Just arrived at home after work and I decided to check on some new Core Set 2021 card previews on Reddit and found this Green gem of a creature. This may look unusual for the color to benefit from additional card draws as Green is mostly focused on brawn and beating up opponents with large creatures. Today’s card preview, however, does more than that.

Check out Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse:

Jolrael’s first Legendary card was way back in Prophecy where she can turn your lands into 3/3 creatures at the cost of two cards. This time, she gives bonus trigger ability when you draw your second card for each turn. Note the ‘each turn’ clause as you can have card draw spells (such as Inspiration) that you can instantly cast in your opponents’ turn for the added bonus.

A free 2/2 Green Cat creature token means that it can be sufficient enough to provide you threats as early as turn 3. The deck build, however, will be very relevant as to how this card’s potential can be maximized. I think you’ve guessed what the first build this card would fit, and that would be Simic Flash.

The build would be more of a cantrip tempo route rather than the usual heavy counter list. Opt, Chemister’s Insight, and Growth Spiral will be the first card choices along with a few cantrip spells such as Keep Safe. You can also consider Blue Mutate creatures from Ikoria (i.e. Dreamtail Heron). One in particular is the Sea-Dasher Octopus which grants a bonus of card draw when your creature it mutated on deals combat damage to a player.

Deck option #2 would be Temur Flash or Temur Mutate though the mana fixing and having mana dudes can be critical as well as the other card inclusions in the deck.

Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse will be a solid two-drop for these decks and I predict will be one of the cards to watch out for in the Standard metagame post-M21.

That is a wrap for now. Until the next blog post.