While Avatar: The Last Airbender was a top-tier Magic set for the most part, it wasn’t without its faults. Some of the new cards printed here just weren’t very good, much to the chagrin of the community. Foggy Swamp Visions is one such card, offering a disappointing bait-and-switch for MTG players. While it seemed like a unique reanimation effect at first, the high resource investment required ultimately pushed it out of contention in the set’s early days.
That said, it’s best never to count a unique Magic card out completely. Now that it’s had some time to simmer, players have actually found uses for the card in multiple formats. Not only does it enable a killer combo in Standard, but it also pairs well with a range of different popular Commanders. If you’ve had copies of this card gathering dust since Prerelease, it may be time to dig them out.
Foggy Swamp Visions MTG
Foggy Swamp Visions is a real mixed bag of an MTG card. On one hand, it’s a much broader reanimation effect than we usually see in sets. Rather than bringing back a single creature, it lets you grab several, and from different graveyards, no less.
Unfortunately, this potent effect is balanced by a significant downside. The creatures you ‘reanimate’ with Foggy Swamp Visions are actually exiled and recreated in token form, which removes them from the pool for future reanimation shenanigans. These tokens also only stick around for a single turn, and don’t gain Haste, which means you can’t use them in combat. Because of this, you need to be hitting creatures with enters or dies triggers to really do anything at all.
The rate you’ll pay for this specific effect is steep, too. You need to sink four mana minimum into this card to bring back anything at all, and one more for each creature beyond the first. To its credit, you can use Waterbending to cut this cost a bit, but it’s still quite clunky.
Four mana in current Standard gets you Zombify, after all, which brings a creature back permanently. Older formats have far better options, too, like Animate Dead or straight-up Reanimate. By comparison, Foggy Swamp Visions is a bit of a lame duck, which explains why the community has been pretty low on it since release.
A Cunning Craterhoof Combo
Despite its shortcomings, Foggy Swamp Visions has actually started to see some success in MTG Standard recently. In today’s MTGO League, MonadicFunctor piloted a deck running three copies of the card to a 5-0 result. This list leverages Foggy Swamp Visions, alongside a number of other Golgari self-mill tools, to put Craterhoof Behemoth into play as early as turn three. With the right start, this combo can actually result in a win on the spot.
To pull this off, you need a fairly specific start. You’ll need to open with a Llanowar Elves on turn one, then follow up with Badgermole Cub on turn two. This will allow you tap Elves for two green, which you can spend on two more dorks.
On turn three, with this setup, you’ll have nine total mana available assuming you hit your land drop. Two of that will need to go towards either Esper Origins or Overlord of the Balemurk, to try and get Craterhoof into your graveyard. If you manage that, you can follow up with Foggy Swamp Visions to bring Craterhoof back, providing a +5/+5 and Trample buff to all your creatures. With Badgermole Cub, a dork, and Craterhoof itself available to swing, you’ll be hitting for 23 total Trample damage.
This combo is also possible with other reanimation spells, but Foggy Swamp Visions has some notable advantages over them. When you factor in Waterbending, it can be cheaper to cast mana-wise than Zombify, which is crucial for combos. It also offers the potential to reanimate an entire board alongside the Behemoth, killing an opponent from nowhere.
Commanders Of The Murk
Surprising Standard playability aside, Foggy Swamp Visions also has a wide array of applications in MTG Commander. At a base level, the card is just much more useful in a multiplayer format. With two extra graveyards to draw from, there’s more chance of there being good targets at any given stage of the game.
The card also has strong synergy with several popular Commanders. Take Obeka, Brute Chronologist, for example. By ending your turn prematurely, you can prevent Visions’ sacrifice trigger from going on the stack, thus keeping your reanimated tokens forever. You can pull off something similar with The Master, Multiplied too, which adds even more explosive power to an already explosive deck.
Additionally, the card is a stellar tool in Aristocrats decks. These decks typically go wide with fodder creatures, meaning you can invest as much as you want into the card via Waterbending, and sacrifice all the tokens for profit. Heck, if things go long enough, you can even bring back a bunch of big creatures at once and feed them to Altar of Dementia for an instant win.
Between these uses and its newfound Standard play, Foggy Swamp Visions is a fantastic cautionary tale about undervaluing new Magic cards. It may not be a busted new staple, but it’s a card with clear use cases nonetheless. After today’s results, I expect more such cases will come to light, as more players give the card the chance it deserves.
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