Valkyrie’s Call – Foundations
Date Reviewed: November 5, 2024
Ratings:
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
This card simply begs to be built around in casual play. A five-mana card that depends on other skeins of war going your way is too expensive to depend on as a win condition for an aggressive deck, but it’s more reasonable if you think about it as a pseudo-combo card. If you have some way to cast it and sacrifice a bunch of creatures in the same turn, you can turn your side of the table into something very threatening – or win on the spot, with the right help. Might I suggest Warstorm Surge for the purpose of walking the same saga-path? Even if you don’t have such a combo, it can end up being a weird sideways evasion card late in the game: playing it when you have an attack on the table might make your opponent reluctant to block and risk calling down the einherjar.
It’s also a rather amusing response if your playgroup is fond of Power Word Kill as their main removal spell.
Kaldheim the expansion and Kaldheim the setting both have a lot of flavor potential that couldn’t be fit into their first mainline appearance in 2021, so it’s great to see cards with their themes continue to appear further down the fate-thread.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
A second life for all of your creatures can be particularly dangerous, especially when that second life comes in the form of a buff. Valkyrie’s Call means that something dying will not stay dead, rising into the air to swoop in a flash of vengeance. If you can get this online, it can make things especially hairy, since removal has some of its edges dulled and some colors just can’t deal with flying well. Notably, this is not a support card for Angels, though it turns creatures into them…still, the buffs can be enough to swing a game open in a hurry.
Of course, the caveat is that this spell is one of my favorite kinds of cards: a do-nothing enchantment that has a high up-front cost and a need to stick around to get going. You don’t see the buffs until something dies, and while the buff can be worth it, you still need to get this out, let it stick around, and get things to die so they can come back to life. I do think this is dangerous if it sticks, but costing five mana is quite a tall ask to begin with, on top of how slow it is to really rev up. This is quite dangerous in slower settings, but I would be surprised if Valkyrie’s Call made an impact in Standard.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.5 (a strong effect held back by its slowness)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4
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