Erebos, Bleak-Hearted – Theros Beyond Death MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

While Erebos’ new version has his Greed effect written as an almost incidental bonus for the repeatable removal ability, I suspect people will end up building around it just as much. It sets up recursion effects really well, and provides a lot of value with mass or repeated token generation (Endrek Sahr Commander, anyone?). When you add the fact that there’s currently a Standard deck that tries to play lots of creatures and have them die as often as possible, I expect to see a lot of Erebos in constructed decks. As always with Theros’ gods, the fact that you get all of this plus the possibility of an efficient, indestructible creature makes it even cooler.

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

Out of all of the new gods, Erebos probably comes the closest to the same mechanical space as his original iteration. He can still draw you lots and lots of cards for life, but the trigger now is creatures dying instead of mana. But you can still turn mana into some benefit, thanks to his removal effect: sacrifice a creature (conveniently triggering his death trigger) to shrink something that might benefit from being shrunk. He has the usual Therosian God thing (enchantment all the time, creature if you believe in yourself), and a 5/6 is decent enough to try and end a game.

I’d say Erebos, Bleak-Heatred is slightly better overall than his original card (Erebos, God of the Dead), albeit with the proviso that this Erebos needs a bit more set-up. He’s agnostic about what creatures die and how they die…just that they die, but also that you have creatures to die. But that isn’t the most-challenging thing to do in black; it has cheap token production (Dreadhorde Invasion in Standard and Bitterblossom in Modern) and creatures that oft don’t mind dying gratuitously. He’s not an unbeatable ace, but he is pretty good and should serve you well if you can support him.

Constructed: 4
Casual: 4
Limited: 4.75
Multiplayer: 4.25
Commander: 4.5