Silent Gravestone MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: Silent Gravestone is masterful at disabling decks that target cards in graveyards, negating the potential for opponents to gain advantage from such strategies. Furthermore, it ensures that your graveyard remains intact, keeping your strategic options open without fear of interruption.

Resource Acceleration: This card offers an emergency resource in dire situations with its ability to be sacrificed along with a small mana investment, allowing you to draw a card and maintain tempo in the game when needed.

Instant Speed: Silent Gravestone’s activated ability to draw a card can be utilized at instant speed. This gives players the flexibility to respond to graveyard targeting threats immediately, ensuring your graveyard’s safety at any critical moment during the play.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Silent Gravestone does not require a discard, but it can indirectly cause discard disadvantages. In graveyard-centric decks, players often count on interacting with their graveyard. This card locks that down, potentially forcing players to discard valuable graveyard interactions as they become useless.

Specific Mana Cost: While it costs only one generic mana to play, activating Silent Gravestone’s ability requires four generic mana. This can hamper your ability to play or activate other cards within the same turn, especially in the early to mid-game when mana resources are more limited.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: The cost to activate Silent Gravestone’s exile ability is steep in comparison to its preventative ability. Other cards provide cheaper graveyard hate or more impactful effects for the same mana investment, which might lead players to opt for alternatives over Silent Gravestone when building their decks.

Reasons to Include Silent Gravestone in Your Collection

Versatility: Silent Gravestone offers flexibility in its usage. As a colorless artifact, it can fit seamlessly into any deck, catering to various strategies that may require graveyard control. Not only does it hamper opponents’ graveyard-based tactics, but it also serves as a protective measure for your own setup.

Combo Potential: Using the Silent Gravestone in combination with other cards can suppress your opponents’ attempts to utilize their graveyard. Moreover, its ability to exile all cards from all graveyards can be a game-changer, disrupting plays and hindering strategies that rely heavily on recursion or delve mechanisms.

Meta-Relevance: The shifting dynamics of MTG’s meta often bring graveyard-centric decks into the limelight. Silent Gravestone is particularly relevant in environments where decks like Dredge or Reanimator variants are prevalent. Inclusion of this card in your collection provides a solid countermeasure, giving you an edge in those matchups.

How to beat Silent Gravestone

Silent Gravestone can be a tricky card to maneuver around in Magic: The Gathering, as it offers a solid defense against strategies that target cards in graveyards. Preventing players from targeting individual cards can be a real stumbling block for decks that rely on graveyard manipulation. However, one can circumvent this issue effectively by focusing on effects that remove graveyards en masse, sidestepping the targeted aspect of Silent Gravestone’s protection. Cards like Bojuka Bog are excellent as they exile all cards from a player’s graveyard without targeting. Similarly, Tormod’s Crypt does not specifically target individual cards, making it another option for resetting the playing field.

If you’re on the offense, versatility in your deck is key. Including general removal spells, such as Abrade or Naturalize, can directly deal with Silent Gravestone itself, since they target artifacts without touching the graveyard. Additionally, having access to counterspells can prevent Silent Gravestone from ever hitting the board, provided you’re on the play. Lastly, adapt your battlefield plays and pivot your tactics away from graveyard dependency to minimize the impact that a resolved Silent Gravestone would have on your strategy.