I want to talk to you today about a spec. Let's prognosticate about this card a little bit.

This is a 3/5 flier perfect for control decks. The Standard format ultimately preferred to use finishers from the previous block, but at rotation, talk circulates about it getting an increased role in a post-rotation Standard.

Both Block testing and sporadic results indicated the card is insanely powerful. A 3/5 flier doesn't look like much on its face, but the amount of card advantage it generates is too much to be ignored. Its lack of adoption in pre-rotation Standard made its price sink very low and lots of copies are online.

This card seems like a no-brainer. Block is usually a pretty good predictor of what the post-rotation landscape will look like, after all. Control decks need a finisher, and this card is an excellent candidate. It meets a lot of the criteria of a good spec.

• Low price
• 1 year of Standard legality left
• Likely to be played in a Tier 1 deck
• Under the radar so easy to scoop in trades

With rotation imminent, lots of people are talking about this card as a spec. A plucky, 3/5 flier has captured a lot of speculators' imaginations going into rotation. Have you got a pretty good idea of the card I'm talking about?

Are you sure?

The Problem with Prognostication

While Prognostic Sphinx has a lot more weight behind it in terms of its playability and applicability in the upcoming post-rotation Standard, I think the comparison to Drogskol Reaver absolutely needs to be made.

Right off the bat, let's start by saying comparing these two cards on their individual merits as finishers is worthless. You're already doing it by reflex. Stop it. That's not the point. The only point in comparing the two as finishers would be to discuss hypothetical scenario where Sphinx was in Dark Ascension and Reaver was in Theros, and that's a pointless debate.

"But wait," I hear you saying. "Sphinx is a better card than Reaver, so the same thing that happened to Reaver won't happen to Sphinx."

This piece is setting out to prove that this won't actually matter. To do that, let's first look at what actually happened to Reaver.

Speculation about its role in a post-rotation Standard pushed it up about 50% but it languished in a new Standard environment that was fast, had uncounterable spells and good removal, and ultimately didn't want Reaver.

Now, that's not to say the deck that he was expected to be slated in didn't materialize. Far from it. U/W Control, Esper Control and Jeskai Control (because any time you call it "American", another little boy in Ecuador loses access to clean drinking water) all became solid contenders, using the advantage generated from cards like Restoration Angel and new tools like Supreme Verdict and Detention Sphere.

Now, let's not pretend that predicting there would be a U/W control deck is John-Edward-on-Crossing-Over level clairvoyance. The deck was there, and it got a lot stronger with some of the inclusions in Return to Ravnica. Let's get one thing very clear about rotation.

Sets Leave Because They Get Replaced

Could Drogskol Reaver have found a home in Standard if all that happened at rotation was we lost the Scars of Mirrodin block without adding cards from Return to Ravnica block? Well, it's likely. Reaver was seeing play in Block to an extent, so that is the extent to which it would see play in this scenario.

But rotation isn't block, is it? You have access to a core set, a full block and the first set of a new block. That's quite a bit more than just cards from Block Constructed. The card pool is bigger, and cards that weren't seeing play will need a real change of circumstances to get played and an expanding card pool is not usually the best of circumstances.

If you bank on a card getting play after rotation you're banking on a list of assumptions.

• The deck it goes in will survive rotation.
• The deck it goes in will need that role filled.
• The next set in the new block doesn't fill that role better.

This seems like as good a time as any to transition from talking about Reaver to talking about the flying, 3/5 elephant in the room: Prognostic Sphinx. The similarities between Sphinx and Reaver extend far beyond the mere happenstance of their having the same power and toughness--a coincidence I discovered after I had conceived of the article making the comparison between the two.

I see a lot of people talking about Prognostic Sphinx as a good spec going into the upcoming rotation and I am inclined to say that my experience with Reaver has caused me to approach Sphinx with a lot more trepidation than most financiers, and I think there are better spec targets.

Will the Sphinx Decks Survive Rotation?

Sphinx is double blue but that doesn't really disqualify it from being tried in a variety of different decks. However, none of those decks really exist right now except for the control decks with very few non-planeswalker finishers.

Aetherling became the final (of many, let's be honest) nail in Reaver's coffin, and Aetherling may be keeping Sphinx from getting played now. Will removing Aetherling from the pool make room for Sphinx? That's not for me to decide, but what I can say is that despite losing a ton of gas, including the all-important Sphinx's Revelation, U/W Control will likely survive rotation in some fashion.

It's hard to imagine Jeskai won't have good U/W gas. I doubt every gold card in Jeskai will be three colors, leading me to believe there will be at least one or two cards that can help make up for losing Supreme Verdict, Sphere, Revelation and Aetherling. We'll still have Elspeth, we have conditional wrath effects and the potential to see a new one in Khans of Tarkir and we have the memory of 21 continuous years of blue-white control decks.

Mono-Blue Devotion is another deck that could survive rotation, but not in its current form. Getting a five-mana 3/5 doesn't make up for losing every one-drop and solid devotion enablers like Frostburn Weird. It's possible there will be some sort of deck that survives rotation, and maybe Sphinx is a candidate for it, but it's more likely that the best home for it post-rotation out of the current crop of lists is U/W or Esper.

Will the Sphinx Decks Need That Role Filled?

Well, yes. An Elspeth backed up by an Elixir of Immortality can be your only way to win the game if you're LSV, but the rest of us want a finisher. Aetherling, as durdly as it was and how less-than-a-dollar it costs right now, was a solid finisher. It got the job done, it was hard as balls to deal with and it's leaving. Esper is losing all kinds of goods including Blood Baron of Vizkopa and Obzedat, Ghost Council.

With no clear creature in Theros block stepping up to take all of those places (I would love to see people play Ashen Rider--every EDH player already knows how unfair that card is) Sphinx is likely doing some work in those spots. After all, there's nothing that can really fill that role better in the current pool. It could be a good spec permitting things go well in the next paragraph.

Will The Next Block Fill That Role Better?

I DON'T KNOW!

NEITHER DO YOU!

This uncertainty is palpable. This is the reason I'm not buying Sphinx. Would Reaver have gotten play if the role it wanted to play wasn't filled better by other cards and made obsolete by better builds? It's impossible to say, even with the benefit of hindsight because the meta does funny things that no one can anticipate.

But there is no way to say that Khans of Tarkir won't have a better creature for the slot that Sphinx wants to inhabit. Anything can happen. I realize the cards have been sent to the printer, but I also know that with that knowledge being closed off to us right now, we can only do the bad kind of speculating; the kind of speculating where you gamble money rather than make it.

Who knows what Khans could have? Maybe there are free spells that help trigger prowess. That could make Illusory Angel playable. Is there a non-zero chance that Consecrated Sphinx is reprinted in Khans? Yes, absolutely. No matter how remote the chance, it's non-zero.

Now, if you had to weigh the probability that Prognostic Sphinx ends up playable post-rotation against the odds that Consecrated Sphinx is reprinted, it's easy to know on which side to bet. But that doesn't even matter! You're not weighing the odds that way because it tells you nothing. What you need to weigh is the probability that a relatively narrow card like Prognostic Sphinx has a home post rotation vs. the probability that any number of the myriad things that could happen to upset that don't happen.

We have no idea what could happen, but there are millions of possibilities, and a lot of them are bad for Sphinx. If the card did more things and were less narrow, the odds would be better. But, like Drogskol Reaver, this is a card vying for a very small number of roles in a very small number of decks, and it doesn't have a proven track record pre-rotation. It has a small chance of getting there and a lot can go wrong.

So What to Do?

I'd make safer bets. I don't like Prognostic Sphinx as a spec right now because there is too much we don't know. Isn't it better to make specs based on what we do know?

We know that we're getting multi-colored wedges.

I like this guy in a polychromatic post-rotation landscape.

Will the Soldier Decks Survive Rotation?

He can go in a lot of decks, and a lot of them survive rotation.

Will the Soldier Decks Need That Role Filled?

Yes.

Will The Next Block Fill That Role Better?

You can never have too many good one-drops, so even if Khans gives us a much better one, you can still jam this guy. Worst case scenario Soldier gets played in the board rather than the main deck.

I'd call him a much safer investment than Sphinx. He's not exactly the same bulk rare that Sphinx is, but he's only a little bit above a historic low and I think a lot of people are on the soldier train and the sphinx train. I'd rather buy a first class ticket on the soldier train than two...coach tickets, one on each... man, I feel like that train metaphor had a lot driving it initially, but it ran out of steam and ultimately derailed. Forget trains. Forget about Sphinx while you're at it.

Soldier of the Pantheon isn't the only card out there that's going to be a better choice than Sphinx for rotation pickups. There is stuff rotating that will get played in Legacy and Modern that will dip a bit and that stuff is guaranteed money, which seems better than gambling on Sphinx even if the potential return is better on Sphinx scratch-offs. There are better specs, better pickups, and anyone with copies of Drogskol Reaver in their "box of shame" can attest to that.