Hearthstone Player Rates EXPENSIVE Magic Cards w/ CovertGoBlue 

I am EXTREMELY disapointed that Covert didn't tell the Chaos Confetti story.

Rarran saying "Powerful nine" every time, and "Fable nine" is hilarious. The Fabled nine actually sounds kind of sick though.

In the early days of chaos orb, people stopped stacking their lands together because there was a risk of losing your whole stack of lands. Then some smartasses started making their library into the shape of a shelter and put cards below the overhang, to hide from chaos orb. One crazy dude went so far as to blu-tack his cards onto a whiteboard in a tournament in order to become chaos orb immune. That's the kind of stuff that led to its banning. XD

I'm glad Rarran mentioned Chaos Orb getting damaged, as there's a horror story about a player ripping theirs up before flipping it so it would hit more things.

I won't try to explain how illusionary Mask works specifically, but I do know it actually ended up seeing play in a combo deck. There are some creatures in magic that don't cost much but have a huge drawback when they enter the battlefield, including a 1 mana 12/12. With the Mask, you can cast them, but since they enter face down, the drawback doesn't trigger. It has never been broken, but it is probably why the price is a little higher

"The effect you just said, opening a pack, is really cool, I'd love to see that in other card games." *Elise the Trailblazer* "Am I a joke to you?"

One of my favorite facts about how Illusionary Mask originally worked is that your opponent can copy your face-down creature with Clone. Then they have a creature in play that they know nothing about. For example if the creature is a Wall, they might go: 'Ok, attack with it.', and you're just like: 'Nope!'.

I like how Rarran said "powerful nine" so many times that CGB even started saying it.

According to internal documents from the manufacturer (Carta Mundi at the time), there were 1008 copies of each rare Alpha card printed, and 3025 for the Beta ones. There is no officially confirmed information for Unlimited, but it's assumed to be around 16000 copies for each rare. All in all, between the three sets, it's safe to assume there were originally about 20000 copies of each Power 9 card.

Time walk was originally red and said "your opponent looses his next turn". They meant they missed it, but testers thought it was 1R win the game, so it was nerfed into this. Edit (time warp to time walk)

Illusionary Mask is a really weird card. I don’t know how it was errata’d because sometimes those errata’s can entirely change the effect of the original card. Based on the wording of this picture of the card, I would assume it works like this: When you summon a creature, you can pay any additional cost (or not). Regardless, the creature goes face down so your opponent doesn’t know what it is. As soon as you use the creature for any reason, it becomes visible again. The point of the card is basically like… if you had a powerful creature card with a very specific mana cost, you could potentially pay a weird mana cost to trick your opponent into not knowing what card it really was. Like something that cost 3 red and 2 black for example. You pay 3 red 2 black and then some additional amount of mana. Your opponent wouldn’t necessarily know which card you summoned. Or you could even try to trick your opponent by paying that mana cost for a different creature card trying to make your opponent think you paid zero mana for the Illusionary Mask effect for your big boss card, but, in reality, you just spent random extra mana tricking them. It’s garbage because it’s basically 2 mana do nothing except give you the option to overpay for a creature if you want.

For reference on how strong Ancestral Recall is, drawing 3 cards at instant speed is typically 5 mana these days.

I would really love if Covert showed you Silver Border cards such as from Unhinged and Unglued, please make it happen :D

I interpret the illusionary mask as saying that you can pay the casting cost of the creature and then also the X cost from 0 to whatever. The idea is that because your opponent doesn't know what mana went to the X and what mana went to the card they cannot guess what it might be

Video idea - Blue plays builds a magic deck and you build a closest copy of it in hearthstone, and Blue does the same

Regarding seeing Chaos Orb played IRL, it's a staple in 93/94 Old School. It has a slight errata to prevent the silly counter tactics, but it gets flipped all the time. It's like half the reason to play that format.

Rarran hitting the perfect 1$ on Consecrate Land was a success story like no other

Back in Alpha, there was no limit of how many copies of a card could be played. So the most powerful decks of all time were something like 20 black lotus, 20 timetwister, 1 lightning bolt. (decks could be 40 cards at that time). Basically, you kept shuffling until you could cast enough lightning bolts to kill someone.

Illusionary Mask is one of the few cards in the game where the errata basically makes up a new function for the card, because the original card doesn’t make any sense within the rules of Magic. It has been used competitively in the semi-recent past as a way to play giant creatures with tiny mana costs, but huge drawbacks as they enter the battlefield because it sneaks the creature in face down. The classic card with this is Phyrexian Dreadnaught.

The bizarre thing about Cyclopean Tomb: it didn't have a printed Mana cost in Alpha (using that art is a little deceptive as such), but it officially costs 4 Mana just to get into play. It's way too slow to be truly toxic: 4 Mana do nothing, then 2 Mana to maybe harrass your opponent a little bit.

I expected CGB to point out that the version of Cyclopean Tomb he showed doesn’t work as printed since it doesn’t have a mana cost and therefore can’t be cast. (The mana cost was supposed to be {4} and has been changed to that in its Oracle text and all later printings)

Regarding Illusionary Mask - X must pay at _least_ the casting cost of the creature you choose, including the necessary colours. At the time, the primary function was to conceal which creature you were playing. These days, it is primarily used to put creatures into play without trigging their enter the battlefield abilities. Most notably this card has been used with Phyrexian Dreadnought to cheat in a 1 mana 12/12 trample. From the extended rulings, if the amount you paid for X could not be used to cast the creature (e.g. paying 0 for a face down Grizzly Bears,) this would be considered a game rule violation, and appropriate tournament penalties would be applied when the violation is eventually discovered. The full ruling is as follows: If you use the ability to cast a creature card face down, you must keep track of the amount and types of mana you spent on Variable Colorless. If that creature spell is moved from the stack to anywhere other than the battlefield, the resulting creature leaves the battlefield, or the game ends, the face-down card is revealed. If its mana cost couldn't be paid by some amount of, or all of, the mana you spent on Variable Colorless, all applicable penalties for casting a card illegally are assessed.

To the judge- "His chaos orb is in a sleeve so technically its not touching my card"

So about the Raging River being undiscovered good, a very similar situation happened in base set of Pokemon TCG. The metagame for base set was between 3 archetypes consisting of "Haymaker", wigglytuff decks and a mewtwo deck. Stall existed as an archetype but had terrible matchups against those T0 decks. It wasn't until a guy called Hookah combined a bunch of his random bulk cards into a classic deck that the scene discovered Moltres & Lickitung stall, which proceeded to wipe the format 15 years after base set was printed. Dude wasn't even playing 4 copies of the important cards. Nowadays Haymaker is dead as it gets beaten out by multiple options that weren't considered previously and Mewtwo decks have had to change a lot of their cards out to adapt.

Camouflage is notable for being basically impossible to fit within the modern card text format. If you look at Scryfall or Gatherer, the card is even longer and arguably less comprehensible than the older version.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the story (or maybe urban legend at this point, I'm not even certain) about some player ripping chaos orb up and tossing it up confetti style

Timetwister is that expensive because its not banned in Commander. Also, good on Rarran for recognizing that Lorcana card "A Whole New World" is basically just MTG's wheel of fortune, which is the non-shuffle draw 7 part of Timetwister. Wheel of Fortune also inspired the cards Professor Oak and Imposter Professor Oak from the Pokemon TCG

Illusionary mask is a cool card. You put a card into play face down by paying at least enough mana to cast the creature card. It flips up when those conditions are met (would take or assign damage or become tapped). It avoids enter the battlefield triggers and it’s most common use is putting Phyrexian Dreadnaught into play without any drawback. (It’s a 1 mana 12/12 that makes you sacrifice 12 power of creatures when it etbs.)

Illusionary Mask simply requires you pay the exact cost of the creature or a superset cost. So for something like Ornithopter you can pay 0, but you can't pay 0 for a Raging Goblin. For that you have to pay at least one R and any amount of extra mana.

the funniest thing about old magic for me is that you only died at the end of the current phase, so you could just do whatever while chilling at -100 life as long as you got back above 0 before the phase ended. the game only checked if you are dead at the end of every phase but you could casually revive yourself no big dead during a phase

For Illusionary Mask, simply put you can pump any extra amount of mana, even 0, to hide the real casting cost of your creature. So you can pay 7 mana for your 2 mana creature if you reaaaaaaaly wanted to.

The thing about the power 9 is that 5 cards are copies, so it's really like the 5 most powerful cards not the 9 most. Totally get why he guessed so many cards were in it.

I think the most fascinating part of this video is just learning how wild the beginning of Magic was (and really early card games when you think about it). I recall land destruction being common place back then but to think creatures were much weaker before is nuts when creatures matter so much more now. Great video idea and would love to see something like this again!

Ancestral recall was actually part of a cycle of cards (one for each color) called the boon cycle which all did 3 of a thing for 1 mana. Blue: Ancestral Recall-draw 3 or force an opponent to Black: Dark Ritual- add 3 black mana Red: Lightning Bolt- deal 3 damage to a creature or player Green: Giant Growth- target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn White: Healing Salve- gain 3 life or prevent 3 damage to a creature or player That's roughly in order of their power, though 2 and 3 could be swapped. White really got the short end of the stick.

We need more of this stuff. This is so cool to see my two favorite games overlap. MtG has so many cool stories with it and it’s super fun to see Rarran’s reactions to them. Reminds me how much I love these games even beyond the gameplay!

Rarran you forget at 23:25, that elise gave you an ungoro pack that you would shuffle into your deck, so Hearthstone did have something like that !

Always loving these types of vids Rarran. Keep it up ❤❤❤

I wonder if eventually we will see Rarran featured in an episode of Command Zone learning commander or a video with the prof. It'd be so cool to see him interact further with the MTG community.

this is one of my favorites of all these M:TG videos, it's hilarious. I would love for this to just be a series of CGB traveling through the various sets in order of release(or maybe blocks of sets) picking out the interesting and unique cards to discuss with Rarran.

When I was new to MTG. I just went to a comic book vintage shop that also sold just collections of mtg cards. They had a box of something like 200 cards for like 15 bucks. For starting out, felt like it was a deal. Since they were a vintage store first, and not a card shop I can only assume they didnt know the value of Black Lotus as there was one in that box. However, I wouldnt know its value either and gave it away without realizing my mistake till about 6 months later when I learned about some of the most expensive cards

Regarding the Illusionary Mask: You must fully pay the legal mana cost of the spell and you can optionally pay more to hide the mana cost of the spell. I believe you can technically pay less (or wrong colored) mana, but then the spell is considered illegal when flipped up and you must return it to your hand and potentially suffer a game loss.

There was a fun practice while Chaos Orb was still legal where people would spread their cards so they were more than one card-length apart so it would be harder to land on multiple things at once. Because Magic has no strict board layout, it was all totally legal, and very funny.

Chaos Orb is also a currency item in Path of Exile because Chris Wilson one of the games creators is a huge mtg fan so he put it in the game as an homage.

I've won tournaments playing Illusionary Mask before, but it works differently now than it did in the past. The key interaction was you can play it with Phyrexian Drednought, and it allows you to skip the CIB trigger. In older Magic, the mask put the creature into play, so it got around counterspells (it doesn't work that way now). When you activate it, you must pay the full mana cost for the creature - It doesn’t allow you to cheat costs. You can pay extra mana to disguise what you’re casting, but you don’t have to. The current rules make it work similar to Morph. You play the card face down. Anytime it taps or takes damage it will trigger, and turn over.

FINALLY MTg content from my favorite goober

white was acutely really good in alpha, it had some of the best creatures with white knight and serra angel and the best removal with wrath and swords

Chaos Orb Story: Plays Chaos Orb > rips up Chaos Orb in 20 little pices > throws the snippets on the table > wipes the opponents board > opponent baffeled > crowed baffeld > judges baffeld > wins game

I love all the videos with these two. I don't even care about Hearthstone at all, and I love these videos, so someone who likes both Hearthstone and Magic must more than love these videos. They really are great.

I want to see Rarran rate the card Balance

Google says there's almost 30,000 Black Lotuses out there (across all printings).

Mask + Phyrexian Dreadnought used to be a deck! The PD was a 12/12 for 1 mana and a wildly detrimental enter the battlefield trigger. By using mask, you could dodge the trigger and get the body very cheaply.

31:29 You activate the artifact anticipating x amount of mana (probably keeping note of the colors). When the hidden creature is tapped, would deals damage or is dealt damage or (i think) interacts with any object or relevant effect you have to pay the mana to cast it, otherwise it is countered (probably)

old magic cards have the text clarity of new YGO cards

Alpha is simply expensive by virtue of being limited print run.

Twiddle was in Alpha to let you untap time vault, but it didn't let you go infinite. For illusory mask, you pay the creature's cost + any amount as you cast it. The "without paying it's mana cost" is just so you don't need to reveal the cost. So you could pay 10 for a 1 drop to bluff it being good, but not 1 for a 10 drop.

I LOVE how every card player has his terminoligy, like Rarran names the colours classes: "The black class" it would have never come to my mind since I started with MTG and then went to Hearthstone. Same goes when MTG players call everything creatures, yugioh heads call them monsters and hearthstoners call em minions. So fun!

The X in Illusionary Mask is different in printed text vs oracle text. In the printed version, you can activate it for X=0, and then cast a face-down Grizzly Bears for its normal cost of 1G. (Or choose a different value of X to hide the fact you're casting a 2-mana spell.) In the oracle version, the X includes the mana cost of the creature. So you could only use it to cast a face-down Grizzly Bears if X contains 1G or more (but you wouldn't have to pay the creature's cost a second time).

I could be wrong but the way that I understand illusionary mask to work in mtg terms is {x}: cast a creature card from your hand with mana value x or less face down whenever it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped instead turn it face up and it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped face up (basically meaning it acts normally now). some notes is that the errata makes the face down version a 2/2 when it is face down all of its triggered effects like entering the battlefield effects don't get triggered feel free to correct me or to make a more accurate summary this is just as i understand as a player of mtg but certainly no judge

When you activate Mask, the X cost you pay has to at least cover the mana cost of the creature you hide (that’s the “which you still have to pay” in the original text, and the “could be paid by…” in the oracle text). The answer to “what happens if you just pay 0” is that you can’t do that (unless of course the creature you hide is free). The original “point” of the card is the hiding thing. But what it actually gets any play for is skipping enters-the-battlefield replacements/triggers, like that of Phyrexian Dreadnaught (why yes I would like a 12/12 trample for 1 mana thanks)

cant wait for the next video of this as well as CGB plays Commander with Rarran

So happy they did a video like this about old cards. Mtg card history is great.

These collabs with CGB are really fun! Love the video!!

23:20 The "open a pack, pick a card" effect reminds me a lot of Elise the Trailblazer, from back in Un'Goro

HYPE! i love rarran mtg collabs

For Illusionary Mask: You can play a card face down by paying it's mana cost, and if you wish, pay extra mana as a way of disguising it: EXAMPLE: this could be used to trick an opponent into thinking a 1/1 is a more powerful card or to play minigames about what you just played.

@Covert: Illusory mask works like this - pay the normal casting cost of the creature you are casting then pay any amount of additional mana you'd like (including zero) and play the creature face down. Then it flips under the conditions stated.

I'm proud of you Rarran, you nailed that final price.

Ayy, I get to explain Illusory Mask! So basically the idea of this card is that you have to pay the mana cost for the creature you cast when you cast it, just like any other Magic card. The X cost to activate is so you have the option of bluffing what that card is by paying extra mana. So for example, you could pay 4 and play a card face down and your opponent wouldn't know if the creature cost 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Paying X = 0 means you play the card for its normal cost. Paying 0 mana overall means you can only play a creature that costs 0, since the total amount of mana you spend has to be at least as much as the creature would cost normally.

Illusionary Mask is an insane card. It basically let's you hide the cost of the creature and put it in morphed, and auto-flip it if you would attack, block, or tap it, or if something would affect it. It let's you mindgame your opponent for if they want to respond, or let you cast creatures while skipping EtB effects. Being about to cast something like Phyrexian Dreadnaught with no downside, without needing a Stifle in hand at the same time, and it is reusable.

Sooo after a bit of Research on Illusionary Mask, it got erratad into Pay X, where X is the CMC (Mana Value) of the Card or More (Designed to Fake out an Opponent i guess) to put it into play as a Morph (2/2 without any Effect (ETB (Enter the Battlefield Effects) do not trigger)). If the "Morphed" Card would be dealt Damage or Deals Damage / would be tapped, it's "unmorphed" and assigns it's Attack/Defense Stats into the Combat. It's more or less a Funny Way to Overpay for Cards and try to Fake out your opponent with Say a Shivaan Dragon when it really was a Crap Card. Atleast thats how i understand the Card and after researching it for like 30 minutes im pretty sure, that's how it works. Dont forget that back in the Ruleset we had Manaburn (each Mana you produced by Effects and/or Tapping Lands that wouldnt be used up after a phase would deal 1 Damage to yourself) aswell, so you could get rid of overproduced Mana by overspending for the Effect.

Mask has a combo with cards like phyrexian dreadnought for a 3 mana 12/12, so it has seen occasional legacy play, those decks use dress down now tho but with more phyrexian dreadnought it could see play again

If I’m getting it right, illusionary mask is used to make your opponent think ur summoning one that costs more then it really does. Then they might use some of their important removal on what they think is a 6 mana card but it’s actually like a 2 mana one. So for that I would tap 2 for the creatures cost and 4 more for the cost of the mask.

I can't believe he didn't tell the Chaos Confetti story

On Illusionary Mask: They way it works is simply that you play a creature spell face down by paying at least its cost, and you can adjust its cost with any amount of mana, usually calling all the colors to confuse the opponent. It wasn't played a lot, but one of the ways it used to be played then (I have some Illusionary Masks, I was there, I am that old) was on small creature decks, where you would throw a bunch of low cost high effect creatures for the time, like Hypnotic Specter or WhiteKnight, and make them all cost the same mana, so your opponent would know which creatures you had in your deck, but had to figure out which of the 2-3-4 creatures was the one that was the real threat for his deck. So I summon this for UBB, and this for UBB and this for UBB, etc. Games used to last a very short amount of time with the classic Land-BlackLotus-Channel-Fireball combo, but when Channel got banned and Black Lotus restricted, some people like me attempted to make fringe cards like this one work. As for the Chaos Orb legend, it happened at a Canadian Tournament in 1994, when a guy brought a deck to the tournament including the Chaos Orb, and proceeded in tearing it apart in the final game, and flipping all the small pieces onto the opponent's playing field, hence destroying most of his lands and creatures, and some of his lands in the process, and winning the final bout of the tournament. The ref didn't know what to do, since it was a first, and since all the small pieces turned, they were all considered the "Chaos Orb", and the guy won the tournament, for which the first prize was a black lotus and an unlimited box, so the cost of the Chaos Orb was offset tenfold. I had a college friend who played at that tournament and witnessed it first hand. Right after, an errata was added to Chaos Orb to indicate that it had to still be a card. That was back when the erratas would come in the magic magazine Scrye.

Best part is both of them trying to figure out how the hell Illusionary Mask works, pulling up the FAQ and getting even more confused.

Illusory Mask quick version: Chose a creature with cost Y in your hand. Pay Y+X: Put it onto the battlefield face-down (In modern magic by definition a face-down creature is 2/2 morph). You can only pay 0 total if Y = 0. The card, while not inheritly busted, was part of a powerful combo play with the card Phyrexian Dreadnaught. Dreadnaught is normally a 1-mana card that has a debilitating ETB effect that makes you normally effectively sac your board, including it if you don't have enough power on board already. If you illusory mask it, you avoid the etb effect by just paying 1 to put it out face down and get a 12/12 trample.

30:58 This card seems very simple to me. Say you want to pretend your typhoid rats is a Sheoldred. You pay X=4, play the rats face down, having “wasted” 3 mana. Boom, you have an up to 4 drop in play, face down. Or, you pay 4 mana later for a face down actual Sheoldred, then the mind games of “can I kill it with less than 5 damage?” comes into play. Ofc, playing Sheoldred face down wouldn’t be great, but maybe it’s a Skithryx, or a Lich.

Illusory mask just says X must be the cmc of the creature. Which includes zero ofc. And then the moment it meets the criteria it’s flipped. Also you would have to show it at end of game to make sure you didn’t cheat and pay an incorrect casting cost. The same penalty you would get if you drew extra cards. It’s just honor system.

The original printing of Time Walk said, "The opponent loses their next turn." When people first started playing the played the card as if it just kills your opponent for two mana.

Word of Command's best (most realistic) lines of play are usually to forcer them to use their removal on their own creatures, or discard/burn spells on themselves. In those cases, it's a guaranteed 1 for 1, and often a 2 for 1 for BB. Board wipes can also be very good if you are behind, and they are just holding a board wipe because they have a more valuable board. You can swap the game state pretty fast. It also uses their mana, so you do deny them whatever else they were planning on playing that turn too! Very good card. My personal Favourite I specify most realistic, because obviously the best lines of play are like, making them cast time stretch targeting you on their upkeep, or some other unlikely scenario.

If camouflage can ve used to activate mega-morph or other "when card is turned face up" effects you could trigger a bunch of abilities with it that have already been in effect. MKM with its disguise mechanic could allow for some interesting use if the effects get triggered once blockers are declared.

Ancestral Recall is one of 5 specific 1-mana instants in Magic's history (1 for each colour, and each does 3 of something), but is by far the most powerful and most iconic one. The others include Dark Ritual (black; Pay 1 black mana to add 3 black mana to your mana pool), Giant Growth (green; target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn), Lightning Bolt (red; deals 3 damage to any target), and the white one (which I don't remember what it is, and it isn't very good). Giant Growth and Lightning Bolt see more regular play, while the white one's usage is almost nonexistent today. Dark Ritual is the second-most powerful of the 5, and as such is only legal in a few formats (a couple more than Ancestral Recall).

I wasn't aware of Lich. Seems to have inspired the Lich's Mastery card, which I actually use pretty frequently as a combo piece in one of my decks.

This video was a sleeper banger holy shit I didn’t expect to enjoy this video as much as I did. For context though. I play both hearthstone and magic. But I only had played with a couple beta cards and didn’t recognize any that weren’t black lotus or the 5 mana generation cards. So learning about them was really fun. And seeing how much weirdness was in the wording added a lot to the video for me. But 10/10 rarran. One of my favorite guests too

0:22 Love covering Covert's face with his avatar.

So, for Illusionary Mask, the way it works is you pay any value for X, keeping track of mana symbols and such. Then, you can take any creature from your hand with a maximum value of X, whose mana cost can be covered by the mana you used to pay for X, and play it face down. So, if you pay RUBGW for X, you can cast any creature from your hand with a maximum CMC of 5, and that requires any combination of that mana to cast - so you can cast anything with a cost of W, B, U, R, G, 1W, 2W, 3W, 4W, 1U, 2U and so on and so forth. It's a super convoluted way to give any creature morph well before morph because an actual thing.

Huh. I always thought interrupts was just an unrefined version of an instant spell, I never knew that there was more to it. Cool

Illusionary Mask lets you pay EXTRA for creature spells (Or the exact amount) and cast it face down as a vanilla 2/2 creature (Which is mentioned nowhere) that flips up if tapped/damaged/deals damage. So its purpose was to hide your creatures from counterspells, removal, etc. Sometimes you just want to pay 5 mana for a Birds of Paradise to bluff it is a Serra Angel you know. Also turns all your creatures into a 2/2 I guess, so that's something.

Fun competitive chaos orb storie, a guy shredded is chaos orb and threw the pieces to wipe the board. I don't remember the judge call on this but it fueled the ban for this card. So many funny and wierd stories with this card.

So, Illusionary Mask: When you use it, you need to pay the creature's actual mana cost plus any additional amount. The creature becomes a 2/2 without any other attributes until one of the conditions for turning it face-up are met. So if you attack (unless it somehow got Vigilance) or it would be involved in a damage exchange, it gets turned face-up. It's similar to a card with Morph, where the morph cost is the card's mana cost + X, except you can't turn it face-up as a special action.

Love these kind of videos!

Anyone wanna explain the timewalk art? I love that this horrific scene is supposed to represent the amazing ability of bending time. It's so scifi

I looked into the rulings for illusionary mask. Basically, X has to be AT LEAST the mana cost of the creature (including the exact colors required). It can be more (for the purpose of keeping information from your opponent) but it can't be less. What makes this card very weird from a rules perspective is that most cards that use properties from hidden zones require you to reveal that information to make sure you can't cheat. This card, by its very function, cannot allow that (there is no way to check if you actually payed the required amount before the creature resolves and enters the battlefield without spoiling the entire point of having that cost be X and not just the creatures mana cost). The rulings on gatherer basically say that players should note exactly what mana was used to activate the mask (including colors), then, either when that creature leaves the battlefield, is flipped, or when the game ends (basically, whenever the front face could first become common knowledge), you check it, and if the person playing the mask cheated, you deal with it then. So to answer your question exactly, if you pay 0 into the x ability of the mask, you get whatever creature you want out, but unless its a 0 cost creature, you are officially cheating, and the consequences will come once the front face of that card is revealed. When in doubt, I find the gatherer rulings page to be a pretty solid first resource for weird rules, especially when its just one card and not an interaction between two cards.

To use illusionary mask, follow these simple steps: 1. Choose a creatuee card in your hand 2. Pay its cost, and any extra you want to pay to hide the exact cost you paid from your opponent 3. Put the creature in play face down 4. Wait for something to happen to it (damage, targeting, tapping, etc), at which point you turn it face up. This is useful because the creature doesn't enter play as itself, so paying 1 mana into the mask lets you put a 12/12 phyrexian dreadnought into play without triggering its detrimental trigger on entry

The strat proposed at the end with Timetwister is one I fell victim to in a game of Arena a few months ago, except the opp used Arcane Bombardment to let them *keep* using both every turn. Shit was unseemly.

So, the way Illusionary Mask works is that you can play a creature from your hand face down for any mana cost. When that creature is dealt damage, receives damage or is tapped, you must pay the amount of unpaid mana. If you don't pay that mana, you sacrifice the creature. I'm not 100% on this, but I'm fairly sure. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

What i absolutely love is i have been playing magic for many many years now and i play mostly Comander so i know of older cards more then the average player and there are still so so many old cards that suprises me Raging River i never seen or heard of that before and it being in red that is so crazy funny

I dont know if someone already explained but illusory mask works like this: the amount of mana and the type of mana that you pay when you activate it needs to be able to cover the cost of the creature, for example if you pay 5 mana (lets assume 3 colorless and 2 red) to activate mask you will be able to put a creature that cost at most 5 and has at most 2 red colored mana in the creature casting cost. So basically the X amount you pay for orb needs to be more or equal to the cost of the creature, you will not be able to pay zero to put a creature that costs more than zero

In Old School '93/'94 format, Chaos Orb is an absolute staple. About a third of all decks run it, but it comes with the limitation of only being able to target one permanent.

the way Illusory mask is writen: You pay for a creature as normal, but you can pay any extra amount (the mask effect) to hide the true cost. If you pay 5, the card you are summoning has to be at most 5 cost (paying 0 from mask effect). You can play this as just a way to hide your creatures (always paying 0 extra), or mindgame if you would have a creature to summon and unspent mana that turn. Notice this is "extra cost" so you have to be able to pay for the creature with the correct colors. The creature cost doesnt become colorless since the mask effect is on top of paying the creature, not in replacement. The reason this could be good is because you are guessing what you are removing, and they could have bait or a combo piece on the board and you would to anwser it or maybe lose the game.