Murktide Regent MTG Card

Card Pros

The Murktide Regent is a powerhouse in any blue deck, offering several advantages that can tip the scales in a player’s favor.

Card Advantage: This dragon not only hits the battlefield with a presence but also offers the card advantage by growing in size for each instant and sorcery card in your graveyard — that’s being removed as part of its delving ability. This translates to potentially massive threats that only enlarge as the game progresses, ensuring that you’re leveraging your past plays for future gains.

Resource Acceleration: While not directly producing additional mana, Murktide Regent effectively amounts to resource acceleration. By efficiently utilizing the graveyard as a resource via its delve ability, it allows you to play a considerable threat at potentially a lower mana cost. This can leave mana available to cast other spells and react to opponents’ moves adroitly.

Instant Speed: The Regent can create favorable board states at crucial moments. Although it’s a creature and not an instant itself, it benefits enormously from spells cast at instant speed. Each instant and sorcery card that goes to the graveyard can potentially empower it, allowing you to strategically plan your moves and cast it when it’s best poised for dominance.

In conclusion, the versatility and power offered by the Murktide Regent make it an excellent addition to decks looking for a robust finisher that also serves as card advantage, enabler for mana efficiency, and a dynamic player at instant speed timings in the game. Its ability to interact with other aspects of gameplay solidifies its place in competitive formats.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: One notable drawback of piloting a deck with Murktide Regent is necessitating the exile of instants and sorcery cards from your graveyard to cast it. This can deplete valuable spells that could be harnessed by other graveyard synergies or recursion tactics.

Specific Mana Cost: Murktide Regent comes with a mana cost that heavily leans on blue mana sources, requiring at least double blue to be cast. This may constrain deck-building flexibility and make it less viable in multi-colored decks that can’t reliably produce the necessary blue mana.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: Despite Delve reducing its casting cost, its initial high mana cost can be restrictive. Clocking in at seven mana, Murktide Regent can be a hefty investment in games where you’re unable to rapidly fill your graveyard, thereby limiting its early-game impact and potentially overshadowing it by more mana-efficient creatures.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Murktide Regent seamlessly integrates into numerous blue-based decks due to its scalability. Its ability to grow in power makes it a formidable threat in both aggressive and control strategies.

Combo Potential: This dragon shines in strategies that seek to quickly fill the graveyard, leveraging its ability to become a massive flyer for a reduced cost. It’s an excellent finisher in decks that churn through their library with spells.

Meta-Relevance: With the ever-present Delver and control archetypes in the metagame, Murktide Regent claims a spot as a resilient threat that dodges most common removal. Plus, its evasion makes it a persistent menace against a variety of decks.

How to beat

Within Magic: The Gathering, facing off against the Murktide Regent can be daunting, given its potential to become a flying powerhouse on the battlefield. To tackle this formidable card, strategic countermeasures are necessary. Players should consider keeping removal spells handy, focusing on those that can bypass the Regent’s rule-changing abilities. Cards like Path to Exile or Terminate come into play here, efficiently taking care of the threat without much fuss.

Controlling the graveyard is another effective approach against Murktide Regent. Since the card’s strength scales with the number of instants and sorceries in the player’s graveyard, employing spells or abilities that exile graveyard contents can significantly undermine its power. Consider using Tormod’s Crypt or Relic of Progenitus for this task. It’s also beneficial to disrupt your opponent’s tempo — countering the Murktide Regent upon casting can prevent it from influencing the board state entirely. Overall, the key lies in preemptive actions and maintaining board control to ensure the Regent’s impact is minimized.