Bone Shards

 

Apparently I missed this one on the MH2 reviews. Perhaps I thought it was a reprint somehow? This card is great. A really useful little removal spell that can help enable some other synergies. The flexibility on this latest iteration of Bone Splinters is just enough to finally make this kind of card playable. This comes as a little bit of a surprise as it is a sorcery but being able to take out the main two types of threat for one mana with the additional cost of your choice is not only a burden we can stomach but often a perk. 

The card is somewhere around the Baleful Mastery and Bloodchief's Thirst mark. All three kill walkers and dorks and all three have potential cost incursions. Compared to Thirst Bone Shards scales rather better and can offer big midgame tempo swings. Early on the Shards are generally worse but that hasn't stopped Path to Exile being a premium answer for many a year! Thirst is a card that covers you but rarely pulls you ahead, it is a buoyancy aid at best. A necessary evil from time to time. Bone Shards however can be game winning thanks to the low cost throughout its range. 

Compared to Baleful Mastery Bone Shards simply has a much better downside. Giving away a card is far more dangerous than discarding one of your own. Conceding a good thing rather than taking control of a bad thing might not inherently have that feel bad emotion going on but it is absolutely worse. In theory the thing you lose will be your least important thing where as the thing you give them will be an average thing. This is also assuming that the additional cost is a cost and not a boon such as pitching a Bloodghast or sacrificing an Eye Twitch etc. Bone Shards is just a nice cheap removal spell that is reliable and often providing supporting synergy. Sure, it doesn't exile, it doesn't have an alternate play mode that skips past the potential drawback, and it isn't instant. Good frankly, the card is well placed as it is. I like my choices in removal to be interesting and with a little bit more this would be rather better than the alternatives and take away from those interesting choices. 

Presently I give it a 7/10 rating which sounds low given the praise just laden on it. I would still play clunkier fairer removal spells in more control decks as they don't need the spot removal to be part of what pulls them ahead as much. Also black is just doing really well for good removal these days and so there is less competition on those kinds of card. That lowers their pick rate and so has the appearance of reducing playability. Remove a couple of other cube worthy black removal spells from the pool and this could easily be an 8/10 card. It is likely a lock in for all budget cubes as well as any supporting sac or discard synergies, which is most cubes. In powered cubes the low cost carries it a long way, in unpowered cube the tempo swing is big (yes, these are similar things but specifically having a card you can play for 1 or 2 mana is important in powered cubes, the tempo element is more to do with low cost with high effect at all stages of the game. Force Spike has the former but not the latter for example). As it currently stands I struggle to think of a cube where Bone Shards shouldn't be. That all being said a meta swing or a continuation of the rapid printing of high quality cards and I can easily imagine this not remaining the case in perpetuity.