Chalice of the Void – MTG Card Review – COTD

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

It took me quite some time after Mirrodin‘s release to “get” this card. It took one of my friends taking up Vintage and explaining how a lot of the powerful cards cost zero or one, and how easy it is to get that many counters on the Chalice on the first turn (ironically, often using those same cards that you’re shutting off for the foreseeable future). Nowadays, of course, we’ve discovered the joys of getting the Urzatron into play and shutting off expensive midrange cards, which proves this card is for tournaments of all seasons!

Constructed: 4/5
Casual: 3/5
Limited: 2/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
EDH/Commander: 3/5

Mirrodin certainly was a set where the power level was a bit out of this world, wasn’t it. Chalice of the Void is one of the more enduring power pieces from the set, prison-locking decks in Modern, Legacy, and even Vintage for some time now. Even casting Chalice for X = 1 tags a lot of card in those formats, and it proves resilient to removal because of how it shuts down a lot of the oft-played artifact removal spells. (It even has use on X = 0 in Vintage, thanks to all the Moxen and the fast artifact mana.) It’s certainly one of the more oppressive cards in the set, and its reprinting in Masters 25 is well-justified.

Constructed: 4.75
Casual: 3
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 4
Commander: 3.75