Only a few days into its preview season andMagic: The Gathering’sLord Of The Rings: Tales Of Middle-earth has already been a much more interesting set than I was expecting. As this is another crossover like last year’s Commander Legends: Battle For Baldur’s Gate, it was easy to assume it was going to be playing it similarly safe and conservative. With no desire to shake up any meta, less people turn against the idea of crossover sets in general.
Instead, Wizards just revealed a card that could easily upend the entire Modern format, and raised the bar of how Lord of the Rings could impact the rest of MTG. Stern Scolding is an absolute bomb, and points to Lord of the Rings being much more confident in its own power than previous crossovers.
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To the uninitiated, Stern Scolding doesn’t look like much. It costs one blue to counter a creature with two power or less. Big deal, there are a ton of one-mana counterspells in Modern. Except there aren’t a whole lot that do what Stern Scolding does: counters creatures.
Most one-mana counterspells either throw an additional cost on top, like Pact of Negation, or only counter noncreature spells, like Spell Pierce and An Offer you may’t Refuse. The closest comparison we have to Stern Scolding is Minor Misstep, which can counter creatures if they cost one or less mana. By basing its counter condition on power or toughness, Stern Scolding is so much more flexible.
Just look at the top-played creaturesin Modern, and the utility of Stern Scolding becomes blindingly obvious. Out of the top 25 creatures played in Modern, 15 of them can be countered. Of course, a lot of those likely could be countered by the time they’re cast anyway, but for just one blue mana that’s still powerful. From turn one you can keep an opponent’s Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer or Grief in check, potentially completely turning off an opponent’s deck.
There has been a lot of pushback against crossovers, with one of the main arguments being people didn’t want to see Gandalf,The Doctor, or Cloud Strife suddenly become all-time format staples. With those criticisms, we’ve mostly seen crossover sets err on the side of caution when it comes to power – both Adventures in the Forgotten Realms and Battle for Baldur’s Gate were famously low-power, and, bar Warhammer 40K’s Commander decks and maybe Baldur’s Gate’s initiative cards, no other crossover has tried to do anything terribly spicy.
On the one hand, I don’t want to see Magic’s visual style diluted by having Ezio Auditore, Eleven from Stranger Things, and Ryu all in the same deck. I’ve already raised concerns about Magic just becoming a billboard for other brands. However, I also don’t want each set to play it so safely that we never get any interesting cards out of them, either. Baldur’s Gate was great fun to play in a limited environment, but almost none of the cards from it make their way into my regular Commander decks, because they’re terrible. Power creep is something to be avoided, but a good card will always be more interesting to pull than a bad one.
This is the exact sort of power the game needs, too. Stern Scolding isn’t a generically good card; it plays specifically against Modern’s most-played creatures, but simply isn’t as good as many other counterspells in any other context. This isn’t going to see full playset use in every blue deck forevermore, but it solves a problem the game has, and it’ll always be something an opponent must consider could be a possibility.
Also, with a name like “Stern Scolding”, the door has been left wide open for future, LOTR-less reprints. Not every version of this card needs Gandalf on it; we could see Teferi in his Tolarian Academy days being told off by Barrin, or Kasmina admonishing a young Strixhaven student. This card is good because the card is good, not because it’s Gandalf.
Of course, predicting any format’s meta when a set isn’t even half-revealed is foolish. There’s every chance this could be talked up as an all-timer and then see zero play. However, if you’re a Modern player, you might want to get over your aversion to Universes Beyond and grab a few copies of Stern Scolding, just in case it becomes the big player I think it will.
