Wakeroot Elemental – Core Set 2020 MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

This is a big card with a lot of big effects, which add up to something pretty overwhelming if you can arrange them all. That activated ability is pretty quintessentially Timmy, albeit slower than some of the variants we’ve seen in the past. Competitive decks will probably look elsewhere: having to (usually) wait a turn to activate it means that it doesn’t gain much resiliency, and the cost means it will all but certainly be limited to mono-green. Having said that, there’s probably some kind of crazy thing you can do with Itlimoc, Cradle of the Sun, and that’s the kind of thing that’s worth building a casual deck to try.

Constructed: 2/5
Casual: 3/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
EDH/Commander: 3/5

The value of Wakeroot Elemental is in that activated ability: being able to just-about guarantee that you’ll always have another 5/5 creature is a nice little feature, and it even presents a potential infinite-mana combo with cards like Gaea’s Cradle, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, or Itlimoc, Cradle of the Sun. (If you produce a net gain of 5 mana with the land in question, you can use Wakeroot Elemental indefinitely to make infinite mana.) But with Ixalan out of Standard, the Elemental doesn’t have friends in that format to play with.

Combos aside, Wakeroot Elemental is a bit of slow inevitability in a deck, but needing to untap with it on board is a downside. Five toughness is decent, but it has no protection otherwise, and a 5/5 is resolutely mediocre without that ability. It seems like a fun card for a format like Commander, and it’s actually very good in Limited because of the Elemental synergies of Core Set 2020, but I doubt this gets there in Constructed.

Constructed: 1.75
Casual: 3.75
Limited: 4.25
Multiplayer: 3
Commander: 4