At Your Disposal : Evil Eye

Continuing my awe at the power wielded by vampires with Maleficia, let's take a look at the Evil Eye.

This is one card that can single-handedly make a large number of decks lose it's combat capability, and in good numbers can be the foundation of a deck, especially if it has combat in mind.

Any combat card that cancel strike cards is a valuable card, and this one not only cancels the strike, it also ensures that the opponent doesn't get another one. Combine this with the aggravated damage open to Daimoinon, and many vampires will just topple and die. This card trumps all combat ends, remove powerful counterstrike cards such as Coma or Entombment, and allows you to do your strikes with impunity. This card, combine with Flames of Netherworld, spells death to a large number of opposing vampires.

At superior this reaction card is almost as good as Direct Intervention. Yes, it only targets action cards, but that's one big issue that can be dealt with, and only with a 1-blood cost card. Moreover, the acting minion is then tapped, and if he has no untap capability, your 1-blood cost has just removed one of his action that potentially can cause great harm (or make your life difficult in general). Evil Eye will simply stop the harmful action right at the beginning.

Combine the 2 effects of this card, it actually becomes quite a good combat solution. It stops enhancement cards such as weapons and strength enhancements, so that vampires do not easily get combat support, and in combat, those decks that relies on powerful strike cards simply loses it's potency to the cancelling.

You may think that the Eye will create a scare tactic in combat - so that the opponent will ponder whether or not to strike with a hand strike instead of losing strikes totally. Well, I assure you that most good opponents will still strike with their strike cards - it's 1-blood cost to you anyway, and you'll run out of Eyes eventually. So don't expect enemies to just stop fighting because you Eye them a couple of times. What the Eye will create however, is a sense of doom and affect your opponent's decision to fight with you. For that, you may be able to get a few bleeds through by scaring your opponents. (Imagine which nut would attempt to fight the Unnamed with Maleficia without damage prevention)

The Eye, however, is powerless against many decks that use environmental damage. But very often these can be easily dealt with by some other combat package, depending on your vampires. For example, you can combat end easily, or absorb the damage with a single Flesh of Marble, since very few environmental cards cause aggravated damage by themselves. So with the Eye and Flesh of Marble (Yes, the Unnamed comes to mind), even an Immortal Grapple with Torned Signpost isn't going to worry you much. For other Infernal vampires that has no access to these cards, you'll still be vulnerable to Immortal Grapples with Strength Enhancements. But the Eye has other weakspots too - such as Claws of the Dead or Raking Talons, or CEL gun decks that uses the gun instead of strikes. (They can Sideslip the 1 miserable point of Flame, so they don't really need to Dodge, but if they do, feel free to make them feel lose by Eyeing them hard hard) So do be careful with who you picked a fight - the Eye is not a total solution.

With these incredible capability packed into one single card, no wonder Maleficia is difficult to achieve. This card of course, will suffer from Direct Intervention, and will hamper your hand size since you don't get to replace until your untap phase. But these are minor issues when you consider the might that Evil Eye gives you, both in and out of combat.

Don't you just want to sell your soul right now?

(o.o)