When I first saw this card on the spoilers I knew it would be good in some cube decks, but I feared it would be too narrow to be a good drafting staple. I figured the card was low impact enough that you really needed to have a deck focused on discarding things to make it a viable inclusion in a drafting cube. Even if you support things like Reanimator in your cube, you want your discard outlets to be cards that are otherwise playable outside of those decks like Faithless Looting or Liliana of the Veil (and Entomb, that is just good enough to suffer being incredibly narrow!). Support cards that only go in one archetype wind up going last pick a lot and lead to less interactive drafts and I feared Collective Brutality would be exactly that sort of card.

Certainly Collective Brutality is at its best when you are a deck that actively seeks to discard things as one of its main strategies however I have found through much play with the card that it is actually impressive in almost any deck list. On the face of it Collective Brutality looks like one of the Charm cycle from Return to Ravnica. A two mana card with three options of what are roughly one mana effects. The Charms are instant, but gold, compared to the easier to cast sorcery speed Brutaility which is overall a pretty similar power level. The Charms have been consistently being culled since their addition to the cube for being generally underwhelming. When the situation occurs to sensibly use one of the modes you don’t ever feel like you got value. The reasonable utility of the cycle did not offset the low power of the effects enough to have them shine in a cube setting.

There are a couple of reasons why Collective Brutality is exceeding expectation despite seeming so comparable to the Ravnica Charm cycle. The range on the effects is impressively encompassing. It is very hard for it to be a dead card in any matchup and often has viability on several of the modes. The Charms all tended to be reactive effects while Collective Brutality is much more proactive. Only the -2/-2 option has a precondition to be useful and a creature in play is one of the more common things to encounter during any game. As such you can usefully fire off the card at any point on your curve that you have a gap or that otherwise fits your plan.

Another aspect that comes from the encompassing range on the three options is that the card makes you feel pretty safe. I have had it in matchups where the ability to pluck a counterspell effect from their hand is something I expect them to struggle to beat. I have also had it where the ability to kill their one or two drop dork is something I feel will buy me enough time to get in the game. The two point Syphon Life is of little consequence early in the game. It is only really used when you have stuff to put in the bin or as a buffer against aggressive red decks just because two life is ultimately going to be better in that matchup than most of the cards in your deck! Late game however having two points of reach damage will sneak some wins and a surprise two life can swing a race. Compared to any of the Charms, the set of the three effects on Brutality are much more things you could want in any deck and against any deck.

The main reason Collective Brutality shines is of course the escalate mechanic. A two point drain life is a really weak effect, if it were on a Charm it would make the card much narrower and worse. The reason it is so much better on Brutality is that you can do it on top of doing something useful. Look at Siege Rhino and how good that is, a four mana 4/5 trample isn’t exciting, a card for a three point Syphon Life isn’t great but put them together and you have one of the best creatures going. This logic applies to the rest of the options on Brutality even more than with the Syphon Life effect. When you can usefully do more than one option the card suddenly becomes very good value for mana. Disfigure and Duress for two mana and two cards is a very reasonable deal. In the situations where you have two useful modes to use then the card starts to feel like an Arc Trail. It causes a huge swing in the game that can happen very early. The discard is entirely your call, it can be spare lands or top end you don’t expect to be relevant in time. Collective Brutality effectively turns dead cards into useful effects when you have it in hand. It is a pseudo card quality effect although not one that helps much in a mana screw beyond being able to do a fair amount itself for not much mana.

As you can see the escalate is a strong and useful addition to the card even when you have no discard synergy at all just through the options, tempo and card quality effects it has. When you do have any synergy however the card goes through the roof. The really dedicated decks like Reanimate will play cards specifically to put things in the bin, sometimes complete do nothing cards like Putrid Imp. While Collective Brutality is a mana more than the Imp it isn’t card or tempo disadvantage which goes an awfully long way to improving the overall power of the deck. Duress and Disfigure are both cards a Reanimate deck might play, the former especially so. Having a card that is not only a split card for either with some bonus utility and fuse going on but that is also a discard outlet is really just the complete package. Even in decks with mild discard synergy rather than those dedicated to doing it. Perhaps it is a midrange list with a Recurring Nightmare, perhaps you have a Bloodghast, Vengevine or Gravecrawler. Perhaps you just need to get to delirium or have enough things to delve out a card. A surprising number of decks have a surprising amount of synergy with discard and Collective Brutality makes them all better.

When a card is obviously playable in cube and then significantly outperforms that initial expectation it is a card well worth keeping an eye on for other formats. While it might not have a place in constructed yet it is a powerful and cheap spell that is one of the best at performing the role of discard outlet. Even if it never finds a place in standard I would be stunned if it didn’t find its way into modern. Certainly put one in your cube but also perhaps set by a play set of these too.