Carnage Tyrant – Ixalan
Date Reviewed: December 7, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 4.00
Casual: 5.00
Limited: 5.00
Multiplayer: 3.88
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
It’s true there’s nothing quite like the feeling when an intricate combo deck comes together, or when you guide the cards you happened to draw through a tough situation. But there’s something to be said for occasionally cutting loose and throwing the biggest, greenest, tyrannosauriest creature you can find at your opponent until the game ends. Carnage Tyrant is the concept in its purest and most elegant form, and is very purely powerful in almost any environment where you care to apply it. It’s equally good as a singular threat you cast with acceleration, or as a late-game response to a control deck using its resources to kill your other things. And it also taught us that Magic had been lacking in the tyrannosaur factor for over two decades!
Constructed: 4
Casual: 5
Limited: 5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Some creatures are very markedly not complicated. Carnage Tyrant is one of those creatures. And, indeed, it’s an extremely powerful creature.
Carnage Tyrant is simple, but powerful: it resists removal, it ignores chump blockers, and it laughs at attempts to tell it no, for it is a giant, implacable death lizard with a long, swishy tail and ruthlessly efficient death stroke, It’s vulnerable to mass removal, but trample and hexproof together means you have a surprisingly narrow bag of answers. And it’s a 7/6 for 6 mana, so it’s pretty competitive on the mana curve.
Carnae Tyrant’s never quite gotten there in Modern, thanks to being just a bit too pricey, but it’s not useless there by virtue of being a creature that forces specific answers, either through sacrifice forcing or mass board wipes (or deathtouch blockers, which are still well telegraphed for the most part). I believe it’s a solid Pioneer top-end creature, though, and it showed us that a giant implacable death lizard is truly the correct tactic in most cases.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 5
Limited: 5
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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