Green Sun’s Zenith – Double Masters
Date Reviewed: July 11, 2022
Ratings:
Constructed: 4.50
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 4.00
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
There aren’t very many of these relatively open-ended creature tutors in Magic, for obvious reasons: they tend to do very powerful and often dominating things wherever they exist. In casual Magic, Chord of Calling is about neck-and-neck with Green Sun’s Zenith due to its instant speed and the flexibility of convoke, but the Zenith is more common in tournament Magic because it tends to use much cheaper creatures. It is also more effective as mana acceleration: X=0 gets you Dryad Arbor, and 1 gets you the familiar mana elves. Additionally, 2 gets you Devoted Druid, which is the centerpiece of numerous infinite combos. That’s the broken side, but it’s actually pretty good as a fair card on top of all of that!
Constructed: 4/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 4/5
Multiplayer: 4/5
Commander [EDH]: 4/5
Any green creature from your deck, if you pay its mana value plus 1, is an excellent deal, and Green Sun’s Zenith is a spell that’s just as good late as it is early. Arguably, it’s better late, but there are still plenty of things you can do early, like fishing out Dryad Arbor (for X = 0) or getting mana dorks to explode things even faster. That this even recycles itself into your deck is even more diabolical, because it can pop back up later in a game to make things thorny for your opponents, and the consistency it affords green decks can be back-breaking in a long affair. It’s rightly banned in Modern for how rude it is, but it even sees a healthy amount Legacy play; nearly every green deck is better by running a copy of this sorcery, and even multi-colored decks with a toe in green have plenty of nifty things they can fetch out.
Constructed: 5 (it’s a staple in green Legacy decks for a reason)
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4 (bringing a creature into play makes this a lot better than most tutoring effects tend to be in Limited)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.5 (recycling itself is a subtle boon for a lot of decks, even if digging it out again might take it a while)
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