Guided Passage

This is easily one of the goofiest cards I’ve ever seen, but boy howdy is it powerful.  Three mana nets you three cards, straight up.  Now, granted, most of the time those three cards are going to be a basic land, a piece of (presumably) useless graveyard hate, and then something like a [card]Wood Elves[/card], but hey, three mana is still a great value for all that.  It has a nice political aspect, as well, since if you have an alliance of sorts going with another player at the table, just cast it targeting them and tell them what you want.  Even if you’re just casting it for value, your opponents probably aren’t crunching all the numbers and figuring out exactly what benefits you least, so you’re probably going to end up with something useful.  Even if what they give you isn’t useful now, well, it’s in your deck for a reason, so it will probably become useful in pretty short order.  The only real drawback is that it costs URG, which isn’t really the most common color combo out there.  That said, if your deck can cast it, you probably should have it in your 99.

Falkenrath Noble

This card is easily the most underappreciated EDH card to come out of Innistrad.  Draining someone for a single life seems so innocuous at first glance that most people don’t give it a second thought.  It’ll sit around, draining for 1 here, 1 there, maybe whacking an opponent for two every once in a while, but eventually someone is going to decide to wrath the board.  And all of a sudden you’re gaining twenty-odd life and nugging an opponent for more than half their life total.  It’s a must-answer threat that accumulates incremental advantage for you while it sits on the board.  It’s even conveniently [card]Reveillark[/card]able for those WBx sacrifice decks out there.  It’s probably not worth running in a control list, but if you’re planning on making lots of expendable dudes – and black is somewhat known for such things – then this vampire is your man.

Scavenging Ooze

Nobody ever runs enough graveyard hate.  Ever.  The problem seems to be that whenever people draw a [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card] or [card]Relic of Progenitus[/card] when there really isn’t any need to nuke someone’s graveyard, it just feels miserable, like you wasted your whole turn.  With the Relic or cards like [card]Nihil Spellbomb[/card] they’ll often just cycle it straight off to get the card, nevermind any future graveyard shenanigans they might need to deal with.  The ooze conveniently sidesteps the problem by not just being fantastic graveyard hate.  Sure, you may not really need to exile your opponents’ [card]Sakura-Tribe Elder[/card]s and [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card]s from their graveyards, but hey, if it means you get some life and a titan-sized basher out of the bargain, that sounds pretty good to me.  And when the time comes that your opponent tries to get frisky with [card]Artisan of Kozilek[/card] or [card]Memory Plunder[/card], well, it’s there for you.  Just make sure to leave that green mana open.

Pithing Needle

I have a standard package of four cards that I put in every deck that runs [card]Trinket Mage[/card].  This is one of them (the others are [card]Sol Ring[/card], [card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card], and [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card], for anyone keeping track).  It’s just such a cheap, fantastic answer to everything from planeswalkers to equipment to problem generals like [card]Heartless Hidetsugu[/card], [card]Merieke Ri Berit[/card], and [card]Ghave, Guru of Spores[/card].  Even lands like [card]Academy Ruins[/card] get shut down by the needle.  True, it can’t quite stop everything – [card]Cabal Coffers[/card] and [card]Gaea’s Cradle[/card] are probably at the top of my list of things I wish [card]Pithing Needle[/card] dealt with, but for one mana in an easily tutorable package it’s hard to beat.  At the very least you should be running it in any deck running [card]Trinket Mage[/card] or [card]Tezzeret the Seeker[/card], and it should probably be in any list with tutor effects able to fetch it.

Cache Raiders

“Cache whooza?”  Yeah, I had never heard of the card, either, until I found it while trawling through magiccards.info looking for bounce engines for my new [card]Maelstrom Wanderer[/card] deck.  Other bounce engines may be more flexible, like [card]Crystal Shard[/card], and others may be more powerful, like [card]Mistmeadow Witch[/card], but neither of those can beat face while doing it.  In a deck that wants to keep getting value off of ETB guys while still getting into the red zone, it’s hard to top.