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I don’t envyMagic: The Gathering’supcoming sci-fi set, Edge of Eternities. It has the impossible task of following up the best-selling set of all time, Final Fantasy, before leading into likely the next gangbuster set of the year, Spider-Man. On top of all that, its outer-space shenanigans are trying to introduce a new setting and a radically different aesthetic at a time when people have mostly just wanted Magic to return to Magic.
And yet, from everything we’ve seen of it so far, Edge of Eternities is knocking it out of the park. Its Sothera system feels faithful to Magic while also being something very new, the mechanics it introduces are ripe for expansion, and the art has been stunning. Of everything revealed, one of the best new toys coming is the stationing mechanic, which is at the heart of our exclusive preview card, Uthros Scanship.
Name And Description
Uthros Scanship
Three generic, one blue artifact - Spacecraft - Uncommon
When this Spacecraft enters, draw two cards, then discard a card.
Station(Tap another creature you control: Put charge counters equal to its power on this Spacecraft. Station only as a sorcery. It’s an artifact creature at 8+.)
8+: Flying - 4/4
At first glance, Uthros Scanship’s ability to draw two and discard a card is effectively a more expensive version of a card we’ve just seen in Tarkir, Roiling Dragonstorm. Four mana to do an effect you can do for two may seem rough, but Edge of Eternities’ new mechanic, stationing, might make this a bigger threat than it first looks.
Withstationing, you can tap creatures to add charge counters equal to their power to Uthros Scanship, and, once it has eight or more, it becomes a 4/4 flying artifact creature. But becoming a creature isn’t the goal here. Don’t think of Uthros Scanship as a creature to beat your opponents down with. Think of it as an easy tap outlet to trigger other cards.
Recent Standard-legal sets have had something of a tapped-matters theme to them. Duskmourn had survival abilities that trigger if the creature is tapped before your second main phase, and Edge of Eternities has lots of cards that trigger when something is tapped. Chrome Companion gets you one life, Starfighter Pilot surveils, and Sami, Ship’s Engineer, will make creature tokens if you have enough tapped creatures.
When you stop looking at it as a creature and more as a tool in your toolbox, Uthros Scanship becomes much more appealing. It gets you hand advantage, it gives you a way to tap your creatures without needing them to attack, and it even counts as an artifact for Uthros, Titanic Godcore, a Planet that can also be stationed to eventually give you a ton of blue mana.
Is Uthros Scanship Good Enough For Standard?
The big question is where will Uthros Scanship fit into the Standard format when Edge of Eternities launches? A few weeks ago, the answer was obvious, as it’s another way to discard Omniscience in the then-popular Azorius Omniscience decks.
But thenAbuelo’s Awakening was banned, and, as that was the main way of reanimating Omniscience from your graveyard to bypass its cost, the deck quickly fell out of popularity. Now, it’s not even in the top 15 most popular Standard decks onMTG Goldfish.
From the decks currently in play, Uthros Scanship might be too slow. Any situation where you’d want to draw two, discard one is covered by Roiling Dragonstorm, and Duskmourn alone wasn’t enough to make tap-matters a dominant strategy. But who knows, maybe Edge of Eternities will be the juice it needed to see play, and Uthros will be a core part of that?
Uthros Scanship In Commander
There’s a lot more use for Uthros Scanship in Commander than in Standard.
Immediately, the first commander that springs to mind is Archelos, Lagoon Mystic. Uthros Scanship is great redundancy after Springleaf Drum as a way to tap him down at the end of your turn, to ensure all of your opponents’ permanents come in tapped on their turns.
Unctus, Grand Metatect is also a commander you’ll want to slot this into. Tapping any creature to station Uthros will let you draw and discard a card, and then it gets a nice +1/+1 buff when it becomes a creature itself.
And, of course, there’s Kilo, Apogee Mind, one of the two face commanders of Edge of Eternities’ Counter Intelligence precon. Whenever it becomes tapped, you proliferate, speeding up how quickly you can station Uthros Scanship, while also putting counters on much more impactful pieces at the same time.
