Doom Whisperer – MTG Card Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

If you take away all the fancy reminder text for surveil, you can see this guy’s activated ability as a strange parallel to Griselbrand: pay some life and do something to your library. The numbers are much smaller, but there is still some combo potential. After all, many players think of the graveyard as an equally good or better place to put cards than your hand, there are plenty of cards that trigger when things go to graveyards or work from the graveyard, and there are relatively few repeatable surveil effects in Guilds of Ravnica. A 6/6 with flying and trample is also technically undercosted at five mana, although if you’re just looking for that in constructed, there is quite a lot of competition. I do want to see what this can do in Commander, where you have both more life and more cards in the library than in other formats.

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

Doom Whisperer is a bit pushed, isn’t it. Let’s start with the body, which is absurdly good: a 6/6 with trample and flying for 5 mana and no downside or color-intensive requirement, which is well above the rate of return black usually gets. Even without its activated ability, Doom Whisperer represents an efficient threat that demands immediate answer.

As for surveil 2 on demand, this makes the card even more ludicrous, acting as filtering (even if it eats a kill spell, since you can respond to the spell by surveilling a lot) and set-up for all of Dimir’s surveil shenanigans. (Golgari and Izzet also like cards in graveyards.)

The result is a powerful attacker who sets up your draws for a good while. Doom Whisperer is pretty absurd, and it’s almost everything you could want out of a 5-drop.

Constructed: 4.5
Casual: 5
Limited: 5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander: 4.5