The Best Ways To Cheat Permanents Into Play For MTG

Key Takeaways

• Use Podding strategies like Birthing Pod to upgrade creatures in Legacy and Commander for powerful plays.
• Polymorph swaps creatures for strong ones; designed for offensive deck strategies.
• Employ artifacts like Aether Vial and Quicksilver Amulet to play big spells for cheaper in various formats.

Paying the full cost for some of the biggest Magic: The Gathering cards is never fun, and players have been searching for ways to streamline their plays for years. If you’ve been on the hunt for something a little different, you’ve come to the right place.

We took a look at some of the different strategies you can use to get those bomb cards into play outside of playing the slow game. While not every deck is going to be able to utilize these cards, you can still build some powerful strategies using these cards in formats like Legacy and Commander.

5 Podding

Keep Climbing Upwards

Born from a green artifact printed back in 2011’s New Phyrexia, Birthing Pod, this style of card is a popular way to upgrade your creatures turn after turn until you get one big enough to win the game or you snag some combo piece.

These cards involve you sacrificing a creature to search your library for a creature card with a mana cost one or two points higher than the sacrificed creature. So if you sacrifice a one-mana creature, you can get a two-mana creature and put it directly on the battlefield. There are some variations to how these cards work, but the pattern is the same.

Birthing Pod, Prime Speaker Vannifar, and Eldritch Evolution are three great ways to get this upward trade going. A common combo that these decks go for, is grabbing creatures that untap your ‘pod’ enabler, letting you then sacrifice that creature to get another, chaining upwards until you get find some win condition.

4 Polymorph

Not What It Seems

Originally printed in Mirage, Magic’s ninth expansion from 1996, Polymorph became the archetype for a number of unique cards that let you swap your creatures out for something else, with little control as to what happens along the way.

Generally, these spells have you trading a creature or permanent, often by destroying that card, to reveal cards from the top of your deck until you find something that shares a card type with them. The original Polymorph has you destroying a creature, with the creature’s controller revealing cards until they find another creature and put that one into play.

This effect can be used offensively, getting rid of a strong creature to hopefully replace it with a much weaker one. However, this effect is better used when you design the deck to trade your small creature for a massive one.

A fairly common build for this style of deck is to only run massive creatures like Eldrazi Titans in your deck while playing spells that can create tokens for you to sacrifice.

Some other great targets include:

• Progenitus
• Atraxa, Grand Unifier
• Blightsteel Colossus

3 Artifacts

Make A Wish

There are several artifacts out there that let you just play cards whenever you like, and while they don’t neatly fit into a similar design space, they still generally get you to the same place. Playing big spells for a lot cheaper than what you normally would.

Perhaps one of the most well-known and most played card that lets you do this is Aether Vial, a Modern all-star that you can tap to put a creature into play from your hand so long as that creature’s mana value equals the number of charge counters on it, which you can choose to add at the start of your turn.

Another popular card that is a little more versatile and sees a bit more pay in formats like Commander is Quicksilver Amulet and its younger brother, Thran Temporal Gateway. Both these artifacts cost four mana and let you pay an additional four mana to take a card from your hand and put it into play. While it does take a little bit of a mana commitment and has plenty of ways of being interrupted, both options let you just take the biggest thing you have and stick it on the battlefield.

2 Sneak

There are quite a few ways to get your big, expensive creatures into play through sneaky ways, though not all of them are legal in their respective formats. A pattern of cards has popped up in red cards that let you take a creature from your hand and put it on the battlefield, getting around casting costs and counterspells, though they generally have the trade-off of having to sacrifice that creature at the end of the turn.

Chief among these cards is Sneak Attack, a wildly popular card that lets you take a creature from your hand, puts it on the battlefield while giving it haste, and then forces you to sacrifice it at the start of the next end step. All that for just one red mana, which is pretty darn good.

There have been a few variations of this effect over the years, like Through the Breach being an Arcane version of it, and then there’s Flash. This card, going back to Mirage, lets you take a creature card from your hand and put it on the battlefield, all for just two mana. You have to sacrifice this creature if you don’t play an extra two mana, which is practically nothing in a lot of formats. The ease that this card creates has led it to be banned in several formats, including Commander, though you can still play it in Oathbreaker.

Oathbreaker is a variation of the regular Commander format that limits the design space of your decks a bit in exchange for giving you a spell in the Command Zone. It’s definitely worth a chance if you haven’t had the opportunity to play!

1 Reanimate

Perhaps the most straightforward way to cheat big cards into play is by reanimating them. This archetype is most commonly used to refer to bringing creatures back from the graveyard, but there are many cards that focus on returning artifacts, enchantments, and lands as well.

The most ubiquitous card among these is Reanimate, a one-mana sorcery that takes a creature from any graveyard and puts it on the battlefield under your control. Sure, you lose life equal to that card’s mana value, but that’s fine when you have a turn one or two bomb.

Another popular way to approach this archetype in Commander is with the five-color legendary creature Kenrith, the Returned King. Not only does Kenrith have a built-in reanimation effect for five mana, but you can spend one red mana to give all creatures in play haste and trample, letting you immediately put that returned creature to good use.