Pointed Discussion

Got better with the loss of mana burn in Magic 2010, of course.

Right then, infinite combo with this card that I use with my EDH deck. It may be overly complicated and prone to destruction, but no one sees it coming.

Thopter Squadron (or similar token generator) +
(Carnival of Souls + Doubling Season / Copy Enchantment ) +
(Essence Warden / Soul Warden + )

So, let's take an example of the basic engine. Thopter Squadron is in play, as well as Carnival of Souls, Doubling Season, and an Essence Warden. You tap some land to remove a counter from Thopter - You create 2 tokens due to Doubling Season. Those tokens cause you to lose and then gain 2 life due to Essence and Carnival, as well as gain 2 Black Mana. Using the Black Mana you can sac a Thopter to put 2 +1/+1 counters back onto the Squadron. Finally, you use your last Black Mana to repeat the cycle.

Throw in a Boon Reflection/Second Warden/other life gainer dependent on Creatures and you get infinite life. Pandemonium lets you do infinite damage. And you have an infinitely large Thopter Squadron and an infinite number of Thopters to attack with.

Yeah, it's not like black has any nice X spells.

I can see that some peole don't like this card, but I think it's OK for what it is. Getting Black mana when creatures come into play is good for a Black deck.
2.5

(Date Posted:12/30/2008) unfortunately you have to do that...this way you need something to make use of your mana, or elsewise you'll get some additional damage from mana burn through your opponent's creatures :/

edit: removal of mana burn has a good upside regarding this card - yet after playtesting this card i have to say the lifeloss is still a huge problem.
it's quite dangerous even for suicide black if you can get this card to produce a good amount of mana unless you use something like Essence Warden to negate the trigger. (i did so with Hunted Creatures and used hybrid mana dual-lands like Twilight Mire to convert the black mana).

It comes as no surprise that the only way to make this card slightly less disgustingly bad was to change the rules of the game.

@ Gunhaven

That's ingenious.

Very good in Kobold Clamps as a way to fuel your Skull Clamping.

got better with the removal of mana burn. however it couldn't get much worse. also

@ gunhaven: your combo works but requires to many cards to set it up. 2-3 card combos tend to work but anything after that becomes near impossible to set up.

Use it to play a Dark Ritual: expanding return!

Good players know, how to use this card!!!

Happy Birthday, Davvol.

You'd think this would be easier to abuse. Skeletal Vampire+Heartstone/Ashnod's Altar/Phyrexian Altar+Doubling Season+Essence Warden is about as close as I can get without going completely overboard on the complexity. Well, off the top of my head, at least.

Possibly the best flavor text ever.

I do like cards of this sort that are unplayable on their own but that you can immediately see were intentionally designed to be abused with some infinite combo. They don't make rares like this anymore. Nowadays, rare = win the game.

Easier infinite mana combo:
Gather three copies of Faceless Butcher/Faceless Devourer and have (as mentioned before) Essence Warden or even Leyline of Lifeforce around. At the very least, you tie the game. At the best, you have some instant or another creature on the battlefield to Butcher, and then play Maga for the win.
These colors are pretty synergistic, as you can put together the combo pieces with Pack Hunt, Bifurcate, or Infernal Tutor. Dual Nature turns a single copy of Faceless into a combo. Bloodbond March acts as a sort of Yawgmoth's Will for the combo.

This card actually works amazingly with a pair of Nether Traitors, something to sacrifice them to, like Spawning Pit, Deathgreeter and, say, Ageless Entity.

Great flavor text.

This and Soul Feast paint a pretty pathetic picture.

I love the wording of ruling. So final.

Here's a silly combo. Use this, Death Match, and two Skullsnatchers. You can keep using ninjutsu, and drain your life to clear the board.

True purpose revealed!

Your board is this:

Carnival of Souls
Skeleton Shard
Throne of Geth
Arcbound Crusher
Deathgreeter
2 x Dross Scorpion
a Memnite, and at least 1 Swamp.

Infinite Arcbound Crusher, go!
Add another Deathgreeter for infinite life!
Add Everflowing Chalice for Infinite Mana, it's infinite proliferate in mono black, go nuts!

Unless I'm wrong, which is probable.

They should have brought back Davvol in Scars of Mirrodin.

I like it. It's an unusual combo card.
I'd most likely play it with some lich. That way you can simply ignore this cards drawback.

This is sub 3? Ke? It's a combo card, and not a bad one. Stick it into the combo deck, and just don't play it until you can offset the life loss, or your combo's going to go off.

Personally, I just put it into a BG Recurring Nightmare deck. Essence Warden offsets the life loss, so if I have a Kozilek's Predator in the grave and one on the board I can get infinite black mana, which means I can infinitely recur anything in my graveyard - say, Kokusho or Woodfall Primus for example. Given the deck runs Survival of the Fittest, the Kozileks aren't even difficult to get.

I'd give it a 4 just for infinite combo potential.

I miss the times that you actually had to think to use powerful cards
alas, such days are long gone

Here's another infinite combo with this card:

Goblin Warrens + Carnival of Souls + Skyshroud Elf + Essence Warden

I think Davvol needs a hug.

This is the guy who became the first evincar of Rath. I think it's because he wanted people to actually celebrate his birthday. Just do a flavor text search for Davvol.

Also...WELCOME TO THE DARK CARNIVAL, BROTHER.

Don't worry, Davvol.
Deranged Assistant feels your pain.

This, Essence Warden, and the Earthcraft/Squirrel Nest combo. There, I broke it. Happy?

Combos with Hunted Phantasm for a 4/6 unblockable creature and on turn three. I suggest following it up with Massacre Wurm. And why not throw in a Deathgreeter beforehand to add insult to grievous injury?

On the other hand, if you no longer want the Carnival of Souls, you could always use that mana to play Phyrexian Obliterator and Dry Spell, but that would make Davvol feel sad.

Death Cultist and Enduring Renewal.

This card, Gravecrawler, Nantuko Husk, and Deathgreeter. Infinity/Infinity Nantuko Husk anybody?

NO! NO! NO!
Apprentice Necromancer (self recovery infinite)
Deathgreeter/ Blood artist
Any dies effect, any sacrifice effect, any gravestorm, flesh allergy, Mikaeus the Unhallowed, Blood Artist/Deathgreeter ( whichever wasn't chosen above), Grave Pact, and Harvester of Souls.
Choose your win condition.
Draw your deck. He/she sacrifices all their creatures. Double this for infinite manna and play your hand or gain infinite life. Remove your opponents deck from play. Kill his creature. He/she loses infinite life. Play with any discard/ effect for huge combos. Then resurrect discarded things. Both super easy to do with black.
This goes well with breaking black.
This card is everything that black wants to be. It turns any combo into an instant win.
Rate it on what its for (not your green deck or red deck)
Flavor 5/5
Combos 5/5
Cost 5/5
Johnny here is your darkest wish.
Run Timmy run!

PS
My fav combo is the infinite mana/ life with two Dross harvester and two of these Profane Command+Radiate
Kill it all and bring it all back. Just so you can see my glory as you die!.

THE SADDEST THING: his name's not even Davvol. It's Dave.

Carnival of Johnnies

Death Cultist + Carnival of Souls + Enduring Renewal. You're welcome :)

Happy birthday, Davvol.

The next unhinged set better contain a 'Davvol's Birthday' card. Just because.

Zeroth: Dark Ritual is so good at doing the same thing you need a VERY good reason to run this.

First: about "Good" and "Bad" a quick sentence--

This is a horrible card in the same way that "Night on Bald Mountain" is a terrible piece of music. They are both extremely DISSONANT and pretty much do the opposite of what you should be expecting good MAGIC cards or beautiful music to be doing. That's the quickest I can say it. If you like this card, I bet you think "Night on Bald Mountain" is good, too. (I like them both.) Compare this to how Sorrow's Path and Dubstep are not even "Dissonant", they just plain suck. (I hate them both.)

Second:

This card has a 'whenever' clause and an 'adds' effect. It might be a VERY unpleasant formula to try to use and abuse because losing life is supposed to be worth...if not a whole card, at least 3/4, or maybe 5/8 of a card, and 1 mana is not worth even half a card. (Unless you're Lotus Petal or Mox Opal). Almost all cards that convert 1 life directly into 1 card are very super-powerful, so we should be willing to get just slightly less than a card for 1 life. You need to be gaining creatures to create mana, and to get gain out of this, you want to be employing creatures that cost {0} or are worth less mana. Namely, tokens but not just any tokens. Broodmate Dragon's Tokens are great with Doubling Season but awful with this because those Tokens are all worth a lot more than {B} so you'd be paying way too much to get {B} if you used Broodmate Dragon and Doubling Season 'just' to pay 2 life and get {B}{B}.

Third: Broodmate Dragon herself may be almost exactly THE worst card to use with this one, but Doubling Season is a fair-costed powerful way to increase a lot of efficiency in your Token production, and this card REALLY needs a deck that is highly efficient at making Tokens to the point that each individual Token is close to worthless. Even though we're not actually sacrificing Creatures here, the effect wants us to lose life for each creature, and I'd compare that to sacrificing each creature and not losing the life. (Sacrificing Creatures is sometimes card advantage and sometimes card disadvantage and is good to compare to Pay 1 Life: Worth a high fraction of a card.)


Every Combo Card wants to be fed something to do its job, and this one has to be seen clearly as needing more to feed it than the average one. Whatever you want to do with that {B} mana needs to be worth whatever you put in to get it. I would be interested to see if someone can make this perform a Ramp function to power out Griselbrand. I think Phyrexian Obliterator is just too easy to Dark Ritual into play, but Griselbrand would be worth a lot of set-up to get, and it would ALSO be worth making a mono-black version of his deck. You need multiple lands and multiple Dark Rituals to get Griselbrand that way, can it be done better a different way?

Why do people think this is so bad? It's easy to get around the life-loss problem if you need to; this creates tempo (the most important and hardest to gain resource) from life (the easiest to gain and one of the least important resources)
-Deathrite shaman gets tempo-free burn on the opponent whenever they drop a creature
-Priest of Gix ramps into a 4-drop (obliterator? persecutor?)
-Bitterblossom costs you life, but creates extra mana/tempo
-This effectively reduces the cost of every creature in your hand by 1.
-Lingering souls gains you not only 2 tokens, but enough mana to cast typical {1}{B} or {B}{B} removal.
-Leaving 1 mana open means you have enough for the above removal spells if they drop a creature. Think abrupt decay in G/B
-Playing a creature means you have 1-mana for a discard spell; ironically Cabal Therapy can hit twice for {B} + a creature. Bone Splinters, culling the weak and others work the same way.

Think about T3 in a zombie deck for a second. You've hit them for 1 let's say and have a carrion feeder. You can now kill them with just a gravecrawler. (sac/play the crawler 18 times., attack for 19) t3 win from a 1-drop zombie. What are they going to do? Give you all your life back by Plows? The applications for this $0.50 card are worthy of legacy in weird decks; you just have to find them..

The Deranged Assistant feels for you, Davvol.

Goes infinite with the thopter foundry+sword of the meek combo. Unfortunately for Davvol, that combo is good enough without him.

Don't worry Davvol, someday they'll print something that will break you.

I'm sure that there is some explanation to this in the novels (which I haven't read), but why is Davvol a slave here? In other cards (such as Attrition), he is the evincar.