Platinum Angel is a card that has intrigued me for a couple reasons.  The most obvious being right there in the rules text: "you can't lose the game and your opponent can't win the game."  Yeah, that is a doozie.  I guess if you're paying 7 mana for a 4/4 flying artifact then it had better do something pretty cool.  After holding out a while, curiosity got the best of me and I dropped the 1.4 tickets for an online version.  The assumption being that I would throw it in any deck that needed a late game boost.  I was surprised by the results.

[caption id="attachment_182" align="alignright" width="200" caption="simple but effective"][/caption]

For clarification, I only bought one.  A single Angel.  Not a flock, or a swarm, or a murder, or whatever you call four angels.  Angii?  It seemed to me a simple thing for my opponents to rid themselves of.  Indeed, its not only a creature, it happens to be an artifact.  Meaning it can meet any number of gruesome fates.  Point of fact, the reason it took me so long to recruit PA in the first place was the idea of my 7 mana creature wasting me a turn before falling to an unmake, flame javelin, or oblivion ring.  At least that was the assumption.  Turns out, much like Judas Priest fans, I had another thing coming.

It won me every game in which I played it.  Every . . . single . . . one.  (Ed. note: sample sizes being what they are I managed to lose with it since.  Once.)  Some of these games I had no business winning.  The deck I chose was a convoluted Cruel Ultimatum deck I had quickly slapped together.  As you might imagine without any tuning, not a powerhouse deck.  I clicked 'begin game' anyway.  First up, an elf token deck piloted by someone who seemed pretty pissed about my new win condition.  After milling through two pyroclasms to short the token tide, I laid PA out on the board like a proud fisherman displaying his catch.  After some spirited words Elves scooped.  Another game, a Grixis re-animation deck caved when its owner realized he couldn't shriekmaw the thing.  He called me out as a cheat and told me Platinum Angel should never have been made.  I was baffled as four other games involving our hero passed with similar results.  Finally, in my last test game I was at a nerve-wracking negative 18 life when my opponent finally broke through with a naturalize.  Or he would have if I didn't have that negate handy.  Another scoop.

To address a now common complaint, should this card be legal?  Wizards of the Coast seems to think so.  They made it in Mirrodin, and then reprinted it in 10th Edition.  That means Platinum Angel has been legal in Standard for over five years!  Apparently not long enough to find a way to kill it.

But I digress, that is not the point of this rant.  No the point of this rant is that I am awesome and I never lose at Magic Online.  Wait. . . no, that isn't it either.  The real underlying point here is the jaw-dropping lack of removal in casual Magic games.  Those same casual games where it should be most prevelant.   A topic that has been mentioned on this site before.  If you're not going to get a chance to sideboard in those disenchants you should probably just include them in the starting 60.  Trust me, because up against a Platinum Angel that third sprouting thrinax isn't going to help you.