Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Well obviously this is something I'm going to want a playset of (actually, a few playsets of).
This is possibly notable for another reason. Although Edict is certainly a creature-centric spell, it's arguably outside the general trend of power-creep in the direction of stronger creatures. If (and this is a big if) the heightened level of power creep we've been seeing with creatures and creature-based cards extends to other cards as well, this has some interesting implications. As probably everyone here has seen at some point, it's been theorized many times that as the cardpool grows (not applicable to rotating formats, but whatever), the number of broken cards that slip through the cracks in design and get added make combo decks stronger (an overpowered draw spell might help a control deck to find some key removal, but it helps a combo deck to kill your face). Barring extensive bans/restrictions, this would lead to combo dominating the whole game. Of course, in some sense, this has already happened. Unban/unrestrict everything and any sane player would predict that combo would become the only game in town. If they start doing power-creep on spells that have nothing to do with creatures, it's practically guaranteed that combo will get beefed up the way aggro (and aggro-control) have been getting beefed up in Legacy. If that happens, something is getting banned. Possibly multiple somethings. But will it be the brand new supercards or the old standbys? Judging from how the DCI has been operating lately, I'm guessing it will be the old cards. If so, which ones?
Of course, this is all highly speculative. Perhaps WotC will be careful and clever enough to continue the power-creep policy, but avoid making combo stronger. They could limit the power creep to newer versions of cards that historically were used in control decks, for example (a better version of Diabolic Edict certainly isn't going to make combo dominate, for example).
I disagree. I mean, I understand the sentiment. But steep costs are, and have always been, all over the place. I think your qualm is really based on the idea that the cost is paying life specifically. Trading life for something has been used more in black cards than cards of the other colors. But even though paying life is usually thought of as a black mana concept, it's not always that limited and doesn't need to be, especially if it's part of some larger theme. Dumping cards from one's hand to fuel powerful spells/permanents is usually in the black mana realm as well, but madness and threshold, because they were broad mechanics meant to be big parts of the sets where they were used, also applied that to the other colors. Cycling seems like a blue sort of thing, but it was applied to cards of all colors.
The flavor here seems to justify applying it to all colors of mana. I don't see a need to limit it to black.
ANT is sort of my pet deck for Legacy, even though I have no time to actually play it in tournaments right now (I moved to Seattle where I could have more opportunities to play in tournaments, but I'm so busy with school that I have no time to; nevertheless, ANT is what I would play if I had time to attend tournaments). I feel qualified to state that while storm is viable in Legacy right now, it's not that much of a powerhouse (nor was it before Mystical Tutor was banned, but whatever). I might even go so far as to say that storm isn't even the best combo deck right now (Belcher is looking pretty good, and even though it often uses storm as an alternate kill, it's definitely not a storm deck). In a typical Legacy game, you're much more likely to have your whole strategy shut down by Counterbalance while you're beaten to death by creatures than to eat a 20-point Tendrils.
While I don't play Vintage, I would also say that storm isn't that scary in Vintage either. It seems decent enough (actually, I think Belcher is probably better right now in this format as well). But there are just so many powerful decks that are fast, disruptive, and consistent. Tezzeret, Dredge, and MUD seem more like decks that define the format than any storm-based deck.
Considering that they banned a key component of the best storm deck in Legacy even though the deck wasn't on top (although to be fair, it was dominating in some local metagames where it was used more, from what I understand), if some new card or cards does push storm to the top, I'm sure they'll just ban some stuff again.
