Midnight Reaper – Ravnica Remastered
Date Reviewed: January 9, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.63
Casual: 4.38
Limited: 4.00
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Midnight Reaper is, more or less, the creature version of Dark Prophecy. It’s not a perfect one-to-one comparison, of course; Midnight Reaper only triggers off nontoken creatures (which does include itself), and it does damage instead of incurring life loss (which matters on occasion, like with “protection from” effects)…but it makes up for these by being a creature with relevant enough creature types and by having a far more splashable mana cost.
Midnight Reaper is by no means a star, but it is a solid enough creature to carry its weight. Its stats are by no means phenomenal, but it’s a workable body in types with healthy support, and it replaces itself on death. Those things alone are strong enough, but it also replaces your other nontoken creatures on death, and that’s even better. And you can let this die at some point to turn it off if your life total gets too low, which can sometimes be a massive boon. Cards like these are always solid glue cards…you’ll rarely notice them working, but you’ll win more games with them than you sometimes realize.
Constructed: 3.75
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4
For a while, I sometimes forgot whether this card was in Guilds of Ravnica or one of the Innistrad sets – it would have fit very well in the latter, both in concept and in mechanic. Speaking of which, despite the fact that the number of black cards which look for your creatures dying is almost at meme level, this one still stands out. It’s already efficient enough to threaten people in combat, and when it really gets going it can turn into an engine in its own right – just be a little careful with the compulsory nature of its trigger. There may be few or no competitive replacements for Dark Confidant, but Midnight Reaper is just as good in casual Magic and sometimes more on-theme; that’s pretty amazing in itself, but especially when you consider that the past Ravnica blocks have sometimes had more focus and attention on the multicolored cards than the monocolored ones. For a card like this to make such an impression, it’s definitely doing something right.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
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