I Hit It With My Axe!

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Impulse is a really good card. If you have one in your opening 7, you can be pretty sure that even a shaky hand will pan out okay. Need that 3rd land for the hand to work? Impluse finds one in the top 4 for you, or at worst clears 4 nonlands off the top without losing you a card. Need to dig for your combo pieces? Impulse gets exactly what you need and ships the less useful cards away to let you keep digging for more. Not looking forward to drawing dead cards you just put or saw on top with brainstorm/scroll rack/ponder/divining top/mirri’s guile/etc? Get rid of the junk while better-than-cantripping for really strong card selection. It’s an instant, so you can leave up mana for that counterspell if you need to early game, or later on cast Impulse with a problem spell on the stack to find a counterspell hiding in your top 4 to use. And guess what? If you read the Visions printing displayed and thought “Gee, that’s decent. But if it didn’t shuffle at the end, it’d be amazing,” then you’re in luck. It got Oracle text that redacted the shuffling clause put there by a templating error. Check Gatherer. What if Preordain let you dig 4 deep at instant speed? What if Peer Through Depths could grab any card? What if you had a double-strength, even faster Sleight of Hand? What if Telling Time showed you even more cards and got all the junk out of the way? What if Fact or Fiction cost half of what it does, and got you that one card you needed without your opponent being any wiser? It’s been called “the perfect balance of cost and card power,” and “the best card in magic.” The consistency-enabling power of a nonspecific tutor, at instant speed, for a measly two mana. You might have noticed Forbidden Alchemy doing awesome things in Standard of late. Impulse did better in its age, and at one less mana. A reprint now would devastate three formats, illustrating just what a difference two vs three mana makes. I run four in my Pyromancer Ascension deck, which plays worlds better after I learned about the oracle text fixing the Visions printing error. You can get Impulses from Visions for under a buck each. Considering their history, utility, and age, that’s a decent bargain.

Impulse is a really good card. If you have one in your opening 7, you can be pretty sure that even a shaky hand will pan out okay. Need that 3rd land for the hand to work? Impluse finds one in the top 4 for you, or at worst clears 4 nonlands off the top without losing you a card. Need to dig for your combo pieces? Impulse gets exactly what you need and ships the less useful cards away to let you keep digging for more. Not looking forward to drawing dead cards you just put or saw on top with brainstorm/scroll rack/ponder/divining top/mirri’s guile/etc? Get rid of the junk while better-than-cantripping for really strong card selection. It’s an instant, so you can leave up mana for that counterspell if you need to early game, or later on cast Impulse with a problem spell on the stack to find a counterspell hiding in your top 4 to use.

And guess what? If you read the Visions printing displayed and thought “Gee, that’s decent. But if it didn’t shuffle at the end, it’d be amazing,” then you’re in luck. It got Oracle text that redacted the shuffling clause put there by a templating error. Check Gatherer. What if Preordain let you dig 4 deep at instant speed? What if Peer Through Depths could grab any card? What if you had a double-strength, even faster Sleight of Hand? What if Telling Time showed you even more cards and got all the junk out of the way? What if Fact or Fiction cost half of what it does, and got you that one card you needed without your opponent being any wiser?

It’s been called “the perfect balance of cost and card power,” and “the best card in magic.” The consistency-enabling power of a nonspecific tutor, at instant speed, for a measly two mana. You might have noticed Forbidden Alchemy doing awesome things in Standard of late. Impulse did better in its age, and at one less mana. A reprint now would devastate three formats, illustrating just what a difference two vs three mana makes. I run four in my Pyromancer Ascension deck, which plays worlds better after I learned about the oracle text fixing the Visions printing error.

You can get Impulses from Visions for under a buck each. Considering their history, utility, and age, that’s a decent bargain.


  1. lorstarcutter reblogged this from manaflooded and added:
    Words described how awesome I think Impulse is.
  2. manaflooded reblogged this from ihititwithmyaxe
  3. ihititwithmyaxe posted this
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