Cathars’ Crusade – Innistrad Remastered
Date Reviewed: Feb. 5, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 2.63
Casual: 4.50
Limited: 4.63
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Cathars’ Crusade didn’t look like much in the eyes of many players when Avacyn Restored was new. Remember that the first Commander preconstructed decks had only come out the previous year, and the mindset of tournaments was still dominant in the discourse – and tournaments were still emerging from the historical paradigm which held that anything that cost four or more had to essentially win the game on the spot. (And yes, this was both the perception and the truth of Fact or Fiction – a lot of cards like that read more innocent than they really are.) Five mana got you cards like Sigarda or Baneslayer Angel, and would soon get you Thragtusk: that is to say, much more proactive options that threatened opponents without support. But it was also a casual all-star from day one, turning any random token generator into a pseudo-Overrun, and going absolutely insane with anything that generates multiple tokens or does so repeatedly. Conveniently, there are a few of those in the Innistrad block itself to give you a hint, and even in the age of Commander and cards with enough text to look like an excerpt from the Wheel of Time series to the unattentive, Cathars’ Crusade has held up very well indeed.
Constructed: 2.5
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
The price tag might be high, but that effect is tempting. Cathars’ Crusade is a card that can snowball very quickly as a consequence of having no limits or specifications: if it’s a creature, it will get triggered, and it will spread a lot of power out in a hurry. And given that white likes to go wide, this helps them go wide and go tall at the same time. The rub is in the details, since this needs to come down as quickly as possible to really have time to get rolling, and you need to be able to capitalize quickly. Still, it guarantees each creature of yours starts with a +1/+1 counter, and it’s not too hard to make it more efficacious than that baseline.
I will also mention that any of the white planeswalkers that create tokens (and there are a lot of those) can make this start firing the turn that this drops, so it’s not too hard to figure out a way to really tighten the screws.
Constructed: 2.75 (too slow to get going)
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4.75
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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