Abyssal Harvester – Foundations
Date Reviewed: December 9, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.63
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 4.13
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 3.88
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Abyssal Harvester is one of those cards that reads as being rather narrow, although a lot of that is an impulse carried over from tournaments and their demands for maximum flexibility (or just the maximum number of decision-making points, which is not quite the same thing). Of course, if you’re playing black, you have a lot more control over that than it looks like: complaints about removal kindred decks are rather misplaced, but there’s a grain of truth in them, not to mention the ubiquity of sacrificing creatures for your own benefit. I suspect that this card goes into a lot more combos than it first appears, and there will thus be a lot of interest for the brewers out there.
And if you really wanted to, you could play it in a demon theme deck just because it comes out comparatively early – it’s one of the few three-mana demons that doesn’t have a drawback!
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Second verse, same as the first. Abyssal Harvester is an interesting hybrid of reanimation and graveyard hate, letting one dead creature come back to serve you in undeath. The caveat is that the creature needs to have freshly died, so you do need to make the call as to what comes back soon…and there is the additional wrinkle of only being able to maintain one creature reanimated this way, thanks to it expelling all other nightmares.
While the limitations on this creature are clear, zero mana reanimation is still quite a nice deal, particularly since the initial investment is three mana, and while Abyssal Harvester doesn’t have a phenomenal body (a 3/2 with no keywords), if you need it to, it can still put in work. Just be mindful of its limitations, and you can make some magic happen.
Constructed: 3.75
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4.25
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
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