Ardent Plea

Enchantment

Exalted (Whenever a creature you control attacks alone, that creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn.)

Cascade (When you cast this spell, exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card that costs less. You may cast it without paying its mana cost. Put the exiled cards on the bottom in a random order.)

Discussion (49)

NinjaKitty778 on Fight With The Power Of Ten (Exalted)

4 months ago

Hello! Thanks for the comment on my deck! I'll see what I can do.

Ok so I see a lot in the way of aggro and not a lot of answers to problems. Don't get me wrong, dedicated aggro decks can be devastating; but they need to be quick and those cards are almost exclusively in red. This deck looks like it kicks off around turn 3-5 so we want to be able to do stuff in the early game. Bant is a color scheme that lends itself well to defensive tactics rather than harming opponents; this can take the form of protection, buffing creatures, or stalling until our game-plan can get off the ground. Now at the end of the day that game-plan is still "turn creatures sideways", so we want to make sure that the creatures we select are aggressive; but, the control colors in our deck (white and blue) can provide us with a fair amount of answers to problems that we can use both early and mid game to ensure our victory.

So what we want from the deck is:

1) Board Control/Stall Tactics 2) Protection 3) Card Advantage 4) Aggressive creatures

Often times these categories can overlap. For example: a creature with hexproof. That fills the "aggressive creature" and "protection" categories so that means we're getting more value out of just that one card, which is what we want. Variety is both the spice of life and the answer to our deck-building conundrum. So we want to make sure that our card selection is refined. So lets break each category down.

Board Control/Stall Tactics

I love the options Bant gives us for board control. Green has a lot of artifact/enchantment removal, white has a lot of good spot removal in the form of "exile" which gets around that pesky indestructible ability, and blue often bounces things off the board or counters things. So what options are best? Honestly, its up to you. But remember that the more options that a card gives you the more value you get out of it. Here are a couple of my favorite board control cards in Bant:

Authority of the Consuls Bant Charm Cryptic Command Detention Sphere Disallow Dromoka's Command Exclude Krosan Grip Path to Exile Qasali Pridemage Remand Spell Pierce Unravel the Aether

That should give you enough options to play with and see which ones you like best.

Protection

Protection spells are many and can come in many different forms, but ultimately it comes down to making sure our permanents stay permanent. For us this is most likely gonna be about protecting our creatures. Some of my favorite protection spells in Bant are:

Fog Gods Willing Grand Abolisher Heroic Intervention Mark of Asylum Shalai, Voice of Plenty Simic Charm

The longer our creature(s) stay on the field the more likely we are to win.

Card Advantage

This can either mean card draw, digging through our library, or just straight up tutoring. Some good options are:

Ardent Plea Brain storm Curiosity Eladamri's Call Gaea's Blessing Impulse Serum Visions Wargate

By giving ourselves card advantage, we can find solutions to problems a lot faster.

Aggressive Creatures

And finally we get to the bread and butter of the deck, the creatures. Now the mechanic we're working with is the Exalted mechanic, which states that if the player attacks with exactly one creature, then each card with Exalted (including the attacker) will grant that lone attacker +1/+1. This aggro tactic minimizes casualties in battle but doesn't reduce the armies strength during the attack phase. So the more instances of exalted we have the more powerful our lone attacker is. Here are some cards worth looking at into for this combat style:

Finest Hour Invisible Stalker Knight of Glory Noble Hierarch Rafiq of the Many Sublime Archangel

With these creatures at our disposal, opponents will often find it hard to outgrow our aggressive playstyle.

Now keep in mind that the exalted mechanic itself is very aggressive and simultaneously acts as the "buff" aspect of our defensive tactics that mentioned near the top. So we need little in the way actual buffing spells like Giant Growth; that leaves much more room open for including a lot more control and card advantage spells. Ultimately what you pick is up to you but try using the cards I've listed above as the basis of your card selection and go from there. Cross reference which cards fall into multiple categories for the best options possible. I don't want to just straight up give you a decklist, I want you to choose the cards yourself and make a deck that's entirely your own. I hope my longwinded advice helped LOL happy deck building.

Lezen on Fiery Colossus 20 Post

6 months ago

What's the point of Ardent Plea?? All the cards cost more.

Chandra585 on Card creation challenge

9 months ago

Birth of a Hero

Enchantment-Aura

Enchant Creature

Enchanted Creature has Protection from creatures with power 5 or greater

Exalted

Totem Armor

to clarify, the Aura has the exalted, not the creature. See Angelic Benediction and Ardent Plea for precedent. Make a Sorcery that involves Exalted.

jesmister on Bant Exalted

1 year ago

Add +2 Sublime Archangel Since she is insane. -1 Giltspire Avenger or Ardent Plea As cascading into path to exile, blossoming defense, or rancor with no creatures out is bad, or -1/2 Sigiled Paladin As he just seems very weak and you wont always have double white turn 2 with Cathedral of War , Breeding Pool , or basic island/forest draws? Also, Finest Hour (or Battlegrace Angel If you want a creature?) Looks very strong even though its 5 mana maybe replace one Rafiq of the Many with it or something?

FortFade on Badass Bant

2 years ago

Cheers elementalheroflamewingman! That is really helpful advice (sorry you had to wait so long for a reply, hahaha). You have convinced me and I have made some changes based on what you recommended.

Path to Exile is indeed an incredible card, MangoPunch; however I would not want to run the risk of accidentally cascading into it with Ardent Plea. For this reason, I eschew cards like Path to Exile in light of low-costing permanents and higher-costing control cards.

ZaphodBeblebrox on Rafiq Enchant

3 years ago

Suggested Removed: Mystical Tutor, Rhystic Study, Dueling Grounds, Ardent Plea, Silent Arbiter, Heliod, God of the Sun, Congregation at Dawn

Suggested Add: Sphere of Safety, Seasons Past, Simic Charm, Wargate, Altar of Bone, Eladamri's Call, Selfless Spirit, Stifle, Pull from Tomorrow, Disallow, Blue Sun's Zenith, Nature's Lore, Oracle of Mul Daya, Citadel Siege, Teferi's Protection, Argothian Enchantress, Bruna, the Fading Light, Gisela, the Broken Blade, Archangel of Tithes, Umezawa's Jitte, Sword of the Animist, Misdirection, Wild Growth, Utopia Sprawl, Ramunap Excavator, Primeval Bounty

Blackflame2121 on Ardent WUG - Magic Aids

3 years ago

Heretic_Dragoon The way cascade is written, I cannot cast a 3-drop off of Ardent Plea, it has to be a spell that costs less (Than the cascade spell). Maybe I should put more creature removal in the board, Journey to Nowhere perhaps? I don't know what to take out though. I did initially want to go esper with this list, but having green just makes it so much easier to out value my opponent.

Blubb3rb3rnd on

3 years ago

ChubyCryBaby Sry no. The Cascade on Bloodbraid Elf hits a random card with is not what i want to cascade into. I run no cards with a CMC of 2 or less to always hit Living End with my cascade cards. Elf is a good card but not here. I could also run Ardent Plea or Shardless Agent but think the 2 we run are enough.