Worthy Knight – MTG Throne of Eldraine Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

Worthy Knight pretty much does only one thing, but she does it quite well. While she isn’t as open-ended as the recent similar card Hero of Precinct One, she gets out of control surprisingly fast; in constructed you just pick all the surprisingly numerous two- and three-cost knights, and in limited you do basically the same thing if you see her early enough. It’s worth noting that her tokens have a different creature type from her and from the creatures that created them, which might be relevant in Standard formats that include Witch’s Vengeance.

Worthy Knight’s flavor text, and the Throne of Eldraine card The Circle of Loyalty, are references to the Siege Perilous from Arthurian mythology. In the original stories, this term referred to an empty seat at the Round Table, reserved for the future arrival of the most perfect knight in the world (Perceval or Galahad, depending on who you ask). In fact, the seat would literally kill anyone who dared to sit in it, other than the perfect knight. It sometimes seems like we in Magic are inundated with champions and paragons, which presumably reflects planeswalkers choosing only the planes’ best to work with; it might be fun to wonder how other planes’ champions got their titles, now that we’ve seen one way to do so on Eldraine.

Constructed: 4/5
Casual: 5/5
Limited: 4/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
EDH/Commander: 3/5 

Worthy Knight is a nice bit of payoff for the prospective Knight tribal deck, turning all of your Knights into a 2-for-1 (even if they get countered, since you get the token on cast). A 2/2 for 2 mana is a reasonable place to be on a mana curve, and the trigger means it’s actually still a pretty reasonable card to play later in the game. Given Throne of Eldraine‘s surfeit of Knights, as well as the number we’ve seen scattered across other sets, Worthy Knight can help the deck to really snowball out of control through sheer board presence, if you have Knights to keep feeding into the effect; a lot of the Throne of Eldraine Knights feel slightly more aggressive in mana cost than their midrange forebears, so that helps them somewhat.

Worthy Knight isn’t a star of a Knight, but it is a good one that can help you take over games through sheer board presence. Of note is that it triggers off of any Knight spell, so the handful of Tribal spells with Changeling will also make an additional body (as will just spells with Changeling).

Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3.75
Limited: 3.75
Multiplayer: 3
Commander: 3.5

Phat
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Worthy Knight

Hey Everyone! Phat Pack Magic here with another card of the day review and we’re looking at Worthy Knight, strutting their stuff and showing off … a sorta-vanilla creature.

So the best comparison of this card is Hero of Precinct One which has been seen in quite a few decks as a sort of resilient threat.

This, is… uh. A far cry from Hero.

Sure it can chain off of casting another copy of itself, but even still specifically ‘Knight’ means that a lot of things have to align before you can start reaping benefits. But the real issue between Worthy Knight and Hero is that Worthy Knight requires you to commit more creatures to the board to get a 1/1 token where as Hero simply said any multicolor spell, which could be a planeswalker, a removal spell, counterspell, etc.

Now since Oko (is probably) going to get banned, the Knights deck that has been kind of puttering around at some LGS might actually start to take off and she could see a part in it. But for the most part she’ll just sit around in the bulk bin.

As far as Cube goes? Making a Knight Tribal theme might be okay, but you’d want much better payoffs than this, and unfortunately she doesn’t even get payoffs with the best Knight Spell (History of Benalia)

Standard: 2/5 It has… potential? Ish?

Casual EDH: 1/5 – “I can’t wait to give even more value to my opponents wrath effects!”

Cube: 1/5 – Only if you’re so hard pressed for 2 drops that you’re considering a bear.

Limited: 3/5 – …It might be okay here since there’s tons of knights

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