Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Set Review - Multicolor (Enemy Pairs)
Fleshtaker by Kev Walker
Multicolor Musings 2: Spawn of Multicolor
After Friday's look at the multicolor cards in the allied color pairs, we move into the enemy color pairs. These cards aren't tied to a particular tribe, which allows us to see more interesting designs and creepy critters that don't fit neatly into those tribal boxes. We've got twenty more cards to cover today, so let's get on with it.
White/Black Cards
In my opinion, white and black gets the best pair of multicolor uncommons in the set. Fleshtaker does a good impression of a Viscera Seer stapled to a Bloodthrone Vampire while also rewarding you for creatures you sacrifice to other creatures and throwing some life gain in for good measure. This creepy friend is sure to be a staple for all your aristocrats-style decks going forward. Rite of Oblivion is a great upgrade to Angelic Purge, which never quite found a home in Commander. Being cheaper, instant speed, able to remove planeswalkers, and having flashback are all big upgrades. You still have to sacrifice a permanent, and it has to be non-land this time, but the advantages here outweigh the small downside by a huge margin. Expect to see a lot of this card.
On the other hand, I don't expect to see a whole lot of Liesa, Forgotten Archangel decks around. I personally find this version of Liesa much less interesting than her Commander Legends version (Liesa, Shroud of Dusk) as a build-around, and even if you're looking at what Liesa 2.0 does, Athreos, God of Passage already does it cheaper, better, and immediately, giving you more combo potential. Finally, while Liesa's creature exiling ability looks promising, it's not related to anything else she does and is a random hate ability that'll be sure to draw all the removal from the graveyard decks at the table. In short, you'll need to be ready to protect her constantly if you're going to build a deck around her.
Blue/Red Cards
Spellslinging is the name of the game for the blue and red cards here, and while all of these cards are solid, Arcane Infusion and Galvanic Iteration aren't anything we haven't seen before. You should consider playing them if your deck is doing what they do, but they don't excite me. Vadrik, Astral Archmage, on the other hand, is an exciting take on a spellslinger commander. His power determines your discount, so now you can play cards like Reckless Charge as mana rituals in order to power out some truly massive spells. Storm Skreelix combines two common spellsling effects together, combining Goblin Electromancer and Wee Dragonauts in an appealing package. Five mana is a lot to pay for a cost reducer, sure, but when you're getting an evasive attacker attached to it, I feel that it's worth it.
Black/Green Cards
The black and green cards in Midnight Hunt care about creature cards in your graveyard, to no one's surprise. This is a solid bunch of cards, including a cool new commander in Old Stickfingers. (An interesting fact about Old Stickfingers is that he is right behind you.) Ol' Sticky has a lot of potential for combos if you build a deck with only a few creature cards in it. For example, if the only creatures in your deck are Necrotic Ooze, Asmodeus, the Archfiend, and Skirge Familiar, Old Stickfingers can put them all in your graveyard. Once you reanimate the Ooze, you'll be able to draw your entire deck and produce a lot of black mana. I'm sure you can figure out how to win from there. In terms of a less complicated card, Ghoulcaller's Harvest just lets you make a lot of zombie tokens twice. Yes, they're decayed, but you're getting that many zombies for only two (or five) mana, so it's still a good deal.
Red/White Cards
Red and white! Red and white! Stand up! Sit down! Fight, fight, fight!
The offerings in this pair aren't breaking any ground the way Lorehold's cards did back in Strixhaven, but we still have some nice tools for the most aggressive of pairings. Angelfire Ignition is a very efficient way to feed an important creature some keyword salad and pump it up. I wish this were an instant, but the flashback makes up for that somewhat. Still a nice tool for any commander-focused decks to get those important swings in. On the other hand, Rem Karolus, Stalwart Slayer is a very sweet card with a lot of potential. Protecting you and your stuff from spells isn't the most common effect these days, with only The Wanderer coming to mind from the past few years of cards. A deck built around Rem is likely to play with all the damage-based sweepers like Blasphemous Act and Chain Reaction, backed up with Toralf, God of Fury if you really want to be that kind of person. Personally, I'm very excited to try Rem out in my Alesha, Who Smiles at Death deck.
Green/Blue Cards
There's no real through line on the green and blue multicolor cards in Midnight Hunt, giving us a variety of cool cards. I have to give a shoutout to Croaking Counterpart as it's a fun play on Cackling Counterpart, a card I have fond memories of from its time in Standard. I don't know that a ton of decks will want Croaking Counterpart, as the creature being only 1/1 can be a big downside. On the upside, the flashback is cheaper and you can copy your opponents' creatures now, so maybe it's fine? I'll have to see it played to really know.
A card that I am excited to see get some play is Slogurk, the Overslime, which gives green-blue an interesting new take on a lands commander that can also fill a self-mill niche. If nothing else, Slogurk will be a nice support card for an Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath deck. So will Rootcoil Creeper, which is a great little multitool of a card which provides so much value to flashback decks for only two mana that I can hardly believe it's only an uncommon.
Dawn is starting to break over the horizon and so in its early golden rays we bid adieu to these strange gold-framed cards in all their Innistradi strangeness. Was it all a dream? No, the monsters here are very real and you'll soon be finding them in your own decks and the decks of friends and acquaintances. Were they put there on purpose or did they choose to be there themselves, sneaking into the sleeves while no one was looking? It's hard to say, but they're there now and we must all live with the consequences of that fact.
Should you wish to speak with me again, you can find me under the sign of the blue bird @JqlGirl. Farewell friends, and good luck once darkness descends this evening and the Midnight Hunt begins anew.
