Ugin's Insight - A Magic the Gathering (MTG) Card Review

by ElspethFTW, Old School Duelist

Ugin's Insight is being called the "fixed" Dig Through Time. It's not at instant speed and doesn't have the advantage of being able to Delve away your graveyard to cast it for cheap. But 5 mana to draw 3 cards was fine on Jace's Ingenuity. Ugin's Insight lets you scry X, as well, where X is the highest converted mana cost among permanents you control. On turn 5, that number could easily be 3 or 4, so Scry 3, draw 3 seems pretty decent.

Where this card really becomes powerful is when you have much larger permanents on board, such as Ugin the Spirit Dragon himself (with a CMC of 8) or any of the bigger Eldrazi cards. You can dig pretty deep for this card and send away anything you're not going to want to draw to the bottom. Dig is probably going to be strictly better during its time in Standard, but this is a pretty decent card to help you dig for combo pieces or otherwise set up your draws in the late game. Perhaps this could help set up See the Unwritten plays, but you need to have a decently sized creature on board already to get the full power out of this card.

The best applications for this sorcery, like many cards in Battle for Zendikar, are in Commander. Braids, Conjurer Adept and Narset, Enlightened Master are two that have come up a lot already. With Braids, you'll get to at least Scry 4 and make sure you're drawing better artifacts, lands, and creatures than your opponents. Narset is a bit better, as she's a 6-drop, getting you Scry 6. You can try to draw 3 cards that you don't really want to hit with Narset. Then, you get to maximize her ability to cast any of the top four cards for free as long as they're non-creature spells. It's powerful card filtering that can simply win you the game. There are tons of other commanders that will love this ability, of course, but those are the most obvious two.

What do you think of Ugin's Insight? Do you think it's Standard playable? How would you go about using it?

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