Coffin Queen – Tempest
Date Reviewed: April 24, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.25
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Coffin Queen was one of Magic’s early attempts at portraying a lich, about a decade and a half before they just ripped the Band-Aid off and gave us Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. And while she only really portrays one element of the creature type, it’s a good one to have around. While she’s definitely expensive and fragile, a repeatable reanimation effect is one that doesn’t come around every day, to put it mildly. It would be many years before we saw the likes of Debtors’ Knell and Whip of Erebos, which were also proportionately very expensive while being slightly less destructible. With the right setup, Coffin Queen can pull out some rather unfair plays, and being a creature means there are ways to move her between zones and game her abilities that other variants can’t take advantage of. Plus, it’s worth noting that in line with her overarching concept, Coffin Queen has received errata to be considered a Zombie, which opens up a lot of synergies you might find fun to explore.
Constructed: 1
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Undeath becomes her, I suppose. Coffin Queen is quite a tantalizing creature, able to bring back any creature to serve you in the afterlife, albeit with several hitches. She only can bring back one creature at a time, and their fate is usually tied to hers…the key word is “usually”, because there are ways to make their fates less intertwined (untapping her with the ability on the stack or just removing her from play). She’s an interesting presence, but this is still a fairly pricey investment to get the most out of; six mana is not insubstantial, especially when it’s all tied to a 1/1 body.
Still, reusable reanimation is quite alluring indeed, and Coffin Queen’s got the chops to make things happen if you can find openings. She’s far too slow to shine in Constructed, but there are plenty of places she can pry corpses out of the ground/
Constructed: 1.5 (slow, fragile, and inefficient)
Casual: 4
Limited: 3 (Tempest was not a great set for graveyard action)
Multiplayer: 3.5 (it can pull them out of any graveyard, so this might be fun enough)
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
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