Pointed Discussion

This card, while ridiculously difficult to hardcast and probably not worth hardcasting at all, is nevertheless extremely badass to run in a cleric deck (say, a white/black one) when combined with Dark Supplicant. With several Supplicants in your deck, you can get a Scion out quite quickly, as fast as turn 3 in theory. He is black, and as such immune to a good amount of removals, not to mention White Clerics have more than enough abilities that help keeping him alive. He has high amounts of health and damage which make him hard to burn down or block, trample for the win and an awesome ability. If you enchant him (Serra's Embrace for example) he becomes utterly cruel.

Those facts have been discovered empirically against a friend's black/white cleric deck with this guy in it.

COME AT ME BRO

even without the clerics his cycling ability puts him over the top, normally if I have a big ass creature in my hand I'm looking for a way to discard him so I can zombify him, this one discards himself AND lets you draw a card!

always fun to cycle him and get him back with Doomed Necromancer :D, but otherwise 8 is too high of a cost unless you make him unblockable altogether

Puts himself in your graveyard without losing cards, this is a reanimater's wet dream.

He's a black trampler with no drawback besides being kind of expensive to cast, that does something great if any of it gets through. So, sure, 8 CMC is a fair bit of mana. Well, that's where Dark Ritual or Burnt Offering come in, unless you just want to cycle and reanimate him which can be done fairly early in the game. So you might have to lose some life to cheat him out, but that's why you're playing black.
Ashnod's Altar with some cheap creatures or tokens can help get him out too.

Turn 1: Dark Ritual, cycle
Turn 2: Animate Dead
Turn 3: Entomb, Exhume

Who needs clerics? ;)

Turn one Dark Supplicant, turn two Cabal Cleric, turn 3 rotlung reanimator, sac all 3 get the scion and 3 2/2 zombies. Win.

oh man I've never been so happy to see cycling on a card

so i herd u like reanimator

@Arachnos, turn two, actually. Turn one, swamp and Dark Supplicant. Turn two, swamp, two more Dark Supplicants and activate first Supplicant sacrificing all three. Bam. Turn three you're coming at your opponent with a Scion of Darkness.

His pose to me looks like: "Don't worry, I GOT THIS!"
And he does.
4.5/5

Turn 1: Swamp, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Scion Of Darkness. WHERE IS YOU COMBO GOD NOW? I WON THE FIRST CLASH, AND NOW I HAVE AN 8 DROP BEFORE YOU EVEN HAVE A LAND OUT!

I can never take this card seriously. Why? He looks like he has really, really smelly armpits. Just look at that art!!
I know it's just his shadow, but COME ON!

o'doyle rules!! ;D