A 4/6 for five mana is nothing to complain
about, especially since a lot of the best Bestow
cards cost six to Bestow and this makes quite
the attractive body to throw one on. The
Constellation effect is also very nice-- you
kill 1-toughness dudes just as an ETB ability,
and later on if you can save up a few cards, you
have the option of unleashing a one-sided
Infest, or worse. And for what it doesn't kill
by Constellating? Well, that 4/6 is going to be
that much harder to block well when your team
has -1/-1.
The only real downside is that by five mana,
you've probably already played most of the
spells in your hand, and so you're not going to
really be able to leverage the -1/-1 like you
would if this had come down sooner. Constructed
has far more efficient ways of killing creatures
anyway, but in a Casual Enchantment deck, if you
can get out more than one of these...
Many constellation abilities (which, again,
is a keyword for reasons unknown) encourage you
to try and trigger them multiple times each
turn. That's not often possible, considering how
expensive some of the creatures in question are;
fortunately, you don't always need to. Barring a
Glorious Anthem or seven, this is a one-man
answer to the Vast Saproling Horde archetype
that has been around casual play since Ravnica
or so - and can even be engineered into an
answer to said horde plus a reasonable number of
Anthems. There are some people whose list of
ideal Magic cards includes that exact thing. I
know because I am one of them.
Today's card of the day is Doomwake Giant which
is a five mana Black 4/6 enchantment creature
with Constellation that gives creatures your
opponents control -1/-1 until end of turn
whenever it or another enchantment enters play.
This is a fairly solid addition to an
enchantment themed deck as it offers a way to
clear the field while supporting the primary
design. It is a bit late to enter the field for
mono-Black, but an accelerated Green/Black could
potentially be aggressive enough to see
competitive play.
In Limited this is easily included in a
multicolor deck and even by itself can
potentially remove some opposition, but with
other enchantments is a notable threat and well
worth the first pick in Booster. For Sealed
there's no reason not to include this when
playing any amount of Black mana as even a five
mana 4/6 is playable, so adding the effect puts
this well above the curve.
Today's Giant has the potential to be one of
the better constellation cards in the set. With
all the enchantments out there, he turns them
all into removal spells. I've yet to see someone
put together a truly dominating enchantment
deck, but if it's going to happen, I see this
guy as a big part of it. If you can string
together a few enchantment creatures with
constellation, you get multiple effects for
every enchantment you play. If you can get that
to happen, you gain a big advantage over your
opponent that is playing one spell at a time for
one effect at a time.
That's the plus side.
The negative side is that if you DON'T have
other enchantment creatures to trigger stuff,
he's a 4/6 creature that doesn't do anything but
give -1/-1 when he comes in. While that's not
terrible for 5 mana, there are a lot of better
things to do - at least in a constructed deck -
for that kind of mana. It's a risk/reward
question. Do you want to risk getting the
additional enchantments you need to make this
guy super powerful, or would you rather play it
safe and play good cards that work on their own?
When it works, it's crazy good. When it doesn't,
your deck can look pretty weak.
Personally, I like the card. I want this to
work. I like building decks with the high
risk/high reward element. Time will only tell if
it's a good investment.
Doomwake Giant. I like how that name sounds.
Kinda gets right to the point.
So today we've got another giant with a
kinda-sorta removal theme, this time in black.
It's a little smaller than yesterday's giant,
weighing in at 4/6. But it's also cheaper,
costing 5 mana. 5 mana for a 4/6 is alright.
Decent. That alone could let it see play in
limited. But our giant friend here is capable of
so much more.
Constellation is the latest in a long line of
"whenever X enters the battlefield" abilities.
As you could easily guess, it being the world of
Theros and all, this wants you to use
enchantments. And for your efforts, Doomwake
Giant will weaken all the creatures on your
opponent's side of the field until the end of
turn.
This can have three purposes, some of them
overlapping. One is to screw up combat math. If
your opponent felt confident they could block
and destroy your 4/4 because they have two 2/2's
on the field, well guess again. They've just
become 1/1's. Sometimes a single point of power
or toughness can be all it takes to swing combat
math in your favour. But wait, what if you
played another enchantment? Well then those
1/1's would become 0/0's, meaning they would
cease to exist and be destroyed. And that's
Doomwake Giant's second use: as a form of
removal. Weakening all of your opponent's
creatures until they die by pumping out a bunch
of low-cost enchantment cards on the same turn.
This gets the most money out of his ability,
powering up your side of the field with a bunch
of new enchantment creatures/auras/bestowed
things or whatever you like casting, while
getting rid of all his creatures in the process.
It's very useful, however it does require you to
have Doomwake Giant on the field, a bunch of
enchantment cards in your hand, AND the mana to
cast enough of them to deal with the opponent's
creatures (which gets harder the more toughness
they have). It specializes in removing weak
creatures and chump blockers. Even Doomwake
Giant isn't really going to be able to bring
doom upon say a 7/7 all on his own. Oh, and that
third purpose I mentioned is anti-token. No
matter how many 1/1 tokens your opponent may
have, they'll all disappear once Doomwake Giant
hits the field.
So how good is all that? Well, the body is
decent for 5 mana as I mentioned. The real
difficulty in using this card is having enough
enchantment cards in your hand, and of course
the mana to cast them, once the giant is out on
the field. Likely this means casting him turn 5,
hoping he lives (which he should, 6 toughness
and all) and then casting a bunch of stuff on
turn 6. But how many other enchantments are you
realistically going to have in your hand at that
point? 1? 2? If your opponent has say a 4/4 and
you only have 3 enchantments, you're only going
to reduce it to a 1/1. And the opponent might
want to get hit in the face for 4 from the giant
rather than chump block, since they get their
4/4 back next turn when all the -1/-1's wear
off.
It's a neat idea for an ability in concept.
And it CAN work out for you. But I would
consider it unlikely to be able to have a big
impact on the game every time you use it. It's
both better and worse in limited; better in the
sense that 5 mana should be no problem, 4/6's
are always welcome, and it's a slower format so
you can stock up and hoard enchantments to play
when you want to use the ability. But you also
might not draft that many good enchantment cards
that you want to play in your deck. I mean, it's
Journey into Nyx, so you'll probably get a bunch
of them. But it could be hard to get the right
mana curve and field setup to cast everything
you want in just the right way to remove a bunch
of weak creatures.
Doomwake Giant's got potential, I'll give him
that. But it'll be a lot of work to get him to
have a big impact. Still, could be worth it in
the right deck, maybe with some Flicker-style
effects.
