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Card Pros

Card Advantage: Augur of Skulls presents an opportunity to disrupt your opponent’s hand, ultimately leading to a potential card advantage. By compelling an opponent to discard two cards, you’re directly affecting their available resources and strategies.

Resource Acceleration: This card may not directly provide resource acceleration, its cost-effective nature means it can be played early, applying pressure and forcing the opponent to deal with it, potentially freeing up your later turns for more powerful plays.

Instant Speed: Although Augur of Skulls itself is not an instant, its regeneration ability can be activated at instant speed. This allows for strategic blocks and regeneration during the opponent’s turn, potentially eliminating their creatures and keeping your board presence intact.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Activating Augur of Skulls’ ability necessitates sacrificing it, which means you’re trading board presence for the effect of making your opponent discard cards. This can backfire if you lack other creatures to maintain control of the game.

Specific Mana Cost: Augur of Skulls requires both black mana for casting, pigeonholing it into black or multi-colored decks. This mana specificity can hamper deck flexibility and may exclude it from various strategies not aligned with black’s slice of the color pie.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: For a card with an impactful ability, some might expect a lower mana investment. Although its cost is not steep, there are other creatures or spells in MTG that can cause discards at a cheaper rate or with immediate effect rather than waiting for the upkeep after summoning sickness has waned.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Augur of Skulls offers flexibility to a wide array of decks geared toward control or reanimation strategies. Its capacity to force an opponent to discard two cards during your upkeep can significantly disrupt the opposing game plan.

Combo Potential: With the ability to sacrifice itself, this card is a perfect fit for strategies that capitalize on death triggers or graveyard synergies. It pairs well with reanimation spells or abilities that benefit from creatures hitting the graveyard.

Meta-Relevance: In a game where hand advantage often equates to control, Augur of Skulls retains relevance. It acts as a deterrent against hand-based combo decks and can effectively trim the sails of an opponent’s strategy in many meta environments.

How to beat

The Augur of Skulls card offers a dual threat in Magic: The Gathering with its early blocker capabilities and the potent forced discard effect. Taking it down requires a tactical approach. One method is to eliminate it during your opponent’s upkeep before they get the chance to sacrifice it for its discard ability. This can be done by instant-speed removals such as Lightning Bolt or Path to Exile, which are effective regardless of its regeneration capacity. Another strategy is to deplete your hand, making its discard ability less impactful. Cards that allow you to play from the top of your library or from your graveyard can help you maintain a hand advantage against such effects.

Moreover, playing creatures that can outmatch Augur of Skulls in combat helps to mitigate its presence on the battlefield. Utilizing cards with hexproof or shroud widens the gap further by providing immunity to its targeted ability. To counteract the tempo loss from its discard ability, cards that benefit from having a less populated hand, like those with the Hellbent mechanic, can be a silver lining and turn the tide in your favor.