Psychic Surgery MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Psychic Surgery enhances your strategy by allowing you to peek at your opponent’s deck whenever they shuffle it, granting you the chance to exile strategic cards and potentially weaken their game plan.

Resource Acceleration: Though Psychic Surgery itself isn’t a direct source of mana acceleration, interfering with your opponent’s deck organization can indirectly speed up your own resource allocation by hindering theirs.

Instant Speed: As an enchantment, Psychic Surgery does not operate at instant speed; however, its triggered ability reacts instantly to your opponent’s shuffle, ensuring you don’t miss the chance to disrupt their strategy.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Psychic Surgery triggers on an opponent’s shuffle, which is dependent on the opponent’s actions and can lead to inconsistent utility.

Specific Mana Cost: Requiring both blue mana, it necessitates a dedicated color commitment, potentially excluding it from various multi-color deck strategies.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: With a casting cost that includes two specific mana, it competes for the slot against other impactful two-drop cards, possibly hindering its inclusion in some deck lists.

Reasons to Include Psychic Surgery in Your Collection

Versatility: Psychic Surgery seamlessly integrates into control and mill decks by not only disrupting an opponent’s strategy but also providing information about their upcoming plays, adapting to multiple game situations.

Combo Potential: This card excels in combination with effects that shuffle the opponent’s library, offering consistent disruption and the opportunity to impede crucial tutor effects, aligning with intricate and calculated game plans.

Meta-Relevance: In metagames with a high prevalence of fetchlands or tutoring mechanisms, Psychic Surgery’s consistent interference makes it a potent tool, turning an opponent’s search effects into a liability.

How to beat Psychic Surgery

Psychic Surgery is a unique enchantment that disrupts opponents by meddling with their deck whenever they shuffle. Its ability to exile cards from the top of a player’s library and potentially remove a valuable counter or threat can be a game-changer. However, this card can be outmaneuvered by adopting diligent shuffling habits and using shuffling sparingly. Cards that allow you to draw or manipulate the top of your deck without shuffling, such as Brainstorm or Sensei’s Divining Top, can effectively circumvent Psychic Surgery’s disruptive potential.

Moreover, relying on tutoring cards that put cards directly into your hand or onto the battlefield, such as Eladamri’s Call or Tooth and Nail, reduces the necessity to shuffle your library, thus decreasing Psychic Surgery’s impact. It is also worth noting that employing graveyard retrieval spells like Eternal Witness can help recover important cards that might be exiled. Ultimately, by minimizing shuffling and employing strategic card selection, you can reduce the effectiveness of Psychic Surgery and maintain control over your deck’s order and contents.