Pointed Discussion

Chaff just like the whole cycle. For the full rant on this guy see the rating i did on Angel's Herald

Sorry, but not:

10/1/2008 To play the ability, you must sacrifice three different creatures. You can't sacrifice just one three-colored creature, for example.

If it were like that, the card would be too powerfull

I just hate this cycle. Five of those blanks (what they are when you don't find any of the fitting mythics) in one set is just too much. One Dark Supplicant was okay but this is annoying.
I understand it's always a dilemma with these kind of cards: common or uncommon? I'd prefer them at common.

You're all forgetting that it's an actually efficient black weenie, which are hard to come by. The ability sucks, as do all the heralds', but it's STILL AN EFFICIENT BLACK WEENIE.

No, it's not an efficient black weenie. Festering Goblin is an efficient black weenie. This a commercial for a mythic rare.

to easily pinged off !! maybe a chumb blocker at the most.

what some of you dont realize is this will probably be run in a grixis deck and most of the cards have unearth and some cards even get a bonus from all the sacrificing like thraximundar this has some use in a grixis deck running a prince of thralls and i can see why people say the others like this card are bad, but i could see use out of this one

prince of thralls is not a legendary, which means if u dont sacrifce this as the black and 4 prince of thralls in your deck, you could have 4 of those bastrds out in 4 turns

Use cheap creatures as sacrifices for this card's ability while you also control Training Grounds.

Come on really a 1/5 rating? Why? I could understand the others being lower then this one but for this you have Thraximundar and Grave Pact to use in a deck with it. I lose three creatures, my big creature gets +3/+3, I get an 8CC creature, and you lose three creatures all for 4 mana. This card has a good use, and at worst it's just a 1/1 for 1, that isn't terrible.

I understand what they were going for (besides pushing the new rarity). You risk some of your board presence to get a big creature with nice abilities. I think where these went wrong is that they carbon copied them to all five colors. Not all the Shards were meant to have tokens or unimportant creatures buzzing around to be given up like Jund, or the revival to recover from it like Grixis and to some extent, Esper. Without altering the goal creature, I think they could have made this cycle interesting by playing to the shard's strength/ability like so:

- Jund had devour, so I guess this could have worked there along with 's token generation, but maybe more lenient on the colors. There wasn't many black token makers in Shards (a few zombies here and there) so up it to 4 creatures but of any color.
- Naya could have just saced one or two power of 5 creatures, or pull a Phyrexian Dreadnought and made you just need to add up to so much power. Another idea would be to sac or blink some lands (See Realm Razer)
- Bant should have only made you tap the three creatures, and they stay tapped for a turn (i.e. Wall of Frost) or even as long as the Angel is on the field. This would keep you exalted while not losing card advantage.
- Esper is a bit tricky. is known for card advantage (or at least draw) so possibly exiling x amount of artifacts from your hand. Then have them come back when the sphinx dies? Not sure on this one.
- Grixis is almost there as is. With all the Unearth, you should be fine with creatures hitting the graveyard. I would have liked to see you able to discard them from your hand as well though, just so you weren't forced to play them all only to able sac later.

I think these versions would have been more flavorful to say the least. Probably would have required some play testing, as I'm writing this off the top of my head. Also, these were not based on the power of the card they summoned, which some would argue were not that great. I don't want to rewrite all of them, I just wanted to fix this cycle. The idea of Bant's creatures bowing at the presence of an Archangel and laying bait to attract the top of Naya's foodchain, just appealed to me.

Thanks Vektor480, I was kind of confused about that!

Another underrated card in my opinion, and why does the ability suck? 3mana; Sacrifice this creature, Jace's Phantasm, and Ali Baba (or any other creatures that are nothing compared to The Prince. Put Prince of Thralls into play?!

Just in case some people aren't seeing it, you are probably not going to sacrifice any other black creature other than this one. That means that all you need is 1 red and 1 blue creature. You could use a Kobold and... maybe a Fugitive Wizard, just to find some use for it. That means that if you played this on turn 1, you could have a Prince of Thralls out on turn 3.

To have a 7/7 with a decently beneficial ability out on turn 3 is pretty good, and you aren't playing Green/Reanimation.

Mono-black third-turn combo with Oona's Gatewarden and Rakdos Cackler (or a Kobold).