.

However, against archetypes where the enchantment works, it's spectacular: Boros Heroic and Mono Red Burn are two strategies where having a hardcore sweeper for a lower cost makes a huge difference to staying alive for the next turn, where you can play some more impactful threat or secure another efficient 2-for-1 trade with The Wandering Emperor.

On the other hand, at Sorcery-Speed, having this enchantment removed at the end of the turn can easily spell defeat for its caster, as they will most likely be tapped out or low on mana available to respond to a torrent of spells and aggression on the next turn — so have your Light of Hope and the like ready to deal with them.

Other strategies that suffers with Temporary Lockdown are the go-wide Aggro, but both have some useful answers to avoid being ravaged by a Board Wipe as early as turn 3, like Geistlight Snare and Brave the Elements, so I think these archetypes can play better around this removal.

However, its existence on the opponent's list also means you need to play a bit more reactive than you might like when you're up against a Control or Midrange, and that a backup turn you need to take to ensure you don't lose your permanents out of nowhere could be precisely the extra turn that allows your opponent to turn the tables and bury you in Card Advantage — it will be up to the Aggro player to determine which risk or reward is more worthwhile.

The enchantment is also very useful for dealing with multiple copies of Witch's Oven and Oni-Cult Anvil with a single card, and permanently exiles the Treasure produced by Deadly Dispute in Rakdos Sacrifice or the creature tokens produced by Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Esika's Chariot, Young Pyromancer, among others.

As for decks that can probably fit a few copies into the Maindeck (since I think in Pioneer, Temporary Lockdown will mostly be a Sideboard piece), I suppose the best options are the Yorion, Sky Nomad archetypes. — Azorius Control can definitely find use in having one or two copies in Game 1 in multiple matchups, and Enigmatic Fires has a solid enough structure where it can include copies of this enchantment and if they aren't that useful, you can always sacrifice them to find a four-drop like Siege Rhino.

Modern is where I believe this new card really has its opportunity to shine since the entire format is geared towards mana efficiency without counting on stuff like Wasteland to make three mana too expensive — but it's also where the format's most intrinsic interactions can lead to desperate times for its controller because there's numerous viable interaction on the other's maindeck against that permanent.

Spells like Brazen Borrower and Spell Pierce are commonly played answers in archetypes where you would probably want access to Temporary Lockdown — such as Hammer Time, Grixis Shadow, and to some extent, Izzet Murktide — and paying three mana at Sorcery-Speed ​​to take a bounce or have your spell countered on a crucial turn can easily spell defeat in a format like Modern.

However, that doesn't reduce the card's potential, as it deals with numerous things:

Hammer Time is the primary target I can imagine having their game plan absolutely shattered by taking a Temporary Lockdown at the right time, as they have a severe difficulty getting back into the game if you mess up their initial plan and can't get afford to always try to play around.

Another target where the enchantment does some damage is against Death's Shadow decks, as its proposal is mostly more proactive than that of an archetype with counterspells and bigger threats like Izzet Murktide — of course we can still take a Drown in the Loch in response, but having all the threats on the list within the same one or two mana curve creates situations where you can perform a massive X-for-1 against this archetype.

Izzet Murktide also has some valid targets for this enchantment, but I suppose the response window is much bigger on their part, as they have Counterspell and Archmage's Charm, in addition to managing to play "over" it with Murktide Regent.

It also handles multiple tokens incredibly well at the same time, so it's also not a totally dead card against Temur Footfalls or for dealing with multiple copies of Urza's Saga constructs.

Looking at the wider space, while not exceptional against any of them, the new removal also deals with minor issues that tend to pile up over the course of a match, such as exiling Aether Vial and the creatures it has put into play, or exiling Strangleroot Geist and Young Wolf against the Yawgmoth, Thran Physician decks, it deals with Wrenn and Six and even Abundant Growth against Four-Color decks, as well as resolving a variety of permanents from lesser-known archetypes like Affinity, Food, Auras, Burn, Black-Based Midrange, and more.

This flexibility makes it a solid option for any Control, and perhaps even for the Four-Color Goodstuff and other slower archetypes aimed at playing "over" the format, including the possibility of interacting positively with Teferi, Time Raveler , where you can return Temporary Lockdown to your hand, putting all permanents back into play, then recast it and exile all permanents that came into play after it was cast the first time.

My question, however, is if it's really worth using it instead of a cheaper and less vulnerable to interaction option, but also less comprehensive too: Engineered Explosives.

I don't have the ideal answer to this question: the Fifth Dawn artifact has some advantages over the Dominaria United enchantment, such as being less susceptible to Spell Pierce, having a more flexible cost, and being less liable to interactions like March of Otherworldly Light or Prismatic Ending as you can sac it in response — although I believe the games where you want the enchantment aren't the same ones where you're likely to face these cards consistently.

On the other hand, Temporary Lockdown deals with any permanent with a mana value of 2 or less, making it more explosive when dealing with Colossus Hammer and Puresteel Paladin simultaneously, or when removing Death's Shadow and Ledger Shredder with a single card, or if you need to deal with multiple permanents with different mana values ​​— but its main problem is a cost of which makes it less accessible to hit early in the game, especially for the Four-Color Piles.

In the end, I think it depends especially on which Metagame you hope to face and what responses you think the opponent might have against you, and it doesn't make Temporary Lockdown a worse or better card than Engineered Explosives, just more useful in certain situations while a bit lacking in others.

There are several useful and interesting targets for the new card in Legacy, but I'm uncertain if the current format supports its mana cost, or if strategies where it can succeed, like Jeskai Control, really need this enchantment on the Sideboard — overall it feels a bit pricey and too heavy for most games where you would probably like it.

That said, it has some great applications, like dealing with Marit Lage's token and an enabler like Elvish Reclaimer with a single card, or clearing the Elves' board for three mana, or removing Aether Vial and the permanents put into play by it with a single card, etc.

In Competitive Commander, on the other hand, this is the type of card that, if dropped on the table in the first few turns of the game, can cause such an absurd symmetrical effect that puts its controller ahead of the other players if none of them has an immediate answer or a counterspell to respond to its cast due to the high amount of low-cost mana rocks the format supports.

Another extremely useful function of this enchantment is, like Culling Ritual, removing Stax pieces from opponents' table to perform your combo after you've tapped your own mana rocks to generate resources — however, I have a feeling that Strixhaven's Sorcery is more efficient in this regard, as it permanently destroys such pieces and generates an obscene amount of mana in the process.

Temporary Lockdown is one of the most powerful cards revealed this preview season so far, with the potential to impact eternal formats and even become a staple between the Maindeck and Sideboard among them.

Dominaria United will be released on September 9, and from that moment on, we will have a broader view of how far the new enchantment can go in the competitive landscape.

Thanks for reading!