Nissa Ramp Is Really Awesome When It Works

 I decided to burn some mythic wildcards and get four copies of Nissa of Shattered Boughs (which, by the way, is pronounced like you're bowing on stage, not shooting a bow... dear lord is English ambiguous in its pronunciation).

So, this Nissa of course replaces Nissa Who Shakes the World as the primary standard version of Zendikar's favorite elf planeswalker. The latter was profoundly powerful, could easily win games on its own and was a staple of practically any green deck.

Shattered Boughs Nissa is going to be harder to work with, as she's now in Golgari colors, and frankly, I don't think she's quite as powerful as the previous version.

That being said, she's still got some really powerful tools. So let's look:

She costs 2BG, which is a manageable cost. I see her as primarily showing up in green ramp decks with a dip into black (I don't know if it makes sense to pair her up with Garruk, Cursed Hunter, but I love that card and might see if I can manage that somehow.) She starts with 4 loyalty, which is nice as her only negative ability costs only 5.

The thing that makes her potentially insane is that she has Landfall: when a land comes into play under your control, put a loyalty counter on Nissa of Shattered Boughs.

This, of course, lets you build loyalty with relative ease, but where it gets insane is when you have a lot of land-placing ramp cards like Cultivate or Beanstalk Giant or what have you. Also, Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, is a very useful card in any landfall decks (it makes all nontoken creatures count as forests, and also as lands) and is a friendly pair with Nissa.

In my last game, I got her up to 11 Loyalty. It makes you feel free to spend her negative loyalty ability, which will actually help keep her alive.

The +1 Loyalty ability resembles her previous incarnation, though it's not quite as powerful. You untap a land, then you may (which is nice if you don't want to expose it to creature removal) turn it into a 3/3 elemental with haste and menace until end of turn. The until end of turn bit of course makes this not quite the army-animator that Who Shakes the World got us, but just being able to untap a land is pretty good, and getting an attacker who can often swing in and smack the opponent for 3 isn't too bad.

The final "ultimate" (though I'd recommend treating Nissa as a longterm permanent and try to keep her on the board) is her -5 ability. You can put a creature from your hand or your graveyard into play with two +1/+1 counters as long as its converted mana cost is less than or equal to the number of lands you have in play.

So, this isn't going to let you bring in some insanely expensive creature on turn 5, but what it does mean is that your opponent is going to have a rough time dealing with your biggest threats. In my recent game, my Ashaya came back multiple times, of courses triggering landfall each time and remaining a massive 14/14 monster the opponent ran out of ways to deal with.

Another good pairing with this is Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager. This is a legendary hydra for 1BG, 0/0 but comes into play with three +1/+1 counters. When a creature that has a +1/+1 counter on it dies, you get to put one on Grakmaw (and you'll potentially have several of those with Nissa's negative ability.) Then, if Grakmaw dies, you put a token into play that's a hydra with power and toughness equal to Grakmaw's when it died.

So you basically get to copy the hydra, only with its power and toughness locked in the second time around. Bringing him out or back with Nissa gives you a 5/5 that then replaces itself with a 5/5 (or more) each time, which seems like a tough thing to deal with.

Anyway, I have yet to determine if this is going to be a format-defining card or just a cool one that works.

One of the downsides of Golgari colors right now is that there is no Pathway land for that combination - four "guilds" lost out, as I believe the current ones are based around the "RPG class" creature types (which are typically found in one of two colors) as well as two green ones (the RPG classes don't cross over with green, though there are some green cards that count as all four types, which should actually make green a really solid option for "party" decks.)

Still, I think they've more or less confirmed that the four missing Pathway lands are coming with Kaldheim early next year, so I think this is a card to keep an eye on.