UFO has officially landed! And with it comes a whole new spread of alien beasties and support for their type – Cosmic. However, before we start officially diving into UFO cards, we have to take one last stop in the Wilderness block set and take a look at a cosmic beastie that may be seeing more gameplay once UFO makes its way into the meta: El Verde Entity.
For three cosmic aura and one neutral, this 80 life point beastie alien has a pretty powerful contract effect that synergizes very well with other cosmic beasties, especially those with a lower aura cost. When contracted, El Verde Entity allows you to return any number of non-token cosmic beasties to their owners chapter. Then during the same turn, the next cosmic beastie you contract costs one less cosmic aura for each beastie you returned using this effect.
There’s a number of reasons why this ability is powerful, starting with the fact that if your opponent is playing cosmic or you have a Chaos Potion on hand, you can use this effect to send their beasties packing. A more in-depth reason as to why this is so powerful is that if you use this effect on your own beasties, you can re-contract them in order to reuse their contract effects. This is especially powerful when paired with the cosmic type due to the fact that a number of cosmic beasties have contract effects or traits that can do everything from stopping opposing beasties from attacking to revealing pages in your opponent’s hand. There are also beasties like Lizard People that, when contracted, let you search for other beasties in your deck and beasties like Atmospheric Jellyfish, which gives you two free cosmic aura if it’s the second beastie you contract – an effect that ties in very well here.
On top of that, thanks to the cost-reducing effect on El Verde’s ability, many of these cosmic beasties can be re-contracted for free just by bouncing one or two beasties. This is because many of these cosmic beasties only cost one or two cosmic aura in order to bring them to the battlefield. I think this ability could especially come in handy for control-style cosmic builds, as it allows casters to essentially swap out their smaller beasties in the late game for one of their more expensive game ending ones. Then once you have your cosmic beastie finisher, you also have El Verde to help bring down your opponent because it can swing for 90 total damage with both stars and forest Terra in play. Plus its attack has the scared effect indicator, which can force your opponent to return one of their beasties to their hand.
Really, the only downside to this card is its lack of traits and any sort of effect that would protect it from being taken out by your opponent. However, I don’t see this as too much of a downside, as the main purpose for this card is in its contract effect, which goes off when it’s summoned. If it were a power or effect that required it to remain on the field for a full turn before activating, I would be more hesitant to give it all the praises I’ve been singing. But since it’s a contract effect and it has 80 life points to keep your opponent at bay for at least a couple turns, I definitely feel like this card has potential, especially after seeing all of the cheap cosmic beasties with spicy contract effects coming in UFO!
