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• Force Of Negation

• Emrakul, The Aeons Torn

• Devoted Druid

• Animar, Soul Of Elements

• Conqueror’s Flail

• Drogskol Reaver

With the end of the preview season in sight, the pace is picking up for Magic: The Gathering’s Double Masters 2022 spoilers. We’ve had dozens of cards today, and with many revealed it can be hard to focus on the ones that really matter.

In today’s previews, we had not one, but two of the game’s best counterspells, an Eldrazi that’s banned in Commander, and a card we’ve not seen in 2012 that will pair nicely with your Streets of New Capenna pulls. Here are the best cards revealed on day six of Double Masters 2022’s preview season.

Force Of Negation

One generic, two instant:

If it’s not your turn, you may exile a blue card from your hand rather than pay this spell’s mana cost.

Counter target noncreature spell. If that spell is countered this way, exile it instead of putting it into its owner’s graveyard.

Easily one of the best counterspells in the game, Force of Negation does it all. You can play it for free, which is generally a good dividing line between the good and the best counterspells, and it even exiles the spell you counter to prevent any sneaky graveyard recursion.

This isn’t the only great counterspell we’ve seen today, as it was also confirmed we’ll be getting Mana Drain. However, we’ve seen Mana Drain twice since we last saw Force of Negation – the original Double Masters and Commander Legends – which makes this the more exciting reprint.

Notably, Force of Negation is legal in more formats than Mana Drain. It’s legal in Modern, Legacy, Vintage, and Commander, whereas Mana Drain is only legal in Vintage and Commander (in fact, it’s even banned in Legacy). If you’re wanting to upgrade your control decks, pulling a Force of Negation is one of the best things you could hope for.

Emrakul, The Aeons Torn

15 generic legendary creature – Eldrazi – 15/15:

This spell can’t be countered.

When you cast this spell, take an extra turn after this one.

Flying, protection from spells that are one or more colours, annihilator 6.

When Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is put into a graveyard from anywhere, its owner shuffles their graveyard into their library.

We knew this was coming after Kozilek and Ulamog, but it’s still cool to see all three Eldrazi titans back in the same set. Of the three, Emrakul, The Aeons Torn is easily the scariest, granting you an extra turn just by casting it and forcing your opponent to sacrifice six permanents whenever it attacks through its annihilator ability.

Fifteen mana sounds like a lot, but there so many ways to cheat Emrakul out. The most popular way is to use Through The Breach to put Emrakul into play for a single turn, which at 15 power can easily be enough to end a Modern game before it has the chance to get started. Any instant-speed reanimation can also outpace her ability to shuffle back into your library, letting you yank Emrakul onto the battlefield before she goes to where you can’t get her.

Considering this set is being described as “Commander Masters” by some, thanks to its huge number of Commander-friendly cards, it’s interesting that we’ve got The Aeons Torn over The Promised End. After all, The Aeons Torn is outright banned in Commander thanks to its power and myriad ways to play it earlier than your opponents can handle.

Devoted Druid

One generic, one green creature – Elf Druid – 0/2:

Tap: add one green mana.

Put a -1/-1 counter on Devoted Druid: untap Devoted Druid.

Wizards of the Coast knew what it was doing when it put Devoted Druid into Double Masters 2022. Only yesterday we saw Necrotic Ooze, which uses Devoted Druid in a popular combo to produce infinite mana. All we need now is Channeler Initiate to remove the -1/-1 counters and produce more mana, and we have the whole combo in a single set.

Of course, even without Channeler Initiate, there are enough ways to gain +1/+1 counters to help cancel out the -1/-1s building up on Devoted Druid. You could even use counter-moving cards from recent sets like Resourceful Defense or Nesting Ground to move them onto other things and keep the mana flowing.

This isn’t the biggest reprint in the world – we last saw it just a couple of months ago in the Streets of New Capenna Commander decks. However, it and Necrotic Ooze being printed in the same set is a great hint of just the power level Double Masters 2022 is aiming for.

Animar, Soul Of Elements

One blue, one red, one green legendary creature – Elemental – 1/1:

Protection from white and from black.

Whenever you cast a creature spell, put a +1/+1 counter on Animar, Soul of Elements.

Creature spells you cast cost one less to cast for each +1/+1 counter on Animar.

The reprints of Commander 2011’s commanders continue with the ever-flexible Animar, Soul of Elements. One of the game’s best commanders for not just Temur (blue/red/green) +1/+1 counters decks, but also for Pod (sacrificing creatures to bring in more powerful ones and working your way up to game-ending plays) and Morph-centric decks, Animar is a powerhouse regardless of where you put it.

Easily the most useful card in Animar decks is Ancestral Statue. With just one card, you’re able to put an infinite number of +1/+1 counters on Animar and cast any other creature for only its coloured mana costs. If you run lots of other colourless creatures, like Solemn Simulacrum, Ornithoper of Paradise, or – terrifyingly – Walking Ballista, this is an easy way to flood the board very quickly.

With Animar, Ghave, Karador, Tariel, Teneb, and The Mimeoplasm already confirmed for Double Masters 2022, there’s a good chance we may see yet more Commander 2011 creatures, like Skullbriar the Walking Grave or Kaalia of the Vast.

Conqueror’s Flail

Two generic artifact – Equipment:

Equipped creature gets +1/+1 for each colour among permanents you control.

As long as Conqueror’s Flail is attached to a creature, your opponents can’t cast spells during your turn.

Conqueror’s Flail is going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in Double Masters 2022. As this is a three-colour-matters set, you’re likely going to be getting at least +3/+3 on the equipped creature – good, but not really why we’re here.

It’s the second ability that makes Conqueror’s Flail so good. Preventing your opponents from casting spells on your turn is something we’ve already seen in Double Masters 2022 with Dragonlord Dromoka, but this Conqueror’s Flail is the only other card in the game with this effect that isn’t blue. Even better than Dromoka, the Flail is completely colourless, meaning you can put it into any Commander deck and almost totally shut off interaction from your opponents.

In Double Masters 2022, where so many powerful instants and permanents with flash could be thrown out at any time, having a card like Conqueror’s Flail is a great way to advance your board state safe in the knowledge nobody can stop you. Of course, they can still use activated or triggered abilities, but these are rarer and tend not to interfere with you quite as much.

This is Conqueror’s Flail’s first paper reprinting following its debut in Commander 2016. The second-hand market price for it has been rising gradually over the years, so hopefully a reprint will be able to deflate the cost and allow more people to play it.

Drogskol Reaver

Five generic, one white, one blue creature – Spirit – 3/5:

Flying, double strike, lifelink.

Whenever you gain life, draw a card.

Drogskol Reaver’s inclusion doesn’t feel like it’s specifically for Double Masters 2022. It’s a great card bursting with combo potential (most notably with Shabraz, the Skyshark to draw your entire deck), but with none of its combo pieces currently announced for the set it feels a bit of a random inclusion.

Instead, this feels like a reprint to get it into greater circulation and playing with other, more recent cards. Streets of New Capenna introduced the Esper (white/blue/black) commander Queza, Augur of Agonies, which together form a two-card combo that draws your entire deck and could potentially knock your entire table out of the game.

Like Consecrated Sphinx, this is a card I’ve been wanting to put in my Kwain, Itinerant Meddler deck for almost two years now. Kwain draws you a card and gain one life, which Drogskol Reaver sees and gives you another card. Even without the combos it’s a nice synergy that pushes what that deck does, so having this be the Reaver’s first-ever reprint following its debut in 2012’s Dark Ascension could be a great chance to grab both it and Consecrated Sphinx.

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