Grave Strength MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: By enhancing a creature with the top cards from your library, Grave Strength efficiently utilizes your graveyard as a resource. This can potentially turn a smaller threat into a game-ending monster, while also providing a form of deck thinning, which can improve the quality of your subsequent draws.

Resource Acceleration: Grave Strength offers a unique form of acceleration by quickly populating your graveyard. This not only buffs one of your creatures but can also enable delve or other graveyard synergies, allowing you to leverage those resources to gain an edge over your opponent.

Instant Speed: While Grave Strength is not an instant, its effect being at sorcery speed means it requires strategic planning to maximize its potential. The right timing can catch an opponent off-guard, turning a seemingly harmless creature into a significant threat before the combat phase or setting up defenses that are much tougher to bypass.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Grave Strength necessitates discarding a card, which can be particularly burdensome when your hand is dwindling and each card counts.

Specific Mana Cost: Demanding one black mana, Grave Strength restricts deck-building flexibility, being less accessible to multi-color decks not heavy in black mana.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: With a casting cost that includes two generic and one black mana, there are alternative spells available that might provide a more immediate board presence or impact. This cost can be a drawback in faster-paced games where conserving mana for other spells is critical.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Grave Strength finds its place in various decks, particularly those emphasizing graveyard synergy and creature strength. By buffing a creature while milling your own library, it supports strategies central to self-mill or reanimator archetypes.

Combo Potential: This spell has great synergy with decks that capitalize on large creature graveyards. It can significantly enhance creatures that grow with graveyard size, such as Nighthowler, or enable threshold and delve mechanics.

Meta-Relevance: In an environment rich with graveyard interaction, Grave Strength shines by both powering up creatures and fueling your graveyard for further plays. Its ability to quickly turn the tide of a game makes it a tactical choice against slower, control-oriented decks.

How to beat

Grave Strength is a spell that shines in Magic: The Gathering’s vast arsenal of creature enhancement cards. Its core mechanic allows a player to dig deep into their library, placing a number of cards into the graveyard equal to the power of the targeted creature. Each creature card tossed this way bolsters that creature further with additional +1/+1 counters. Overcoming this can be as simple as maintaining a deck with ample graveyard manipulation or disruption.

Rest in Peace and Scavenging Ooze stand out as excellent countermeasures, as they either remove graveyards from the game altogether or selectively exorcise key creatures before Grave Strength can leverage them. Timing is also crucial. By utilizing instant-speed removal spells like Path to Exile or Fatal Push before Grave Strength resolves, you can thwart your opponent’s attempt to build a juggernaut, leaving their strategy in tatters. Keeping these tips in mind, you’ll be prepared to dismantle the enhance-and-conquer tactic that Grave Strength embodies.