Pick the Brain - Shadows Over Innistrad Card Review (Magic the Gathering)

by ElspethFTW, Gaming Successfully Staff

For long time Magic players, Pick the Brain from Shadows Over Innistrad looks like a much worse version of Surgical Extraction. Many players have already remarked that they’d much rather have Thoughtseize or even Duress over this.

But actually, Pick the Brain is a better version of a card from the original Innistrad, Night Terrors. It lets you exile any nonland card from your opponent’s hand for 2B. But with Delirium, you get to search your opponent’s graveyard, hand, or library for any copies of a card with that name and exile them, too. While having four different card types in your graveyard sounds difficult, it may not be with the amount of discard effects featured in Shadows Over Innistrad.

This is one of those cards that may mostly be featured in Limited. Exiling your opponent’s best card is even more important in draft or sealed deck. Is this good enough for Constructed? It all depends on how good Delirium-centric decks become. This isn’t going to do much outside of Standard, since in Modern and Legacy you already have Surgical Extraction (which can also hit non-basic lands!) But as far as power level, this is already a functionally better version of a previous Innistrad card.

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