Obliterate MTG Card

Card Pros

Card Advantage: The Obliterate spell allows for significant card advantage, as it destroys all artifacts, creatures, and lands. This puts your opponent at a substantial disadvantage, reducing their options in the game.

Resource Acceleration: Obliterate also greatly speeds up your resource acceleration. Your opponent loses their resources due to the spell, while your hand remains untouched, allowing you to deploy cards and progress more rapidly on the board.

Instant Speed: Though Obliterate is not an instant spell, it comes with an edge because of its “cannot be countered” clause. This trait generates a similar advantage as being played at instant speed, as your opponents cannot respond once you cast Obliterate, ensuring its devastating effect takes place on your terms.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: Obliterate doesn’t require the discard of a card, but it destroys all artifacts, creatures, and lands, leaving you with potential emptiness on your side of the field. You’ll have to be strategic to prevent this action having unrecoverable consequences on your game.

Specific Mana Cost: Containing both red and colorless mana in its casting cost, this may limit the card’s use to specific decks. Unless your deck is tailored to meet Obliterate’s specific mana cost, it could be a challenge to bring into play.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: Eight is a high cost even for a powerful effect like that of Obliterate. In the fast-paced world of MTG, paying such a significant amount can make this card a risky play. There are other, less harmful board wipes or targeted removals that could be played for less.

Reasons to Include Obliterate in Your Collection

Versatility: As a comprehensive board sweep, Obliterate provides immense utility numerous deck types. It can fit into red, white, and blue control decks, as well as jankier combo decks that love to reset the board.

Combo Potential: Obliterate clears the way for big threats. This card pairs well with creatures that have indestructible or hexproof, or effects that trigger upon the destruction of other cards, creating devastating combos.

Meta-Relevance: The current format heavily features creature and planeswalker-based strategies. In such a meta, Obliterate can act as a trump card, dismantling opponents’ heavily-invested boards while leaving your game-changers intact.

How to beat

Obliterate is an incredibly powerful card in MTG, capable of destroying all artifcats, creatures, and lands on the field. Its unique characteristic of not allowing for a counter makes it difficult to deal with, but there are strategies around it. Countermagic may be ruled out, but remember, strategies that involve cards leaving the battlefield might just be the trick.

Consider cards like Ghostway or Teferi’s Protection that can protect your creatures from the devastating effects of Obliterate. They’ll leave play and return unscathed after the spell resolves. Similarly, lands that have indestructibility, such as those bestowed by Heroic Intervention can also survive such an onslaught.

In essence, Obliterate is a potent card, but timely use of cards that use phased out or blink effects and land invulnerability can help you neutralise its powers and remain in a strong position in the game. The beauty of MTG is that even a most powerful card like Obliterate still has its counter, it just comes down to the way you strategically build and play your deck.

BurnMana Recommendations

MTG players seeking dynamic play and keen on deck-building strategies will find discussing Obliterate invaluable. With its capability to clear the board and turn the tide of gameplay, understanding its strengths and weaknesses is crucial. We recommend considering your deck’s capability to recover post-Obliterate and the right moment to play it for maximum impact. Ponder on its interaction with cards that protect your assets or that benefit from mass destruction. Whether it’s building around Obliterate’s potential or crafting a response to it, each card choice shapes your path to victory. Dive into our insights to make Obliterate a cornerstone in your winning strategy.