Zul Ashur, Lich Lord – Foundations
Date Reviewed: January 14, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 3.00
Multiplayer: 3.37
Commander [EDH]: 3.63
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Zul Ashur has been making her presence felt in Magic’s multiverse for well over a decade now – yes, the original new-style core sets are now about the same age that the sets around Urza’s Saga were when they came out. I think a lot of people were excited and hopeful to get a card for Zul Ashur one day; does it justify the wait? If this card had been in M12, the first time we heard from her, it would have been hailed as one of the absolute best legendary creatures ever printed. Now, of course, Commander has risen, expanded, and, for some people, lived to become the villain rather than falling as the hero. And it has changed what people think of when they think of legendary creatures – we’re used to the two- or three-color colossus with a bunch of text which at the least provides card advantage, and sometimes a self-contained engine. Zul Ashur doesn’t read like much compared to some of those, but this impression is partly misleading. Zombie kindred decks have been getting ever stronger as the years go by, and their overlap with graveyard synergies makes it surprisingly easy to make a deck where Zul Ashur can do something. The real reason I didn’t rate her slightly higher for Commander is because the format’s rules over-incentivize sweepers, and since the response to sweepers is recursive creatures, people then reach for sweepers that exile. But even there, the right deck can use her to wreck entire tables.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 3
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5
Undeath becomes her, I suppose. Zul Ashur, Lich Lord is an interesting piece of the Zombie puzzle in that she lets you reanimate things…slowly, and more akin to a proper cast than a full reanimation, but still. Zombies are a deep and well-represented tribe with a plethora of options, and there are ways to increase the pool of options, I hear.
That said, Zul Ashur is maybe a step too slow to cut it. Her ward shield isn’t nothing, but it definitely is a sort of soft way to discourage rude things (read: not all that efficacious), and she needs to usually survive a full turn to get the gates open. Still, in a deck aiming to grind out advantage, she has her upsides, and while I’m not hugely optimistic about heer prospects, you could do a lot worse.
Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 3 (hard to set things up how they need to be in order to make this work)
Multiplayer: 3.25
Commander [EDH]: 3.75 (more options is always fun)
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