Dispossess MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Dispossess shines when it strips key components from your opponent’s arsenal, potentially removing multiples of a troublesome artifact from their deck and diminishing their future draw quality. This can indirectly serve as a form of card advantage by reducing the efficacy of your opponent’s draws.

Resource Acceleration: While Dispossess itself does not directly provide resource acceleration, it can disrupt your opponent’s plans, especially if they rely heavily on specific artifacts for their mana base or combo pieces. By denying them these resources, you could potentially accelerate your own game plan by stalling theirs.

Instant Speed: Although Dispossess is a sorcery, its ability to preemptively tackle artifacts before the opponent has a chance to use them makes it a preemptive strike that can be as impactful as an instant in certain scenarios, especially given the high value artifacts in many MTG decks.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Dispossess targets a specific type of nonland card, requiring in-depth knowledge of the opponent’s deck composition which can sometimes be counterproductive if the guess is wrong or the target isn’t present in sufficient numbers to make an impact.

Specific Mana Cost: At three mana that must all be black, Dispossess has a specific mana requirement that restricts playability in multi-color decks. It could potentially strain your mana base or slow down your gameplay as you try to meet its casting cost requirements.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: With a mana cost of three, Dispossess can be considered costly for a card that does not directly affect the board state. Often, by the third turn, players might prefer to develop their board with creatures or other permanents that provide immediate value or pressure.

Reasons to Include Dispossess in Your Collection

Versatility: Dispossess has a place in decks aiming to disrupt artifact strategies. It can remove key pieces from opponents’ decks, hindering their game plan significantly.

Combo Potential: Beyond its primary use, Dispossess works well in conjunction with cards that allow you to peek at the opponent’s hand or deck, ensuring you make an informed decision when naming the artifact.

Meta-Relevance: In environments where artifact decks are prevalent, Dispossess serves as a powerful sideboard option, effectively countering popular cards and strategies in the current meta. Its ability to non-discriminatorily extract artifacts makes it a tactical choice against these types of decks.

Understanding Dispossess

Dispossess is an intriguing card that targets a specific card type: artifacts. Its ability to let a player choose an artifact card name and search their opponent’s graveyard, hand, and library for any number of cards with that name and exile them means it can strategically disrupt an opponent’s game plan. Particularly potent in formats where artifacts play a key role, Dispossess can be seen as a silver bullet card against decks that heavily rely on a specific artifact to function.

How to beat

Countering the unique challenge that Dispossess presents requires a multifaceted approach. Firstly, it’s imperative to diversify your deck’s threats to minimize the impact of losing key artifacts. Incorporate a variety of win conditions that don’t solely hinge on artifacts. Additionally, consider running instant-speed interaction like counterspells or abilities that can protect your valuable artifacts or even shuffle them back into your library in response to Dispossess. Having a countervailing sideboard strategy also helps: by including alternate win conditions or card types that are not susceptible to Dispossess’s pinpoint exiling effect, you can pivot your gameplay post-sideboard to outmaneuver this specific disruption.