Yesterday marked the official debut of Magic: The Gathering’s Spider-Man set, and there’s a ton of new stuff for players to chew over. We got a surprising number of spicy Villain cards, as well as a large chunk of the set’s MAR Bonus Sheet. Heck, we even saw the first of several promised Spider-Man Secret Lair drops. All of this was revealed on-stream, but in the card image gallery a couple of sneaky extra MTG spoilers were added: Carnage, Crimson Chaos and Gwenom, Remorseless.
These are both cards that were leaked previously. While we’ve checked out Carnage before, The Gwenom leak was pretty much totally illegible. Now that we have the full card in our hands, it’s looking like a banger. It turns one of Magic’s most notorious Game Changers into a creature. As a result, it’s a card with a more or less guaranteed spot in a wide range of Commander decks.
MTG Gwenom, Remorseless
- Mana Value: 3BB
- Type: Legendary Creature – Symbiote Spider Hero
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: Deathtouch, Lifelink.
Whenever Gwenom attacks, until end of turn you may look at the top card of your library any time and you may play cards from the top of your library. If you cast a spell this way, pay life equal to its mana value rather than pay its mana cost.- Stats: 4/4
Gwenom, Remorseless will look very familiar to most established MTG players. That on-attack ability is a word-for-word recreation of Bolas’s Citadel, a card so good that it’s on the Commander Game Changers list. The combination of ‘card draw’ and mana cheat here is incredibly powerful. As soon as the effect goes live, you can likely get a few spells off for free, maybe more if you dodge land pockets. That kind of tempo swing is enough to put you firmly in the driver’s seat of most games.
That said, Gwenom is different from Citadel in a couple of key ways. First of all, it doesn’t have the effect as a passive, but rather an attack trigger. This means you’ll need Gwenom to survive a full turn cycle before you get to pop off. You can work around this with Haste granters like Lightning Greaves, but a lot of the time, you are going to have to wait.
This is unfortunate, since Gwenom is much more vulnerable to removal than Citadel was. Artifact removal is relatively uncommon in Commander, but creature removal and board wipes are everywhere. 4/4 isn’t a particularly impressive stat line, either.
There’s still plenty to enjoy here, mind you. Unlike Citadel, Gwenom gives you a way to replenish the life it uses via Lifelink. It also has Deathtouch, which is easy to overlook but makes it less likely your opponent will want to block it. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of you getting multiple swings and triggers over time. Some kind of innate Haste or Web-slinging ability would’ve been appreciated here, but the effect is so powerful you can understand Wizards’ restraint.
A Free Combo Piece
What really sets Gwenom, Remorseless apart from Bolas’s Citadel is the fact that it’s a legendary creature, and can therefore be your MTG Commander. It’s always worth paying extra attention to legends with powerful effects like these, since the consistency you gain by having them on-tap every game cannot be understated.
In Gwenom’s case, it essentially gives you access to a powerful combo engine from the start of the game. As much as Bolas’s Citadel is a powerful generic value card, what really earns it its Game Changer status is its combo potential. As Gwenom has the same effect, it enables all the same combos.
The obvious one is Sensei’s Divining Top. By using its tap ability, you can draw a card and put Top on top of your library. With Gwenom’s effect active, you can replay it for one life, then rinse and repeat to draw a ton of cards. With Aetherflux Reservoir or Golem’s Heart in play to offset the life loss, you can draw your whole deck. As any cEDH player will tell you, it’s not hard to win a game at that point.
Alternatively, you can loop a single creature with Mortuary and a sacrifice outlet to win that way. The sacrificed creature, like Top, will return to your library each time to be cast again. Gray Merchant of Asphodel is the top pick here, but you can also use any cheap creature if you also have a Blood Artist effect in play.
Doomsday is another great avenue to pursue, since you can set things up so you can cast the perfect five-card combo immediately. All of this combo potential makes Gwenom dangerous in the command zone, even if it does restrict you to mono-black.
Reverse Power Creep Done Right
- Mana Value: 3BBB
- Type: Legendary Artifact
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: You may look at the top card of your library any time.
You may play lands and cast spells from the top of your library. If you cast a spell this way, pay life equal to its mana value rather than pay its mana cost.
Tap, Sacrifice ten nonland permanents: Each opponent loses 10 life.
Aside from being a potent new MTG Commander, Gwenom, Remorseless is also solid in the 99. Bolas’s Citadel is good enough to run in plenty of lists, so getting a second, albeit worse, version is fantastic. It may even be better in the 99, since there are many more combo options outside of mono-black.
Perhaps the best thing about Gwenom, however, is the way that it opens up options for Commander play on different levels. Because of the Game Changer list, those who enjoy Bolas’s Citadel but want to play at more casual tables are out of luck. By printing a new, more reasonable version of the same effect, these players now have a way to do so.
This isn’t the first time Wizards has done this. Retrains of busted old Magic cards come up pretty regularly, especially in supplemental sets like Modern Horizons. Necrodominance is a great recent example, creating a low-bracket-friendly version of Necropotence. It’s still a hugely powerful card, but with enough safety valves to keep it from dominating quite as much.
Creating cards like this is one of the best ways for Wizards to push the bracket system. It ensures that each bracket has a good array of options, rather than reserving all of the spicy play patterns for bracket three and above. It also gives players an easy way to ‘tune’ their decks. With alternatives like these, you can easily take a deck down from bracket three to bracket two by subbing them in.
Overall, Gwenom is an excellent card that represents an excellent avenue of design for Wizards. Hopefully they continue pursuing it in future sets.
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