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I'm a relatively new MtG player, and among my first batch of cards was Leyline Phantom:

At first I wondered what I'd do with a card that might return to my hand regularly. Is it a relatively cheap source of power and toughness at a trade-off? I figured this would be mainly used for triggering various effects, but I had no idea what they were until yesterday. It would work very well in at least these two situations:

  • It cooperates well with Sage's Row Denizen from the Dimir Delusion starter, which mills the opponent a little bit each time a blue creature is played and can help strengthen other Dimir Delusion cards.
  • It could be used to regularly trigger evolution in Simic Combine creatures.

Now I'm wondering what other uses for it I'm missing, and whether there's even more to the above two points than what I've mentioned.

How can I take advantage of Leyline Phantom?

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  • @murgatroid99 Why are you removing images from posts? I would prefer it to be present, and don't see a particular reason to remove it.
    – doppelgreener
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 2:18
  • It takes a lot of vertical space for the information it communicates, which is already basically redundant with the gatherer link to the card. I was going through old posts to try to improve them, and removing images seemed like a good way to make posts conform to current standards. That said, I don't have a strong preference, and I won't try to change it if you put it back.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 2:43
  • @murgatroid99 Okay. I prefer it being there, and don't feel it's redundant given it's the entire focus of the question, and vertical space is not much of an issue. I will roll back the edit.
    – doppelgreener
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 2:50
  • @murgatroid99 It's not redundant: I live in a locale where English is not the primary language. Here, gatherer links often misfire, because the website automatically translates based on locale information. But the link searches by English name, resulting in no matches. It's also nice just not having to click through.
    – Esoteric Screen Name
    Commented May 3, 2015 at 10:09
  • @EsotericScreenName That sounds like a bug in Gatherer. And, unlike the apostrophe problem, it might be important enough to fix. I would suggest sending an email to them detailing the problem with an example or two. In the meantime, you might be able to work around that problem by changing your preferred language to English.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Commented May 3, 2015 at 16:38

2 Answers 2

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You've pretty much summed it up yourself. While you probably would not put Leyline Phantom in a constructed deck, it saw a fair amount of play in limited, since it both has a pretty big body for the cost and has various synergies with a few other cards in the same limited environment.

I would not spend to much time trying to figure out other ways to use the card; since the card is just not very powerful. I'm sure there are plenty of other cards that combo with Leyline Phantom, but for most of those there are lots of other cards that combo even better (e.g. the "gating" creatures from Invasion block).

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If you were running a Blue and Green (Simic) deck featuring creatures with Evolve (like Experiment One or Gyre Sage), it could be very beneficial to cast Leyline Phantom multiple times, as the combination of a high power/toughness, plus a (relatively) low casting cost would let you trigger Evolve several times.

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