Now that the full Avatar: The Last Airbender set has been spoiled, I think it’s safe to call it a big success. The community has embraced this set much more than Spider-Man, both because of its superior flavor and better card designs. There are a ton of fantastic new cards in MTG Avatar, in fact, which makes whittling things down to a top five best a tricky endeavor. Nevertheless, that’s what we’ll be doing here today.
Before we begin, a couple of quick caveats. Firstly, this list will only be considering cards from the main Avatar set, and not the Eternal or Jumpstart products. Second, this list will be ranking the cards that we feel have the most potential across multiple formats. Some cards in the set, like Koh, the Face Stealer, will be bangers in Commander, but didn’t make this list because they’re unlikely to make an impact in constructed. With that out of the way, let’s get into the list!
Honorable Mention: Airbender Ascension
Kicking things off we have a card with a ton of potential. Airbender Ascension offers a cheap way to Airbend any creature in play, which is great by itself. You can use this to temporarily deal with a problem creature, or re-use an enters trigger on one of your own.
It’s the latter use case that makes this card look particularly exciting. Modern is full of Blink decks at the moment, which rely on blinking powerhouse creatures like Quantum Riddler and Overlord of the Balemurk to win. Legacy Death and Taxes decks have been employing similar packages as well. Decks like these could easily find a home for Airbender Ascension, and may even be able to blink or cast enough creatures to get its second ability going.
Unfortunately, there’s a big question mark on this card at the moment due to its speed. Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd and Ephemerate are the gold standard for blink cards currently, and Airbender Ascension is slower than both. It’s also unclear how reliably you’ll be able to get four quest counters on it during normal gameplay.
Players will undoubtedly test this out in Blink decks soon, and it may well earn a permanent spot there, but for now it’s an honorable mention at best. It will be fantastic in Commander Blink decks right off the rip, however, so don’t be surprised to see it in your pod soon.
5 | Mai, Scornful Striker
Mai, Scornful Striker is highly reminiscent of Eidolon of the Great Revel, a powerhouse hate card from the past. Instead of burning players for playing cheap spells, however, Mai burns them for playing noncreature spells. This makes it easier to build around Mai’s downside, and turn it into a one-sided damage engine for your black decks.
If you rely mainly on creatures, which is very possible to do thanks to all the great black options that have been printed in recent years, then Mai offers extra pressure at no cost to you. Decks like Mono-Black Midrange and Rakdos Midrange in Pioneer should be able to find some sideboard slots for it, and may even shake up their noncreature suite to add it to the main board in some cases.
Where Mai really shines, however, is against Combo decks. While it’s in play, your opponents will find it very difficult to pop off a lot of the time. Since Mai’s ability causes life loss and not damage, this even works through The One Ring’s protection in older formats, so opponents can’t use that to get around it. Combo decks are a constant feature in both constructed and Commander, and wherever they thrive, Mai will be a great tech option against them.
4 | Earthbender Ascension
The whole elemental Ascension cycle from Avatar is pretty excellent, but Earthbender Ascension is probably the best of the lot. It starts out as one of the better ramp spells we’ve seen in a while, and morphs into a terrifying aggressive threat later on.
Three mana to bring a single tapped basic into play isn’t a great deal, but the fact that Earthbender Ascension also makes you a 2/2 via Earthbending more than makes up for that. While we used to get ramp like this in the days of Wood Elves and Farhaven Elf, we haven’t for a while, so that’s exciting in itself. This isn’t even taking into account powerful interactions Earthbending can enable, either, like ramping you with Fetchlands or doubling up on land destruction like Wasteland.
The card’s second ability is hugely promising, too. While it looks tough to access at first, the card essentially gives you two land drops itself, one on entry and one when your Earthbent land is inevitably removed somehow, so it shouldn’t be hard to get going. Once it does, it becomes a powerful tool for Mono-Green Landfall decks in Standard, and any kind of Landfall deck in Commander. Earthbender Ascension does so many things for so many different MTG strategies that I’d be shocked if it wasn’t one of the best new cards in Avatar overall.
3 | Beifong’s Bounty Hunters
Sticking with the Earthbending theme, Beifong’s Bounty Hunters is a card that pushes this new mechanic to its absolute limit. Letting you Earthbend whenever any nonland creature you control dies, tokens included, opens up a whole world of possibilities.
As we’ve talked about before, this card lets you go infinite in both Standard and Commander. There are a bunch of different ways to abuse the card alongside Landfall triggers and sacrifice outlets, so it makes for a reliable alternate win condition in decks like Aristocrats.
Beifong’s Bounty Hunters could see a lot of play based on the combo aspect alone. What really pushes it over the top, however, is the fact that it’s also a solid card when played fairly. Repeatable Earthbending enables a lot of fun synergies, including extra Landfall triggers and those we discussed for Earthbender Ascension above.
Bounty Hunters is also the rare card that can let you “insure” a board full of tokens. If your token army gets hit with a board wipe, Bounty Hunters can convert it all into animated lands. It even counts itself, which most similar creatures don’t do. There are a ton of avenues to explore with this one, and it’s a good enough tempo play on its own that I expect it to see a lot of play in a lot of decks.
2 | Badgermole Cub
After the deeply disappointing Spider-Man, most Magic players weren’t expecting genuinely good stuff from Avatar. Wizards defied those expectations right away during the set’s debut, when they unveiled the absolutely ridiculous Badgermole Cub.
This card is absurd on several different fronts. As a 2/2 that Earthbends 1 on entry, it already represents a 3/3 in stats for two mana. Of course, the really exciting part here is the ability to double your mana from creature sources. This comes scarily close to replicating the passive ability of Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, one of the best Commanders in all of cEDH.
Badgermole Cub doesn’t double up your mana rocks, unfortunately, but it does do so with Earthbent lands, which even Kinnan can’t do. Play it on three, and you can immediately tap your new creature land for two more mana. If you’ve played any mana dorks previously, they’ll all give out an extra green too.
In Commander, mana dorks are run in the majority of green decks, so this seems like an easy ramp staple. Even in constructed, getting extra mana at this rate is pretty impressive. We could definitely see new ramp decks emerge in this card’s wake, since it totally changes the mana-per-turn math that they’re working with. In fact, outside of Legacy and Vintage, I don’t think there’s any Magic format that won’t at least be testing this card out.
1 | Wan Shi Tong, Librarian
While Badgermole Cub is incredible, it still pales in comparison to the best of the new cards in MTG Avatar: Wan Shi Tong, Librarian. This card is like the unholy lovechild of Hydroid Krasis and Archivist of Oghma, and it’s every bit as scary as that sounds.
For starters, having a scaling, instant-speed draw spell that also comes with a scaling Flying body attached is excellent stuff. Wan Shi Tong gives you an outlet for any excess mana in the late game, as well as an ideal card to hold up alongside interaction early to mid. Since the counters aren’t halved it’s always a solid rate, even if you’re just casting it for four mana.
Even if you don’t have a lot of mana to spend, Wan Shi Tong’s second ability can often make it worth running out for just two. Tutoring is extremely common in high-level MTG, whether it’s Modern or Commander. This means you can get a lot of counters, and a lot of cards, out of Wan Shi Tong in most games. This is especially true in cEDH, where this card looks like an absolute slam-dunk.
Factor in nice incidental synergies with cards like Mox Amber, and Wan Shi Tong is the clear frontrunner of Avatar. You’ll be seeing this card in Commander, and most likely in the likes of Modern and Legacy as well. It’s the rare case where a $49 pre-sale price for a card may actually be a generous offer and not a total rip-off.
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