Cover of Darkness – Assassin’s Creed / Onslaught
Date Reviewed: July 18, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.25
Casual: 4.13
Limited: 3.63
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
yay darkness
Cover of Darkness isn’t a fancy spell, but it’s a potentially devastating one: make all of your creatures unblockable, more or less. Fear may have been depreciated as a keyword, but it still exists, and drastically curtailing the number of eligible blockers (or blanking them outright) is great.
It’s certainly a spell with holes, though, and it has two. The first is fear; some decks won’t care about fear at all, and against those decks, this might be a dead card. The other is how it grants fear: to all creatures of that type. This is symmetrical, and if your opponent has a lhurgoyf in their deck when you grant all of them fear, they’ll stand to benefit.
All that said, two mana to grant your board evasion is quite a good rate, and there may well be times where dropping this wins you the game on the spot. That said, this slots into tribal decks only, as the risk of this backfiring is a very real one at times.
Constructed: 3.5 (I think this has legs in some decks, like Human tribal, but it is situational)
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 3.75 (Onslaught was famous for its tribal lines, and this can pay off if you build carefully)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
You never used to see this card too much in constructed, and just a little more in casual Magic. Recall that when it was new, Dark Ritual was still legal in Extended and there were way crazier things that black could do on the first or second turn. Additionally, there wasn’t really a deck that it fit well with in Onslaught Standard. But it’s a solid finisher in a lot of kindred decks in casual play, albeit slightly situational (don’t forget that black used to struggle against other black decks, and fear is worded accordingly). I feel like that might be even more true now that all the kindreds are a lot bigger and there are some to choose from that didn’t exist then. Eldrazi don’t really need evasion to be good, but it certainly doesn’t hurt; faeries become nearly unblockable and often want to be in black anyway; and classes like warriors and berserkers are already great at attacking and might get put over the top by a card like this.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 4
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
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