Cavern of Souls – Avacyn Restored
Date Reviewed: November 30, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 4.63
Casual: 4.00
Limited: 3.25
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.38
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
A lot of people have to train themselves to get past the instinct that rare lands are “boring” – this is an understandable reaction, because most of them historically have been dual land variants and don’t do much of anything other than land stuff. Cavern of Souls doesn’t have that obstacle, because it clearly states that it does something, even if that’s adding a comparatively passive ability to your spells. It’s something that a lot of people had been praying for in the years and decades before its release, so there’s no surprise that it was adopted immediately. There are few better ways to force creatures through everything from Counterspell to Counterbalance, and it’s yet another way to cheat when you’re playing Chalice of the Void. Even if you’re not in a Buehler Blue meta, you might want it just because you’re playing a typal deck in three or four or five colors and you need every multicolor land you can get. It’s hard to imagine a time when this won’t be a card in high demand, and it’s just as well there’s a new version of it in Lost Caverns of Ixalan.
Constructed: 4.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
Cavern of Souls is a card that has cast a pretty long shadow over the past decade, one of Avacyn Restored‘s most desirable cards. It’s not too hard to see why, as it’s a land with few downsides for tribal decks that also ducks past countermagic, which is a huge boon against more control-inclined decks. It’s also a land with little downside in multiples, with the only issue being that it can only have its colored mana be used for one type of creature spells. But for creature-heavy decks, this still is huge and scarcely a downside, and it even can draw colorless mana otherwise.
This is the kind of land that plays far better than it looks. It’s a consistency booster for tribal decks that all of them can make use of, and it’s been played in just about every format it’s been legal in for that reason. It’s back in Lost Caverns of Ixalan as a mythic rare, but it’ll keep doing what it’s always been doing as a fantastic weapon for decks that make use of creatures of a particular inclination. It’s only real downside is that it can’t be easily tutored without generic land tutors, but that’s not so bad.
Constructed: 4.75
Casual: 4
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.75
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