Death's Approach MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Death’s Approach can be a hidden gem for controlling the battlefield and chipping away at your opponent’s resources. By shrinking down a creature’s power and toughness for each creature card in its controller’s graveyard, it has the potential to turn the tide over time, either neutralizing threats or even eliminating them outright. In metas with lots of creature-heavy strategies, this enchantment offers incremental advantage with minimal investment.

Resource Acceleration: This card itself does not provide direct resource acceleration in the form of additional mana or cards. However, by handling potentially costly threats for a single black mana, it allows you to allocate your resources elsewhere — potentially accelerating your board presence or strategy while stunting your opponent’s development.

Instant Speed: While the enchantment operates at sorcery speed, it sets up a scenario where the value increases at instant speed as creatures are put into graveyards during either player’s turn. This interaction ensures that Death’s Approach scales in effectiveness throughout the game, especially in formats where the graveyard fills up rapidly, becoming a persistent threat that’s always on your opponent’s mind whenever creatures clash or spells fly.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: For playing Death’s Approach, although there is no need to discard a card as a cost, being able to leverage its full potential requires a certain setup where graveyard management is key.

Specific Mana Cost: Death’s Approach requires black mana for casting. This can be restrictive and makes it less versatile for decks that are not focused on black mana or are not able to generate it efficiently.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: While Death’s Approach might appear mana-efficient, its impact is often underwhelming when compared to other removal spells at similar mana costs. It also requires a build-up of creatures in an opponent’s graveyard to be truly effective, which can be difficult against decks that don’t rely heavily on creatures or have ways to shuffle their graveyard back into their library.

Reasons to Include Death’s Approach in Your Collection

Versatility: Death’s Approach offers a scalable removal option that can be slotted into various black decks in MTG. Its effectiveness increases as opponents’ graveyards fill up, allowing it to adapt to longer games.

Combo Potential: This enchantment synergizes well with strategies that require frequent creature deaths or benefit from graveyard manipulation, making it a formidable piece in sacrifice or mill decks.

Meta-Relevance: In an environment where creature-based strategies are prevalent, Death’s Approach serves as a low-cost answer to keep looming threats in check. It’s particularly impactful against decks that utilize graveyard strategies to their advantage.

How to beat Death’s Approach

Death’s Approach is an enchantment card that can be a pesky nuisance if you’re running a creature-heavy deck in MTG. This card has the uncanny ability to cripple your creatures based on the number of creature cards in your graveyard. However, it does have its Achilles’ heel. Since Death’s Approach relies heavily on your graveyard content, keeping your graveyard clean becomes a powerful counter strategy. Cards such as Tormod’s Crypt or Relic of Progenitus can exile creature cards from your graveyard, nullifying the potency of Death’s Approach.

Moreover, employing creatures with hexproof or shroud provides a layer of protection, as enchantments like Death’s Approach cannot target them. You could also consider utilizing enchantment removal cards such as Disenchant or Naturalize, which are staples in most sideboards. They allow an immediate and affordable answer to threats like Death’s Approach. In essence, by managing your graveyard and utilizing strategic removals, you can diminish the impact of Death’s Approach and maintain a strong board presence.