My “Trash for Treasure” series of article sure has taken some time off again; which is something that I wrote in the “Mirrodin – Artifacts Galore” article aswell. The first set of a block always takes ages because there are so many cards to go through while my willingness to write about them only lasts for a couple of entries before I do something else again. This time around was especially painful, I am not going to lie: Champions of Kamigawa is actually pretty terrible. Sure, there are a few surprisingly good cards in the set as always, but as soon as you look at it from a budgetary level of a maximum of 0.10€ per card you really have to sift through a lot of wastes of cardboard. It does not help that so many cards either are Spirits or support them in one way or another, since the entire Kamigawa Spirit tribal idea was ill-fated. But enough of me complaining: I went through the entire set giving you my opinions about the cheap cards of the set and compiling what I would deem solid enough for purchase if you were looking to have some staples around to work with.

After quite some time of writing impressions on cards, changing some layouting, and doing searches on Scryfall, I have finally managed to finish the Trash for Treasure article for Betrayers of Kamigawa, the second set of the Kamigawa block. Obviously, it continues to feature the heavy emphasis on Spirits, which means that there are lots of cards of the Spirit tribal, and keywords like Soulshift and Splice onto Arcane. The most unique new feature of Betrayers of Kamigawa are certainly the Ninjas introduced in the set and their keyword Ninjutsu, but it also was the first appearance of the Offering keyword (which is not going to be featured here since it is only printed on five Rare cards). It is not a crazy mix of weird keywords as the Saviors of Kamigawa article I have written before, and simply introduces a number of cycles that all marry into the already existing Spirit theme that Champions of Kamigawa introduced. But enough of that: I will go through all the cards in Betrayers of Kamigawa that cost less than 0.10€ on Cardmarket at the time of writing, the cheapest cardboard you can get, and then look for cards that might be still useful to have for deckbuilding purposes. Let’s start our journey through the set with the shuriken symbol:

It has been quite some time since I released the last “Trash for Treasure” article since they are wordy and clunky to write. However, they still convey useful information (at least, I think they do), so it is worth making more content in which I take a look at the cheaper cards in a set and determine what could be good to work with. I have done the Mirrodin block before, a block filled with powerful cards even at the low-cost range. However, the next entry might be a little bit more difficult: Kamigawa. As I am sure I have mentioned on the blog before, I do like the old Kamigawa with its conflict between the material and ethereal, but WotC blew it in fear of creating a lasting power creep situation after the Mirrodin scenario with keywords like Affinity. Starting with Saviors of Kamigawa, we have quite a lot of weird themes to work with. The entire set was themed around the idea of simply having lots of cards in your hand for bonuses, which kind of entails not playing the options you have in hand which is unhelpful. WotC also created keywords and cycles to make sure that your hand is packed, with the ill-fated Sweep to destroy your own mana base, cycles that bounce your own creatures for little gain, and the absolute madness that is the Epic keyword which basically makes you unable to play. But there might be yet something worthwhile in the card pool below the 0.10€ threshold, so without further ado let us take a look at the lantern has in store for us.