Excavating Anurid MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: The aptly named Excavating Anurid can favorably affect your hand by allowing you to dredge and potentially retrieve it multiple times, granting you access to more cards over the course of the game. This can be pivotal in decks designed to capitalize on graveyard strategies.

Resource Acceleration: Excavating Anurid provides a slight form of resource acceleration by allowing a land play from the graveyard once it hits the battlefield. This subtle advantage nudges you ahead by maximizing your land drops and turning an otherwise empty graveyard play into a resource.

Instant Speed: Although Excavating Anurid itself doesn’t operate at instant speed, its dredge ability pairs well with instant speed spells. It provides flexibility in decision-making during your draw step, ensuring that you can adapt to the fluid dynamics of the game while maintaining the pressure on your opponents.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Excavating Anurid necessitates the discarding of a card when it enters the battlefield. This can be counterproductive, particularly when you’re trying to maintain card advantage or have no disposable cards in hand.

Specific Mana Cost: Requiring both green and generic mana, Excavating Anurid’s cost demands a commitment to green mana sources. This could potentially restrict it to green-centric or two-colored decks, possibly limiting its versatility in a broader range of deck archetypes.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: For five mana, Excavating Anurid may be a costly investment, especially when taking into account the rapid pace of play and the availability of other creatures that provide more immediate board presence or value without the additional cost of discarding a card.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Excavating Anurid offers a flexible role in green-focused decks, easily slotting into strategies that value graveyard interaction or require sturdy blockers.

Combo Potential: This card can synergize with landfall mechanics or strategies that capitalize on sacrificing creatures, making it a powerful tool in certain combo builds.

Meta-Relevance: In game environments where resource advantage is key, Excavating Anurid’s ability to self-mill while providing a solid body can be extremely beneficial, particularly in decks designed to exploit the graveyard.

How to beat Excavating Anurid

Excavating Anurid presents an interesting challenge for Magic the Gathering enthusiasts. To overcome this creature, players must understand its strengths and weaknesses. Excavating Anurid flourishes in graveyard-centric decks due to its ability to self-mill, thereby fueling its 5/4 body. This feature, coupled with the potential to draw a card when it enters the battlefield, makes it a valuable asset for any graveyard strategy.

However, this card’s self-milling effect can be a double-edged sword, allowing opponents to target key strategies. Graveyard hate cards, such as Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void, can significantly hinder the utility of Excavating Anurid by exiling cards before they prove useful. Moreover, since Excavating Anurid necessitates a player to return two lands to their hand, it can disrupt one’s mana curve. Utilizing land destruction or denying land recovery can thus be instrumental in mitigating the Anurid’s impact on the game. Board control spells and targeted removals like Swords to Plowshares also offer a straightforward solution to this potential threat. Understanding and exploiting these weaknesses is key to mastering the game and effectively countering Excavating Anurid.