Friday Card Review 5-23-25

We’ve got a TWOFER this time, gang. This is in part to make up for my TRASH recommendation. I’ve been looking back on Infested Roothold, and I gotta say. This was a rare Niv-Mizznt L take. We hate to see it. So this week, I got two card reviews:

In this article on the CardKingdom Blog, Jacob Lackner talks about underrated sagas. You can read the article yourself, but I think there were two interesting pieces for token strategies:

The Hunger Tide Rises is a classic sacrifice tutor that also provides insect tokens as sac fodder. At the base level, this is a three mana tutor spell that can tutor for a 3 cmc creature on turn 7. But with proliferate effects and/or token strategies, this can be so much more. A distinguishing factor for me is that you can also search your graveyard, so you can, if you need to reanimate something, you plan to put in your graveyard. I think The Hunger Tide Rises takes a traditionally Black effect, tutor/reanimate, and gives it a Green spin by making you wait to have creatures. This is, of course, the card’s significant weakness: if you play a boardwipe before IV, that does shut it down. But this makes the card fair and balanced in casual play: make a traditionally difficult-to-remove permanent reliant on easy-to-remove permanents.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from Standard, it’s not to underestimate mice. This goes for Three Blind Mice.

Three Blind Mice does something I didn’t realize when Wilds of Eldraine dropped: it makes a copy of ANY token, not just creature tokens or the mouse token you have. Role enchantments, which also came out in Wilds of Eldraine, are a notable example of tokens you can clone with this effect, since Roles are tokens! This doesn’t necessarily buff your creature since a creature can only have one role (thanks, SAG-AFTRA [that’s the union for Actors]), but this does mean that enchantress or Constellation effects that care about enchantment ETBs get hit twice.