Magic the Gathering Card Analysis: Identity Crisis

Identity Crisis is a rare Gold sorcery card from the Alara Reborn expansion set of Magic: The Gathering. Its casting cost is two Black mana, two White mana, and two colorless mana. When Identity Crisis is cast, a target player must remove the cards in their hand and in their graveyard from the game. This can cripple an opponent whose strategy was based on resurrecting creatures from the graveyard.

One card that will help make good use of Identity Crisis is Telepathy, an uncommon Blue enchantment with a casting cost of one Blue mana. While Identity Crisis is in play, opposing players must reveal all the cards in their hands. Not only is this terribly annoying for those players, but it will give the player with Identity Crisis a heads-up when an opponent draws a powerful or useful card. This is the time to strike with Identity Crisis, preventing one's opponent from using those cards.

Identity Crisis is also very useful against players with a Black deck focused on putting cards into the graveyard and then removing them later. For example, the rare Black creature card Revenant has a power and toughness equal to the number of cards in its controller's graveyard. Its controller can use a number of other spells to discard cards, boosting Revenant's power and toughness, and then return the useful cards to their hand or into play later with spells such as Dread Return, which returns a creature card from a player's graveyard into play under their control.

However, Identity Crisis does not block an opponent from using a spell such as Ashen Powder, which allows them to put a creature from any graveyard into play under their control. If you wanted to be particularly evil, and you had enough mana-producing creatures and artifacts in play to limit the damage to yourself, you could also play a card such as Armageddon to destroy all lands. This would leave the player unable to use anything except for the creatures they have left in play.

The only real drawback to Identity Crisis is the fact that it is a sorcery, which limits the element of surprise and requires a bit more planning from the player to determine the perfect time to cast it. However, Identity Crisis is a very powerful card which can cripple an opponent relying on a graveyard. Even for a non-Black player, being forced to discard one's hand can prove a severe setback.

Source

MagicCards.info