Magic: The Gathering’s new Reality Fracture set has revealed Sphinx’s Approach, a three-mana blue instant that lets players put as many copies of the card in their deck as they want. Better yet, casting enough of them turns the unassuming common into a powerhouse tutor spell that puts a Sphinx creature directly onto the battlefield.
Magic normally limits constructed decks to four cards with the same name, outside of basic lands and a small collection Hare Apparentof cards specifically written to ignore that restriction. Fifth Dawn’s Relentless Rats started the modern version of the ability, followed by cards like Shadowborn Apostle, Rat Colony, Persistent Petitioners, Dragon’s Approach, Slime Against Humanity, Templar Knight, Hare Apparent, Tempest Hawk, and Cid, Timeless Artificer. Wizards of the Coast internally refers to the ability as “relentless,” after the original Relentless Rats.
Sphinx’s Approach is notable because it’s the first instant to join that unique subset of cards. Magic head designer Mark Rosewater actually teased that exact distinction before Reality Fracture previews began, promising an instant bearing the words “A deck can have any number of cards named CARDNAME.”
Sphinx’s Approach Is Dragon’s Approach With A New Blue Coat Of Paint
For one generic and two blue mana, Sphinx’s Approach draws two cards. Afterward, its controller may exile the spell alongside four other copies of Sphinx’s Approach from their graveyard. Do that, and they get to search their library for any Sphinx creature card and put it directly onto the battlefield.
In other words, it takes the basic premise of Dragon’s Approach and gives it the sort of makeover one might expect from Reality Fracture’s Sphinx-heavy Hexhaven setting. Dragon’s Approach burns opponents before eventually summoning a Dragon, while Sphinx’s Approach replaces that damage with card draw before calling in something similarly large and winged.
The important difference is that Sphinx’s Approach does something perfectly reasonable even when its deckbuilding gimmick never comes together. Three mana to draw two cards at instant speed isn’t spectacular, but it’s definitely functional. A deck running an obscene number of copies therefore isn’t filling itself with cards that are completely useless until some elaborate payoff materializes.
That could matter in competitive formats, particularly since Reality Fracture has already seen players scouring Magic’s back catalog for forgotten cards that suddenly work with its new designs.
Sphinx Of The Chimes Is Built for This
There is one spectacularly silly old card that suddenly looks purpose-built for Sphinx’s Approach. Sphinx of the Chimes, originally released in 2012’s Return to Ravnica, is a 5/6 flier that allows its controller to discard two nonland cards with the same name to draw four cards. That ability has always been particularly awkward in Commander, where decks can normally contain only one copy of any card other than basic lands.
Sphinx’s Approach obliterates that problem. Once four copies are sitting in the graveyard, another Approach can put Sphinx of the Chimes directly onto the battlefield. Every pair of additional Approaches in hand can then be discarded to draw four more cards. Players immediately spotted the interaction, with Commander and Pioneer players already kicking around decks capable of chewing through enormous chunks of their libraries.
Conspiracy Unraveler provides another enticing Sphinx target. The seven-mana 6/6 from Murders at Karlov Manor lets its controller collect evidence 10 instead of paying the mana cost of spells, meaning discarded three-mana Approaches can also help fuel subsequent game-changing spells for free from the ‘yard.
None of this guarantees that Sphinx’s Approach will produce a top-tier deck. Filling a library with three-mana draw spells is a substantial commitment, and spending 15 mana to cast five Approaches before the Sphinx payoff arrives is hardly subtle. Of course, players don’t actually have to play fair here: self-mill and other graveyard-filling strategies can dump four copies of Sphinx’s Approach into the graveyard, allowing the next one cast to immediately fetch its Sphinx. Cards that explicitly rewrite Magic’s normal deckbuilding rules tend to invite exactly this sort of experimentation.
That remains one of the game’s more entertaining design tricks. As Magic has spent decades replacing clunky old rules text with increasingly precise language, occasionally it prints a card whose most important sentence simply tells players to ignore the normal rules entirely.
Reality Fracture releases worldwide on Oct. 2. Wizards says the complete card image gallery will be available Sept. 18.
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