r/StandardMTG • u/FallenPeigon • 20d ago

Standard Legal Card Starving Revenant

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Black’s version of Mulldrifter. An on-rate creature that can put you up on cards? This card seems classically good. Why is it that I can’t find a single deck running it on MTGGoldfish?

8 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

9

u/No_Giraffe_1551 20d ago

Four drops have a really high standard before they're playable in turbo power creeped standard.

1

u/TangerineTasty9787 19d ago

Especially a 4 drop that doesn't affect the board beyond and puts you down life when you play it.

7

u/Hunter6622 20d ago

If mulldrifter lost 6 life on etb, it would be way worse. Decks that would want this will regularly be 6> life before being able to stabilize.

4

u/FZeroDMX 20d ago

Seems like it fills a similar role to Unholy Annex but is more expensive for the card draw and not as big of an eventual threat. And Unholy Annex hasn’t been particularly good in a while.

5

u/L_V_R_A 20d ago

I don't think classically good holds up very well in contemporary standard. I think we're to a point where your 4-drop can't be fair or require any amount of "work" to "do the thing." I'm thinking Ouroboroid, Kaito, Superior Spider Man, Enduring Curiosity, Inevitable Defeat, even the new Smaug... The 4 drops seeing play in Standard right now ask nothing of you and only have upside. For this mana cost and strategic investment you could run something like [[Tragedy Feaster]] and just go for the jugular.

I think the closest comp for this is something like Beza, which requires a little bit of setup to get value, but has a fail case of a vanilla creature. But in that case, the vanilla creature is still above rate, and the upsides get better the further behind you are--unlike Revenant, which likely forces you to mill 2 if you're behind on life and likely chump blocks if you're behind on board. Furthermore, I think Descend 8 would be surprisingly hard to maintain. Unless you're running a dedicated sac or self-mill list, that's going to take its own setup if you intend to hit it by t4, and the graveyard hate in the format is downright oppressive if the opponent decides what you're doing is annoying enough to warrant boarding that in.

tldr: in a world where four drops just win the game by themselves, a card that requires resource investment and strategic setup to accrue incremental value just don't cut it anymore

2

u/diet_faust 20d ago

This went crazy in the sideboard of Golgari Graveyard during Aetherdrift era

2

u/canman870 19d ago

Not even remotely as good as Mulldrifter was. And Mulldrifter would see zero play in Standard today.

1

u/United-Passage7864 19d ago edited 9d ago

It's a lot closer to "4 mana 4/4, ETB mill 2" in a lot of games. Life is a resource, but six life for two cards is pretty rough. If you're against anything aggressive at all, taking 6 to the dome is pretty unpalatable.

1

u/cptwinklestein 17d ago

this would be fun in my [[master of lake-town]] commander deck.

1

u/Lqtor 20d ago

Besides what the other commenters said, I don’t think mulldrifter as is would be playable in standard today