Despite the year drawing to a close, this has been a blockbuster week for MTG. On Tuesday, the Marvel Superheroes Preview Prologue gave us tons of new spoilers to admire, six months early. After this, Wizards treated us to a trio of Lorwyn Eclipsed spoilers yesterday to whet our appetites.
Today, a brand new spoiler for Lowyn Eclipsed has been revealed. This time around, one of the set’s protagonists, Kirol, has been revealed, and they don’t disappoint. Offering an ability that’s somewhere between useful and broken, this card is bound to see play.
MTG Kirol, Attentive First-Year
Released in the 5th episode of the Lorwyn Eclipsed story, Kirol, Attentive First-Year is a delightfully powerful MTG card. Capable of copying an ability just by tapping two creatures, Kirol easily allows you to get incredible value. Whether you’re dropping a powerful bomb with a huge enters effect, or just getting an extra card, the possibilities are endless.
Thankfully, utilizing this effect is really easy, too, since there are hardly any restrictions on Kirol, Attentive First-Year. While there is a “once per turn” clause, to keep them mostly contained, the cost of tapping two creatures is barely anything. Notably, this ability doesn’t specify nontoken, and Kirol can be used to pay the cost itself.
The only real downside of Kirol, Attentive First-Year is that you can only copy triggered abilities that you control. This stops you from jumping on a counterspell chain started by an opponent’s Tishana’s Tidebinder, for instance. While this technically is a downside, in reality, you’ve still got more than enough abilities to copy.
On social media, MTG players are already eyeing this card up for Isshin, Two Heavens as One decks. While Isshin doesn’t really need any help copying abilities, getting more powerful triggers is always helpful. Similarly, other players are planning to use Kirol in Edgar Markov decks, thanks to this effortless token creation ability.
Realistically, the only thing holding Kirol, Attentive First-Year back in MTG is his color identity. Since he’s a Boros hybrid card, he won’t be playable in mono-red or mono-white Commander decks. That is, at least, so long as Wizards of the Coast doesn’t change Commander’s rules around hybrid mana before the set’s release.
Breaking Parity
At worst, Kirol, Attentive First-Year seems like a very strong MTG card for a variety of decks. The once per turn clause is annoying, as always, but you can still get good value. So long as you have triggered abilities going off on your opponent’s turns, you can easily copy them if you’ve got enough bodies.
Outside of this, you can also just get around the once-per-turn clause with cards like Agatha’s Soul Cauldron. While each of your creatures still have the once-per-turn restriction, you can get around this by having multiple creatures with counters on them, just like Vivi Cauldron did. So long as you have something that grants +1/+1 counters to creatures on entry, just playing a Beetleback Chief gets you infinite tapped tokens.
With infinite enters triggers, winning the game from this point is trivial. Since you’re in Boros, throwing in an Impact Tremors for the win is an obvious choice. If you want to get weird with it, however, there are even more ways to break Kirol, Attentive First-Year.
If you have a way to copy Kirol, like Cadric, Soul Kindler, you can easily go infinite with Ocelot Pride. Provided you have the City’s Blessing, which should be a breeze, copying Ocelot’s token-doubling trigger will get you exponentially more tokens. Since one of these will be Kirol, you can keep the copy and simply activate the ability again, getting you even more tokens.
Unfortunately, the only downside of this Ocelot Pride combo is that it all happens on the endstep, and it’s a bit difficult to execute. Thankfully, this is yet another problem that Impact Tremors can solve, so winning the game should be trivial.
More Spoilers Soon…ish
Ultimately, while it’s unclear how good Kirol, Attentive First-Year will be in MTG Standard, they definitely have a home in Commander. At the very least, the amount of shenanigans that Kriol can cause is delightful. There’s certainly a concern that this card breaks Agatha’s Soul Cauldron all over again, but we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully, the rest of the cards in Lorwyn Eclipsed will be just as good, but we’ll have to wait until January to find out.
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