Insidious Roots – Murders at Karlov Manor
Date Reviewed: February 26, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.13
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 3.38
Multiplayer: 3.25
Commander [EDH]: 3.50
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
The most dangerous part of this card is likely the way it turns all of your tokens into mana producers. There are any number of decks which can generate an obscene number of tokens, and I could imagine a (likely one-time) psychological advantage in ending a game with Craterhoof Behemoth after starting as a different style. It does depend on one particular type of card and class of strategy, and thus won’t be a staple in decks of its color, but when it works, it’ll do some pretty spectacular things. The second part of the card seems like it’s mostly there as a fallback, though it is worth noting that it plays well with dredge and delve. It seems a little slow for competitive dredge and delve, but I feel like we’ve said that a lot about dredge and delve themselves, and it may not be wise to underestimate them.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 4
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
Insidious Roots feels like the kind of card that can do really obnoxious things, serving both as a mana acceleration engine and a tool for going wide. Green and black are also pretty good at graveyard manipulation, so it makes sense that Insidious Roots is in those colors, and it does a decent job of being a Plant support card in a long game. There are a lot of things this can work with, like Avenger of Zendikar in a long game, and this can get scary if left alone.
That said…this is not a card that does much on its own, and it’s more a force multiplier than a deck’s centerpiece. You need to get a way to cull the size of your graveyard, and while those are things that Golgari does well, you still need to devote space to get that online. And it can provide tokens to ramp mana, but this provides them pretty ponderously, and it’s very unreliable as a mana acceleration engine.
I do think this card is overall promising, but I think it’s too fiddly to shine brightly. It feels better as a fallback option; you might be able to use collect evidence in Limited and Standard as a way to fuel this, but making it the crux of your gameplan feels like it’s going to rarely pan out.
Constructed: 3.25
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 3.75
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
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