Hypnotic Specter
Creature — Specter
Flying
Whenever Hypnotic Specter deals damage to an opponent, that player discards a card at random.
Trade
| Have (2) | CompleteWaste , metalmagic |
| Want (1) | colorneon |
Printings View all
| Set | Rarity |
| Mystery Booster (MYS1) | Rare |
| Arena Cards (ARENA) | Rare |
| 2010 Core Set (M10) | Rare |
| Tenth Edition (10E) | Rare |
| Ninth Edition (9ED) | Rare |
| Ninth Edition Foreign Black Border (9EDFBB) | Rare |
| Anthologies (ATH) | Rare |
| Fourth Edition (4ED) | Uncommon |
| 4th Edition Foreign Black Border (4EDFBB) | Uncommon |
| Revised Edition (3ED) | Uncommon |
| Revised Foreign Black Border (3EDFBB) | Uncommon |
| Unlimited Edition (2ED) | Uncommon |
| Collector's Edition (CED) | Uncommon |
| International Collector's Edition (CEI) | Uncommon |
| Limited Edition Beta (LEB) | Uncommon |
| Limited Edition Alpha (LEA) | Uncommon |
| Promo Set (000) | Rare |
Combos Browse all
Legality
| Format | Legality |
| Duel Commander | Legal |
| Oathbreaker | Legal |
| Modern | Legal |
| Custom | Legal |
| Legacy | Legal |
| Casual | Legal |
| Commander / EDH | Legal |
| Unformat | Legal |
| Canadian Highlander | Legal |
| Arena | Legal |
| Historic | Legal |
| Oldschool 93/94 | Legal |
| Block Constructed | Legal |
| 2019-10-04 | Legal |
| Vintage | Legal |
| Limited | Legal |
| Highlander | Legal |
| Leviathan | Legal |
| 1v1 Commander | Legal |
| Tiny Leaders | Legal |
Latest Decks
Hypnotic Specter Discussion
MagicMarc on OVERplayed cards?
3 weeks ago
It's pretty historically proven that ramp, especially cheap and efficient ramp is a plus in any deck. It just makes everything faster and cheaper allowing you to make multiple plays, activations or whatever in a turn sooner than you could without something like Sol Ring or even Chromatic Lantern.
It's hard to call a staple overplayed. Its been reprinted like a million times and is still a 2-3 dollar card for good reasons.
It's hard to call a card overplayed that is banned or restricted in certain formats because of how much acceleration it provides. The only thing better than a turn 1 Sol Ring is turn 1 Dark Ritual into Hypnotic Specter. Just kidding, that is from a long time ago for Magic.
Sure, there are certain archetypes that may not benefit from the card, but like someone else said in this thread, those are probably an exception and certainly not the norm.
Titus7007 on
The Goyf Farm
1 month ago
MagicMarc The original version that I played also ran 4x Hypnotic Specter and together with Hymn to Tourach they dismantles a lot of threats, albeit most likely against lesser decks. I've changed things around sense then, but I haven't played paper at all since March, so I don't really know if the changes are for the better.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll pick the older cards up on EBay. I think I have the Heroic Interventions. I like to have a ~ 40 card maybe-board for a lot of my decks.
ilovemydoghisnameistuna on
Black discard
3 months ago
I often find with discard decks that it is really hard to close out a game, even with Hypnotic Specters and the like. I would recommend taking the Abyssal Nocturnus out of the sideboard and into the main and adding a 3-4 Liliana's Caress.
MrKillStar on
Kaervek, the Fun Police
3 months ago
For more police fun, I suggest Sudden Spoiling (Massacre Wurm smiles even more).
For some nice recursion: Mortuary/Haunted Crossroads/Tortured Existence.
Maybe some specters to discard as "police helicopters"? :D Hypnotic Specter;Liliana's Specter;Urgoros, the Empty One;etc.
For some secret CIA fun police, you could go for Nightmare Incursion;Sadistic Sacrament;Bitter Ordeal;Praetor's Grasp perhaps even Surgical Extraction for those pesky Shadowborn Apostle/Relentless Rats/etc. decks :D
From the newer sets, you could use:
Revenge of Ravens - more protection.
Witch's Vengeance - depends on your opponent's deck.
Bone Miser - great card if you manage to discard your own cards. It is pretty much Waste Not, but it works only on yourself.
Peer into the Abyss - works great with Underworld Dreams and Price of Knowledge.
lagotripha on
Everytime We Touch
3 months ago
Mono black has a lot of stuff to work with, as does vamp tribal. With the deathtouch/lifelinkers, P/T boosts are good. I much prefer stuff like Drana, Liberator of Malakir, Indulgent Aristocrat or Cordial Vampire in this kind of list, but bad moon will work.
The big advice I have is; plan your sideboard. Knowing that you can hate an entire FNM's meta out just by packing 15 Duress variants in your sideboard is great. Knowing that its a transformative board into Hypnotic Specter control is also great. Some notable options are Imp's Mischief, Whip of Erebos (the recursion is super good), Lashwrithe (build your own wurmcoil) or good old Sign in Blood.
abby315 on
I've got a very tiny bone to pick with you
4 months ago
Rasaru Join ussss!
You can just take out two Swamps for the Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and Cabal Coffers, or if you're really worried about having enough basic Swamps and you're not concerned about your opponents' graveyards, you can swap out the Bojuka Bog. But 36 lands (incl. Geier Reach Sanitarium) seems about right for what I'm running.
I'm torn on Liliana of the Dark Realms - I had her in, but took her out because she doesn't discard. In general I'd be looking to make a cut in the Utility category for her. You could probably cut Gray Merchant of Asphodel, since it's similarly expensive. It's just in there now for a bit of reach and lifegain to offset all the draw triggers, and because I already had him.
I'm not running Doubling Cube either, but you could take out Umbral Mantle - which I have in because it goes infinite with Magus of the Coffers, but Doubling Cube could be a more consistent way to get a lot of mana without running a do-nothing card in Umbral. Magus is still worth running on its own without Umbral, IMO.
Sword of Feast and Famine can go in for any of the "My Turn Discard" slots, since that's what it is. The weakest ones are probably Hypnotic Specter and Okiba-Gang Shinobi, but since you need creatures to wear the Sword, you might want to cut something like Raven's Crime instead.
Hope that helps! It's been a blast to playtest so far!
Boza on The Best Black Common
5 months ago
Dredge4life magwaaf it is in fact legal, but commons do not have the payoffs to pair with Dark Ritual or good enough commons to mitigate the card disadvantage. Since pretty much all storm cards are banned, and the classic Hypnotic Specter or Necropotence are not commons, Dark Ritual does not need to be banned. The most powerful thing you can do is probably turn 1 swamp + Dark Ritual + Dark Ritual, delving both to bring out Gurmag Angler.
In a similar vein, artifact lands Seat of the Synod are legal in Pauper, with the only Affinity-related banning in Pauper, while they were banned in their Standard and were on the initial banlist for Modern and will never come off it, you would think they are too powerful for pauper.
Femme_Fatale on Synonyms/Nicknames System for Deckbuilding and …
5 months ago
Introducing the synonyms/nicknames system to alleviate all those "wtf was that one land of that one cycle named?" problems that plague you.
This system is simple. It is designed to redirect terms that you typed out that match a synonym/nickname of a card, to that card name. This lets you never have to remember the name "Seachrome Coast" and can instead just type out "WU Fastland" (as an example). Note that this only works in text edit entries on deck lists and inventory, not the live edit or the card search forms.
There is a lot of other things that are utilised here as well.
- Godzilla Names
- Non-American Spellings
- Common Nicknames
- Common Misspellings
- Redirections of Misspelled Submissions
- Each side of a split card as a synonym (unless they already exist as a card).
Not needing to know the name of each card in a land/artifact cycle is a big boon, but you still need to know the nickname of that cycle and the syntax. For lands/mana rocks/the swords of X and Y at the present moment it is always "XY Nickname" or "YX Nickname". Examples:
- WU Fastland
- GR BFZ
- GW ABUR Dual Land
- BW Fetch
For 2 colour lands, it is always the two colour letters, followed by the nickname, and then followed by the option to have the world land either connected to the nickname or not. (these are all viable options for example: "WU Fast", "UW Fastland", "UW Fast Land".) For 3 colour lands, it is only the primary order of colour letters you see on cards, or the Alara/Khans name. (WUB Lair, Mardu Triome as examples.) Swords and other artifact cycles follow the same setup (though swords can also be "Sword of GB" or "Sword of G and B"), and mono colour land cycles use the same setup just with only one letter. Note that none of these are plural, so don't put that s in. Colourless cards that are a part of a cycle use C/Colorless/Colourless.
Some of these cycles don't have well defined names yet (like BBD) and some of these cycles have had too many names that people constantly fight over so there was no point in bothering to put them all in and instead I just used the TLA (specifically BFZ).
Goals:
The primary purpose of this is to make the ability to tag cards and edit decks/inventory far more robust than what it has been. Tappedout doesn't presently have a spellchecker, and to be fair most sites don't. It's not an easy feature to implement. So with this synonyms/nicknames feature, we can alleviate some of those aggravations of misspellings or different ways to spell a word by making them valid targets and redirecting them to the right card name. Another benefit of this is the ability to give cards shorthands or nicknames when the community largely doesn't remember the actual name of a card, just their shorthand. We have all been hit with "wtf is that land's name again?" when we know for a fact that it's just "the blue and white shadows over innistrad reveal land". This saves the step of having to open up a search engine to figure out the card name, and in general speeds up and makes the process of building decks and inventory, a lot more enjoyable.
Cycles that currently have nicknames: Show
A lot of the cycle synonyms are meant to intuitive and robust so that you won't even have to think about knowing what the exact written synonym actually is and still be able to get it right on the first try, though it will take time to reach a point in which this is 100% true. As an example of scope, each recognized nickname for a cycle creates 6 entries for each given card in that cycle. So the AKH lands have 30 entries for each card in that cycle, resulting in a total of 150 entries. The Triomes have the same amount, but if I were to add each individual string combination of the colour letters (WUB, BUW, WBU etc) then that count would increase by 45 for each entry, resulting 75 entries for each one, totalling at 375 entries for the whole cycle.
Nicknames will usually be things like "Snappy", "Bolt", "Path", "Bob", "FoW", etc. They are to be commonly used by the larger community as a whole, not what your FNM/play group exclusively uses (though this isn't a hard set in stone as I'm not omniscient).
Here's a list of nicknames that I have. Show
I have about 200+ cards of non-American spellings added as synonyms in this site, however I'm certain there's like, 5x that much I've missed. If you notice a non-american spelling I do not have in, let me know.
Here's a list of things that is in the works to do. Show
Limitations:
A card can have any number of synonyms/nicknames. But only one synonym/nickname can be tied to a card. So if a new card/land cycle gets printed that has covers a misspelling (like an UNcard might) or has that nickname as it's actual card name, those synonyms will get removed (as an example, Snapcaster Mage cannot have Snap as a nickname). We are also looking to limit the amount of times a synonym has to get removed so nicknames of cards during their presence in the standard formats are not likely to be put in, as they become forgotten or even re-used when they rotate out. These are also done manually so sometimes a change might just take a while to do if it encompasses a large number of cards or a large number of synonyms.. We also won't be going through alternate language as possible synonyms because WotC doesn't nearly double check duplicate card names for foreign languages as well as they do for English cards.
This is not something on the card submission form, so it is not available to edit for any user.
If you know of something missing like common misspellings or common non-American spellings that will be needed, or cycle syntaxes that you tried to use but didn't work, post them here and I'll review them for possible inclusion in the future.
EDIT: Before you ask for a nickname etc to be added:
- Check if it exists first by trying it out.
- Check if the larger community recognizes it, this is done by going around discords, lgs' and other forums about that nickname.
- Check if it has any nsfw, discriminatory or derogatory terminology, we straight up will not allow these.
This isn't a system for your pet nickname that your local playgroup uses. This is a system that can utilize nicknames that naturally grew organically out of continued use from the larger mtg community as a whole. This isn't a "which nicknames do you think this system could use" but rather "which nicknames that are used across the world that we have missed".