Later sets offered their own takes, from the nigh-unstoppable Slaughter Games to targeted strikes like Infinite Obliteration and Dispossess. History: More RecentĬranial Extraction lived on in a generic form as Memoricide. In a more open format, you can’t afford to maindeck Extraction effects, and you turn to them as sideboard weapons against linear decks, who then have to consider finding backup plans to hedge against this. This was a highly unusual case, of course. Spending so much mana and a card to knock out one threat made you even more vulnerable to getting run over by the others – if Nezumi Graverobber or Nezumi Shortfang didn’t nibble you to death first. As is typical on Kamigawa, these threats were all legendary, so you couldn’t run too many copies of each anyway, and the namesake Gifts Ungiven along with Time of Need gave you even more reasons to mix these up. That all changed post-sideboard, where both players would field a shockingly diverse array of threats for a three-set format. Once their Extractions were gone, you could recur your own to remove the rest of their relevant cards at your leisure. In Game 1, the Gifts Ungiven control decks in Kamigawa Block Constructed would race to extract the opponent’s Extractions, removing the one reliable way to interact with the Hana Kami recursion engine whose inevitability made these decks so dominant. My introduction to it was a strange inversion of its use as a sideboard card in every other format. When I found Magic, Champions of Kamigawa was the most recent set and Cranial Extraction was its most expensive card. But Magic has thankfully come a long way since looping Lobotomy was a legitimate win condition. Jester’s Cap was a fan favourite over 25 years ago, and every new riff on that concept has a guaranteed fan base. There are few more popular effects in Magic than getting to strip specific cards from the opponent’s deck. In a shockingly deep set, The Stone Brain demands your attention as one of the best versions we’ve ever seen of an incredibly popular effect.
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