A thread was started by Justin Vazaro titled “Just Broke Tamanoa” over at the TCGplayer.com forums. I clicked on the link thinking that his usage of “broke” implied that he found a way to completely abuse this card possible by going infinite with it. I was disappointed.
I don’t think there is a single intelligent Magic player who didn’t scream Searing Meditation when they saw Tamanoa. The cards were obviously made for each other. To declare he broke it by putting these cards together in the same deck, throwing in some non-creature burn, is very underwhelming. The fact that the combo revolves around a creature, the only creature in a deck, with a standard metagame extremely focused on killing creatures makes the whole idea of putting a deck together around Tamanoa stupid.
Tamanoa strikes me as a great sideboard card for Zoo vs. Zoo mirror matches and nothing else. I do not understand why such an accomplished author could take such a path of least resistance while trying to assemble a deck.
I’m going to write more about the “path of least resistance” at a later date. If you read as much about Magic as I do you’ll find authors and forumites always fall for this trap and subsequently publish article lists that anybody with half a brain could come up with.
