MTG has been around for 33 years at this point, and the game has changed quite a bit. Cards are more powerful and efficient than they used to be. Thanks to this, it’s only natural that many old designs would get left in the dust.
That said, despite Magic’s power creep, there are still plenty of cards from the early days of Magic that still pull their weight. MTG Haunted Crossroads is a great example of a forgotten tool that has plenty of utility.
MTG Haunted Crossroads
Printed back in Mercadian Masques, Haunted Crossroads offers a repeatable ability that can set up your future turns. While this enchantment doesn’t directly pull you ahead on cards by itself, alongside certain support pieces, it can actually threaten to dominate the game.
Haunted Crossroads shines brightest alongside Commanders that reward you for manipulating the top of your library. By putting large threats on top of your library, legends like Vaevictus Asmadi, the Dire or Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign can reliably cheat those big bombs into play. Similarly, this idea maximizes Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos and Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow, ensuring your opponents lose a boatload of life. Throw in some graveyard tutors such as Entomb or Buried Alive to get things started, and you’ve got an incredible engine.
Beyond just setting up your Commanders and making your draws more impactful, Haunted Crossroads also provides a repeatable way to make cards leave your graveyard. This makes the card a great addition to Imotekh the Stormlord and Teval, the Balanced Scale strategies by helping you flood the board with tokens.
Executing Combos
In addition to the general synergies Haunted Crossroads enables, there are also some combos you can pull off. The easiest, and flashiest, among these requires you to combine this enchantment with Etali, Primal Conqueror and Phyrexian Altar. With the Dinosaur’s trigger on the stack, sacrifice Etali to Phyrexian Altar. Holding priority, you can activate Haunted Crossroads to put Etali back on top of your library. This way, when Etali’s trigger resolves, the big Dino is waiting on top of your deck to reenter. By repeating this process over and over, you’ll get to exile and cast every nonland card in each opponent’s deck for free!
Beyond Etali, there are a handful of four-card combos that you can set up with Rakdos, the Muscle as well. Once you land Rakdos, Haunted Crossroads, Ashnod’s Altar, and Priest of Gix, for example, you’re able to make infinite mana and cast your whole deck. With any infinite mana outlet among them like Walking Ballista, winning should be trivial.
A Forgotten Gem
Overall, even though Haunted Crossroads’ applications are a bit narrow, the enchantment is certainly worthy of more recognition. This enchantment only appears in 11,000 decks according to EDHREC, which is quite low considering the popularity of some synergistic Commanders.
Nonetheless, it isn’t too surprising that this enchantment has gone largely unrecognized given how old it is. There are budget options of the card available too, with worse conditioned copies of the card going for $2. So, if you’re looking for a sweet upgrade to your EDH deck that can surprise some players in your pod, Haunted Crossroads could be a nice addition to your collection.
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