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- What Is Blitz?
- How To Use Blitz
- What Colour Is Blitz?
On Magic The Gathering's crime-ridden plane of New Capenna, only one family can call themselves truly vital for the continued survival of the city: the Riveteers. While they once built New Capenna on girders in the middle of a wasteland, they now hang out in the lower levels of the city as a ragtag group of fighters, ruffians, and construction workers. Impatient and explosive, the Riveteers will demolish entire skyscrapers if you cross them and have more than enough tools to deconstruct your kneecaps.
The Riveteers move fast and hit harder, which is represented through their faction mechanic, blitz. Paying less mana for a short-term advantage is their entire style, so here is everything you need to know about the blitz mechanic.
What Is Blitz?
Blitz is an alternative casting cost you may pay when casting a creature. If you want to blitz a creature, you pay the associated blitz cost instead of its normal mana value: for example, Girder Goons costs four generic and one black to cast normally, but you can blitz it by paying three generic and one black instead.
Like other alternative casting costs like mutate and foretell, paying the blitz cost changes how the creature enters the battlefield. When you blitz a creature, it enters the battlefield with haste (meaning it can attack and tap the same turn it entered the battlefield). The creature also gains a death trigger: when it dies, you draw a card. It doesn't matter how the creature dies, whether it be in combat, sacrificed, or destroyed.
However, there is a catch with blitz. At the end of the turn, the creature you blitzed is sacrificed. This is the trade-off for the mechanic: you can either the usual casting cost and have a slower creature that won't draw you a card but sticks around longer; or you can blitz it, have it cause chaos straight away, give you card advantage, but only have it last a single turn.
Other than these differences, casting a creature using its blitz cost works the exact same as any other spell. Unless the creature you're casting has flash, it can only be used at the normal time you can cast a creature (on your turn, in your main phases, when the stack is empty), and the creature spell will have to resolve as normal.
As blitz is an alternative casting cost, it doesn't work anything else that changes the casting cost. For example, a Goblin Anarchomancer's cost reduction doesn't apply to blitz, and if you cascade into a creature with blitz, you can only choose to either cast it without paying any mana or pay its blitz cost.
How To Use Blitz
Blitz' intended purpose is as an aggro tool. It allows you to throw out creatures who deal damage straight away – after all, you don't need to worry about the end step if your opponent dies before then.
For the most part, blitz costs will be lower than their normal mana value. Cards like Jaxis, the Troublemaker; Plasma Jockey, Mezzio Mugger, and Pugnacious Pugilist all work this way, allowing you to throw them out onto the battlefield ahead of your opponent setting up an adequate defence.
That isn't a universal rule, though. Some creatures, like Riveteers Requisitioner, Workshop Warchief, and Wave of Rats all have death triggers of their own. Blitz is an effortless way to trigger those abilities, so for balance's sake they're higher than their normal cost.
Keep in mind that you'll draw a card when your blitzed creature dies for any reason, not just when it sacrifices itself at the end of the turn. If it dies in combat or is removed, you'll draw a card, which is good motivation to swing in and keep the pressure up. Critically, though, you'll draw a card if you sacrifice the creature in another way, such as if you cast a casualty spell. Blitz is amazing for casualty, as many of the creatures who have blitz have higher powers. If the creature is dying at the end of the turn anyway, why not burn it up to copy a spell?
Flickering (exiling and returning to the battlefield) give us a fun interaction with blitz. When the creature is exiled, it loses the forced sacrificed clause, but doesn't lose the card draw death trigger. If you have ways to flicker in your deck, doing it to a blitz creature is a fantastic of working around that sacrifice and keeping your cheaper creatures out for longer. Alternatively, cards that can make you skip the end step, like Obeka, Brute Chronologist; Glorious End, or Sundial of the Infinity also help keep your creatures out for a little bit longer.
What Colour Is Blitz?
Just like the other four new mechanics in Streets of New Capenna, blitz is limited to a specific family. Therefore, it's only found in the Riveteers' colours of black, red, and green.
As of Streets of New Capenna's launch in April 2022, there are 15 cards with blitz, all of them creatures. Most of them are mono-coloured, where six are red, four are green, and four are black.
Oddly for a family faction mechanic in the set, only one of them is multicoloured: Ziatora's Envoy, which is in the three colours of both Jund and the Riveteers: black, red, and green.
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