As more cards come to Magic: The Gathering with format-warping abilities, it’s not uncommon for cards that went ignored for years to make a roaring return. This is rather common in Commander, where a new interesting Commander to build around has powerful synergies with old cards. It can also happen in competitive Magic, albeit it’s significantly rarer.
Unlike Commander, where any new cards can be interesting to build around, competitive Magic only uses strategies that can keep up with the other best decks in the format. The bar for what gets played is a lot higher, which makes it even harder for older cards to see renewed play. Despite this, we still see old cards reemerge after longer periods of time. Such is the case for Herbal Poultice from Lorwyn.
MTG Herbal Poultice
Herbal Poultice isn’t a card that many are likely to have heard of before. Considering it was only printed in Lorwyn and has seen little play before now, it’s not that surprising. The card doesn’t have a fantastic effect, all things considered, so it’s little wonder it was forgotten. Herbal Poultice basically allows you to store one instance of Regeneration on a creature for three mana.
While the effect of Herbal Poultice is mediocre, its mana value is anything but. As many MTG players know, zero-mana artifacts are commonly incredibly powerful when combined with other tools meant to take advantage of them. There’s a reason why Wizards of the Coast is shying away from creating any more zero-mana artifacts from here on out. This has allowed the card to place first in a recent MTGO Modern Challenge, as well as get another top four appearance.
Urza’s Saga and Tezzeret, Cruel Captain have granted a lot of utility to zero-mana and one-mana artifacts. The cards already work well with Affinity payoffs, but these cards, in particular, give a lot more strength to one-of artifacts that can both build your Affinity up and serve as powerful tools in certain situations. Herbal Poultice is primarily seeing play as an Urza’s Saga target in Modern Affinity builds.
In most cases, if you want a zero mana artifact that regenerates other ones, Welding Jar is a better choice. It won’t cost anything to use Welding Jar’s activated ability, making it a lot more efficient than Herbal Poultice. The particular build of Modern Affinity using Herbal Poultice, however, is using a Legendary Creature package. This was incredibly common in the days of Underworld Breach, but they have been dropped in recent times.
Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student and Emry, Lurker of the Loch both enable Mox Amber, and allow Affinity to go far deeper into the game. While this can give the archetype a lot of staying power, targeted removal becomes a lot more efficient against the deck as well. Herbal Poultice can allow these threats to have a lot more staying power. It can also insulate your Construct tokens from common removal like Fatal Push. Emry is capable of looping Herbal Poultice back into play as well, protecting your threats from removal and allowing them to block for free constantly.
This, combined with Poultice enabling all of the various artifact synergies, allows the card to play a unique role in Modern that other cards cannot.
Herbal Poultice Outside of Modern
Besides its recent appearances in Modern Challenges, Herbal Poultice has seen little to no play at all. It has, however, appeared in exactly two cEDH decks over the last year. Similar to Affinity and Urza’s Saga, Flubs the Fool has some additional synergies with zero-mana artifacts. Because this Commander wants you to be Hellbent all the time, it’s better to use cards that have delayed effects in play than to actually keep spells in your hand.
Herbal Poultice does everything that Flubs is interested in. You can protect your Commander without keeping cards in your hand, and you can use Poultice as a cantrip to draw more cards if your hand is empty. The card is good at all stages in the game, so long as your Flubs is in play. This variant of the deck, notably, played a ton of Cheerio cards that don’t have relevant effects.
Otherwise, Herbal Poultice has appeared in an Urza, Lord High Artificer cEDH deck. Similar to Flubs, Poultice can play double duty in this archetype. It can both protect Urza from removal, and it acts as a Mox Sapphire when Urza is in play. Similar to the Flubs list, this Urza, Lord High Artificer cEDH list also used a ton of ‘Cheerio’ esque cards to ramp mana fast. As a result, there were a lot of other payoffs in the deck, like Forensic Gadgeteer, Hullbreaker Horror, Battered Golem, and countless more, to take advantage of cards like Herbal Poultice.
Outside of these appearances, Herbal Poultice has not seen play at all over the last year. The card has appeared in multiple brew-esque cEDH decks over time, however.
Will This Stay?
Herbal Poultice is a really specific card that, thanks to Urza’s Saga, has a rather low opportunity cost to play. Whether or not this card is good will likely depend on the overall structure of the metagame.
Right now, despite Herbal Poultice’s success, there are a lot of matchups where it doesn’t do much. Any Solitude deck completely bypasses Herbal Poultice’s usefulness, making it a poor inclusion. Similarly, Eldrazi is a bad place to include the card. Most of the deck’s destruction effects come from Karn, the Great Creator, who shuts Herbal Poultice off. The card can occasionally do work in the Affinity mirror by creating endless chump blockers, but more often than not, you’ll be swinging at each other with unblockable Kappa Cannoneers.
This card does, however, perform well against Boros Energy, which is the most popular deck in Modern. Insulating Emry, Lurker of the Loch from Galvanic Discharge is very valuable. Personally, I would consider moving this card to the sideboard, but I haven’t played enough with Herbal Poultice to count it out for sure.
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