Previewing: Ghariv, the Quaking City (Limited Archetypes)

I love casting cantrips. I love the decision making they offer, the ability to consistently find threats or answers as the situation calls for them, and the ability to shave on lands because of turbo xerox theory. But an issue you repeatedly run into when making a deck composed primarily of cantrips is sometimes you'll have a mid game stint where you just have to string several cantrips into each other to find the specific card you're looking for, and the entire time you're spending mana without any direct reward. As such, the best Turbo Xerox decks have found ways of abusing these cantrip strings, finding cards they can play to allow them to generate value off the casts. Deathrite Shaman era Grixis Delver ran Young Pyromancer, Miracles ran Mentor, and the current builds of RUG Delver run Dreadhorde Arcanist.

Dross Incubator looks like Yet Another Young Pyromancer-like, but it has a surprising amount of depth to it. If you're generating just one token a turn, you're not going to get anywhere; unlike Peezie, the tokens don't natively have power. But if you can chain multiple cantrips together, you can put 8 haste power onto the board at a minimum (three tokens + Incubator pumping itself). It proccing off of colorless spells also means two other important things: it'll apply to most artifacts (MSEM's Rail Lines inspire anyone?) and it'll apply to future copies of Incubator. Sometimes, it can be unfortunate to draw creatures when you have these sorts of cantrip spam cards, but as long as you've built your deck correctly those creatures won't stop you from taking full advantage of Dross Incubator.

There is the other key part of this card: The tokens aren't just vanilla 0/1's. They can act as rituals. Dross Incubator is a modal Young Pyromancer/Goblin Electromancer, which gets especially gross when you look at the fact it works with artifacts (it can be an Etherium Sculptor, so it can reduce your Sensei's Divining Top to effectively 0 cost if you have another thing rewarding you for casting it). You can bank this mana across turns, or just across different parts of your combo turn. When you don't need the mana, you get a body. And when you need mana, the body becomes mana. You can't waste the discount.

This card is, of course, a 4 drop that dies to Scorch. It does dodge Pith Wilt, Cursory Glance, and plenty of the other cmc check style removal spells that see MSEM play, so that's a non zero factor, but it is still incredibly fragile. I would be shocked if it took over MSEM, but I do think that it has a home somewhere if Ghariv finds itself in MSEM or a lower powered constructed format.