Tarmogoyf Nest – Modern Horizons III Commander
Date Reviewed: June 28, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 2.00
Casual: 4.75
Limited: 3.75
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
As part of the Commander subset, this card is legal only in Legacy and Vintage. I believe this can appear in the Play boosters, so I’ll include a Limited score…but keep in mind that you’re extremely unlikely to see one.
In many ways, this card feels made to appeal to me. It’s an homage of sorts to Squirrel Nest while also making one of my favorite creatures, the infamous Tarmogoyf. And, yes, this actually makes full-out copies of everyone’s favorite lhurgoyf…so, in effect, you can make a Tarmogoyf each turn. And while Tarmogoyf is a mediocre Commander card on account of it just being a big, stupid beater, this makes one every turn, if you have the mana to support it. In many ways, this card is perfect, and it’s even a Lhurgoyf itself…
…unfortunately, this is more cute than good. It’s very cute, yes, but the fact of the matter is that you’re still investing a lot of mana to get this set up and producing lhurgoyfs even once, and it’s functionally a slight overpay most of the time (two mana, plus tapping the land this is attached to). I will say that the Commander deck this hails from has a lhurgoyf theme going in it, and the tribe is notoriously and unjustly underpopulated, so this helps a good bit with smoothing out that pain point, and I’d even say it’s a bit of a necessity…but that still doesn’t completely mitigate its weaknesses, being both slow and mana-hungry.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like this card and wish it was good enough to devastate Legacy and Vintage, laving the format trampled beneath a horde of lhurgoyfs…but this is not how you achieve the dream there. It’s a very good fun card, but I will be pleasantly surprised if this makes waves in deeper formats.
Constructed: 2 (too slow, and in formats hostile to what it’s trying to do)
Casual: 5 (look I don’t know what you were expecting if not a 5 here)
Limited: 3.75 (I don’t know quite how fast the limited is here, but I suspect that this is quite tricky to get past, even if they’re only 2/3 or 3/4 bodies)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.5 (a good way to mitigate Tarmogoyf’s EDH weakness is to just have a lot of Tarmogoyfs)
As we’ve noted before, the Modern Horizons series is basically an extension of Time Spiral, and as such is a place for official Magic memes. There’s another very clear one in the main part of the expansion – disturbingly Phyrexianized, at that – and I would not be surprised if the fourth installment has a black-bordered version of Crow Storm. Tarmogoyf Nest is indeed a meme, especially for anyone old enough to remember the arguments about That Future Sight Rare on the old Wizards of the Coast message boards. Tarmogoyf was the first creature that was considered extremely overpowered in an era when everyone had a forum account which they could use to yell about it. I may even have participated in discussions about whether it should have been banned; those were about as productive as they sound.
Calling this card a meme doesn’t mean it’s one you’ll never want to play. It doesn’t seem quite powerful enough to crack constructed, because it requires a lot of mana over its use cycles, in formats that value cheap but impactful plays. And as powerful as Tarmogoyf was when I started writing for Pojo, the eternal formats have shifted in a way that has definitely made it less of a figure of fear. It definitely has some advantages in other settings, though. Consider that if this card was a land rather than an Enchant Land, it would probably be insane – a control or disruption strategy could knock out all the opponent’s cards, then drop an uncounterable threat generator. You can use it like that any place you have more time and space; in casual formats up to and including Commander, you might be able to cast this during an opportune window and then take over the late game.
I never thought I’d be writing some of the phrases I wrote above, but I have to feel it might be a sign of how Magic has matured past some of its hangups (like pretending that Wizards of the Coast’s official message boards have anything to do with actual players). And if you thought some of this was crazy, come back in a week or so.
Constructed: 2
Casual: 4.5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
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