A truly awful Magic: The Gathering card is seeing a sudden uptick in price, as it’s quickly started to see play in Modern. Though it’s still very cheap at time of writing, the sorcery card Selective Memory has risen by 200% from $0.60 on September 8 to $1.80 today. And it’s all thanks to one of the strangest MTG combo decks we’ve ever seen.
What’s so bad about Selective Memory? Well it’s a four mana sorcery, and all it does is let you search your library for non-land cards and exile them. That’s pretty much useless 99.9% of the time. You might initially look at it and think this is perfect for a Thassa’s Oracle archetype, but because it can’t exile lands this strategy doesn’t work. You’ll still be left with a library of land cards.
It is an interesting effect though, especially as you can pick any number of spells to exile. There are perhaps some exile-matters combos using cards like Crackling Drake that can take advantage of this power, but these are really just gimmicks.
So what about the 0.1% of the time where it’s useful; where does the card fit in right now? Well, I lied a little bit when I said Selective Memory doesn’t work with Thassa’s Oracle (or perhaps I just forgot).
The trick is you need to have a zero land deck. Which sounds silly, but thanks to a number of double faced cards (DFCs) released in Modern Horizons 3 and earlier MTG sets, it’s now possible to create a functional blue deck with no land cards at all.
Selective Oracle combo is aiming to win the game by exiling your whole deck with Selective Memory, then either playing a Thassa’s Oracle or activating a Jace, Wielder of Mysteries to claim victory.
The trick is that it runs DFCs like Bayeen Veil and Sink into Stupor which are spells on the front and lands on the back. They can provide you with mana when you need it, and also be exiled when you’re ready to win.
This deck idea has been around for a number of years, but it’s grown in acclaim recently, seeing good results on MTG Online and Modern tournaments. It’s likely that a big reason for the rise in popularity is the YouTuber Aspiringspike, who has covered the card twice in the past few weeks, with the second video dropping just yesterday.
We’ve got plenty more Magic: The Gathering content you might enjoy, including our guides to the most expensive MTG cards and our handy MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
