The Stellar Sights Bonus Sheet is reprinting some truly powerful lands. Although a majority of the sheet’s inclusions are rather disappointing, there are a few that stand out from the rest. Ancient Tomb is the clear leader in terms of reprint value, but in terms of raw power, Strip Mine outshines the rest.
This card is so powerful that it’s been outright banned in Legacy and Restricted in Vintage. Destroying an opponent’s land in exchange for your own is problematically powerful once you find a way to pull ahead and break the parity. Fortunately, this land is not going to be legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern, so outside of potentially Timeless, it shouldn’t actually impact gameplay that much.
As you may expect, however, there’s always an exception to the rule, and that’s going to be Edge of Eternities Limited.
This is Incredibly Unfair
Blowing up all of your opponent’s lands shouldn’t be something any player is capable of in a Limited format. Sadly, because Strip Mine is in Edge of Eternities, it is something that’s on the table. If you manage to assemble Strip Mine and Icetill Explorer, you’re opponent is in for a miserable time.
Icetill Explorer, spoiled in its Japanese variant and previously leaked, allows you to both play lands from your graveyard and gives you an additional land drop. This, alone, makes Icetill Explorer one of the best land enablers we’ve ever seen in Magic: The Gathering. It should become an auto-include in any Commander deck with Landfall shenanigans solely thanks to being both a Crucible of Worlds and an Exploration on just one card.
It also happens to make Strip Mine a massive problem. Just blow up an opponent’s land and use Icetill Explorer to pick it back up from your graveyard. After this, blow up another land, and repeat the cycle. You’ll be able to blow up two lands on every turn this way; potentially three on the first turn if Strip Mine was in play before casting Icetill Explorer.
As long as you’re not extremely behind, this is more than enough to completely knock an opponent out of a game of Limited. Even destroying two lands can be devastating, but untapping with this combo will likely end the game outright. Not being able to play your cards is incredibly frustrating, hence the major distaste for land destruction in casual Commander.
While this might sound like a novel win condition, having this available in Limited is not a good idea. Losing to this two-card combo will feel abhorrent and will be incredibly demoralizing to any new player. The only silver lining is that this combo should be somewhat difficult to assemble during a prerelase or Draft.
Will This Devastate Limited?
The good news, at least, is that in order to pull off this combo in a Draft or Sealed event, you need to get extremely lucky. Strip Mine is a mythic Stellar Sights card, and Icetill Explorer is a rare, after all.
This is far from the first time a devastating infinite combo has been printed in a recent Limited format, either. MTG Foundations, in fact, had a much easier-to-assemble infinite combo involving the mythic, Bloodthirsty Conqueror, and the common Marauding Blight-Priest. Assemble these two cards, and as soon as you gain life or an opponent loses life, the game ends.
Even with this combo being worryingly easy to put together, players weren’t really dreading playing against this, but were instead excited to assemble it. It’s not like breaking the combo up was difficult, either; just remove a creature and your problems go away. The same is true for this new combo. You’ll lose a land in the process, but killing Icetill Explorer will stop the Strip Mine shenanigans.
Other niche Limited infinite combos have constantly appeared in recent sets. Outlaws of Thunder Junction had an infinite Mindslaver Combo, but both cards needed to assemble it were on different Bonus Sheets, making it almost impossible. Modern Horizons 3 had an infinite lifegain combo, but it was a three-part one that involved two rares and an uncommon. These combos, as a result, were almost never seen.
The Bloodthirsty Conqueror combo did have a real effect on MTG Foundations Limited. The mythic had the third-highest win rate in the format. Starting with Bloodthirsty Conqueror, after all, made putting the combo together almost a certainty. That said, it didn’t dominate MTG Foundations Limited, and that combo is way easier to put together than this Edge of Eternities one.
So, while you may run into this a couple of times, depending on how much you play Limited, it’s not going to affect the larger Edge of Eternities Limited format. That said, when someone does manage to assemble this, there’s going to be some upset players at the table, as watching your lands get blown up is way less fun than the game suddenly ending.