Animal Boneyard MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: The Animal Boneyard enchantment offers a sustained benefit by allowing you to convert creatures in your graveyard into a resource, essentially turning what would be a spent card into ongoing life gain. This plays a pivotal role in maintaining your life total advantage over time, which can be crucial in outlasting an opponent in protracted matches.

Resource Acceleration: While indirectly, Animal Boneyard can contribute to your resource acceleration by conserving your life total. The longer you stay in the game, the more mana you’ll have access to for casting powerful game-changing spells or summoning formidable creatures. It effectively buys you time to reach your deck’s key plays.

Instant Speed: While not an instant itself, the card encourages a strategic style of play that maximizes the use of your mana and spells at instant speed. By investing in your enchantment during your turn, you free up subsequent turns to cast instants or activate abilities that can react to your opponent’s moves, without compromising on building your defenses.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Animal Boneyard necessitates parting with a creature card from your hand to activate its ability. In games where your hand is dwindling, this can pose a tough decision, potentially depleting your resources at a time when every card counts.

Specific Mana Cost: This enchantment asks for a specific commitment to white mana, which might not always align with the mana base of multi-colored or colorless decks. It can restrict its adoption to mainly mono-white or decks with heavy white influences, potentially reducing its overall flexibility.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: Sitting at three mana for its effect, including two white, Animal Boneyard can be considered a bit costly, considering that there are other enchantments or spells that can offer graveyard interaction or life gain without the additional cost of sacrificing a creature.

Reasons to Include Animal Boneyard in Your Collection

Versatility: Animal Boneyard offers an effective and straightforward way to gain life in decks that are heavy on creature cards. Its utility shines in a variety of settings, from casual play to more focused life-gain strategies.

Combo Potential: This card pairs wonderfully with decks that utilize creatures’ deaths for strategic advantage. In combination with cards that benefit from creatures entering the graveyard, Animal Boneyard helps turn losses into gains.

Meta-Relevance: In a game state where maintaining a high life total is crucial to outlasting opponents in attrition battles, this card becomes a valuable asset. It provides recurrent life gain that can be the key to staying in the game against aggressive strategies.

How to beat

Animal Boneyard presents a unique challenge on the battlefield. This enchantment card turns any land into a source of life gain by tapping and sacrificing a creature. Players aiming to counter this strategy in Magic: The Gathering should focus on flexible removal spells to address both the land and the creatures it might target. Graveyard hate cards such as Rest in Peace or Scavenging Ooze are also effective for disrupting the synergy that Animal Boneyard relies on by removing creatures from the game. Additionally, enchantment destruction spells like Naturalize can be a direct answer to Animal Boneyard itself.

Control decks have an edge in this aspect, where counterspells can prevent Animal Boneyard from ever hitting the field. Similarly, aggressive decks can overwhelm a strategy reliant on Animal Boneyard by applying early pressure and reducing the pool of creatures available to sacrifice. Remember, maintaining board control with spot removals or mass removal spells like Wrath of God ensures your opponent can’t use this enchantment to their advantage. Ultimately, while Animal Boneyard can be an asset in the right deck, a calculated approach with the right cards can easily neutralize its benefits.