Agatha Of The Vile Cauldron – Wilds of Eldraine
Date Reviewed: September 22, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.50
Casual: 4.00
Limited: 4.00
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Double, double, toil and trouble . . . and an ability relating to other abilities, in these colors? To be fair, I’m not sure it’s ever been explicitly shown which colors get to mess with activated abilities. Anything involving cost reduction should set off alarm bells, and we should remember a lot of infinite combos from our recent experiences with Zirda, the Dawnwaker. Agatha is limited by the reduction being tied to her own power and the way she only affects creatures’ abilities, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about combo players, it’s that they’re persistent. And there are so many cards and so many activated abilities that it’s impossible to be certain that she doesn’t reduce something to a really threatening cost. On top of all that, she offers Gruul-colored Commander decks a whole new angle to build around.
Constructed: 3.5 (this rating is likely to look high in a few months, but also likely to end up looking low)
Casual: 4
Limited: 4 (if nothing else, she breaks stalemates)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Cheapening activated abilities is always a dangerous game to play on a card, and while Agatha of the Vile Cauldron won’t set an ability’s cost to zero, there are still plenty of rude, degenerate loops you can make with her in deeper formats (one that coms to mind is Spawnsire of Ulamog). As-is, though, she’s pretty solid, offering 1 mana off of all abilities (including her own) out of the gate and promising more if you play carefully to protect her. She is fragile, but he can help to break logjams in a pinch, and cost reduction is rightly feared. I think she’ll need time to find her legs in Standard, but her suite of abilities can be an interesting one to play with.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4.25 (probably more threatening for her active)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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