Weeping Angel – Doctor Who
Date Reviewed: October 25, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.00
Casual: 4.50
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 3.63
Commander [EDH]: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I may not be familiar with Weeping Angels as they appear in the Doctor Who TV series, but I really like the Magic cards related to them. Their portrayal in cards and flavor text is absolutely terrifying. They break some bedrock color pie conventions – a blue/black angel? With first strike? That doesn’t fly? – reminding us that these things aren’t necessarily immutable. And they have a pattern of play that is quite unique. Not many 2/2s can defeat basically any creature they engage, and even fewer do so by putting them someplace from where it’s so hard to retrieve them. The wrinkle, of course, is that as a 2/2 with only combat keywords, it’s not too hard to prevent the Angel from getting into combat – not to mention that line of text that will sometimes let people remove it from an attack! I think it might be worth viewing this card as more like a variant on an “exile target attacking creature” spell which then lets you (slowly) close out the game.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 4
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
“Don’t blink.”
Doctor Who‘s Weeping Angels are certainly a horrifying specter, statue-looking creatures that throw their victims to a different point in the timeline to consume their energy. As a card, Weeping Angel does a sublime job of capturing…well, all of the quirks about the species, into a cohesive and cogent card.
As a surprise, Weeping Angel is a devastating blocker; unless a creature has protection or evasion, this will take a creature out of combat and off the battlefield in a single stroke, and it makes for a threatening attacker because of its vigilance letting it stay as a blocker. It turning off as a creature is a nice way to capture the ability (and tendency) of Weeping Angels to revert to being an inanimate statue on observation.
Weeping Angel isn’t perfect; it’s vicious, but it lacks evasion or a way to stop creatures with evasion, and it’s a 2/2 artifact creature that lets an opponent opt out of dealing with it as a blocker…after the first time, usually. Still, look at this as a three-mana “kill” spell for an attacking creature to remove normally implacable creatures that offers upsides after that, and you have a threat that might actually make occasional ripples in Legacy. I don’t think it’ll be a star there, but it’s a good way to throw all sorts of tables into chaos.
Constructed: 3 (wins combat against a lot of things)
Casual: 5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4.5 (with big and stupid creatures being hard to remove at times, this deals with a lot of them more permanently than a fair few options do)
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