Muraganda Petroglyphs – Future Sight
Date Reviewed: February 20, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 2
Casual: 3
Limited: 2.5
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3.25
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
One of the joys of Future Sight was that it offered glimpses into worlds hereto yet unseen, and one of the ones that stood out was Muraganda. After 18 years, we’re finally visiting Muraganda, albeit as part of the three-plane track, and so the card that introduced it all makes for a fun throwback.
Muraganda Petroglyphs is, in a word, tantalizing. Vanilla creature support is a unique angle, and since most tokens are also vanilla creatures, there’s a lot of room for this to be a substantial boost; a team-wide +2/+2 is no laughing matter, though it does turn off if they gain any abilities. Still, it makes modest creatures menacing, and that makes for some fun…
…though the issues here are maybe a bit much, relegating Muraganda Petroglyphs to a curiosity. It’s four mana (which is conservative, but awkwardly high to work(, and it is symmetrical. While you know it’s going to happen (probably), most decks can make use of tokens to some degree, and most of those tokens would be buffed. So this can be a bit of a double-edged sword.
Still, this is a neat card that served as a tantalizing window into a future that has since come to pass (sort of(, and Muraganda Petroglyphs can make for a fun sort of puzzle. Still, be mindful of its limitations and weaknesses, because it certainly has a fair few.
Constructed: 2 (too pricey to work, and too constrictive to make things really pop)
Casual: 3
Limited: 2.5 (a bit too fiddly to shine in Limited, and just as likely to backfire)
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3.25
It’s been a long time coming, but Muraganda is finally getting its due in Aetherdrift, albeit sharing the spotlight with Avishkar and Amonkhet. I’ll discuss that issue more in my gameplay-free review, but for today, I thought it would be interesting to shine a light on just how far back the references go. It’s almost hard for me to believe that Future Sight was nearly 20 years ago. It feels like we should still be waiting and looking for future-shifted reprints and references, even though in reality, they probably gave up on trying to get to all or most of them a long time ago.
That makes me a little sad, because we never would have gotten the cool Muraganda cards in Avishkar if not for the Petroglyphs. They provide an interesting angle to build a deck around – note that back when this was released, the more standard boost for an anthem effect was +1/+1. Unfortunately, it does suffer a little from vanilla creatures’ tendency to fall behind against more wordy decks, and from the fact that the anthem is curiously symmetrical. It came right between Glorious Anthem being in Tenth Edition and Imperious Perfect’s first release in Lorwyn, so I’m not sure how that came to be. Even so, the synergy with most tokens can’t be denied, and it’s a fun card to play around with to this very day.
I also always interpreted it as a hint to a prehistoric-themed set rather than a vanilla creatures set per se, and am not sure why Mark Rosewater was always so fixated on that particular difficulty.
Constructed: 2
Casual: 3.5
Limited: 2.5
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 3
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