Gallows at Willow Hill MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Gallows at Willow Hill offers a unique form of card advantage by allowing you to remove key creatures from your opponent’s board. Instead of drawing cards, it helps you diminish the opponent’s resources while potentially maintaining your own board presence, pivoting the balance of power in your favor.

Resource Acceleration: Although Gallows at Willow Hill doesn’t directly produce mana or tokens, it accelerates your game plan by selectively removing blockers or threats. This can indirectly lead to resource acceleration by making it easier for your creatures to connect with the opponent, ultimately leading to more damage or in-game advantages.

Instant Speed: The power of Gallows at Willow Hill comes into play when you can activate it at the end of your opponent’s turn, making it a surprise tactic that can disrupt their strategy. Although it’s not an instant card itself, its activation during your opponent’s turn can catch them off-guard, much like an instant-speed interaction would, thus holding a resemblance to the flexibility and surprise element of instant speed spells.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Gallows at Willow Hill involves sacrificing a creature you control to activate its ability, which can set you back especially if your board presence is crucial to your game strategy.

Specific Mana Cost: This artifact card requires a unique mana combination that includes one of each; white, black and green. This specificity can complicate its incorporation into decks that don’t support these colors simultaneously.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: With its activation cost combined with three mana of different colors, the total cost of using Gallows at Willow Hill’s ability can become burdensome when compared to other removal options that are less taxing on the mana pool and can be executed faster.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Gallows at Willow Hill offers a unique form of repeatable creature removal that can be integrated into a wide array of deck strategies. Its ability doesn’t rely on a specific color, making it a flexible choice for multicolored decks looking for creature control options.

Combo Potential: This artifact thrives in decks that can reliably produce a high number of creatures, particularly Human creature types. It sets the stage for potential combos with cards that care about sacrificing creatures, such as triggering morbid abilities or empowering sacrifice-driven strategies.

Meta-Relevance: In a meta where indestructible or hexproof creatures are prevalent, the Gallows at Willow Hill bypasses conventional removal, providing a strategic edge. As players adapt their collections to handle a variety of threats, having access to this type of targeted removal can prove indispensable.

How to beat

Gallows at Willow Hill is an artifact that has the potential to be a thorn in the side of many players, creating tension among creature-based strategies. This card lets you tap three untapped Humans you control to destroy a creature, effectively altering the battlefield. Dealing with this artifact requires a blend of preemptive and reactive strategies.

Counterspells are a reliable method – stopping Gallows at Willow Hill from ever hitting the board is a clean solution. But if the artifact has resolved, you can rely on artifact removal spells such as Abrade or Disenchant to eliminate it. Versatile permanents removal like Assassin’s Trophy can be useful as they handle any troublesome cards.

Another strategy involves limiting the opponent’s capacity to use the Gallows. Using board wipes to clear human creatures or employing removals like Doom Blade on key Human creatures can disrupt your opponent’s synergy. Also, consider graveyard control strategies, which can prevent the return of crucial Human creatures with various recursion abilities. Outpacing the artifacts’ activation cost is another approach; if you keep your non-Human creatures’ power high, it becomes tougher for opponents to find viable targets for the Gallows.

In sum, maintaining control over the state of the board and the key pieces in your opponent’s strategy is vital to countering the effectiveness of Gallows at Willow Hill. Efficiently managing your resources and keeping removals in hand can help ensure this artifact doesn’t dictate the flow of the game.