Undying Beast MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: The Undying Beast shines when it’s about sustaining card flow in the match. Its condition for returning back to your hand creates a loop of usage, ensuring your hand remains stocked and you potentially outpace your opponent in terms of available resources. This recursive ability ensures that it rarely leaves you without a creature to play, providing advantage as the game progresses.

Resource Acceleration: Although it doesn’t generate additional mana or treasure tokens directly, the Undying Beast’s potential for repeated playing can synergize well with permanents or abilities that trigger upon a creature entering the battlefield or dying. This can lead to indirect resource acceleration, as those synergies can generate additional mana, tokens, or other valuable in-game effects whenever the beast makes its return to the battlefield.

Instant Speed: The inherent power of instant speed interactions isn’t lost with the Undying Beast card. Its ability to be summoned or recur after demise during any time in the match allows for strategic plays that can keep opponents guessing. Holding up the mana for this beastly card ensures you can respond swiftly to changes on the battlefield, thereby maintaining a tempo that can be challenging for your adversaries to overcome.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: The Undying Beast card necessitates discarding another card from your hand to utilize its abilities, which can lead to a depletion of your hand size and hinder your gameplay, especially if you’re running low on cards.

Specific Mana Cost: Undying Beast’s casting cost includes specific mana types that may not be readily available in all deck builds, making it less versatile and potentially difficult to play on curve in multi-colored decks.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: For the effects the Undying Beast provides, the mana cost is on the higher end when compared to other creatures in its class. This can slow you down, as investing such a significant amount of mana could hinder your ability to play other spells or abilities during your turn.

Reasons to Include Undying Beast in Your Collection

Versatility: Undying Beast can be a key player in any deck that thrives on creature durability. With its ability to return after being destroyed, it keeps your battlefield presence consistent.

Combo Potential: This creature’s resilience can be leveraged in decks that capitalize on death triggers or require reliable blockers to defend while setting up game-winning combos.

Meta-Relevance: Given the prevalence of removal spells in many game formats, having a creature that can withstand being taken out once can give you an edge, making Undying Beast a solid choice in a variety of meta environments.

How to beat

Undying Beast presents an obstacle for many MTG players with its resilience and capability to return to the battlefield after being destroyed. This makes it crucial to understand the most efficient strategies to overcome it. Unlike typical creatures that you can eliminate through damage or destruction effects, the Undying mechanic allows this Beast to come back stronger if it had no +1/+1 counters when it died.

To counter this, consider using exile effects, such as Path to Exile or Swords to Plowshares, which remove the creature from the game entirely, bypassing the Undying ability. Alternatively, placing -1/-1 counters on it through cards like Black Sun’s Zenith can prevent the Undying trigger from occurring when the creature dies. Another approach is to utilize control cards that change ownership, like Control Magic, essentially making the Undying ability work for you instead of against you. Planning these strategies prior to facing an Undying Beast in your game can turn the tide in your favor and help maintain control of the battlefield.