Over the years, the Reserved List’s fearsome reputation has eclipsed much of the reality behind it. While there certainly are broken, hyper-expensive cards on there, the bulk of the Reserved List is more reasonable, in terms of both cost and power level. Somewhere in between those two camps, however, the really interesting cards lie. These cards are bangers in power terms, but without the recognition to price them out of players’ hands. Carnival of Souls is one such MTG card, offering seriously explosive potential for Commander players.
Carnival Of Souls MTG
Carnival of Souls is a simple card in every sense of the word. This simplicity is deceptive, however, as the applications here are incredibly varied. At a base level, it’s an incredible ramp tool for aggressive decks. If you’re aiming to play a bunch of cheap creatures like Carrion Feeder or Changeling Outcast, Carnival can fully refund your mana for more spells. This is particularly good when paired with cheap card advantage like Village Rites, to keep the engine going.
Carnival of Souls is also an incredible interaction tool, to boot. Since it triggers when your opponents’ creatures enter as well, it gives you extra mana to work with during their turns. With a steady stream of sacrifice fodder, you can feed this mana into Attrition to kill your opponents’ creatures as soon as they come down. Alternatively, you can also spend it on other instant-speed tricks, like drawing cards with Greed, or sneaking in a tutor like Entomb.
Of course, all this power comes at a significant cost. Losing one life per trigger makes Carnival of Souls incredibly risky, especially since it’s not optional. For that reason, it’s best to prepare accordingly and pack your deck with some lifegain. Creatures like Soul Warden and Essence Warden are your best bet if you’re in the right colors. If you’re stuck in Mono-Black, things are trickier, but Deathgreeter, Blood Artist, and friends can help out as well.
The Combo Carnival
As potent as it can be in fair MTG decks, Carnival of Souls really shines as a combo enabler. Since there are no limits on how often its ability can trigger, you can easily go infinite with this card, in a surprising number of ways.
Most of the loops available with Carnival of Souls rely on exploiting creatures that can be cast repeatedly. Acererak, the Archlich, for instance, can be discounted to just one black with Heartless Summoning or The Sibsig Ceremony. By casting Acererak for one black, you’ll receive one black back from Carnival before Acererak bounces back to your hand. Throw in Aetherflux Reservoir as a win condition and a way to offset the life loss, and you have yourself a combo.
Gravecrawler loops are also easy to pull off with Carnival of Souls. Since Carnival refunds Gravecrawler’s cost on entry, you can keep casting it as long as your life allows when paired with a free sacrifice outlet. With a creature like Zulaport Cutthroat in play, this loop will finish off the table in a single turn.
Naturally, these combos are at their best in Aristocrats decks, but Carnival of Souls can easily wreak havoc in other archetypes. In Artifact decks, for example, it creates a spicy loop with Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek. You can pay one to sacrifice Sword to Foundry, creating a 1/1 Thopter in the process, and netting one mana with Carnival. This will bring back Sword from the graveyard, so you can spend your floating black mana to repeat the loop. Since Foundry gains you one life per use, you can repeat this infinitely, to build up an infinite board of Thopters right before your turn starts.
A Surprising Sleeper
Despite its huge potential, Carnival of Souls doesn’t see nearly as much play as you’d expect in MTG Commander. EDHREC data indicates that only around 6,150 decks run it in total, which feels incredibly low. This is especially strange since Tokens, Artifacts, Aggro, and Aristocrats, archetypes where Carnival has the most to offer, are incredibly popular in the format.
While it’s often the case that Reserved List cards are precluded from play due to their high price tags, Carnival’s is actually fairly reasonable. There are plenty of near-mint copies available for around $9 on TCGplayer right now, with shipping included. If you’re not too fussy on condition, you can easily grab lightly, or moderately, played copies in the $6-7 range, too.
Since the card is fairly affordable, the best explanation for its lack of Commander success is almost certainly just low awareness. This is great news for now, since you can pick up a powerful engine piece for cheap. Going forward, however, it does mean that Carnival could be fairly volatile price-wise.
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